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The Bridge of Bones (Trouble and Riel's Story)
🕑 Added 2021-08-31 23:42:42 +0000 UTC[EXTREME CONTENT WARNING: This story is an attempt at a police procedural murder mystery, and contains all of the elements included in that genre, including extensive discussion and investigation of murder and death. In particular, this story involves the implied kidnapping, physical beating, and violent murder of a child, as well as examination of the crime scene and his injuries and dead body. It also involves discussions of morgues and contains adult language and brief allusions to vomiting. Please protect yourself and read only at your own risk!]
Part I: A Whole Lotta Eyes
Trouble has a specific routine he follows, whenever he’s out on patrol.
Normally, Shepherd officers patrol in teams of two: safer to travel in pairs, and to have another set of eyes to scan for signs of trouble. And you never know when a firefight will suddenly break out and you’ll need the backup, or someone to run for reinforcements.
But lately, he’s taken to patrolling by himself, because hey, he’s the goddamn Vice-Commander of the whole Order, and that has to count for something, even if it’s just an occasional flaunting of the rules. And Blade does it, in the rare times he decides to take patrol duty between all of his other responsibilities. And anyway, Trouble knows these streets, knows Ashtown. This neighborhood has been his home his entire life, and he feelsits every alleyway, gutter, and ladder like he feels his own veins thrumming in his hand, or feels which way the sun is tracking across the sky without looking directly at it. Ashtown is his fucking beat, as the detective novels would put it. So he doesn’t exactly need backup to waltz around his own home.
He ambles down Baker Street first, the main thoroughfare of this tiny section of Ashtown, breathing in the floury, warm, slightly dusty scents of the bakeries that line the aptly-named road. Mrs. Bard waves him over and hands him a hand pie wrapped in parchment paper, cooling rapidly in the autumn morning chill, but heavy and steaming inside with potatoes and gravy; he thanks her—he’s long since given up trying to refuse, and he’s never been one to turn down food, anyway—and listens politely as she chats about her grandkids; he inquires after her nephew, who’s just enrolled in the Army of the Sun as a cadet. Then he strolls down to the corner that intersects with Bright Walk, ordering a hot cup of khav from Old Man Kennyth at the little covered stall outside of his shop. The Old Man tries to foist a custard bun on him, too, but Trouble pats his stomach like a drum and wryly makes a comment about needing to keep his fighting form, and the Old Man laughs and comments that he’d better not be getting soft with the Shepherds, because he still remembers Trouble inhaling everything he could when he was a teenager, even food other people had picked at first, and once an entire chocolate cake for breakfast; and Trouble laughs him off, because it was a cake that he’d stolen from Old Man Kennyth when he was still a shithead brat, and he’d been sick both with sugar and guilt for hours afterwards. Then they part ways, and he does his survey along Bright Walk. All very uniform, very routine.
From there, he’s supposed to do his rounds throughout the beat, a small sliver of the overall district. (Back in the day, he and the others were expected to cover much more ground, but with so many damn recruits joining up—almost more than Shery can house and process without there being a waitlist—each team can reliably police much more manageable tracts of the city at a time.) On normal days, this particular route takes him about two hours: he strolls, has a smoke, checks in with regulars or pokes his head in on known troublemakers. Sometimes people flag him down for his help, but it’s rare that it’s anything beyond a cat stuck up a tree, maybe some petty theft, once or twice a ketch—short for kuketch, Haven slang for a creep or voyeur. In each case, he always intervenes, even though there’s technically a mandate that such concerns are outside of Shepherd jurisdiction if they don’t meet the threshold of evidence regarding arcane or demonic activity. He can’t get in trouble for helping out anyway, though, because he doesn’t have Diminished powers to be misusing; so nothing stops him from rolling up his sleeves and climbing up trees to snag particularly angry felines and hauling in idiots to the Vice Guard for arrest.
There hasn’t been a sign of a demon on this beat for months. It makes him proud that the Shepherds have done such a good job of eradicating them from the city—before “the Hero of Haven” joined, it was common to see at least an Imp a night after curfew—but he tells himself that he can’t get complacent, can’t relax his guard. Endarkened are tricky, and it would be just like them to lull everyone into a false sense of security, then attack while the iron is cold.
That’s why he carries his big sniper rifle across his back, even on a patrol as mundane and familiar as this one. It’s just as good of a partner as the human one he doesn’t take on these morning walks, bumping against his shoulder like an old friend, keeping an eye on his six and watching his back. The neighborhood folk have gotten used to the foreboding sight of it, are maybe even comforted by it—and the ones who aren’t comfortable are at least visually warned not to fuck around in front of him. Multipurpose, and all that.
He supposes that’s how it’s so easy for Timo to find him in the morning crowd: he just had to look for the tall glint of Trouble’s rifle and its scope (Widowmaker today, sleek and prim, because he felt it needed the exposure to light and air). The kid is a friend of Caine’s, a buck-toothed little upstart with a loud and happy family down by the canals, though Trouble is more familiar with some of his older brothers: friendly, jocular teens who look out for some of the younger urchins and keep them out of trouble. Timo’s face is shiny with sweat as he jogs up to Trouble, jostling his elbow and shaking his sleeve the way he might with one of his brothers.
“You gotta—come quick—”
Trouble peers down at him, frowning suspiciously, hands still shoved insouciantly into his pockets. Because of their connections to Caine, some of these kids forget that the Shepherds are usually on-duty officers and try to involve them in silly games, often babbling about trading cards that have been floating around the neighborhood. It doesn’t help that sometimesthose officers indulge them, or show off how many pushups they can do with a kid on their back (not that he would know a thing about any of that). “I’m on patrol, kid,” he says, striving for professionalism, “so if it’s about the cards, it’s gotta wait—”
He cuts himself off when he finally takes in the look on Timo’s face. It’s not scared, exactly, but he is genuinely distressed. “What’s wrong?”
Timo shakes his head wildly, his sweaty hair sticking up in all directions like a porcupine’s. “We found a kid,” he pants finally, trying to regain his breath: Trouble remembers that he might have asthma, something like that. “Uh—down by Attican Way. In an alley. We was playing—well, it don’t matter what we was playing, only all of a sudden Moll started yelling, and there was this kid on the ground. He ain’t breathing.”
Trouble begins to run, not stopping to question it. No matter how silly they can act, Ashtown kids never joke about things like injury or death. “You know him?”
Timo, doing his best to trot after him, shakes his head. “Uh-uh. He ain’t from around here.”
“You sure? How d’you know?” Trouble always lapses back into his slum accent, around these kids.
Timo shakes his head again. “You just can tell. Wait, and you’ll see.”
#
Trouble stares down at the body for a long moment, then squats down on his haunches, taking a long, deep drag of his cigarette. The smoke blunts his nerves only a little. “Ah, shit.”
When Timo had come running up to him, Trouble had thought he’d known what to expect. Ashtown isn’t as bad as it was when he was younger, but dead kids still turn up now and again. Usually it’s accidents—apprentices taken a bad fall in cotton mills, couriers too small for over-fast carthorses to see them before it’s too late. Charities and orphanages and state-run poorhouses have improved since his time: starvation and untreated sickness among the young are rarer, though not unheard of.
But murder. Murder, he wasn’t prepared for. He feels the roil of bile shifting in his stomach and takes another drag of the cigarette, though it only makes him feel vaguely sicker.
The boy is thirteen or fourteen, he would guess. Norm. He is slight of frame and has coifed dark hair and gentle, soft features. Slim wrists, smooth palms—like Riel’s. Never did a day’s hard labor in his life.
His clothes are like Riel’s, too: well-made, fashionable, aristocratic. Dark, tailored suit, polished gold buttons—even a snowy cravat, for God’s sake. Definitely not someone from Ashtown. An extremely wealthy merchant’s son, maybe. Or, God forbid, a politician’s. What was he doing all the way out here, in some obscure alley in the Attican Way?
What’s even stranger is how immaculate his clothes are, even in death. The boy’s body is riddled with bruises, ligature marks, evidence of strangulation, and the obvious cause of death—the frayed crater in the boy’s torso, not unlike what he’s seen Blade or Briony do to an enemy when they’re pretty pissed off, with energy so hot and strong that it’s cauterized the edges of the wound—threshold of evidence, indeed—but the clothes are almost perfect. Who the Hael would straighten, button, and tuck in the victim’s shirt after blowing a fiery hole clear through his chest?
Someone who knew him, maybe, his mind offers, the cynical part of him that he tries to ignore in his everyday life. It makes him a good investigator, but surly and ill-tempered as a friend. Someone who cared about how he’d look when he was found.
But the brutality of the rest of the wounds—these bruises indicate an extended beating, vicious and passionate violence—speak to intense anger, burning hatred. How could someone have tortured this kid for hours, but still cared about him enough to treat his corpse with respect after the fact?
His charch is burning to nothing; he feels the hot touch of it against his gloved fingertips and carefully moves out to the street, stubbing the cigarette out on the wall and grinding the remains to nothing under his boot. Timo and his friends watch him warily from the end of the block, where he made them wait. They’re quiet, subdued, but not as hysterical as some might expect. Ashtown kids can be weirdly numb when it comes to death.
He straightens and runs over his options. He needs to send for Vesuvia Rench, the so-called “Mistress of the Art of Death”—one of the few Thanatologists in the city, and the only one known to him in Ashtown. He can count on one hand the number of Mages who have the exact combination of gifts to make them Thanatologists, people who can magically embalm and preserve bodies for later inspection: they need the vast anatomical knowledge of Healers, the touch of ice that some Elementalists have, and the sharp skills and mental fortitude to understand arts way beyond his reckoning, generally in the Binding and Shifting schools of thought—something to do with matter and the flesh and entropy, or whatever. And despite Vesuvia’s flat refusals to become an official Shepherd—she even stood up to Blade’s best shot, though Blade’s best probably came off as more of a threat than an offer—she’s proven willing to work with Trouble before. The body of the boy hasn’t been disturbed, so far as he can tell; the kids must have been the first to stumble across it. Otherwise he suspects it would have been moved or looted by now. And it must have been left here—the boy must have died—just today, only hours earlier, judging by the condition of the… remains. He needs Vesuvia to get down here fast, preserve the body, and then move it to the privacy of her morgue. Then he needs to go over the crime scene, see if there’s anything else that he can find—then interview the kids, then interview potential witnesses—but wait, wouldn’t it be better if he knew a time of death? That will require one of the Healers to do an examination, or even better, one of the Diviners, though they hate using dead bodies as focuses and always throw up—and then there’ll be Vesuvia to contend with, because she hates letting Shepherd officers into her clinic, but he doesn’t have a choice—
He runs a hand through his hair and tells himself to get it together. Takes a deep breath. Then he crooks a finger at the kids waiting down the street: a few of them, Timo included, jog forward.
“It’s magic, isn’t it?” one of them blurts before he can say anything. “I saw the hole in his chest. A Mage done doffed him, didn’t they?”
Trouble crouches so that he’s at the girl’s eye level, looks her square in the eye. The girl—Bekah, he thinks, precocious and bossy—shrinks under his hawklike stare. Trouble says softly, in a stern, fierce tone, “We don’t know nothing yet. So you don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, you hear? Not your parents, not your brother or your sister, not your friends. I gotta figure this out, and if people start spreading false stories, it’s gonna make it harder on me to get justice for this kid, find his true killer. You hear me? You start telling people that magic got him, they’re gonna start hunting. And Mages you know—nice people, like Red and his friends, or Briony, or the Hero of Haven—they might get blamed by angry people who jump to conclusions. Get it wrong. So you don’t say anything about it until I figure it out, all right?”
Slowly, the girl nods, biting her lip. Inwardly, Trouble sighs, but he maintains his severe expression. He doesn’t like employing guilt and threats, not towards kids, but it’s the best he can do—he needs to buy himself time, and word getting out early that a child-killing Diminished murderer is on the prowl will lead to panic, if not outright rioting. And word willget out—because magic or arma or something like it definitely killed the boy in the alley. The best he can do is forestall the chaos as long as he can.
He turns sharply to Timo, who snaps to attention like he’s a bonafide military recruit in front of a superior officer. “You. I need you to run to Shepherd headquarters. Tell the guards that Vice Commander needs backup at this location. Six Solar Corps officers and Thigol Squad. Tell ‘em I saw a crow eating a lily, if they ask for more.” Timo is probably going to tell them everything, anyway, but he didn’t spend all that time memorizing the code phrases if he isn’t going to use them. The boy nods, and Trouble flips him a danar for his troubles.
To Bekah, he says, “I need you to head down to 37 Ebon Street, off the intersection with Flint Lane. Find a woman named Vesuvia Rench. She’s hard to miss, got this great cloud of fiery red hair, purple and black robes, sort of wild eyes. Tell her Trouble needs her here. If she drags her feet, tell her I’ll pay double her fee for her to get this done within the hour. You got that?”
“Uh-huh.”
He gives her, too, another danar, and watches as she trots off down the street with a heavy heart. This is why people patrol with partners, he thinks, a sour taste of dismay in his mouth; he wants to spit. That way, they don’t have to rely on random street kids. But it’s the best he can do, under the circumstances: he didn’t know that this was what he’d find this morning. Widowmaker bumps against his shoulder, half a comfort, half a reprimand. Nothing to shoot right now, more’s the pity. That’s when he’s actually useful.
He positions two sets of kids on each end of the alleyway, forcing them to keep their backs turned as they focus on preventing intruders from fumbling their way through the crime scene, thumbing the new danars in their pockets. Meanwhile, he picks over the ground, keeping a keen eye out for anything that looks out of place. The alleyway is a mess of footprints and thin, cracked mud: it rained yesterday, the kind of feeble drizzle that turned dirt into slush and didn’t actually wash the white cobblestones clean. But there’s no way for him to tell which footprints are relevant and which are from the hundreds of residents who go tramping through this part of Ashtown every day. The clothes on the boy don’t show any signs of rain damage, though. So he was likely killed—or dumped—here after it stopped raining. Which was sometime last night, he thinks: he’ll need to consult someone, a Weather-Mage, maybe, because he was passed out long before the patter of rain on the windows stopped. And there’s no mud on the boy, either, no wet spatter, so there was likely enough time for the rain-damp dirt to dry back into urban dust by the time the victim found his way into the alleyway. So sometime in the early morning, maybe?
Other than that, he can’t find much of note aside from the boy’s corpse itself. No murder weapon—of course there wouldn’t be a murder weapon, the murderer likely is the weapon—no blood trail, nothing like that. No signs of a particular struggle, not around here, and judging by the evidence of being bound and gagged and the prolonged violence, it’s highly unlikely the boy was killed in this alleyway, anyway. The likelier probability is that he was tortured and eventually murdered somewhere else, somewhere with less risk of discovery, and then brought here to be disposed of. So they would have come in—what, some sort of vehicle, a wagon or a cart or a carriage. Would have looked conspicuous, carrying around the body of a well-dressed teenaged aristocrat boy on foot, even if he’d been bundled in carpet or tarp, which Trouble doesn’t think he had been. So, the murderer used a vehicle. But if they had that resource, why bother dumping him in this particular alleyway? Why not take him to the docks, throw him in the river, where he’d likely never be found—or cart him out into the Sun’s Embrace to bury him?
He glances at the boy’s immaculate appearance again, feels his jaw tighten. The bastard wanted him to be found.
Bad, bad fucking news. Mage or Ket killer, targeting a rich Norm kid, dumping his body in a public place—in Ashtown, no less, the heart of Diminished life in the city. An enraged rebel, maybe, lashing out against a son of his oppressors? A deranged killer pointing the finger at easier culprits? Or just some senseless asshole shouting a big fuck you to both sides and sitting back to watch them tear each other apart?
He checks the boy’s body last, gritting his teeth against the feeling of… invasion. Sacrilege. But there’s nothing of note there, either, aside from the obvious wounds. The clothes lack labels, as all designer fashion would. He can’t find anything to indicate who the boy is or where he comes from, except all the parts that scream not here.
His reinforcements are coming soon, so Trouble rises from his crouch and turns in a slow circle to survey the alleyway by himself one last time. He checks his sightlines, takes note of every angle and field of vision towards and from the narrow, crooked passageway. A sniper’s habit. No windows here, no balconies or porches or side doors. No trash bins. He’s always avoided this particular alley precisely because it makes him feel so cramped, sort of unnerved by its airlessness—and Dog, when he’s with Trouble, always goes wild because of the rats…
Trouble freezes, then angles his head to the right, squinting through the brightening noon gloom. There’s a particular hidey hole here near the ground, he knows, a literal rat’s nest where the vermin burrow during the day: he knows because Dog is always shoving his face into it like a man trying to inhale a too-small pie. And everyone knows the saying about Haven’s rats. If there’s anything valuable in the vicinity…
Trouble smiles grimly to himself, thinking about how Chase loves to needle Riel with that phrase. A Haven rat steals gold even when he can’t eat it.
He finds the hidey hole, a fist-sized, shallow indent in the brick wall with a deeper tunnel in the center, and unceremoniously plunges his hand into it: the rats on this side of town are cowards, not like their more vicious cousins closer to the river, who would rather bite a man to the bone rather than tolerate his disrespect. There’s the rustle of scraps of paper, bits of cotton—thank God he’s wearing gloves—and the scuffle of the rodents fleeing deeper underground in the face of his intrusion. And then—his hand closes around something smooth and heavy and metallic, tucked near the entrance of the nest.
Trouble nearly crows with triumph as he extracts his hand and holds a heavy, expensive pocketwatch up to the light. It’s made of solid gold—not something dropped by an Ashtown laborer or everyday tradesman—and sports a pristine crystal face and tiny, delicate golden hands. He holds it close to his ear; it’s still ticking. And the dial has the letters C.S. painted on it. Trouble huffs at it. There’s room to have had the full name painted, which would have made his job a lot easier—but he’ll take it. Damn it all, he will take it.
There’s the clatter of familiar bootsteps behind him, and he turns to find the children parting for two rows of smartly-uniformed, saluting Shepherd officers: he may never get used to it, the sight of them greeting him like that, but just like the watch, he’ll take his blessings where he can get them. He pockets the watch and tilts his head towards the dead boy in the alleyway.
“Gear up,” he tells them, with a gruff confidence that he’s not totally sure he feels. “We’ve got a murder to solve.”
#
He spends most of the afternoon working with his reinforcements, doing the legwork that accompanies any investigation of this nature. They cordon off the alleyway, get Vesuvia to preserve and move the body, and canvass the area for evidence and witnesses. The kids already told him everything, and their stories all match up: one minute, they were playing Shepherds and Demons, some sort of elaborate pretend game which is supposedly unfair because the boys always make the girls play the demons. The next minute, one of them, a shy girl named Moll, found the body.
None of the neighbors claim to have heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, not last night, not this morning; most of them have the blank look of confusion that indicates telling the truth, and the others simply look wary of the general trouble a murder can bring to the neighborhood. No one had any cause to use that particular alleyway that morning, which Trouble believes: it pops out into a street that no one in the surrounding houses would have a need to get to, not on their ways to work or school. So either the murderer knows this area well, or they got extraordinarily lucky.
By the time the sun is melting into the western part of the sky, a fire-orange egg sliding across a hot pan, he’s finally wrapping up his business in the Attican Way and heading over to Vesuvia’s morgue to see what she’s uncovered. The Thanatologist has worked herself up into a towering rage by the time he gets there, so Trouble has to stand there and argue with her instead of looking again at the boy’s body—neither of which he particularly wants to do.
“Three hours,” Vesuvia cries, her vivid red ringlets curling and uncurling around her head like tendrils of a sea anemone, crackling with her anger. “Three hours, and you know how it taxes me to keep a body in stasis! And I’ve got three other clients already on their slabs, and every minute you dawdle is another moment the spells on all of them risk failing—”
“I had to ask around for witnesses while the crime was still fresh,” Trouble answers tartly, feeling a vein throb in the back of his head. Experience has taught him to be wiser when giving powerful Mages lip, but it’s still an effort to hold his tongue and remain reasonably civil. “And, let’s face it, Ves, your other clients don’t come close to this. They’re, what, old fogeys afraid to look ugly in death, or relatives who want a few more days to say goodbye before the pyre. This is a murder. You keep that body preserved as long as we tell you to. We’ll pay for the lost services if the spells on any of the others sputter.”
She stares at him for a moment, speechless, half-gasping with anger. Vesuvia takes her title as “Mistress of the Art of Death” extremely seriously, he knows. And each body she has to preserve is a constant drain on her magic: she likened it once to controlling multiple limbs at once, using each one to hold up a separate anvil. The more bodies, the more limbs she has to unconsciously keep track of—and the more her energy is dispersed and leeched away. Add too many limbs—or too many anvils—and eventually, her body will give out under the pressure, and each limb will fall. All the bodies under her watch will immediately revert to their natural decaying state.
He cannot have that happening, not yet, so he cuts her off before she can launch into another tirade about the sanctity of death and the beauty of corpses and whatever. “The Order will pay you triple if you help us solve this case. In addition to the lost wages, should they happen.”
She immediately goes silent, regards him shrewdly. “Can you do that?”
He smirks, tired. “I’m Vice Commander, aren’t I?”
She runs skeptical brown eyes over him, her gaze finally settling on his sniper rifle. She’s a handful of years older than him, was already successfully plying her trade and working towards opening her clinic when he was still an adolescent with a bloody nose and a fire in his gut to give the world one back; sometimes he thinks that’s all she remembers, all Ashtown remembers, that sullen, cocksure young man, and he never knows if it’s a good thing—if it creates a stronger tie between him and the people here or if it undermines him—or not. “Right,” she drawls, folding her arms, calculating. “Sometimes I do forget.”
Before either of them can say more, the Diviner he sent for—one of Red’s old schoolmates, a dark-haired mystical sort named Raven—appears at the clinic door, looking apprehensive. Trouble jerks his head to indicate that she should come in before Vesuvia can protest, saying, “You sure you’re up for this?” He hasn’t worked with Raven on a case like this before.
The Sage swallows a little, her hand reaching up to clasp her throat. “If I must,” she says faintly, looking unhappy. Trouble steels himself against the sympathy. He knows looking into the past of the dead, especially in such close proximity to them, is distressing for Diviners. But this case is already too urgent to forego any answers they might glean for the sake of comfort.
Surprisingly, Vesuvia doesn’t protest the incursion—she is usually overly protective of “her” dead and their privacy—and they head down together to the morgue, which is fittingly situated in the clinic’s basement. There, Trouble has to suppress a shudder: the air here is somehow damp but icy cold, an abrupt change from the growing heat of the day upstairs. There is no smell, except for the faint notes of antiseptic that bring to mind an infirmary. Only, the “patients” lying on the marble slabs scattered throughout the room don’t need bandages or poultices. They lie still, covered in white sheets that don’t flutter when the group walks by. The lack of movement, or reaction to his presence, makes him feel immaterial—almost as if he were a ghost himself.
He hears Raven suck in a sharp breath, her psychic senses likely assaulted by the press of all these dead. Trouble reaches out to place a reassuring, grounding hand on her bony shoulder, but the contact only makes her jump; she shies away from him—he is mostly a stranger, after all, and her commanding officer—and Trouble’s hand falls away like it’s a dead thing. Wrong thing to do, then. Doesn’t bode well for what comes next.
Vesuvia leads them to the slab in the farthest corner of the room, and Trouble can already tell that’s where the boy is, because the body under the sheet is so much smaller than the others. The Thanatologist doesn’t pause, doesn’t give Raven (or him) time to process, before she draws back the sheet and uncovers the boy’s face. His eyes are open now, Trouble notices, unnerved. Or they were before, and he simply didn’t see. The eyes are gray and dull, and the boy’s expression is bent into one of frightened sadness.
Trouble tears his gaze away from the boy’s face. “Did you learn anything from the body?” he asks Vesuvia.
She scowls, as if to rebut with something about how he’s only paying her to preserve, not evaluate, but after a moment, she too glances at the dead boy’s face and sighs, adjusting the sheet so that it uncovers the wound in his chest. Trouble’s heart kicks up at the sight of it: it is a brutal injury, worse with the clothes peeled away. Like a small meteor had punched through the flesh.
“Contusions all over his body,” Vesuvia says, her voice clipped and clinical but her eyes a little troubled. “Both from shoes and fists. One perpetrator, I would guess: maybe two if they were the same size and weight, but one is more likely. Some blunt force trauma, but not enough to cause bleeding in the brain. Laceration on his back and the back of his head. Seems like he was thrown, tossed around.” She looks up at them, grave. “Someone spent hours beating him. While he was tied up. At some point they began to strangle him—bare hands, which I would guess speaks to something personal, a vendetta, it’s too intimate otherwise—but stopped before it could kill him. The intensity of the marks there—they weren’t made by someone necessarily strong. Not a big man or woman, though not small, either. But violent, hateful.”
Trouble nods. None of this is anything he hasn’t already figured out for himself. “And the—killing wound?”
Vesuvia glances at the injury, then blows out a long breath. “Magic,” she says, absolutely decisive. There is no doubt in her eyes. “There are still tiny magical charges lingering on his body, if you know what to look for. In another hour or so, they’ll disperse completely. But you can feel them, smell them. Someone used astral magic to fire up energy in their hand and blast it through his chest. Like a starbolt, in battle magic terms, or a simple destructive blast. Not fire, just a concentration of pure energy. Like firing a gun. It would have killed him instantly.” She hesitates, then adds, “Well. He wouldn’t had time to—feel any pain.”
“Damn,” Trouble says quietly. He doesn’t know what to say for a moment; and all three of them know that this is their worst fear realized. “Couldn’t have been Endarkened, could it?”
Vesuvia shakes her head. “I can’t say that the Endarkened weren’t involved—perhaps the killer was possessed or corrupted in some way—but the magic itself doesn’t contain any of the Rot, the essence of demonic magic. The hand that did this was a Mage’s, through and through.”
It’s a dark day when the best-case scenario is that a child killer was possessed by a demon when driven to kill; it would provide some level of… dispersing the blame, at least. Trouble feels his gut go cold at the thought; he clenches his fist to ground himself and says, “You got a time of death?”
Vesuvia shrugs. “It’s an imprecise thing,” she comments, almost dismissive. “Maybe two or three o’clock this morning. Divination could show us more.” And she looks pointedly to Raven.
The Seer winces, the moonstone diadem in her hair shivering with the movement, but after a moment of gathering herself, she finally steps forward and places her hand—just two fingers—on the dead boy’s shoulder. None of them speak as she closes her eyes and begins to enter the trance-like state that Divining can induce; Trouble feels the air shift around them, subtly, and then the tiny thrum of power he can sometimes sense when others are working their magic, sort of like a staticky crackle on his skin, particularly over his face. A terrible stillness falls over Raven as her breathing slows. His heart thumps heavy in his chest in the silence. Please, he prays to no one in particular. Don’t let this be for nothing.
Only a minute or two passes before Raven suddenly jerks away from the body, gasping for air like a rescued drowner. Vesuvia is ready with a bucket; Trouble turns away as Raven clutches for it, heaves and gags, though nothing comes up. At Vesuvia’s impatient look—as if he’s the cause of the other Mage’s nausea—he goes to fetch some water from the clinic upstairs.
“I didn’t see much,” Raven pants when he returns, grasping for the cup of water with desperate fingers. She drinks deeply for a moment, cold sweat shining on her face; she still looks clammy and sick, and her fingers tremble. “Just—impressions, feelings, colors. There was… so much pain, and fear, towards the end. He knew his captor. He… he had hope. Hope that it would be over soon, that he would be rescued, or that his tormentor would tire of the game and let him go. That was the worst part. The hope. He didn’t truly think he was going to be killed. Not until it was too late.”
She draws a shaky hand over her brow again and falls silent, evidently sorting out her thoughts. Trouble doesn’t want to press—he can’t imagine what it’s like to experience and feel someone else’s death—but he’s got a duty to the case, so he says, his voice gentle: “Did you get any names? Any places?”
Raven frowns, then shakes her head. “Not… not so much,” she says, blowing out another breath. “Like I said, they were mostly just… impressions, colors. Smears of experience. He… he went to school in Whitestone, I’m almost certain of that.”
Trouble can’t help the flick of disappointment; the clothes had told him that, but he tells himself it’s good to eliminate the possibility that the boy had come from outside of Haven. Before he can ask for more details, Raven massages her brow with her thumb, right beneath the moonstone gem resting there, and mutters, “And I think… I think he was killed—in a warehouse. Something like that. A big, empty place. Gray walls. Stone floor. Crates… crates everywhere.”
Now Trouble does hiss through his teeth: that could describe literally any warehouse in the city, in Ashtown or Smoketown or the Market Quarter. “Did you see what was inside the crates?”
She shakes her head again, looking like she knows how little this information helps. “No. They weren’t open, so he never saw the contents—so neither did I.”
That’s about all she can dredge up, and Trouble knows it’s time to stop when the Seer closes her eyes, her head swaying a little on her neck like she’s about to pass out. He had been hoping that she could Divine the watch, too, but he knows that would be asking for too much, at least right now. Vesuvia lays a protective hand on her shoulder, and Trouble says, striving to keep his tone light, “You did good, Raven. I appreciate the help. Really. I know it wasn’t easy.”
The Mage offers him a nod, a wan look that might have been a smile—and then musters up the strength to salute, startling him. “Vice Commander,” she says. And then Vesuvia leads her out.
When the Thanatologist returns, Trouble is contemplating the boy, their nameless, helpless victim. Raven’s information, at least, throws a little more perspective on the boy’s expression: he does not look so much terrified or betrayed as he does sad. As if he was disappointed that whoever killed him had let him down, failed that damnable hope that he was going to survive their encounter, after all. But why have such faith in the killer, if that’s what it can be called? He had to know him. But what business did a rich Norm boy have, knowing a Mage who hated him enough to want to murder him?
Now Trouble rubs at his brow with his thumb. Kak, none of this is making sense.
But then, he thinks, murder rarely does.
He turns back to find Vesuvia watching him, her face totally unreadable. Trouble shoves his hands in his pockets to stave off the morgue’s chill and says, “So. We know he was a rich kid who went to school in Whitestone.” One of thousands. “He was killed in a warehouse with gray walls, a stone floor, and crates.” One of thousands. “His attacker knew him. He probably knew his attacker.” But we don’t know who he is.
Vesuvia folds her arms; he notices that her nails are painted stark white against the midnight dark of her skin. “You ever hear that old Haven saying?” she asks him, her voice very dry.
He thinks he knows the one she means. “‘A wise man knows not to look for a black cat in a coal cellar?’”
Vesuvia shakes her head, almost gifts him a tight, close-lipped smile. “‘A Haven dog doesn’t let go of a bone,’” she says, “‘not even when it chokes him.’”
“I ain’t heard of that one.”
“That’s because you, muti, are always too busy chasing after your bones.”
#
When he first started out as a Shepherd, Trouble didn’t know what in fuck he was doing—especially not when it came to investigative work. There wasn’t much training to be had in it, not when it was basically just him and Blade and Tallys and a handful of others starting out. The Vice Guard would have sooner shat in a hat than send over any tips or instructors. And Trouble had little experience in it himself. He’d worked as a gun-for-hire, a mercenary, and a streetfighter, not as any kind of detective. In the beginning, he’d felt as if he was bungling everything—he didn’t know what kinds of things you were supposed to look for, where you had to start. He’d been shooting in the dark, and if there was one thing sharpshooters hate, it’s running into situations blind.
But, eventually, one’s eyes tended to adjust to the gloom, and he figured some things out. He could be clever, when he put his mind to things, and he had a sniper’s eye for details: very little passed beneath his notice, even if he didn’t always put the pieces together right away. And, most importantly, he had a strong rapport with the locals in Ashtown. He knew the right contacts to ask, the right people to cajole or threaten. People trusted him. Put that all together, and he thought he made a decent enough officer. He even read detective novels to gain some idea of the right procedures. His favorite was a series called Hawk & Silver—the protagonist smoked the same brand of charch as him.
But sometimes, none of that was enough, and he found himself just as lost as he feels now.
Across the table, Tallys reaches over and taps for his attention. Trouble jerks back to himself and smiles apologetically. “Sorry, Tal. It’s been a long day.”
The Elf waves a hand, a gesture of non-offense and dismissal, and says, “Maybe you should get some rest.”
They’ve been going over the details of the case all evening, taking dinner in the captains’ conference room and then continuing the talks over drinks: whiskey for Trouble, Elvish almond liqueur for Tallys. They haven’t gotten very far, and both are trying to step around the worry they feel gnawing at them. Any minute, this story is going to break. A kid is going to talk, or one of the neighbors he interviewed, or a journalist from the Haven Herald is going to catch wind of it, and then the whole thing is going to turn into a feeding frenzy, sharks scenting blood in the water. Almost literally. And they still have so little to go on.
Trouble scrubs a hand over his face. “No,” he says, muzzy with weariness but too stubborn to go to bed. “No time for that.” Tallys is deploying on a mission tomorrow, taking her squad somewhere South. Blade, Ayla, and Lavinet are away in the North, somewhere in the ass-end of the Bleakmoor; Briony and Chase are in Ambryn, hunting an arsonist. He doesn’t even remember where Red and Halek have gone. That leaves him with the rest of the captains, who can shoulder the logistics of running the Order with Shery while he takes point on this murder case: it’s not that he doesn’t trust anyone else to handle it, it’s more like he’d feel guilty passing off the immense burden off onto them. Besides, he was the one who found the boy. It was his patrol, his beat. His neighborhood. Shirking the responsibility and handing it to someone else feels wrong.
“You should go to bed, though,” he says finally, staring down at the pocketwatch resting next to his empty, glittering whiskey glass. “I know you leave at the crack of dawn. Can’t have you falling off your ahfuri from lack of sleep.”
“Elves don’t need as much sleep as your kind,” she replies crisply: it would sound haughty to anyone else, but it’s an old joke between them at this point, a kind of stupid banter. –You don’t butter both sides of the bread when you make a sandwich? Norms are better. –Elves don’t need the extra fat. Then, watching him, Tallys’s expression subtly changes into one of concern. “I don’t like to leave you alone with this, Trouble. If there was anyone else who could go on my mission instead…”
He waves a hand. “I know.”
Tallys opens her mouth, closes it again, and then forges ahead: “Have you considered—bringing Riel into this? I think his insight could prove useful.”
By sheer gut instinct, Trouble pulls a face. “Riel?” They never involve him in combat scenarios—well, almost never. And aside from the Black Sun business, Trouble has never really given much thought to Riel’s abilities before. He sort of just… blended into the Order, like a tetchy, wall-watered plant. Seemed to work best when left to his own devices, undisturbed. “He isn’t—he’s like Shery, isn’t he? He does administrative stuff, coordinative work. Bureacracy, that kind of stuff, and getting supplies and alliances. Not that’s not hard, or anything—Hael, I couldn’t do it. But—kak, Tallys, this is murder. I can’t see a guy like him wanting anything to do with that.” Riel won’t even be in the same room as an unorganized bookshelf, won’t pick up something off the street even if he uses his handkerchief to do it: he’d rather just buy a new one rather than stoop. Trouble can’t imagine him picking over a dead body. If he’d been there when Raven was trying to throw up that afternoon, Riel probably would have ejected out of his own body and joined the spirits in the heavens.
Tallys’s face has that flat, unimpressed look. “I think he’ll surprise you,” she says, her voice very cool and dry: it always makes Trouble think of old books, for some reason. “You realize he’s one of the most brilliant minds on the Continent, don’t you? And that he’s done investigative work for his business contacts, as leader of Merchants Guild? He’s tracked down missing shipments, lost contractors—solved some impossible cases, all on his own.”
He had forgotten some of that. “I know he’s smart,” Trouble says, sounding more stubborn than he intends, “but has he got the stomachfor it? This is ugly business, Tal, and we’ve got a Mage killer to contend with—that kisich could still be in the city, and we don’t know if they’re done killing. I don’t bring a gun to a fight if it won’t fire.”
Tallys’s smile is small and bleak. “You should if that gun can interrogate suspects better than anyone else can,” she points out. “And besides”—she tilts her head towards Widowmaker, propped carefully against the wall—“I think you carry enough guns for the two of you. He can be the ice to your fire. Watch your six, as you put it.”
That strikes a chord. He wonders if he’s ever going to risk going on patrol without a partner again: handling the investigation today, pretty much on his own, was a nasty reminder of his own shortcomings. He does need someone to watch his back—and more importantly, keep an eye out for the things he misses, find the patchwork if there is any, point out the openings in the enemy lines when he’s too busy staring through his narrower scope.
Trouble thinks on it for a minute, spinning the pocketwatch around and around on the table, watching the firelight from the hearth glint off of its polished gold surface. A different Diviner had taken a look at it, once he came back to the compound, but hadn’t found anything useful—except that it was a gift from a father to his son for his Wreath Day. Whitestone-made. The father had gray hair and a mustache, and did not like to touch his son.
“Fine,” Trouble groans after a moment. “But he’d better not make me do any paperwork.”
Tallys laughs suddenly, one of the bright, bell-like laughs so different from her cool, silvery chuckles that Trouble has to grin. “Trouble,” she says, her green eyes crinkling with mirth, “you’re Vice Commander. He can’t make you do anything.”
Trouble grumbles to himself, remembering how Riel effortlessly commandeered him into carrying his suitcases up the stairs on the day he moved into his office in the compound. “Sometimes I think he forgets that.”
“Sometimes I think you forget it,” she returns, fond. Then she rises to her feet. “I’ll go see if he’s busy. He’s usually in his office until past midnight. And then I’m going to bed.”
He offers her another smile, grateful and weary. “Thanks, Tal.”
She pats his arm and then exits the room.
About fifteen minutes later, the door to the conference room swings open again and reveals Riel, striding into the room with effortless, imperious confidence, as if they’d prearranged to meet at his behest. He’s wearing a dark, dramatic cape-thing over his crisp suit, clasped at the throat with a perfect gold triangle; Trouble only sees him like that when he’s been meeting with people he wants to intimidate. There are dark thumbprints under his eyes, so purple against his pale skin that they almost look like bruises. He sweeps in and settles in the chair across from Trouble’s, then says without preamble, “I believe I’m up to speed. What are your ideas?”
Trouble blinks at him, trying not to look too owlish or dumbfounded. He’s not really one for small talk, but Riel’s habit of cutting straight to the point sometimes catches him off-guard. There’s never any how do you do’s, with him; Trouble supposes it’s because the merchant leader can already tell how he’s doing at a glance. He doesn’t need to ask.
“Ideas,” he echoes. “You mean for who I think did it, or what I’m going to do next?”
Riel makes a sharp, impatient gesture. “The latter.”
Trouble turns the watch over and over, spinning it idly again on the table as he thinks. “I’m going to send out some recruits,” he says finally. “We know the victim went to school in Whitestone, and he probably lived there, too. We don’t have a name, but surely his family would notice he’s missing, by now. So the recruits will go door-to-door through Whitestone. They’re going to canvass every house and see if anyone’s missing. Then we’ll find his family at some point.”
“With all due respect,” Riel says, reaching over and tapping the watch with a pen so that it stops moving, “that would be a terrible idea.”
Trouble feels the first dull pinprick of annoyance, not quite anger yet, and squashes it. “Oh, yeah?”
The merchant leader nods. “By doing so, you’ll almost certainly start a panic among the wealthy elite,” he says. “Everyone will know that a Whitestone boy has gone missing, and that the Shepherds are involved in investigating his disappearance. There’s nothing like the murder of a child to ignite class wars, or tensions between wealthy Norms and the Diminished—because of course the Diminished will be blamed: who else predominantly lives in Ashtown, where it will come out that his body was found? It will be a catastrophe.”
“I already thought of all that,” Trouble nearly snaps—it’s such a basic line of thought that he’s almost insulted that Riel bothered to explain it to him. He tries not to think of it as an omen for their working relationship. Then, mastering himself, he says: “What do you propose I do, then?”
Riel taps the watch with his pen again, thoughtful. “If his family has realized his disappearance,” he says, “and that is a strong if—they could believe he’s at boarding school, at some event, en route to visiting relatives… but if they’ve noticed that he’s missing, they would have reported it to the Vice Guard. It would be easy to check their records for recent reports of missing heirs and scions.”
“It’s the same problem, though,” Trouble points out. “I go to the Vice Guard and ask for their records for kids gone missing in Whitestone, they know I’ve found someone—otherwise, I wouldn’t be asking. Then they put two and two together, and make me give up the details if I want the records, and then the cat’s out of the bag: the story’s out, same as if I’d gone door-to-door.”
Riel makes a soft tutting sound. “Yes. I see your point.”
Trouble leans back in his chair, a little satisfied that he’s pulled one over the Order’s so-called genius. “Then?”
Riel hears the faint smugness in his tone and arches a brow, but otherwise doesn’t comment. He points at the watch with his pen like a king with his scepter. “May I examine that?”
Trouble nods, and Riel carefully picks up the pocketwatch, cradling it in his bony hands, turning it this way and that. When he opens the cover and finds the gold letters painted on the watch face, the arch in his brow becomes more pronounced. “Where did you find this?”
Trouble refuses to let a smile touch his lips; he stays perfectly serious. “Rat’s nest.”
A pause. Then, very carefully, Riel sets the pocketwatch down. “I don’t care for such jokes, Trouble.”
“I ain’t joking, Riel. I found it in a rat’s nest at the crime scene. Pretty obviously the boy’s, or whoever dropped him there. You don’t just find watches like that just lying around Ashtown.” At Riel’s silence, he continues, his voice starting to quake a little from the effort of holding in his laugh: “I’d call it a stroke of luck, me. If it was dropped on accident, the killer might have doubled back and taken it away. But the rats got to it first, squirreled it away for me to find. Our dear little friends.”
“Did you sanitize it?”
“With what? Water and soap? Would have ruined the watch.” At Riel’s bald glare of horror and loathing, he says, his grin distinctly shit-eating now: “I gave it a good wipe with a clean rag.”
Riel turns his eyes heavenward; he doesn’t say anything, but if he believes in a god, Trouble is convinced he’s praying to them for strength now. Instead, he wipes his own hands with his kerchief, flexes them, and then begins to disassemble the watch.
Trouble starts forward in his chair, his grin dropping. “Oi! What are you—”
Within seconds, Riel has pried the watch completely apart, its inner mechanisms laid bare as the exposed ticking of the miniscule gears fills the room. He takes a perfunctory glance inside and declares, “This watch was made by Hermux Tantamoq. A Whitestone watchmaker, a bit eccentric—though aren’t they all?” He makes another tutting noise, as if this confirms something he’s suspected all along. “His shop is open at seven daybell tomorrow. I suggest we’re at the door then: he tends to have a stream of customers and well-kept appointments filling up his schedule, and he hates others’ lack of punctuality. Fitting, I suppose.”
Trouble blinks at him rapidly. “How do you know all that?”
Riel spins the watch around for his inspection. “Every watchmaker leaves their own mark or insignia within their creations,” he says, his voice perfectly factual, neither condescending nor kind. “This is not only to provide proof of authenticity and discourage replicas and fraud, but also to provide other shops with their information in case things like repairs or replacements need to be made. This mark, here—that’s Hermux’s.” It’s a tiny mark on the inner rim of the pocketwatch, no bigger than a pinhead: Trouble squints and thinks he can make out a mouse, maybe an hourglass. Riel continues, “He’s one of my merchants, Mr. Tantamoq. He belongs to the guild. So if we ask questions about this watch—about whom he sold it to, and who this C.S. is—he will answer them.”
Trouble shakes his head. “‘We?’”
Riel tosses him an acerbic look. “You don’t want my help?”
Trouble runs a hand through his hair. “No,” he says. “It’s not that.” He doesn’t know how to talk to Riel, he thinks; that’s the other reason why he doesn’t think of him very much. They don’t have a lick of things in common—Riel comes from the world of fine linens and gold cape-clasps, while Trouble comes from an underbelly of fistfights and skunky beer. Riel interacts with others primarily through money; Trouble earned the respect of some of his oldest friends with a headbutt. Gunpowder and cologne don’t mix, he thinks. They just… don’t move in the same circles, think about the same things, do any of the same kind of work.
Well, he thinks, viewing Riel’s faintly impatient expression—the merchant leader, of course, seems to know exactly what he’s thinking, exactly each one of his doubts. It’s not as if we have to be friends. We’ve just got to find this killer. And he’s reasonably sure they can do it without killing each other, first.
Reasonably sure.
He extends his gloved hand, and Riel eyes it like Trouble’s offering him a dead rat. “You want to help?” the sniper asks. “Then—fine, I’m not fool enough to turn it away, especially not from someone with your skills and expertise. But we’re partners in this, yeah? And you’re leader of Merchants Guild, but I’m Vice Commander of the Shepherds. We do this as—equals, or we don’t do it at all.”
For a moment, Riel just watches him, his icy blue eyes baring no discernible expression, and for a moment Trouble thinks he’s going to back out of it—and that may be better, because if he was disturbed by the rat’s nest, there’s no telling what other foulness they’re going to find. But Riel still dissembled the watch to see what made it tick, and with that same attitude, he raises his hand and places it in Trouble’s. His palm is cold and unyielding, almost like marble, and even through the gloves, Trouble imagines it’s like the touch of a machine, an automaton. Or maybe like the dead. Same hands as the goneaway boy, he thinks, errant and distracted.
“Partners,” Riel says finally, his tone mild and somehow contractual. “Yes. I accept the terms of your arrangement.”
Trouble grins, fierce and sharp like Widowmaker. The Haven rat’s found gold. “Let’s go digging for some bones.”
Comments
Ezzi
Ah! So good! <3 You're spoiling us for real.
emeraldgreaves
This was fantastic; I could read Trouble and Riel, Reluctant Dynamic Detective Duo all day. It reminded me of the Watch books from Discworld, especially the opening paragraphs where Trouble interacts with Ashtown. Everything feels so richly detailed. Can’t wait for next month’s!!
