35
Mistress Janey Morgan was special in a couple of ways. For one, she was a master-ranked alchemist. If she didn’t know something about potions and tinctures, it wasn’t worth knowing in the first place. Secondly, she was married to Jack Cooper, Sunhampton’s top-ranked artificer and most grouchy person, and putting up with him was worthy of Janey getting a statue in the town plaza, if you asked Mick.
Her alchemy workshop was at the very top of a huge hill not far from the town plaza. On the summit of the hill was a house, an artificery workshop, an alchemy workshop, a kennel full of wolfhounds, and various sheds and stores. There was even a pond covered in lily pads, some bushes, and a fruit tree or two. The whole place was known as the craftstead, and it had been here for generations. Mick had visited it plenty of times; sometimes to have a chat with old Cooper, and once even for Jack Cooper and Janey Morgan’s wedding.
Mick liked alchemy workshops. The rows upon rows of little glass vials and huge jars filled with all kinds of oddments fascinated him, and there was something about the way alchemists worked with their measuring spoons and their mortars and pestles that spoke of precision and mastery of their craft.
Only thing was, the workshop aromas played havoc with his allergies, and he couldn’t look at a potion vial without being reminded of the dozens upon dozens he had to drink when he was a kid, back when his stomach gave him daily trouble. He’d drank so many different medicines that it almost seemed like Healer Brown had run out of things to try. It was only when Ma forgot to buy milk and Mick had gone a couple of days without cereal, that the pieces fell into place a little. Dairy - that had been his problem all along.
Janey made Mick wait while she finished off making a potion, boiling a bog-green liquid in a big, bulbous jar and then pouring the solution into a vial, before stopping it with a cork. She had a drawer full of the little corks; must have bought them wholesale.
When she was done, she removed her eye goggles. They left red rings on her face. Crossing the workshop, she took off her white alchemist coat and hung it on the back of a chair.
“Sorry about that,” she said, “But when I’m the middle of something, I need to see it through or I lose my way.”
“S’alright. What’s that you were making, then?”
“Can’t really say. A person has to be able to trust their alchemist.”
“Fair enough,” said Mick, leaning back against a workbench. “Did you get chance to look at the seeds for me?”
Janey pulled out a stool and sat down on it. “They were very interesting. Where did you get them?”
“Some woods near Perentee. What’s interesting about them?”
“I’m intrigued,” said Janey. “I’d love to know who would have cause to soak seeds in a cloaking potion and scatter them in the woods.”
Maybe a few days earlier, this might have come as a huge surprise. Only, he’d spent a while in his office, pacing in front of his corkboard and turning solutions over in his head. The idea that the seeds were somehow helping the birds fly around without being spotted had been one of them. He hadn’t guessed a cloaking potion, exactly, but the math was simple: Birds stealing stuff without getting seen, multiplied by a strange person feeding them seeds in the woods, equals something suspicious.
“This cloaking potion,” he said. “Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I need to be working from the facts. It makes things invisible, then?”
“In a roundabout way, yes. What it actually does,” she made air quotes with her fingers now, “is ‘wrap’ something in a sort of fluid mirror of their environment, making them reflect what’s around them. Effectively, yes, it shields them from view.”
“I never heard of anyone using a potion like this before.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. Anything larger than a cat, and the illusion is easier to spot.”
“Is it expensive to make, this potion?” asked Mick.
Janey nodded. “A pretty penny or two. It’s the kerwick root. Only grows in certain conditions, and it’s hard to get hold of. You wouldn’t brew it just to mess around.”
“Interesting. I’ll have to bear that in mind. Say, Janey, do you think I could ask you for a favor?”
“Not really. I’m very busy, Mick.”
“Alright, it’s not really a favor, then. An alchemy order.”
“My sign doesn’t say, ‘Janey Morgan – Master Alchemist’ because I knit cardigans. What is it you need? I told you I’m happy to brew a potion that will let you have dairy. Just half a vial before a meal, and you can stuff your face with milk, butter, whatever you want.”
“No, no. Don’t trust those potions, no offense. Tried one once and then ate a full cheesecake to myself, and…let’s just say the potion wasn’t genuine, and the next week wasn’t pleasant.”
Janey put her hand to her heart. “You would equate me to some back alley alchemist hawking colored tap water?”
“No, ‘course not. But it’s the association. You never got sick from eating a food, and then whenever you think about it you feel queasy? That’s how I am when I think of those potions that help folks like me have dairy. But anyhow, it’s not something I need making. I was thinking, ‘ccording to this book I have, my Forensics skill tree has a lot to do with alchemy.”
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Janey nodded. “At its core, yes.”
“They issued me with a sleuthing kit, of course, and it has a little forensics kit inside that does everything for you. Takes the difficulty away. But I figured if I learned the theory behind the equipment, y’know, the chemicals and how it all actually works and what have you, it’d be good experience toward my skill tree.”
“You want me to teach you some alchemy, then.”
“I’ll pay, and I only want to know the basics. Y’know, the alchemy that’s used in forensic procedures.”
Janey drummed her fingers on the workbench. “It might be useful for my business if I could say I’m endorsed by the Sunhampton guards. I could put it on my leaflets. Town visitors aren’t to know that you’re the only guard, and that you work out of a storage unit. No offense, Mick. I didn’t mean that in a bad way.”
“S’alright, you’re not far off the money. Only, I have an office on Bishop’s Way.”
“I’ll call around for a coffee the next time I’m over that way.”
“No problem. So what do you say? Can you teach me a thing or two?”
Janey nodded. “Let’s start right now. It shouldn’t take long to instruct you in the basics.”
After a few hours of instruction from Janey Morgan, Mick already knew about a hundred times more alchemy than he had when he’d woken up that morning. She hadn’t even shown him the surface of the subject, let alone scraped it, of course, but Janey was able to show him how to do some very, very basic forensic experiments that his Forensics kit would otherwise have done for him. Just as he’d suspected, learning a little of the theory behind it gave him some experience toward earning his Forensics skill tree.
Following that, he made a visit to his office so he could pace around in front of his corkboard for a while and make some deductions. It really did help, all the pacing. If he didn’t know better, he’d say the corkboard was artificed to make his thoughts surer; there was just something about walking up and down in front of it that made things slide into place. When he was done, he sat at his desk and scribbled down the order of events to make it even clearer in his head.
Afterwards, he locked up the office and crossed town, once again heading all the way up the giant hill leading to the craftstead. This time, he walked past the alchemy workshop and headed toward the artificery one. He knocked on the door twice, but didn’t really expect an answer. Artificers were a special breed; they got so wrapped up in their work that they were oblivious to the outside world.
Walking in, he saw Flo Anderson standing at a workbench that had a metal feeding trough turned upside down on it. She was dressed in blue overalls and wearing goggles than resembled Janey’s, only with different colored lenses. Holding a strange little tuning fork, she repeated a strange process of tapping the trough, then grabbing some pincers and snapping at thin air.
Flo was Jack Cooper’s artificery apprentice, and by all accounts she had almost passed her apprenticeship. Mick had known to find her here because there were three places in Sunhampton you could reliably seek her out: her house, the King’s Head tavern, and Jack Cooper’s workshop.
Mick held back from saying anything until she was done. It was only as she took her goggles off that she seemed to become aware of his presence. She rubbed her eyes where the goggles had pressed a little too hard.
“Sorry, duckie,” she said. “How are you getting on with my little lid problem? Oh, how rude of me! Want a brew?”
“I’ll take a coffee, if there’s one going.”
“For my favorite sleuth, there’s always a cup going spare.”
While Flo brewed up, Mick’s natural curiosity took over. He asked her what she was doing with the feeding trough. Unlike Janey Morgan, Flo was all too happy to explain what she was working on. It was a self-filling trough that Farmer Tew had commissioned, apparently. He wanted eight of them making, which he planned on placing in his more remote fields, hopefully saving him a good hour or two of work each morning.
“And what about you, chick?” asked Flo, when they sat down with their coffees. “Anything to tell me?”
Mick had been looking forward to this moment. “I know what’s happening with your lids.”
“Ooh! Come on then. Let’s hear it.”
Between sips of coffee, he explained to her what he thought was going on, subject to verifying it all. It seemed to him that the mysterious driver of the black carriage was going to Perentee woods and scattering seeds coated in a cloaking potion. The birds that ate it soon became, to all intents and purposes, invisible.
Then came the part where incredulity got stretched thin like biscuit dough. When Mick asked around in Perentee and Sunhampton among the folks he could trust to be discreet, he discovered that a few of them, after they went and checked, were missing some of their jewelry and ornaments. Not just any jewelry, though; only the pieces they never wore, and kept stored away. The ones they weren’t likely to notice were gone for a while.
This line of questioning hadn’t just been good for the case, but it had also given him some decent experience toward his Interrogation skill tree. All in all, he’d racked up a decent chunk of Forensics, Deduction, and Interrogation experience lately.
“The birds are trained,” said Mick. “Somehow, whoever this driver is, they’ve taught the birds to meet them in Perentee, eat the seeds, go and steal a bunch of stuff, then fly the goods back to their cottage, where I’m assuming they get some kind of reward. More seeds, perhaps?”
“Well I never,” said Flo. “I’m lost for words. Completely lost for them. I can’t think of a single word to say. I tell you, duckie, I never heard of such a thing! Not in all my years living here in ‘hampton. It’s an absolute disgrace. It’s struck me dumb, cross my heart it has. Struck me so mute I can’t even think of anything to say.”
“You might point out that your milk bottle lids aren’t valuable.”
“Oh. That’s true.”
“Way I figure it, one of the birds might not be as well trained as the rest. Must think your lids are worth stealing. Or maybe it’s an even craftier little thing – reckons it can deliver milk bottle lids to the carriage driver, and still get a lovely handful of seeds as a reward.”
“Birds are much cleverer than you think,” said Flo.
“Well, scatter a few seeds on your doorstep tomorrow morning, before your milk gets delivered, and see if they get disturbed. That ought to tell you if I’m right. Don’t do it before bed, because hedgehogs and badgers wander around at night. Do it maybe thirty minutes before your milk arrives.”
“What about all those poor peoples’ jewelry and such?”
“Leave that with me.”
“That I will do, Mr. Mulroon, because you’re a fine detective, and I’ll trust you’ll sort it out.”
“I’m a sleuth, if you please, Ms Anderson. And thanks.”
“I got you something, in anticipation that you’d get to the bottom of this. I’ll still pay you, of course, but I thought I’d give you something extra.”
Flo crossed the workshop and retrieved a brown, oak case with a leather handle, which she placed on the workbench in front of him. His initials were chiseled into the lid.
“It’s artificed,” she said, wearing a look of pride. “Enchanted the miodes myself. When you open it up, it’ll store much more than it ought to.”
Indeed, the case interior was much roomier than should have been possible. It was like having a suitcase, except it was barely bigger than a book. In fact, he could probably have fit it in his pocket.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said. “My fee was more than enough.”
“I’m an artificer, chick. It’s nothing to me to make a little trinket like this. And you deserve it.”