In the six nights since the first death three more had been murdered. Each of the bodies found with bloodied, peeled back faces, the front of their skulls carved off with increasingly surgical precision. The prints had come to label the perpetrator of these crimes the ‘Facesnatcher’. For Vespia it had rankled, she had interviewed every one of the artist’s associates, inspected all of the spots he was known to frequent and followed up on a number of anonymous tips which had only led to the discovery of one Lorek Vonyn’s infidelity to his slightly illiterate wife. Other than the grisly remains he left behind there had been no sight of their primary suspect Leorik von Leyn, and Vespia had become convinced that someone must be helping him to hide from the Watch, someone with the resources and knowledge to help a man who had never had to evade more than paint splatters.
On the seventh night the agreement with Triska had borne fruit, according to his sources the artist had been using a dockside warehouse - left empty in the winter months - as his abode and had been seen entering it just an evening prior.
Now, a pale moon lit the sky and a squad of watchmen in dark leathers advanced through the icy frostbitten streets, their breath fogging up the night. With the way their unsheathed dirks glinted in the moonlight they looked more like a band of rogues looking for evening sport than protectors of the city, but Vespia had made the decision to do this as soon as possible and make sure Leorik didn’t have the chance to prey on anyone else in the city; the little hours were his preferred hunting time at least if Tyghul’s time of death estimations were as accurate as he claimed.
Vespia nodded to another watch officer as the warehouse came into sight, a foreboding wooden shadow that creaked and groaned like a tree in the midnight winds, and he led three of the men around the back of the building, the fall of their footsteps barely audible thanks to the padded and soleless shoes they had opted for that evening.
As she approached the smaller door at the front of the warehouse, meant for dock officials and managers, Vespia’s heart thumped in her chest. This was their chance to put this bastard in the ground for good, and as she carefully cocked the flintlock pistol in one hand with the other she had to remind herself that ideally they wanted to take him alive and bring him in for questioning.
With her back to the wall and the door to her side she beckoned two of her men over, glancing at the hunk of wood banded with iron they held between them; a primitive, but effective, battering ram.
A set of thumps echoed through the night as they turned the door to splinters, and soon the shouts and yells of the watchmen filled the riverside. There was even an explosion of light, a whiplike crack, and a blooming of bitter tasting smoke. Five minutes later, when the excitement had settled down and it came to light that Leorik was nowhere to be found in the warehouse Vespia couldn’t help but seethe.
“And who was the bloody idiot that fired that pistol?” Vespia cast her gaze around the other watch officers as a sheepish greenhorn, barely old enough to grow fuzz on his chin, put his hand up slowly. “You? Alright, you just won guard duty on the place until the afternoon. Pick someone else to stay here with you as well. The rest of you head back to the watch house, if the Captain doesn’t have anything for you all to do you can get some rest.”
She knew investigations like these could take time, but not when they already had a suspect in mind, and definitely not when they had a background like Leorik. Her theory that he was being given some form of assistance seemed to grow more credible by the hour, and she didn’t like it. The only people who had known what she planned here tonight was herself, the Captain, and Triska. Obviously she hadn’t said anything, and if Triska was helping Leorik why bother even telling her about the warehouse? The Captain, well the Captain she trusted implicitly, but the people who read the Captain’s reports were far more suspect.
One small consolation was that the evening hadn’t been entirely wasted though, Leorik had been here. She had made her way up a set of decaying, rickety wooden stairs and into what must have been a dock manager’s office at one point. Now it had been set up as something she could only describe as bizarre. An ad hoc artists workspace crossed with an occult shrine.
Vespia flicked a match against her boot and started to light the oilwick lights stationed around the room. On one side of the room there was an easel with a wooden palette propped up against it stained red with paint, but not quite as red as the workbench laid out with all manner of gruesome tools. Hacksaws, scalpels, hammer and chisel, and a selection of wicked knives. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of paint in the air, it was an acridly copper sort of scent.
The other side reminded her most potently of the chambers of Sigismund the Wizard - Renard’s adopted sibling - in the most twisted of ways. The walls on this side were filled with jagged black spirals that crossed in on themselves, the symbol had been drawn, painted, even scraped into the wood until they overlapped in a manic display. The part that scared her the most though was the spiral painted on the floor in pitch black charcoal and surrounded with a dizzying geometric pattern that she recognised as a summoning circle. At the centre of the spiral there was a single shadowy candle, made of a vantablack wax that seemed to suck in and gobble up all the light that the oilwicks cast about the room.
For a moment, the woman was seized with the urge to light the candle. Then she brought her foot up and crushed the wax beneath her boot. “It had to be magic. Ugh, where’s Renard when you need him?”
That was another thing entirely. Renard had shut himself away with his scrolls and his books, chasing some new obsession and she hadn’t had the chance to discuss the case with him at all.
The good news at least was that Arlene had told her he’d gone for an interview the last time she was at her apartment…That must have been a day and a half ago now, with how hard she’d been pushing herself. Vespia didn’t like to admit it, but the fatigue was really starting to set in. It was about time she got back to her own bed, and in the morning she could ask Renard for advice on this summoning circle.
“Uh, Lieutenant? You up there?” The sound of the sheepish greenhorn’s voice reached her ears, and a frown crossed her features as she made her way back toward the steps.
“I am, what’s the problem, new blood?” The frown turned into an arched brow as she came down the stairs and saw a grimey courier standing beside the new watchman, “Bit late for a delivery, isn’t it?”
“Special one, ma’am. You Lieutenant Larue?” When she nodded her assent and he placed a hand into his tattered jacket she felt an inexplicable fear for just a moment, sure the man was about to reveal a pistol and shoot her through the heart. A sigh of relief escaped her as he brandished a far less threatening sheet of rolled up paper.
“Yeah, that’s me. Who’s this from?” She took the letter, passing a few bronze numas into the courier’s palm as she did so.
“Triska sent it, he told me to come double quick, make sure it was given to you directly.”
Vespia watched the courier leave with a suspicious gaze, tearing open the letter and reading through its contents.
“It’s from Triska alright. Nobody has handwriting as bad as his. Or spelling.” Her eyes went wide as she continued to scan the page, “Leorik was seen just a few hours ago, entering Rijmen’s Paints.”
She thrust a finger at the second guard, “Get to the watchhouse, round up some of the lads and get them to meet me over at Rijmen’s Paints, quick as you can. Greenhorn? Get that pistol reloaded on the way, you’re with me.”
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Rijmen Paint Makers’s windows were lit up brightly, the only shop on the street that hadn’t emptied out for the night at a reasonable hour. Vespia and the greenhorn had sprinted through the streets of Vatan, and she had to grab him by the back of his leathers as they grew closer. “No, no. You go in through the back, like we did at the warehouse. I don’t want to take any chances with this one.”
The watchman gave her a wide eyed nod, opting this time for his dagger as opposed to the pistol. Vespia took the chance to dust herself off and take a deep breath, there were a number of possibilities here. Perhaps she was about to stumble upon the scene of another murder, or perhaps the clerk at Rijmen’s was helping Leorik hide, in the end she decided that if Leorik were still here it would be best that she acted as if nothing were untoward. She straightened her back up as she approached the door and wrapped her knuckle upon it.
A moment later and the clerk had opened the door inward, one side of his wispy moustache curled down the wrong way, and his gaze frightened. When he saw Vespia a sigh of relief escaped his lips. “Lieutenant, what are you doing here at this hour? We’re closed, I’m afraid.” The clerk tried to close the door, and Vespia kept it forced open with her boot.
Then she put a finger to her own lips, and her free hand on her pistol as she looked past the clerk and into the shop. Softly, she spoke. “Is he still here? Leorik?”
“What? How did you - no. Not right now.” The clerk glanced around the street frantically, beckoning Vespia inward. “But he was just an hour ago. He was rambling, demanding I give him a special sort of paint. I thought he was going to kill me, I was too afraid to go to the watch. I was going to do it in the morning.”
Vespia suppressed a scowl at that, by the morning Leorik would have gone to ground again. The clerk led her deeper into the shop toward the counter and Vespia released her grip on her pistol, but she kept it cocked just in case. “What sort of paint was he looking for? Did he tell you where he was going? When did he leave? I want to know everything.”
The clerk nodded, wrapping himself up tighter in his jacket. “I stay above the shop, you see. He came into my room - my room! - and he told me to get him some of the paint. Some of the Vaelic stuff, like I was telling you he had grown interested in.” He dipped under the counter, bringing up a pot of black and red paint. “This was what he wanted.”
Vespia picked up the paint, peering at the glass pot. It didn’t have a name, “What’s this paint called?”
“Wyrdroot Red. Some people say it has magical properties, but that’s nonsense. We don’t deal in anything magical here, but Leorik seemed convinced it would help him get back to his gallery.” The clerk rubbed at his moustache as he spoke, “The red is light and vibrant, the black adds a touch of darkness once mixed. I’ve never liked the smell, too coppery.”
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Coppery. Just like the paint she had smelled back at the warehouse. Vespia popped the paint open without asking, taking a sniff at the fumes. It was the exact same smell, but so strong that it made her eyes water. “Does anyone else in the city carry this?”
“Oh, no of course not. We’re the only paint maker that will mix with Vaelic dyes this way. The only ones who can afford it really, with the taxes.” He explained, a hint of pride in his voice as he extolled the virtues of his shop’s wealth.
“He must have been running low, then. Did he tell you where he was going, when he left?” She placed the paint down onto the counter, a grunt escaping her lips as a thrum started playing in the back of her head. She glanced upward as a thumping noise from above startled her. “What was that?”
“Uh, he said something about an estate. That he had to get back to the estate, that his employer was waiting on him.” The clerk popped the cork stopper into the paint bottle again, before offering her a strained smile. “What was what? Are you alright, officer?”
In the moments since she had stepped back from the counter the thrum grown into a cacophony of pounding drums at the back of her skull, and when her hand whipped her pistol up the action was sluggish and slow, like that of a drunkard who had been thrown out of three taverns already. “You put something…” The realisation was a dim one, and she barely noticed the clerk’s pitiful sobbing apologies as she thrust the pistol into his face. Her attention was focused on something else entirely.
An elderly man with silver hair stood in the doorway to the backrooms, holding a meat cleaver that was dripping red with the fresh blood of a greenhorn watchman. Without hesitating Vespia swung the pistol round toward him, squeezing the trigger through her hazy vision and firing off a deafening blast that filled the room with gunpowder scented smoke and put her totally off balance. Before she had even hit the ground, her world had gone black.
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It had taken Renard fifty two steps to reach the bottom of that yawning black staircase, one hand steadying him against dust encrusted stone wall to his left, clawing at cracked stonework and loose mortar as makeshift handholds, while the other held a sputtering oil wick that cast just enough light to cast a long, crooked shadow behind him.
As he descended, he couldn’t help but imagine that he was lowering himself down into the gullet of a great beast, ready to swallow him whole and snuff out his meagre light. Then he would be left alone in the dark, groping at the same blackness that always filled the left portion of his vision. He had to take his steps carefully, in fear that the ancient crumbling stonework beneath his boots might give way at any moment. Renard had almost become convinced that he would be trapped there, forever travelling further and further into the bowels of the earth like some ironic punishment from the Gods, and so it came as something of a surprise when he set his foot forward and connected with the stone floor half a second earlier than he should have.
He had arrived at the ancestral crypt of house Du Vogare.
The entrance chamber was roofed with a wide arcing dome, and the walls were fitted with alcoves bearing long abandoned shrines or with the frayed banners of the house of Du Vogare - a golden chalice on a fabric of rich aquamarine velvet - sitting limply in the stagnant, cloying air.
The stonework here was different from that at surface level, the crypt had been constructed with obsidian blocks criss crossed with twinkling veins of gold, like seams that had never been mined. Lines of ancient sarcophagi filled the room, and stretched on further than the light of his oilwick reached. Renard recognised the architecture; this room had been built by Telavingia’s original inhabitants. The black haired, pale grey skinned, white eyed people known as the Telarothi. This must have been an ancient burial chamber for some of their greatest heroes and sorcerers, since converted for use by the Humans who had driven them far into the north to eke out a living as corsairs, killers and blood mages.
Holding his light high above his head, Renard started to make his way past the sarcophagi, each engraved with the names of one of the vaunted lineage of Du Vogare, or very close associates. His every step was imprinted in the dust of ages, and echoed throughout the subterranean halls. If his light had been brighter he might have noticed that his tracks were not the only set marking the floor. Surely there must be great treasures hidden within the obsidian resting places, crowns and bangles and swords forged by the greatest of southern artisans, left to rest within the hands of the rotting dead and being put to absolutely no one’s use. If he had been an individual more focused on material gain, the Wizardling would have seen this as the chance to weigh down his pockets and make himself a rich man.
Renard, however, was here on a mission, lips moving as he read each of the names, searching for his target and delving his way further and further into the labyrinthine halls of the crypt.
There was something nagging at the back of his head though, like an itch that he just couldn’t reach. Something about the estate up above had been off, it had been wrong. It felt like a word or an idea was on the tip of his tongue and that he just couldn’t bring himself to form it. The meeting with the Elector had gone badly, he knew that. But he could have sworn there was something else - no, it must have just been nerves. Placing his free hand within his doublet, he palmed at the wand he had kept so close over the past few days. Again, that electrifying feeling of power made his hair stand on end and his remaining eye light up. Svenja had never given him a focusing tool as potent as this when he had been her apprentice, and he couldn’t help but feel a sense of eager excitement at the thought of the magic he would be able to enact with it. This, along with the thought of the knowledge Tyla and the Scarlet Robes could give him access to, pushed him deep within the narrowing corridors.
Eventually he found what he was looking for at the corner of one of the corridors, an obsidian tomb engraved with the name ‘Andros Du Vogare the First’. Renard set his light down upon the top of the tomb, and placed his gloved palm flat against the pitch black obsidian, running a finger along one of the golden veins and pulling his wand forth from within the folds of his doublet.
He cut something of a figure; a pale skinned, one eyed wizard dressed in a black silken doublet with silver threading skulking about a subterranean lair, his face barely lit by the light of a smouldering wick that gave him the menacing aura of one about to call up an army to flood the civilised realms of men above and choke all life out of the world.
Fortunately for the civilised realms, Renard was only interested in raising one spirit that evening, and he was only interested in making it answer his questions. He took a deep breath, and then he raised his wand up above his head as he began his fell work. The incantation he wove under his breath was a chant older than the Empire of Telavingia itself, one which had been hidden deep within the journal of Syrenki, and he knew that if he mispronounced a single syllable, or let his thoughts wander for a moment then it would be likely to destroy him. He swirled the wand around in a set of sure, practised motions that he had spent sleepless nights perfecting.
That was when he felt it, felt himself opening up to the Wyrd, and he let that realm of unreality, of spirits and Gods and darker things, run through his veins like sparking fire. Colours became more pronounced and he saw through a left eye that was no longer there, the dusty smell of decay in the crypts became somehow more vibrant, and the golden veins that ran through the obsidian brickwork began to slither and undulate like some divine snake, or like some massive system of veins pumping golden blood through the crypt.
Renard pushed forward on the sarcophagus's top and with the power of the Wyrd running through him it gave way like a creaking, scraping doorway to reveal the body of Andros the First.
The corpse was adorned in a regal cloak of purple, a mark of his status as Elector that he had worn in life and still wore in death, with golden frills and swirling arabesque symbols imprinted upon it. A set of chainmail worth more than most peasants would ever see in their lifetimes covered his upper body, silver wrist guards set with lapis lazuli gemstones were wrapped around his wrists and a shimmering steel greatsword as sharp as the day it was forged rested under his boney hands. But there was something truly bizarre about the remains. Though he was by now a skeletal husk, Andros the First was missing his skull, leaving only his crown of gold set with studs of amber left resting upon a frayed silken pillow.
It would not stop Renard from doing what needed to be done, the body was nothing more than a conduit to assist him in calling Andros the First’s spirit, his very soul back to the material realm. And a soul could speak without lungs or lips or a skull. This was an older corpse than he had ever worked on before, but with the wand as his focus he was able to reach out with his mind's eye and drag the smokey spirit of Andros the First into the skeletal remains.
The dust around the crypt whipped up into a storm, as if some great giant had taken a legendary intake of breath. The smouldering wick died and left Renard in a blinding blackness but then the breath was released and the light returned, even though the greatest high of power had passed by, he could still feel an underlying current of magic tingling at his palm where he clutched the wand. He stood there silently for two heartbeats, doubting that he had actually succeeded.
“Why have you called me back from my rest?” The breathy tone echoed through the empty crypt, “Who are you?”
“I…” Renard paused then, bringing himself up to his full height and clearing his throat. “I am Renard the Black. I have some questions to ask you about your death.”
“Hmph. Never heard of you.” Andros the First’s skeletal fingers flexed around the hilt of his sword, “I suppose there is no rest for the wicked, correct? If you wish to know about my death, you could have asked my apothecary. It would probably have been easier.”
Renard couldn’t stop himself from blinking at that, deflating just a tad at the nonchalant way the spirit had taken his brief return to the land of the living. “I wanted to ask you about the nature of your death. From what I’ve been told, the illness that ended your life was unnatural.”
“Oh, yes, that. Downright strange. I expected to die in battle you know, one never expects it to be the little things that end up killing you.” Came the reply “It was a fever of some sort. My grandson recovered from it - and for that I am thankful - but I did not.”
“Do you believe it possible that your…” Renard wasn’t sure how to approach the topic, so he decided it was best to be as blunt as possible about it. “Is it possible that your sickness was caused by your son? So that he could take your place as Elector.”
“Hah!” The rumbling laughter made the walls shake and shadows flex. “I wouldn’t put it past the little bastard. Andros was always ambitious, he always thought he was better than his brothers, better than anyone. I’ve no way to tell you if that’s the case or not though, the sickness came quite suddenly, none of the treatments seemed to do anything. Even my own wizard couldn’t deal with it.”
That ruled out the possibility of a magical ailment, unless whoever had inflicted it upon Andros the First was more powerful than even his own court wizard, and Renard doubted that Andros the Second would have that sort of knowledge.
“Did he seem different the last time you spoke with him? Or at the funeral? Assuming you decided to be present for it, that is.” One’s funeral was usually the last time their spirit was present in the material world, without the meddling interference of necromancers that is.
“Oh, he barely came to see me while I was sick. He was at his son’s bedside constantly. Like I said, a similar ailment afflicted the boy. The funeral was very nice, very stately.”
“Do you have any idea how your grandson was cured?” Renard questioned as the sudden realisation of just how comical he must look, conversing with a headless skeleton hit him. “Why couldn’t they give you the same treatment?”
“They tried all the same treatments. In the end, I died, and my grandson lived. I suppose you’ll just have to take it up with the Gods, boy. He had the benefit of youth on his side.” The clanking of platemail echoed throughout the crypt; it seemed that Renard’s presence within the crypts had not gone entirely unnoticed. “Besides, I think you might have bigger problems. Good luck, Renard the Black.”
"Merovik’s bones.” The echoes grew louder, and from the pace it was clear there was more than one knight bearing down on the crypt. Renard dropped his wand into the sarcophagus, grabbing at his oil wick lantern and fleeing down into the depths of the darkened corridors with hurried footsteps.
Tyla had told him that if anything went wrong she would see that all charges were dropped, but now that there was a very real chance of his being caught, he suspected that the head of the Scarlet Robes would be far more likely to claim she had absolutely no idea who Renard was when push came to shove.
He scrambled through the corridors, skidding past a left and then a right, down a longer tunnel flanked by as of yet unfilled tombs, and on his next turn directly into the plated fist of a Knight of the Tattered Banner, his lantern escaped his grip and shattered against the floor as unconsciousness took him.