What had he done yesterday, Greensleeves wondered, as he awoke with his arms wrapped tightly around the body of somebody he did not recognise. Where was he? Who was this?
Oh, right! His brain started to catch up, wheels grinding slowly without the lubricating fluid of alcohol. This appeared to be the dosshouse down on Broadside, he'd know those stains anywhere. This was way out of his normal remit, though.
As he groaned and staggered to his feet, the memories started to trickle back in, like the last of the beer from an almost empty keg, tilted on it’s side to hopefully release those last few precious drops.
Oh gods.
How much had he spent last night?
A check of his pockets revealed: actually not all that much. Greensleeves wasn’t into the fancy-dancy expensive stuff, and he was very good at cadging and cajoling drinks out of others. Others such as his poor assistant here.
He stared down at their peacefully sleeping face, one hand on his pounding, pulsating, painful head, the other on his coin purse, and then he gave them a solid kick in the side.
They snorted, and then rolled out of the hammock, landing on the floor with a thump and a squawk. A moment later they curled up into a ball, groaning and clutching at their skull.
That was more like it, couldn’t have your underlings too happy for too long, wasn’t good for business. He nudged them in the side again with the toe of his boot, and they released one hand from their head to swipe at him ineffectually.
“C’mon, we’ve got a job to do!”
Right after some water, and maybe a little hair o’ the dog.
-
Swiftlight was having an awful morning. He had no idea how he had gotten here, or why his head hurt so gods damned much. Had he been attacked? Poisoned? The sharp pain in his side, resonating with the one in his brain like a symphonic instrument certainly seemed to imply that he had been both.
“C’mon, we’ve got a job to do!”
The voice, emanating from somewhere far above him, was familiar, and very loud. Where had he…
Flashes of memories flashed through him, like code from a smugglers lamp, and he groaned again, letting go of his head and attempting to rise to his feet. Oh. Now he remembered. The charlatan they had picked up from the dockyard pub.
With painful movements, he tried to pull himself to his feet, using the hammock beside him as a helper.
As it flipped over at this weight, depositing him back on the floor, from somewhere above him he could hear laughter.
-
His assistant was an idiot, but that was a good thing, Greensleeves thought as he watched the poor sod attempt to stand. That or he’d never been well and truly drunk on the bad side of town before, either was possible. The kid had been wearing a smart uniform the night before, but now it was stained with food and beer and several unsavoury things it had probably picked up when they’d taken a tumble into the street, down near the quays.
Ahh, it had been a good night. Any night you woke up with hoof-prints on your back was a good night, but last night had been especially good. Those bargers sure knew how to throw a good party.
As he dunked his head in the barrel near the door, Greensleeves considered that he hadn’t actually gotten much closer to finding the wayward waif, but there was time. She’d been missing for weeks, one more night on the streets, or wherever she might be, wasn’t going to change anything.
-
Filled with coffee and thick bacon sandwiches, Greensleeves and Swiftlight sat down on the grass in a local park, and he actually started to consider doing what he'd been hired to do.
The kid had been a genius, according to the people in the hall. A once in a generation magical marvel, capable of feats even most adult mages couldn’t conceive of. Or she would have been, once she’d had a couple more years to grow into her talents.
Instead, she was missing. Swiftlight didn’t mince words, the drunken antics of the night before having bonded them together in mutual trust, as intended. For a start, he started, "the school fucked up."
There had been a scandal only a few years before and their organisational structure had changed, their modus operandi changing to what was meant to be a much safer and steadier curriculum than what had been previously taught.
That previous way of teaching seemed to mostly consist of “make sure the kids don’t accidentally morph themselves into birds” and nothing else. Some guidance was given, and warnings repeated, but as long as they weren’t harming themselves, the kids were generally left to their own devices. Change, which the school mostly focused on, was a safe magic, and very intuition based, it was difficult to fuck it up.
Then, two years ago, the Accident had happened. Two kids had fought, with the end-result being that one of them was killed. They were a child of nobility, or something, so it was noticed. There wasn’t much nobility about these days, but rumours were that they may have been a descendant of the Monarch himself.
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The idea of that was quite something, for a multitude of reasons, but Greensleeves didn’t question, he just listened.
Whoever the kid had been, their family had Connections, with a capital C, and the death had been investigated. The school turned inside out and staff replaced, proper lesson plans put into place and the student body whipped into shape. The result had been that most of those students had left, either pulled out by their parents or never turning up come the new term, choosing instead to study elsewhere. The stellar reputation of the much beloved school had been dumped. Down, done and dusted, despite the supposedly better teachers and lesson plans now.
You couldn’t fix that reputation hit overnight, but the school had persisted for a hundred years, and would persist for a hundred more, it was taking them a while to acclimate to the changes.
Swiftlight took another drink of coffee, or would have if his mug wasn't empty. He stared ahead into the trees, rotating the cup in his hands.
Greensleeves nodded, catching his attention and telling him to go on, the motion almost not painful, the sun only mildly glaring.
Anyway, back to the missing girl. The school had taken in a student roughly a year ago, who was supposed to be a genius. She had been flown across the country by the Mail Dragon, all the way from the other side of the continent on a specially chartered flight spanning weeks. There had been high, high hopes for her.
But, the delay between her acceptance and her eventual arrival had been over the scale of years, and by the time she turned up, she hadn’t fitted in with what the new administration expected from their students.
Still, they had attempted to teach her as best they could, but she had been a wild thing. The teachers at her previous school had lied about the scope of her talent, and about her nature. The village she had come from had obviously been less civilised than they had all been led to believe. She had been of a sulky and disobedient disposition, resisting the structured lesson plans at every turn, fighting with the other students and stealing from the faculty.
It was quite a picture they painted, and Greensleeves questioned if they had checked for local burial grounds for her, if she’d been that much of a pain, but no, Swiftlight shook his head and carried on. The school had tried to do their best by her, but at some point during her first year, she had run away anyway. Ungrateful for all that she'd been given and all that had been done for her.
She was a scholarship student, so there was no fees due to the parents, but it still wasn’t good. They had wasted their wages on a wastrel, and now they wanted her retrieved.
Greensleeves wondered about some of the story, but he only had Swiftlight’s story to go on right now. Despite the heavy drinking of the previous night, he had actually asked around, and nobody had seen her. Urchins and guttersnipes weren’t unusual, but they didn't go as unnoticed as they thought, especially ones with a good talent for magic. No matter how old or young you were, you could always make a living with that.
Time to check out the school, he supposed. He was a world famous private detective now, after all.
-
The school was as grim close up as it had been from far away, maybe grimmer. It was all terraces and vines and strange austere, cube-like architecture. The staff at the school explained that this was so they could rearrange the insides without fuss, moving the walls for classrooms and such around as they needed it, but Greensleeves thought it was more likely laziness on the side of the builders.
The design of it made for a dark and strange atmosphere, the ceilings always too low or too high, the corridors either too narrow or unreasonably wide. It felt like somewhere that should have been lighter, busier, happier, but instead it was as quiet as the earth.
All of the students had been sent home, his guide said, until the investigation was over. So “if he could just get on with it…”
There was an implicit threat in those words that Greensleeves didn’t like, and he walked a little slower from then on, shuffling his feet and peering into cupboards at endless rows of worm-eaten pencils. Checking under beds, and crouching down to see into the strange narrow room they said she’d been using as a “den”. There wasn’t anything left in there, they'd said. They'd had to scrub it clean, as she had merely collected filth and stolen things. They had certainly cleared it out, he thought, the floor scrubbed clean and the air stinking of bleach, despite the open window.
There was nothing under that smell, though. Normally filth on the level they described would leave some taint in the air, he should know, but then again, they were the magic-school, for all he knew they had some mystical method of scrubbing the air.
Greensleeves thought about that, as he wandered around the school. It was a vast and lonely place, something about it making the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Like waking up in a pub hours after closing time, the lights shut off, the barkeep having somehow missed you during the evening clean. If she had been killed, and he found evidence of it, then the school would be shut down, for good this time. That was the unspoken dragon in the room, as the teacher fidgeted beside him, as his assistant followed behind, clutching their forehead and glaring at the ceiling. Was he willing to get this place shut down?
He glanced up, following Swiftlight's gaze, just in case there was a clue up there, but there was nothing except cobwebs and lights. And the cat.
Perched on top of one of the cupboards, it stared down at him with vibrant green eyes. It’s fur was the same grey as the dust on the walls and shelves, and it's body seemed to blend into the gloom, until all that was left were those bright, bright eyes.
Was it, he questioned the teacher, sweeping his gaze past, not wanting to let the cat known that he had seen it, possible that she had turned herself into a cat?
Ten minutes and a terms worth of lessons on why that wasn’t possible, and Greensleeves was thoroughly schooled on the subjects of “mass”, “not that talented” and “don’t be ridiculous”.
Well, it hadn’t hurt to ask he thought, as he eyed up the cat again.
Or where the cat had been, it had left at some point, only a cat-shaped memory there now. Part of him imagined that he could still see the trail of it’s eyes, but that was probably just the lack of alcohol and gloomy atmosphere affecting him.
There wasn’t much else to see, that he was allowed to see. A dormitory stripped bare, and a library so full of books that he questioned the stress and the structural strength of the floor beneath.
They had checked through it, they said, but if her body was in there then it was somewhere beneath a mound of books entitled things like 'Magic for Beginners' or 'Rot and You', all decades out of date.
There were more cats in there, though, staring at him from atop piles of books, looking down from high shelves, sending shivers down his spine with their staring…
Ok, he needed to get out of here before he went mad. With a clasping of hands he thanked the teacher who had led him around, and then left the relieved woman to the rest of her day.
Time to check the canals and see if anyone had found a body.