Chapter 43
The DIC runs on tea.
Quote attributed to the Third Master Investigator in Quips and Quotes, Meridian Avans, Sunderland Press
“How did I get involved with the White Circle?” Haran said. He rubbed the back of his head, as if trying to pull up old memories. “Well when I was just out of secondary school, I was trying to decide what to do next? We were living in Meridae at the time when - ”
A loud rap sounded on the door. Both men swerved around at the sound.
“Time for a round table,” came a voice on the other side. It was muffled, deep but loud, and Haran wasn’t sure who was talking.
“Who was that?” Haran said.
“Sounded like Yosh Boudin. He’s got the deepest and loudest voice of us all. I guess that was our cue,” the Dragonkin said, with a small sigh. “So much for tea and questions and getting to understand each other better before we jump into the soup pot.” He got up, and took his mug to the tea service table and left it there. “I think Master Investigator must be anxious to put your fresh eyes to work.”
“Well, that’s why I came here for, I guess.” Haran stood up, grabbed his notebook and pencil, and slipped them into a pocket. “Anything in particular I should be on the lookout for?”
Byrony rubbed the back of his head, and thought for a moment. “I tried to pick a good team, but I’m not ruling out bias, especially against Jinn people. People make these assumptions based on who knows what.”
“I noticed that walking in. Something to do with the effect of the Gray Lands on Dragonkin magics, perhaps? Funny in my case. I was never much in the Gray Lands, proper. I was raised in Harani as a kid, and then we moved to Meridae, in Ynys Afel. Not much of a Jinn, except by ancestry.”
The two men walked to the door. “Maybe some of it is that. Cultural blinders afflict all peoples. And sometimes, they just want scapegoats they can blame things on. Even in the DIC.” Byrony reached for the doorknob.
“More common than you might think, everywhere,” Haran said.
“Doesn’t matter how common,” Byrony said, turning to Haran. “When working on investigations, we could be missing things because of those preconceived notions. One of the things we are looking at do involve a mining freehold in the Gray Lands. A rather nasty murder took place there recently, and at least some Dragonkin businesses had been interested in the place long before that happened. To add spice, a few years before that, it was hammered by an attack, supposedly of Gallu and their allies, but that’s never quite sit right with some of us.”
“They suspect it was a Jinn operation?”
“Not with any evidence, just bias and gut reaction,” Byrony said, opening the door. “If you pick up any of that, seeing us blinding ourselves that way, it would be useful if you can point it out. And if there’s anything you know about the Gray Lands or Jinn culture or behavior, don’t be afraid to speak up.”
They started down the hallway. “But it’s possible you might face pushback or undercutting of anything you notice. If you do, come tell me.”
“Forewarning is forearmed,” Haran said.
They stepped into the main room with its bright lights, clutter of desks and tables and clutter, where the bulk of people working on this operation, were gathering, sitting in small groups, leaning against tables. Two were sitting quietly alone, one reading a text, the other with crossed arms, watching the in-gathering. Master Investigator stood in the middle, behind his desk, waiting for the last of the stragglers. Haran and Byrony were not the last to walk in. The last to join their number was Asper Bloodstone, who carried a big roll of charts under one arm, which he plopped on the Master Investigator’s desk, to the leader’s irritation.
“The latest maps,” Asper said. “Thought they might be useful,” he explained.
Master Investigator shrugged. “Maybe. If we get that far today.”
“Grab your tea, people,” Master Investigator said. “Once we get good and started, I don’t want any interruptions.”
A few people went to the tea service and filled mugs. Master Investigator sat back down, examining the maps Asper had brought, squinting, frowning and shaking his head. “Maybe this one,” he muttered, running his finger along some detail that nobody but he could see.
Taking that as a sign of his impatience for getting started, nobody took long and hurried back to their places.
Once he was sure everybody was through moving around, the senior investigator put the map down and looked at the crew gathered before him.
“I know I brought you all here on rather short notice, and made you drop other projects you were working on,” Master Investigator said. “And we’re still an awkward bunch who haven’t smoothed out the kinks of how we’ll work together, but your being here is important.”
“I hope so,” whispered a green haired woman in the back of the room. She was an unusual looking woman, with the green hair of the Lake people and the height and ears and brown eyes of a Bauchan. She wasn’t dressed in any sort of uniform – instead she wore a type of overall with many pockets on her chest and legs. There were tools protruding from several of them, and other things hanging from a belt, holstered and in pouches. “My latest piece is too complex for my staff. If any of them touch it before we’re done here, I’ll kill them when I get back.”
There was a little snicker of laughter in the room.
“You’re not the only one with key projects just dropped, Leda Greenslope,” Master Investigator said, nodding towards the woman,“but I thank you, and at some point, President Grimsbeard himself will thank you, after we solve this situation.”
“Now, to what we are doing. You all know by now that Gandaran has moved in his sleep, and President Grimsbeard has pushed finding out why and stopping whatever is going on that caused it to the highest priority.”
“Are we really sure it’s significant?” A sharply dressed female Dragonkin, wearing an immaculately pressed DIC uniform of the type only people in the Archives subdivision wore asked that question. She pressed a single finger to her mouth, and took a deep breath. “I have never been able to find a suitable answer to that. Have the crises we have uncovered in the past been signaled by Blessed Gandaran, or has it all be coincidence? Are we missing plots and potential crises going on in the background all the time?”
Master Investigator rubbed his forehead and sighed, then turned to face her. “This is an interesting question, Tobris Slipstone. But we only have Gandaran’s promise to warn us, and if we ignore the warning, the promise of his awakening and our destruction. Every time he stirred in the past, there was something there. And, add to the fact we’ve seen far less plotting and schemes uncovered during other time periods, I lean to believe it is true. Still, an interesting speculation.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Now we have one of the most complex situations I think we’ve faced. Every division of Dragonkin seems to be involved, except for pharmaceuticals. Finance, exploration, trade, transport all seem to have been targeted. What we are looking for seems to have started slowly, maybe six years ago, but has been building steam over the last year or two.Our job will be to investigate these events and decide if they are coincidence or coordination, and if coordination, run down the bastards doing it.”
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He reached down to his desk, picked up his tea mug, gulped down a swallow and almost slammed it down on the desk. “And before any of you flame jockies get any wild ideas, no I am not expecting just us eleven to solve the world’s ills. We will approach it like proper DIC agents. There will be assignments to certain areas to start the investigation, assigned sectors. You are my team heads. You will be allowed to request your own team members and logistical support – equipment, travel expenses, even perhaps granted access to places you don’t normally get to have.”
Rust stood up. “Within reason, friends. Right now, we have the blessings of the Logistics office and the President, but do be careful. No telling when that blessing might get called back. You know the old saying about Dragonkin and gold.”
Several heads nodded, and a couple of people smiled snidely. Someone from the back said, “The more gold they have, they less they want to see it leave their hand.”
A snicker of laughter erupted.
Master Investigator coughed into his hand. “When you pick out your workers, be aware – we know someone’s been, well, leaking’s not the actual word I’d like to use for people working for the DIC, but perhaps less security conscious than they need to be. Ears and eyes, whether physical or magical, can be anywhere. And it’s not always greed that gets people to do things they ought not. I trust you because either I or Byrony have worked with you in the past enough to trust you. Make sure the people you pick - ”
“What about him?” Yosh Boudin asked, interrupting the Master Investigator gesturing to Haran with a thumb. All eyes focused on Haran, but only Yosh gave the Jinn an angry, suspicious look.
Haran, to his credit, did not react to Boudin’s attack, merely stood next to Byrony, and crossed his arms, his face remaining calm and placid.
Boudin continued his complaint. “Don’t tell me you’ve been working with him long enough to trust him. Why bring in an outsider, to begin with? And one like him? Do you think we can actually trust the White Circle and the Birch not to dig into and try to do something to the Dragonkin?”
“This is not the time for unwarranted paranoia, Yosh,” Master Investigator said.
Byrony stood up tall, and his spikes flared. There was some soft talk among the gathered people, because while Boudin always acted aggressively, with it showing in his spikes all the time, Byrony almost never did.
“He was one of the people I worked with on the smuggler operation,” he said. “I found him to be a good man. He gave us impeccable intelligence, and knew how to run his part of the investigation better than some of us in this room.” His eyes were just as angry as Boudin’s and two of the women investigators took a step back. “And he’s vouched for by the two top people in the White Circle. I don’t know where you get the impression that the White Circle is out to get us. Have you been listening to those fools who want us to break our agreement and ship arms to the Shadowlands? The White Circle is out to keep the peace and minimize attacks from those people. They have saved our people more than once. You think I wouldn’t check him out before bringing him on board?”
A small growl came from Boudin, then the investigator took a deep breath and stepped back and gave a curt nod.
Byrony crossed his arms. “You know me better than that, Yosh. How many years have we worked together? You know how high I rank the security and well-being of all Dragonkin. Don’t you dare call me out on that.”
“True.” Boudin nodded.
“Besides, the leaks don’t seem to be coming from his people,” Master Investigator said. “They’re getting information that wouldn’t have come through Ynys Afel sources. Good magical spytools might have tuned into some of it, but Ynys Afel’s not the only people who could have used those. People from Sunderland use things like that all the time – and the details seem to be coming from Dragonkin sources, as close as we’ve been able to discover, when we can discover.”
“But there’s other sources. Talk’s percolating all over Redbeard’s territory,” Boudin replied.
“When doesn’t it? That’s a sea of thieves, ready to jump at the smallest rumor, and ready to feed the rumor train for their own benefit. And that’s just places like Brightwater and Tantis.” The Master Investigator picked up his tea mug once more, and looked deep into it. “The smuggling business, and whether or not someone’s trying to bring down Redbeard and his people are just a part of it.”
Bryony nodded. “The situation there doesn’t explain what’s going on in Meridae or in Harani, either.”
“Two physical attacks on Meridae banking houses. Sabotage in one of the top Touchstone production facilities. The production of unlicensed jumpstones,” Master Investigator said. “As far as we know, none of the Aos Si people can make them on their own. We’re still trying to trace where they’re coming from. But it has to be from someone with Dragonkin knowhow.”
Byrony nodded. “Whoever it is has been making some effort to make it look like a B&F operation, but when you dig into it, the clues for that disappear -and Briarwood would have way too much to lose doing that.”
“But he’s a sneaky, greedy bastard,” Tobris muttered. “He’s got a lot of enemies. People might want to believe it.”
Some heads nodded in agreement.
“It was the potential B&F connection that got us checking things out, long before Gandaran stirred. It started with people who were doing no space research just disappearing. All of them were non-Dragonkin. Most of them were academics, being financed by people who could be seen as competitors to B&F.”
“The Aos Si have been trying to find ways through no space of their own for centuries,” Tobris Slipstone noted. “Once in a while no space accidents happen. That is particularly dangerous for non-Dragonkin, since they have no inherent magic for it.”
“And at first, that’s what we assumed happened,” Master Investigator said, nodding. “Still, since we investigate all no space incidents, we logged them and analyzed what we found. And for these incidents, two things became apparent. Normally, there’s a no space accident of this time once every four or five years. Once we went a whole ten years between events. But we had at least seven of these in a three year period. And most of the missing were highly respected, experienced researchers who knew the dangers, and had a history of knowing how to use the proper safeguards. None of these were mad mages, just getting started in research.
“I don’t know about you,” Master Investigator said, before drinking the last of his now cold tea, “but that made my investigator sense tingle.” He handed his mug to Byrony, who handed it to Leda Greenslope, who nodded, and went to refill the mug.
“More than that, on the reports that had any information of what happened leaning up the incident, we discovered a few things. The researchers were all in correspondence to a supposed no space expert out of Harani. There was, of course, no expert by any of the names the researcher knew him by. And the messages all went back to businesses or buildings that had anything to do with no space – a laundry, an alehouse, a bookshop, a dressmaker’s shop, and so on. By the time we reached them, the businesses had been closed down, at least twice by the owner’s passing.”
“That sounds ominous,” Boudin said.
Master Investigator nodded. Greenslope took the moment to hand him his tea. “Thank you,” he said and took a sip.
“Two other commonalities. At least half of the disappeared were visited by a Dragonkin man. He was seen by others, heavily cloaked; one person reported that they thought he was a brown, but he wasn’t sure. This person may have visited them all, but we just don’t know. The third commonality was reports of high level magic, glowing lights, mana streams – a real light show. After the effects calmed down, and the researcher’s frightened families or co-workers discovered them missing. There were traces of mage fire in each room, but no researcher.”
“Magic lightshow sounds like a distraction,” Boudin said.
Master Investigator nodded. “Not long after the disappearances peaked, about three years ago, that’s when we first heard talk about smuggled jumpstones going to the Shadowlands. Once again, rumor was aimed at B&F.”
“They are the big name in jumpstone technology,” Lero Bluestone said. “But they aren’t the only ones. Did you know there was a report of three jumpstone developers from Cintas Transports about four years ago? We found the body of one, but not the other two.”
“How -” Master Investigator’s eye ridges shot up in surprise. “I never saw that report. He bent over his desk and quickly scribbled a note.
“And this is why we have assembled this whole team,” Byrony said, stepping in while Master Investigator wrote. “What else have we missed? And we still need to weed out the coincidences that have nothing to do with what looks like a plot. Some how a lot of the clues we’re seeing have a Harani connection like the so-called Dragonkin researcher. Perhaps connected is the recent murder of two miners working a freehold on the edge of the Gray Lands. The killer used Blazendraught on one of the Aos Si miners.” There were shudders in the room. “It was the same site as an attack several years earlier on a team of researchers who had found an old pre-Sundering artifact. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but that might be the first incident in this chain of events. One of the exploration companies tried to buy it between the two incidents. When I tried to talk with the person who had offered the contract, he refused to show up. And a few days ago, he ended up dead.”
“Something’s going on,” Master Investigator said. “Tomorrow, we’ll officially assign you areas to start your work. Today, start assembling people you want to work with, and touch base with Rust about anything that costs. Lero, I want you working on figuring out what you can about the smuggled jump stones that Byrony brought in from the last operation. We need to know where they’re coming from. Tobris, you are our archivist. I’m counting on you to check the records and see if there are anything else, like the missing jumpstone people, we might need to know about, plus whatever research our investigations need.”
She sighed, frowned, and nodded. “Can I have extra staff, too?”
“If they’re trained enough and can be trusted.” Master Investigator turned to the rest of them. “So get busy, people! Put together your team. Get ready to investigate!”