by nobody103
Zorian frowned. "What about Nochka? Their daughter? I was told her body was never recovered and that she might still be alive?"
The two policemen suddenly became very uncomfortable. Even the first one, who clearly didn't like cat shifters as a whole, felt bad about the little girl who reminded him of his own daughter. Neither of them thought there was much chance of Nochka ever being found again, but they were unsurprisingly unwilling to tell this to Zorian and instead tried to think of a suitable non-answer they could give him.
They both breathed a sigh of relief when their exchange was interrupted by the arrival of their mustachioed friend who exited the house with Haslush in tow. Haslush, for his part, decided to lead Zorian on a walk away from the house, ruining his plan to keep mind reading the mundane policemen while they talked for additional clues.
It might be for the better, actually – paying attention to two different thought streams at the same time had already been rather hard. Trying to have a conversation with Haslush while doing the same would have probably been impossible.
"So, Zorian… I can call you Zorian, right?" Haslush asked. Zorian nodded, aware that the man had a massive dislike for formality. "Right. I'm guessing Miss Kuroshka has told you what happened back there, but just so we're clear: Rea and Sauh Sashal have been found dead in their home yesterday morning, along with the mangled corpses of two giant centipedes. Their daughter was nowhere to be found, and nobody has heard anything about her since. Any of that news to you?"
"Mister Tverinov and Miss Kuroshka already told me most of that, but not the part about the mangled centipedes," said Zorian.
"Yes, well, your younger sibling reacted so badly to the news that I censured myself a little. Called it a monster attack rather than dwelling on the details," Haslush shrugged. "I apologize for upsetting her so much. I'm told I can be a little tactless at times, but it's a hard trait to lose. This line of work tends to make you more than a little bit morbid, and I sometimes forget most people aren't exposed to death and crime every waking moment of their lives."
Zorian thought about assuaging the man's worry and assuring him he didn't hold a grudge about that, but then figured the man would be more willing to share information with him if he appeared guilty, so he remained silent. Instead, he shifted the topic back to the killings.
"So they were killed by giant centipedes?" asked Zorian. "I didn't see any damage outside the house. How did they get in?"
"Through the door. Apparently the occupants had left it unlocked."
Zorian gave Haslush an incredulous look.
"I'm just telling you what we found," Haslush said defensively. "I know this case is strange, it's why we haven't pronounced it closed and moved on. And on that note, is there anything you could tell me about the Sashal family that would explain what happened to them?"
Of course he did – but nothing he could tell the man without getting himself in trouble. He told Haslush everything he had figured out about the apparent cat shifters though his interactions with them, but this was very sketchy information, and based on Haslush's unhappy expression probably wasn't anything new to the detective. Not that surprising – Imaya alone had probably told him everything Zorian just did and then some.
"This wasn't really a monster attack, was it?" Zorian asked.
Haslush gave Zorian a piercing look, which Zorian met unflinchingly. After a few seconds, Haslush withdrew a hip flask from his jacket, took a long, deep sip from it and then put it back into his jacket pocket.
"No, probably not," he admitted.
"Why were they targeted and by whom, if you don't mind me asking?" Zorian said, trying his luck. Hey, who knows? Maybe the man would even answer.
"Well now. If I knew that, I wouldn't be speaking to you now, would I?" Haslush pointed out.
"So you have no leads," Zorian concluded.
"I have too many leads," Haslush corrected. "The Sashals… well, how much do you really know about them?"
"I presume you're talking about them being cat shifters?" Zorian guessed.
"Ah, so you do know about that. I've been wondering about that – the rest of your housemates didn't seem aware of that fact, but Imaya said you were 'unreasonably suspicious' of Rea right from the start. Well, if you know what they are, then you surely know why this could be any number of things…"
"I don't, actually," said Zorian shaking his head in denial. "I was suspicious about Rea because she looked suspicious and I am a paranoid person. Them being cat shifters never factored into it, and to be frank I know virtually nothing about them. What's the deal with cat shifters anyway?"
"Bluntly put, most cat shifters are heavily involved with crime," Haslush said. "Theft, smuggling and spying, usually, but occasionally even assassination. Their alternate forms are tailor-made for such shady activities, after all. Cats are small, stealthy animals whose presence is hardly ever notable in and of itself. How many new, never-seen-them-before cats do you see in a week?"
"A lot."
"Right. In a big city like this, unfamiliar cats are ubiquitous. Few things threaten them aside from humans, and most humans don't hurt cats without reason. And on top of that, shifters get the ability to access traits of their animal form even while they're human, meaning cat shifters get things like night vision, a sense of smell powerful enough to put most dogs to shame, superior balance and agility, and a whole bunch of other benefits."
"I'm still a bit surprised this lets them be so active in crime," said Zorian. "You'd think the sheer flexibility of classical mages employed by the various police forces would allow them to shut down a shifter group operating like that, regardless of their special abilities."
"Ah, but you're assuming cat shifters work alone, which is not the case at all. They are hands down the most firmly assimilated shifter type of them all. They live in cities and towns among ordinary people, and are virtually indistinguishable from a normal human on casual inspection. Everything a regular citizen could do, cat shifters can as well – in particular, this means they have no problems in getting classical magic of their own. Hell, their links to crime mean they can get their hands on many things an average mage can't, like permanent enhancement rituals or illegal spells for evading notice and influencing people…."
"Do you have any evidence that Rea and her family were that type of cat shifter though?" Zorian frowned. "Maybe I'm naïve, but they didn't look like that to me. Surely there are non-criminal cat shifters?"
"There are," Haslush nodded. "And every single cat shifter would have you believe they're one of them. Considering what happened, I don't think I'm willing to put much stock in the Sashal family being such counter-examples."
Half an hour later, Haslush decided he'd gotten everything he needed out of Zorian and sent him on his way. Instead of going home, however, Zorian hung back. Once he had confirmed that Haslush was not going back to the scene of the crime, Zorian stealthily went back there in order to do some more fact-finding. There were guards posted in front of the house, but none were inside. Perfect. Zorian didn't dare enter the house himself, afraid that there was some kind of alarm on the house to notify the police of break-ins, but conjuring an ectoplasmic eyeball and sending it inside didn't seem to trip any wards so he closed his eyes and had his eyeball spy look around the house.
The bodies of Rea and Sauh were long gone by this time, but it was not hard to figure out where each had died due to all the blood stains. Tragically, Rea seemed to have been killed in front of her daughter's room, trying to keep the attackers away from Nochka. She didn't go down without a fight – the bodies of the two giant centipedes, which the police decided to leave in the house for some reason, littered the entire area. They had been quite literally torn to pieces, their bodies sliced into sections by some powerful severing attack. In the end, though, it hadn't been enough. The door to Nochka's room was smashed open – the only door in the house to have been dealt with so destructively – her bed flipped over, and Nochka herself nowhere to be found.
Half an hour later, not having found anything similarly notable, he was ready to call it a day and go home. That's when he searched the place where Rea had died again, and noticed something interesting on the severed head of one of the centipedes – faintly carved into the chitin of one of the forward sections of the centipede was a very familiar symbol – a circle with an archaic Ikosian pictogram for 'heart' inside of it. It wasn't the official symbol used by the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon, but it was one of the several 'secret' signs that their lower order cultists used to signal other members of their membership.
After inspecting the rest of the centipede parts and failing to find anything else significant, Zorian let the eye dissolve and walked away. So his initial suspicion was right – this wasn't some shady deal coming back to haunt Rea and her family, it was connected to the invasion somehow. Admittedly, Zorian had no idea how, but he knew where he could find that out.
The Cult of the Dragon Below was going to get a lot more visits from Zorian in the coming days.
✦ ✧ ✦
After that day, Zorian's daily schedule changed completely. Kirielle lost all interest in magic and no longer attended the lessons he had organized for her, and he decided to free some more time by dropping his membership in Taiven's group and skipping most of his classes. He spent most of this extra time planning and executing attacks on known members of the Cult of the Dragon Below, trying to find out what they did with Nochka. He attacked them incessantly, hitting two or more locations a day, and ruthlessly memory-probed every cultist he disabled in those excursions.
He learned some interesting things doing that. For instance, while Sudomir Kandrei, the mayor of Knyazov Dveri, was indeed a member of the cult, he was a very independent-minded one… to the point that the cult was very annoyed with him. They seemed to have no idea he was killing soul mages around his town, nor did he have any links to the Ibasans as far as they knew – the man promised to give his flocks of iron beaks and hordes of winter wolves to the Cult of the Dragon Below, not to the invaders as a whole. Zorian supposed he might be in contact with the Ibasans on his own initiative, but it was equally possible that his soul mage killing practices were his own thing. What he hoped to accomplish with that, Zorian could only guess.
He also found some emergency resource caches that the Cult scattered around the city, its underworld, and surrounding villages. They looked very… steal-able. He made himself a note – a real written note, seeing as how he could now effectively take a notebook with him to the next restart – to search through those in some future restart for anything interesting or easy to sell for some quick cash.
When it came to locating Nochka, however, his successes had been underwhelming. He managed to track down the group that kidnapped her, but they had simply been following orders and had long since handed her off to another group. He then tracked down that group too, but they no longer had her either and also didn't know who had her now. He had dived deeply and aggressively into their memories, shattering their minds beyond repair, but to no avail – the man they handed Nochka to was a total unknown to them, other than being a high ranking member of the cult, and they had absolutely no idea where she might have ended up in.
Truthfully, Zorian had already suspected that kidnapping Nochka had been the whole point of the attack on the Sashal family, so his findings weren't a huge surprise. The fact that the order had come from the very top of the cult indicated they considered it to be of critical importance. They also told both groups that Nochka had to be delivered alive and unharmed to the transfer point, forbidding abuse under the pain of death, which was also fairly strange. Why? Why did they want Nochka so badly, and why was her continued health so important?
He suspected the answer was something in line with 'she's their sacrifice to the primordial to wake him up'. Demon summoning often involved ritual killings, so it wouldn't surprise him much if unbinding a primordial required the same. Still, why Nochka in particular? Because she was a shifter? The cultists did refer to the primordial as – among other names – He of the Flowing Flesh, which could indicate an ability to change its physical form. There were other shifters in the city, though. Other cat shifters, even.
He didn't think he could get to the bottom of this by the end of the restart. If he had another week, maybe, but the restart was near its end and the Cult of the Dragon Below was getting more paranoid in face of his constant assaults on them – they'd already tried to set up an ambush for him the last time he tried to attack a location, and only his ability to read people's surface thoughts kept him from stumbling into it and getting himself killed. He wasn't going to get much from them in the two days he had left before the summer festival.
Although, as horrible as Nochka's kidnapping was, it could prove to actually be a huge opportunity for him, so long as it happened predictably in every restart. If he could place some kind of tracker on Nochka, she could lead him to the highest echelons of the Cult of Dragon, those who had stayed well hidden from him up until now. Also, if she really was intended as a sacrifice like he suspected, she could lead him to the place where the cult intended to perform their unbinding ritual, which could be a key to a lot of mysteries surrounding the Cult's actions - perhaps even the time loop itself.
He would have to wait and see how events would play out in the next restart.
✦ ✧ ✦
"Can we talk?"
Zorian looked away from the novel he was reading and glanced towards Kirielle, who was currently standing on the doorway, nervously gripping one of the support beams. Strange. Kirielle had been very subdued and asocial ever since Nochka had disappeared, rarely ever bothering him anymore, so her approaching him like this was quite unexpected.
"Sure," he agreed easily. He wasn't doing anything important at the moment, anyway. He was supposed to be organizing his notebooks so he could store the latest blueprints in his mind, but he just didn't feel like doing that at the moment and was instead procrastinating with some light reading. He could spare some time for his little sister. "What is it?"
She ran up to him and, before he could tell her to stop, hurled herself on top of him. As he was currently lying on his bed, she ended up basically re-enacting what had long become a very familiar scene to Zorian.
'Damn it, Kiri, I get enough of that crap at the beginning of each loop!' thought Zorian, but refrained from actually saying it out loud. Kirielle was already shaken up, no need to snap at her when she finally decided to open up a little.
"Where are your shoes?" he asked instead. "Don't tell me you've been walking around the house bare-footed again?"
Kirielle glanced at her feet and gave him a guilty look. "Don't be like Mom, Zorian. It was only one time."
"You're doing it right now, too," Zorian pointed out.
"Okay, two times," she said, pouting.
He put a bookmark into his novel, laid it aside, pushed her off of him and rose in a sitting position. She immediately mimicked him, sitting on the end of his bed beside him. They sat like that in silence for a while, Kirielle dangling her bare feet over the floor and staring at her toes like they were the most fascinating thing in the world.
"I'm sorry," she finally said.
"What are you sorry for?" asked Zorian, surprised.
"For being difficult."
"Difficult?" asked Zorian incredulously. He peered into her mind for a moment and found her thinking about Mother. Ugh. Yeah, that did kind of sound like something their mother would say. She never did like crying much. One of the few things she praised him for was that he rarely cried, even as a young child. "Kiri, you lost your friend. It's okay to be sad about that. You weren't being difficult at all."
"But you've been avoiding me all week," she mumbled.<
br />
"I wasn't avoiding you," he protested, aghast that she would even think that. "I was just… giving you some space to grieve in peace. You know? And besides, I was…"
She gave him a curious look when he didn't continue. "You were what?"
Should he tell her?
"I was trying to find Nochka," he finally admitted.
Her eyes widened at this. "You were… Is that… you should have told me!"
"I didn't want to get your hopes up," Zorian said.
"I was hoping anyway," she said, gripping the sheets tightly in her little fists.
He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into an embrace. She was still tense, but gradually relaxed after a while and returned his hug.
"I didn't find her," he admitted after a while.
"Well, obviously," she said, as if it was the most self-evident thing ever. "But you tried. You knew you probably weren't going to find her, and you still went out and searched for her. You didn't cry and mope around the house all day like I did."
"Kiri, you're nine," Zorian sighed. "What else could you have done? You're being way too hard on yourself."
She didn't say anything to that. Eventually he decided to just spend some time playing cards with her and praising her drawings. Which did cheer her up in the end, so he chalked that up as one of his better ideas. One of these days, once he mastered the alteration spell he was using to transfer notes into subsequent restarts sufficiently, he should gather some of her artwork into an art book of some sort and copy it into the next restart. Showing her the drawings she herself had made in previous restarts was bound to produce some amusing reactions.
✦ ✧ ✦
Later that evening, Zorian decided he had given Kael enough time to wrap up his last minute experiments and went down into the basement to retrieve the last of the morlock's promised notebooks. The door was unlocked, so Zorian simply walked in and closed them behind him.
As the door clicked shut, Zorian felt the sounds of the house above them disappear, the privacy portion of the wards placed on the basement engaging and sound-proofing the room. Among many other things. The privacy measures were apparently a standard part of the warding package the academy used to secure their workshops, and thus got added automatically to Imaya's basement when Kael had requested they turn it into a proper alchemical workshop… something that was very convenient in moments like these, since it meant that Zorian didn't have to spent hours securing the room every time he wanted to talk to Kael about some sensitive subject.