“And the fact that their powerful, well-connected families must be baying for blood hasn’t motivated you in the slightest, I’m sure.”
“Again, believe what you like. I’m here to see if you have anything useful to offer the investigation, not defend myself or the watch. The next new moon is in three days, and that’ll be sixteen deaths if the killer keeps doubling his kill-count. But by all means, keep being a prick instead of lending a hand.”
Dead gods, but I hated to admit, even to myself, that he was right. But he was. “Fine, fine. Tell me how they died.”
“They were all heart-stabbed. Going by the wound, the killer uses a stiletto or something very similar. Narrow, double-edged blade, eight or nine inches long. A single thrust in every case. His aim is unerring.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. Well, as best I could. Age had not been kind to my fingers.
“You’re a mage. Any sign of the art? There had to be magic at work in that carriage, at least.”
“No-one thought to look for it in the first three instances. By the time someone did, any trace had already dissipated. As for the carriage, yes, it stank of magic, but not the art.”
“Blood magic?”
“No.”
“Daemon-taint, then.”
“No.”
I looked him in the eye. His face was impassive.
“Go on and say it, then.”
“I have never before sensed any such magical residue as was present in the carriage.”
“Kluge, there’s only one other kind of magic.”
“That we know of.”
“Piss on that. If what you sensed wasn’t the power of a mage, a blood witch or a daemonist, that leaves only one thing.”
The power of a god.
Kluge blinked, and was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was low and tight. “I choose to believe there is another explanation, revered, because I do not know how to hold a deity to account for crimes committed.”
And just like that, all the fun went out of baiting him. Kluge never admitted he might be out of his depth. His admission of inadequacy to the task in front of him made me feel like an ass. I’m well aware that I am one, mind you, but I rarely feel bad about it. That day I did.
“Well, I suppose we’d better start by seeing what sort of connotations night lilies have with murder and death,” I told him. “And if it leads to some god, you’ll just have to accept the fact.” I worked my way out of the chair and he stood as well.
“I assume these are for me to keep?” I asked him, motioning towards the papers he’d brought.
He nodded. “When will I hear from you?”
“Come back in the morning if I haven’t sent a message.” He started to speak, and I held up a hand. “I know, time is short, three days to the next new moon. Jessep and I won’t dawdle.”
“My thanks, revered.”
I grunted. I didn’t want his thanks. I wanted him to go back to being a self-satisfied, smug bastard so that I could go back to pricking holes in his inflated sense of self-worth.
Some days you don’t get what you want.
“Jessep!”
“Master?”
“Come transcribe this chicken scratch into something legible for me. And feel free to summarize. I’ve no desire to subject myself to the watch’s idea of formal language.”
“I live to serve,” the boy replied, making his way forward from the stacks.
I snorted. “If only that were true. If you need me I’ll be in the stacks, looking up night lilies and the connection between the new moon and murder.” Neither Jessep nor I bothered to pretend he hadn’t been eavesdropping.
Jessep arrived at the petitioner’s table and picked up the first page of Kluge’s report. A look of horror flitted across his face as he scanned it.
“That awful, is it?”
“Dead gods! Who taught this monster how to spell?”
“No one, obviously. Have fun with that.”
I CHASED LEADS AND references until nightfall. By then I’d amassed dozens of scrolls and manuscripts at the reference desk, making notes as I went. Jessep had finished his unpleasant task while there was still light in the sky, but he knew better than to break my concentration. He made himself silently available to collect anything too heavy or too high for me to get at, and as night fell, he set about lighting the lamps and preparing a cold meal. It wasn’t often that he and I had such a paper-chase, but when it did happen, he really was a faultless acolyte. Not that I’d ever give him the satisfaction of telling him, virtue being its own reward.
Finally, I exhausted every reference and source. I doubted there was anything else to glean from the reports, Kluge being not a complete blithering idiot, but I’d see what I would see. There might be a second round of research. After a meal and some wine.
I tossed the last scroll on the desk and stretched my aching shoulders as well as I could. My leg was on fire, but no amount of stretching was going to alleviate that. I sat down heavily on the reference desk chair and let out a sigh.
“Food, master?”
“And wine. There’s a good lad.”
He brought a plate of cold roast beef and half a loaf of brown bread, along with a bottle, and then perched himself on one of the rack-ladders that were attached to the shelves. Normally I’d’ve scolded him for that, but piss on it.
“So,” I said around a mouth of bread and meat, “anything worth reading in the reports?”
“You’ll read it for yourself, of course, master, but the only thing that jumped out at me in that abominable misuse of ink and paper had to do with the first death. The cobbler.”
“Go on, Jessep. I’m really not getting any younger.”
“Did Commander Kluge tell you where they found the body?”
“In bed.”
“Did he say where that bed was?”
“Spit it out. I can see you think you’ve found something interesting.”
“The Crack’d Tower,” Jessep said, eyes alight.
I forgot to chew for a moment.
“How the hells did he forget to mention that? I take back all the times I took back all the bad things I said about Kluge,” I said. “He really is a moron.”
“Actually, you’ve never taken back anything you said about him,” Jessep informed me.
“Well that just goes to show how good a judge of character I am.”
The Crack’d Tower. Eight stories of black basalt right in the heart of the Spindles. More than three centuries before, it had been the sanctum of a powerful mage named Feklin. Of course he’d been an evil fuck; with a name like that, how could he be otherwise? The neighborhood had grown weary of children going missing, so the story went, and had pooled their resources to hire another mage to make Feklin dead. One assumes the watch was just as useless then as it was now. The ensuing duel had killed both mages, and cracked the tower in the process. The Tower still stood, riven though it was, and its reputation had not softened over the centuries. Mams still threatened to lock misbehaving kids in it, at any rate.
It seemed like something Kluge should have mentioned.
“All right,” I told Jessep, “that’s something worth noting. What else?”
“The watch has been very busy trying to find where the night lilies came from, to no avail. Nobody sells them, either in the market or on the black market. Reading between the lines, the watch has made itself really unwelcome with flower sellers, herbalists and apothecaries across the city these last couple of weeks. The search continues.”
“And there’s really no connection between the victims?”
“Not from one murder scene to the next, no. Nothing they’ve been able to uncover, at least.” He shifted on the ladder, which wasn’t exactly built for comfort. “And you, master? What have you discovered?”
“Nothing pleasant.” I looked at the mass of primary and secondary sources piled on the desk in front of me. “Fifty-three references to night lilies. When I cross-referenc
e them in connection to death, it becomes forty-seven. With murder, we’re down to eighteen. And every single one of those eighteen, directly or indirectly, has to do with Nematos.”
“Nematos? Who’s that?”
“The god of murder.”
“That’s, uh, not good.”
“Well, he’s supposed to be chained up until the end of the world.”
“Maybe he escaped?”
“He certainly wasn’t let out for good behavior. Apparently one of the few things all the gods agreed upon was how much they hated Nematos’s guts.”
Jessep scratched at the stubble on his scalp. “You don’t think it’s really a murder god murdering people, do you?”
“I sure as fuck hope not, lad. Every time he murders, he gets stronger, more powerful. Every time he murders he doubles his body-count. You do the math. If Nematos was left to his own devices, everyone in the world would be dead in a few years. That’s why they locked him up and destroyed the key. Pray it’s some mad imposter doing all the murdering and not the real thing.”
Jessep’s face had lost some color, contemplating my words. He gave a small shudder. “That’s me not sleeping tonight,” he muttered.
“How fortuitous, since I need you to write out a report for Kluge detailing everything we just discussed. With proper citations, mind you. Show those barely literate bastards how it’s done, lad.”
Jessep gave me a stare that was less than adoring. “I suppose you’re off to bed, though, master.”
“Actually, no. I need to pay a call at Bath’s temple.”
I waited for him to ask why, but he didn’t oblige. So I filled in the rest for him.
“I’d tell you why, but it’s a secret. Heh.”
Stone-faced silence. He didn’t even groan.
“Because Bath is the god of secrets? Do you not have a sense of humor, whelp?”
“That joke is older than you, master.”
“That joke is evergreen, boy!”
He just looked at me with a sort of mild expression of pity on his face, but I chose to take his silence as agreement. I harrumphed and worked my way out of the chair.
“Oh, master?”
“What?”
“The murder god. Every time he kills, he leaves a night lily on the corpse. And every time he kills, he kills twice as many as the previous time.”
“That’s the size of it.”
“So assuming he’s left unchecked for a long time, where would he go about getting millions of night lilies?”
I stopped to consider. “That may or may not be a good question, but it’s definitely one I have no answer to. Try and think of some more like that while I’m gone. Who knows what might help. And when you’re done writing out my research notes, write a message to Kluge telling him to take us round to the Crack’d Tower in the morning. Then take the whole mess to the local watch station and tell them to make sure it gets to Kluge tonight.”
“I live to serve,” he said once more, in a tone that suggested he was trying to convince himself of the fact.
BATH’S TEMPLE WAS JUST a few dozen yards down the Street of the Gods, but it was almost like entering another world. Power throbbed from the stones of the building, for those with the ability to sense it. Unlike Lagna’s temple, no speck of grime or graffiti besmirched Bath’s unassuming edifice, and no beggars had to be chased away from the front steps – which in Lucernis could only be attributed to magic. Such was the difference between the temple of a living god and a dead one.
I made my painful way up Bath’s steps, cursing my dead leg and general decrepitude. When I got to the top of the stairs, one of his sewn-lipped, shaven-headed priests was waiting. She bowed respectfully and opened the massive but unadorned temple door, letting a heavy, musky incense drift out into the night. I nodded and hobbled inside.
The interior of Bath’s temple was never the same twice. Bath always knew why you’d come. Where you ended up, how you got there, and who you saw – if anyone – was all determined by the purpose of your visit, and how Bath felt about it. Most temple-goers went straight to the Chapel of Secrets to unburden themselves.
I was not most temple-goers, so I followed a lamp-lit corridor that terminated in a snug little room inhabited by two comfy chairs and a fragile scrap of a table with a teapot on it. There was only one cup.
I worked my way down into one of the chairs by degrees. When the creaking and cursing had subsided another door – which had not been there a moment before – opened and Bath’s high priest entered. Like all Bath’s priests, his name was a secret. Like all Bath’s priests, his mouth was sewn shut. Unlike all of Bath’s other priests, his robes were sable instead of gray, which was the only way you knew he was the high priest.
He nodded, sat in the other chair, and poured tea for me. Then proceeded to stare at me with keen, intelligent eyes while I sipped.
It’s a delicate thing, dealing with an organization whose whole reason for being is the keeping of secrets. Professional courtesy gets you only so far. If I just came straight out and asked whether Nematos was loose and murdering folks, I’d most likely only get a bland, if somewhat disgusting smile as a reply. There was a certain quid pro quo expected if I wanted information from Bath and his minions. To get, I had to give, and that wasn’t particularly easy considering these secret-mongers knew a hell of a lot. Giving them something trade-worthy was a challenge. On the other hand, sometimes what they’d accept in trade was, to any normal person, ridiculously unimportant.
I finished the cup, set it down, and said “Shall we begin, then?”
Bath’s high priest made a little open-handed gesture inviting me to start.
“I need to know if Nematos is really free and murdering folks.”
He made a sort of ‘all right, then’ gesture.
“Well, let’s see. Did you know that King Orvo II only had one testicle?”
His eyebrows scrunched up in a put-upon expression, as if I’d offered him a rotting fish in exchange for a pearl.
“Fine, fine. How about this, then: the Kharthrd folio is no longer able to banish demons.”
He mimed a yawn, the bastard. Then he pulled a thin strip of paper from his sleeve and passed it to me. My master requires something of a more personal nature, it read.
That raised my hackles.
“Oh, Bath wants personal information, does he? Well how about this: I happen to know that your master has a sibling. That’s quite personal, and not at all common knowledge, is it? I wonder why. Maybe I should start asking around, so I can figure out why Bath doesn’t want anyone to know that—”
The high priest raised his hand to cut me off. He was stone-faced. He pulled another strip of paper from his cuff.
Tsk. Threats are unbecoming of a high priest.
“And what exactly would lead you to believe I give a pox-ridden fuck about what’s becoming of a high priest? That’s a serious question, by the way.”
One last slip of paper appeared from his sleeve.
You make a good point. The answer to your question is yes, Nematos has escaped His captivity.
When I looked up from the note, Bath’s priest had vanished.
KLUGE CAME ROUND AT an abysmally early hour to collect us, banging on the temple’s door before first light. I would have complained about the lost sleep, but he had obviously not slept at all. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and the flesh around his deep-set eyes was dark and unhealthy. The powers that be must really have been holding his feet to the fire.
“If you’d mentioned one of the murders took place in the Crack’d Tower yesterday, we wouldn’t have to be up at this gods-forsaken hour,” I told him.
“If I’d thought it important, I would have,” he replied. “That tower has a nasty reputation, but it hasn’t stopped vagrants from dossing down there for decades, at least. There’s nothing of magic left there, revered.”
“Dark places attract dark things, Kluge. It would not surprise me if Nematos started there because
of its history.”
“If it is Nematos.”
“Bath says it is.”
He blanched at that. “When did you speak to Bath?” he asked.
“I popped round to his temple last night. And I talked to his high priest, not the god himself. But the information came from Bath.”
“What exactly did Bath say?”
“He said Nematos has escaped his confinement.”
“That’s not the same as saying Nematos is doing the killings,” Kluge said, but it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it.
“You hold on to that fine distinction, Kluge, if it gives you comfort. Now let’s go have a look at the Tower, and then get some food. Jessep gets cranky as all hells when he skips breakfast.”
The ride out to the Spindles was quick, if brutally jolting. Kluge sat in the carriage with us, while two watchmen sat up front, one handling the team and the other ringing a clanging hand-bell to clear what traffic there was that early.
“You read the report I sent?” I asked Kluge.
“I did. It was... thorough.”
“Damned right it was,” Jessep muttered.
“Anything useful?” I asked.
“Did it include information on how to find or capture a god of murder?” Kluge asked.
“You know it didn’t.”
“Then its usefulness was not immediately apparent.”
“Kluge, what do you know about gods?”
“What everyone does, I suppose.”
“Which means not fucking much. So let me give you a little information pertinent to your investigation. First, gods have no fixed address. They’re not even required to stay on this plane of existence. They may feel a particular affinity towards a specific place, or person, or group, but they do not have homes, not even those with temples.
The Last God Page 8