They huddled all the culprits in the village hall. Where else would all the villagers of Alderhelm be able to see the ones causing them such grievous harm the best they could?
Vasco had done well to round up as many of the adults of the village as he could. Kayden had set him on the errand while he had been busy dragging every perpetrator to the hall’s large gathering room. He appreciated the spaciousness of the chamber. A big building for such a tiny village.
It let him throw down his would-be murderers and their leader in the centre of the gathered crowd.
Kayden had already explained a big part of what was going on. His investigations, his conclusions, and finally, his trap that had caught the true evil-doers basically red-handed.
“This can’t be true,” someone muttered.
“The old man?” came another. “Impossible.”
“Why? Why?”
Shock and disbelief ruled the day. Well, that was a bit of an understatement. Kayden was actually surprised the villagers weren’t turning on him and demanding him to release their dear, old leader. He wondered if some of them had suspected this all along. That all Kayden had done was confirm their worst fears, ones they had been nurturing in secret for a while.
Nevertheless, it stood to reason that he ought to present more proof than a bunch of dirty, tied-up men who were doing nothing to proclaim and their innocence and decry Kayden’s acts.
“I know you all must be shocked and scared at this little presentation,” Kayden said. “But this is the truth. The village elder, the very same man you’ve been depending on all these years to lead your village, is the true instigator behind all the sorrows plaguing Alderhelm.”
At that, some protests did rise up. Several people asked how in the world he could prove his conclusions. Kayden was happy to present it.
“I’m not the only one who was investigating the truth,” he said. They already knew that he had been hunting down the crime’s perpetrators through all the interviews he had conducted but what they didn’t know was that he’d had a predecessor. Kayden pointed to his left. “There was another who had been seeking the truth. Another who was murdered, just like old Nyester.”
They all turned to stare at Mierin. She didn’t shrink away from the sudden attention. Instead, she made it quite obvious that she wasn’t just a regular person attending this dramatic, little meeting. Even though she couldn’t make herself look any more ghostly than she’d had so far, she could certainly set her presence to become something familiar.
Something many of them had already felt through her hauntings.
Murmurs of “It’s her!” and “The ghost!” broke through the crowd. Things were already so shocking with the village elder’s apparent culpability in the crimes going on that they couldn’t muster any actual protests against Mierin’s presence.
But more importantly, there had to be some among them who were curious why she was here. Kayden pounced on it.
“The ghost was a cultivator like myself,” he said. “One who had been sent to investigate Alderhelm and its issues. However, she was murdered by our congenial old man here. Him and his cronies attacked her with the same drug they laced your waters with to kill the cultivator, but she used a technique that preserved her body as a spirit. Thus, you see her now, as a ghost.”
“Drugs?” someone yelled. “He’s makin’ drugs?”
The man spat at the elder.
Kayden nodded at the woman from the apothecary. She’d been staring with distaste at the group of huddled perpetrators, but now she stepped forward. “I’ve taken a look at the powder I was brought from under the well.”
The farmer’s widened. “That’s why there’s been noises coming from it all this time.”
Nodding, the woman continued. “The well contains one of the ingredients they need to make their drug. It’s a hallucinogen, and one of its strongest components comes from remyscyla.”
“I thought we uprooted those weeds,” another villager said. She growled. “Looks like we’ll have to send in the divers to get those things out again.”
Kayden cleared his throat and reiterated everything he had found in the well. The secret tunnel, the short passageway that led to the room with its only other entrance and exit on the roof, and the crates full of the hallucinogenic drug the elder and his cronies had been storing away. “That’s how you’ve been hearing those other weird sounds too, like the skittering coins.”
They all stared accusingly at the village elder, who seemed to have shrunk into himself.
“Why?” the woman from the apothecary asked. She stepped closer to the bound men, looking like she could bludgeon them all if she’d had something to do it with. “Why did you do something like this? When did you get so greedy?”
“It wasn’t greed,” the old man said, barely speaking above a whisper.
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“What?”
The elder raised his voice. Raised his head too, his face broken in despair. “It was for the good of the village!”
Angry mutters greeted that pronouncement. Several people yelled abuses and shook their fists at him. The apothecary woman now appeared to regret she really didn’t have something to attack the elder with.
For his part, even Kayden was a little shocked. How far did one have to fall to become convinced that one was doing the right thing in a case like this?
“Insult me all you like,” the old elder said. “But it’s the truth. Where do you think the money to keep the village running was coming from? Just selling our crops and catches and paying our taxes? No, that wasn’t enough. That was never going to work. We needed more to keep things running. We needed more to thrive.”
“So you started selling drugs in the undermarket to get yourself and the village more money?” Kayden said. “When did you start?”
The old man was staring back at the ground. “It started… it started so long ago. When I was just a boy. When I used to run around playing, old Nyester was the one who first showed it to me. How to transport myself to another world far, far away from our plain, mundane village. How to feel like something grand and great, almost…” His eyes found Kayden’s. “Almost like a cultivator.”
“Cultivators aren’t made of dreams,” Kayden said.
The old elder sighed. “They aren’t. Reality set in. I forgot about it for a long while, until our wealth started dwindling.”
“When?” the apothecary woman asked. “We never knew about it. You never told us.”
“Why would I?” the old man spat back. “What good could any of us simpletons do? No matter how hard we tried, we could never be fully self-sufficient, not unless we turned even more backwater than we already were.”
True enough, Kayden supposed. A village like Alderhelm might be able to produce its own food and water, maybe even the majority of the basic tools and clothes and building materials needed for upkeep. But not everything. Not at all.
And to get the things they needed but couldn’t produce themselves, of course they were going to need money. Money that, apparently, Alderhelm didn’t have.
Money that its leader was willing to acquire no matter what.
“One of the rumours that floated down even all the way here was how the rich folks were getting fed up with the exorbitant price of their extravagances,” the old elder said. “So I thought I would provide them with a cheaper alternative. Something perhaps not as refined as what they were used to, but something that works all the same.”
A market disruptor. Of course. If it hadn’t been illicit drugs—the production of which had put his entire village at risk—it might have actually been a smart move.
But there was one problem.
“They didn’t like it, of course. The ones who were already entrenched in this business.” The old man sneered, though mostly to himself. He was still facing downwards. “They would never abide some backwater villager encroaching on their territory.” With a slow, almost jerky motion, the elder glared at Mierin. “Which was why they sent out a cultivator to investigate.”
And of course, feeling threatened, the old man had tried to kill her. That he had gone so far as to end Mierin’s life, that he had successfully defeated a powerful cultivator like her, spoke to the sheer ruthlessness, determination, and ability this old man possessed.
“Yet you never killed me for it,” Kayden said. “I never registered as a proper threat, did I?”
The old man sighed. “The mistake I regret most.”
“You thought you could convince me to keep my head down, and when that didn’t work, you thought I wasn’t smart enough to actually get to the bottom of the mystery. You never imagined that I’d be able to meet with and talk to the ghost that your actions had invited. You…” Kayden paused. “You thought you could get by without killing another cultivator so soon again.”
“My hands were tied.” The old man almost sounded apologetic, and Kayden could see why. All his cronies were disgruntled. They clearly thought Kayden should have been dealt with a long time ago. “The Feronil clan wouldn’t have let me live if you died here. Even if it looked like an accident or the work of your illness.”
Convenient for him, then, that he was from a powerful clan. It sounded like Mierin, strong though she had been, didn’t enjoy the same privilege. Come to think of it, someone from a powerful clan or sect wouldn’t have been involved with the kind of people who considered illicit drug-dealing as “encroaching on their territory”.
There was nothing much to say after that. The old man finished up his story, the initial fervour possessing his voice now dying out as his tale came to an end. He had been convinced of his position before but now, his reasonings were barely above pathetic.
“I’ve debated long and hard on the next steps to getting the right security for my home and all who live in it,” the old elder said, trying to look at them all in the eye but flinching away at every contact. No one was forgiving him so easily. “I had to make difficult decisions for the good of everyone.”
“That don’t make it right,” said the farmer.
The woman apothecary agreed with a terse nod. “You made decisions like that without ever bothering to consult any of us.”
“I’m the elder!” The old man tried to glare at them but failed. “This was going to work!”
Sure. Up until someone like Kayden came along and exposed the folly of it.
“Good of everyone,” the apothecary woman said. “Except for Nyester. Except for the cultivator you murdered. Except for our latest guest, whom you tried to kill only a few hours ago.” She looked like she was barely holding herself back from spitting in the old man’s face. “The only good you fooled yourself into seeing is that of your idea of what Alderhelm should be.”
The old man’s fire went out. Now he looked stricken, aging a decade in the span of mere seconds.
“Why did you even kill Nyester?” Kayden asked. “Because he discovered what you were up to?”
The elder didn’t answer, but one of the men who had attacked Kayden raised his head.
“Old Nyester was sniffing around too much,” he said. “Getting too close to discoverin’ what was goin’ on. Couldn’t have him learnin’ the truth, so we offed him before it got too bad.”
“I told you not to be too hasty,” the old man growled. Kayden blinked. Ah, so the elder’s subordinates weren’t as tightly leashed as he would have liked.
The man simply shook his head at the elder. “Look what not bein’ hasty got us into, old man.”
“I’m done with this,” the woman said. “Someone deal with these crooks. I need a break from this madness.”
She whirled around and left. Kayden wondered what they were going to do with the old man and his cronies. He considered helping them with it, whatever it was they intended they do, but he felt a sudden tug on his soul. An alert that went straight to his spirit.
Mierin.
He turned too, as fast as the apothecary woman had, and found that Mierin was gone. Or rather, she wasn’t at the corner of the room any longer.
His heart spasmed, mind trying to fish out where she could have gone too from the net that had pulled in too many implausible ideas. But then he caught the trailing end of her robes disappearing just outside the doors of the hall. She was leaving?
Excusing himself, Kayden followed Mierin outside, hoping against hope that the bit of her robes he had barely seen wasn’t going to be his last sight of her.