The police officer and firefighter glanced at Aaliyah’s badge then swept an appraising look around the intersection, checking for bystanders. She recognized both of them, but couldn’t put names to the faces. Thank god for name tags on uniforms.
“A real shitshow is what we got, Quaesitor,” Rafferty, the police lieutenant, said. “Sentinel wards picked up a massive aether disturbance twenty to thirty minutes ago.”
Lehman, the fire captain, added, “Bystanders got a whiff of it, so plenty of folks called 911. Protocols almost weren’t quick enough to intercept.”
Aaliyah held up a hand to forestall further explanations. Eresthanon really should have been hearing the initial briefing, but there was another, better reason to have him join them right now. She gestured for the elf to join them, then took a deep breath and steeled herself to keep a straight face.
When her partner got out of his car in a billowy blouse, intricate vest, and pants with more straps and zippers than a dozen backpacks, Aaliyah was glad she’d taken that moment to center herself. Otherwise, she’d have been cackling.
The two officers gave him a look that said exactly what they thought of his outfit. She waited for the elf to get close before introducing him.
“This is my partner, Eresthanon; Eric Nathanial in public. It’s his first day on the job. Apparently he took the lack of dress code as an invitation to, uh, express himself or whatever. Any chance one of you has a department windbreaker he could throw on over his clubbing gear?”
The elf — damn him — was as implaccable as ever. “Pardon my appearance, I was meeting an informant and needed to blend in.”
Rafferty opened the back of his police SUV and handed over a dark blue jacket. Eresthanon put it on, then hung his badge around his neck.
“Okay, just so’s we’re all on the same page, let’s recap,” Aaliyah said, “A big aether disturbance on the block, visible to mundies, happened around half an hour ago. What else do we know?”
“Let me walk you in so you can hear it firsthand,” Rafferty said.
The lieutenant led them past the vehicle cordon, pointing out a townhouse halfway down the block. A fire engine and ambulance were parked on the street in front of it.
The house was five storeys tall and made of large, pale limestone bricks with a rounded, bulging front. It was set back from the sidewalk a few feet and had a small patio enclosed by a wrought iron gate just over head height. The central window on the third floor, framed by a handsome balconette, had shattered. The sidewalk and street glittered with broken glass.
“I’m guessing that’s where the disturbance came from?” Aaliyah asked.
Rafferty nodded. “Looks like it. That glass is no joke to break, by the way, and the whole building seems to be warded up so tight there’s no way the sentinel wards would’ve picked up anything if the window hadn’t broke.”
They had arrived at the ambulance, where a firefighter sat on the edge of the cabin. A blanket bunched on the floor behind him suggested he may have been in shock.
“This is Delman,” Rafferty said. “He was first on the scene from the MRU.”
Aaliyah leaned over and stage-whispered to Eresthanon. “That’s the Magical Response Unit.” Then she turned back to the firefighter. “Delman, how’re you holding up?”
The firefighter nodded to each of them in turn. “Quaesitor, Tribune. It’s a real shitshow in there.”
“That’s what we hear,” Aaliyah said, doing her best to be warm and, like, soothing. Or whatever.
“Not gonna lie; my quick sweep left me a little shook up,” Delman said.
Delman turned to look at a paramedic with a clipboard standing nearby and raised his voice a little. “Not so much I needed a damn blankie, but you know how twitchy medics get.”
The paramedic glanced their way and shrugged.
“What kind of shitshow are we talking about?” Aaliyah asked.
“At least six dead, spread around the house. I only walked the main hallways up to the top floor. No way was I gonna go in there. It’s like a maze or something.”
“So the site’s not secure,” Aaliyah said, turning to Rafferty. “Get a tac unit here on the double; just in case we need backup. What else can you tell me, Delman?”
“It was a slaughter, real one-sided. Something major blew out that window on the third floor; it’s a mess up there.”
They thanked the first responders and headed to the house. A few gawkers were milling around on the sidewalk across the street but the uniforms had them well in hand. After a quick scan, no one stood out as being too interested in the crime scene so Aaliyah paid them no more attention.
“Why are there so many more people from the fire department than the police?” Eresthanon asked as they approached the gated patio.
That was a damned good question, actually. Most people would assume the personnel present were appropriate to the incident and think nothing more of it. The elf was observant and insightful; Aaliyah had to give him that.
“Accidents and fires aren’t as sexy as crimes, so people pay less attention,” she answered. “And cops are armed, so that draws focus, too. In an ideal world, we’d respond to all of these things with Con Ed workers or garbage men. Then no one would give us a second look.”
They took a moment on the patio to examine the front entry. The door was slightly open with signs of damage near the floor, though it wasn’t extensive. Eresthanon knelt down and examined the masonry around the door frame. He drew Aaliyah’s attention after a few seconds.
“Do you see this mark?”
Several short lines were carved into the brick at the base of the wall. It was a simple design, like a rune or a letter. The edges were smoothed from weathering, so it had been there a long time.
“A mason’s mark? So what? Is this from some kind of famous magic bricklayer?”
“Look behind the mason’s mark,” Eresthanon suggested.
Aaliyah turned her attention back to the small engraving. Fucking illusions. She was perceptive, in both the mundane and metaphysical sense, but seeing through mystic obfuscation often required her to focus, which was a pain in the ass.
Behind the illusory mark, she saw a more complicated engraving — an open hand with a burning candle over the palm.
“Do you recognize it?” she asked.
“Unless I’m much mistaken, it’s the sigil of the Brotherhood of the Flame Bearers. A small, rather uninteresting fraternal order of magi formed in the late nineteenth century.”
“Wizards. Of course it’s wizards.”
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Eresthanon paused, thinking. “From what I can recall of this order, they should have nowhere near the resources to own a building like this nor to support the kind of enchantments I’m sensing.”
“So it’s a front,” Aaliyah mused. “Well, let’s go find out what kind of mystic horrors are waiting inside this ritzy chantry or sanctum or whatever.”
Beyond the front doors was a small foyer with another set of double doors on the opposite wall. The floor was littered with broken glass and crystals from the remains of a chandelier hanging overhead. The body of a woman lay in one corner.
Aaliyah pushed the front doors most of the way closed while Eresthanon examined the corpse. She stopped and pulled them open again, peering at them from the other side. Something had caught her attention and she spent a few seconds verifying her initial observation.
“The damage to these doors is all on the interior. They weren’t even forced open as far as I can tell,” she said.
Eresthanon stood up from beside the corpse. “This woman was bludgeoned to death, her skull was crushed.”
“So whoever it was that came through here was either let in or already had a way in.”
They moved on, continuing through the foyer. The house was so glitzy it had another, grander foyer after the regular one. Or maybe it was an atrium? Could a room be an atrium if it didn’t have a skylight?
The room was two storeys high with a double-wide quarter turn staircase climbing the walls on either side. There were doors on each side of the room, one under both staircases and double doors in the far wall.
“Three sets of double doors... this place is too damn fancy,” Aaliyah said.
The fighting had grown more intense in the atrium or whatever the hell the room was. The walls and floors were scored with damage from spells, mostly around the staircase on the right side of the room. The intruder or intruders had been met there with fierce resistance.
Aaliyah and Eresthanon took a moment to scan the space from the doorway, taking in the whole then narrowing their focus down to the specific. Three bodies were visible — two on the landing near the base of the stairs and one at the top.
“Check out those two,” Aaliyah said, heading up the stairs with measured steps and keeping part of her attention split between the head of the stairs and all the closed doors she was leaving below her.
The layout of this place was about as close to a nightmare scenario as she could imagine, with so many potential angles of attack for the doers that there was no effective way to secure the scene without a much larger tactical unit.
If it weren’t for Delman’s description suggesting the violence had moved upstairs — and her own prodigious badassness — she probably would have erred on the side of caution and waited for exactly that. Well, maybe not; that might have made her look weak or scared, neither of which she could afford as a woman in law enforcement. However, that didn’t mean she was going to be reckless.
At the top of the stairs, she didn’t stop to examine the body. Not yet. The disturbance had started barely half an hour ago and the house hadn’t been properly swept; it was possible the intruders were still in the building.
A hallway stretched away from the balcony, running through the house. Aaliyah approached slowly, pulling out a crystal marble the size of a strawberry. She set herself, hips facing the wall, and slowly adjusted her footing and posture, each small movement letting her see a little bit more of the hallway.
Each “slice” of the “pie” gave her a slightly greater field of vision down the passage without revealing her position to anyone she couldn’t already see. Since she didn’t have the manpower for overwhelming force and had absolutely no idea what was around the corner, it was the preferable tactic to a more dynamic entry.
Not having a gun or other ranged weapon in hand made the technique much less useful, since she’d have to draw a wand or something and that would eliminate the benefit of surprise, but it was better than just sticking her head around a corner and hoping no one tried to blow it off.
Besides, Aaliyah wasn’t too worried about a little magic getting flung her way and she had little fear of a more corporeal assault. Her initial assessment of the victims suggested the intruders relied on physical might rather than arcane to do their killing, so she wasn’t terribly concerned. She would be pissed if some shit-wizard ruined her jacket, though.
It took Aaliyah a few seconds to get a clear view of the hall. There were several doors on either side and a staircase at the far end, but the passage itself was clear. For the moment, anyway.
She knelt and rolled the marble down the center of the lush carpet. It came to a stop just shy of the first doors, even with the jamb. If anything bigger than a fly moved in that hallway or the aether started changing enough for a spell, the marble would let her know. With the hallway as secure as she could make it, Aaliyah went back to the body at the top of the stairs.
The corpse was a middle-aged man. He had fallen against the corner, crumpled in a heap. It only took a second to confirm the cause of death — his neck was broken. Someone with incredible strength had done that; more strength than the average eidolon was capable of.
Eresthanon called to her quietly from the bottom of the stairs. “Come take a look at this, Quaesitor.”
When Aaliyah came down the stairs, Eresthanon was waiting beside the corpses on the first landing of the stairs. He held up one of the dead men’s arms, revealing a tattoo of a teardrop with a wave inside, then showed her another, different marking on the other corpse, a palm and candle matching the masonry outside.
“Both marked with sigils for different, unrelated orders, both killed by brute force,” the elf said. “I’m not sure the intruders even used offensive magic themselves. However…”
Eresthanon brushed at the carpet on the stairs with the flat of one hand, sweeping something into the other. He held up his palm to Aaliyah, showing some kind of fine, dark powder.
“This is stone. Unenchanted, as far as I can tell, but with lingering traces of magic on it. If I’m understanding this correctly, the intruders used some kind of stoneshield spell unlike anything I’m aware of to protect themselves from the chantry’s defenders.”
“A stoneshield?” Aaliyah said. “Would that even be effective against anything with real punching power?”
The elf brushed the dust from his hands into a small pouch. “If it were thick enough, perhaps; although even old stone golems would have been marked by enchantments to increase their durability. This is not a magic I am familiar with.”
It was too early for forming theories or ruling things out, but a picture was starting to develop. Each body told them more about the how of it, but they were missing the who and why. Those answers would likely be harder to find, but every piece of information filled in the edges of the picture.
“Let’s see if we can get some more information from the rest of the house or chantry or whatever it’s called,” Aaliyah said as she stood and began climbing back up the stairs. “The perps could still be in the house, so we’ll move with care.”
Back on the mezzanine, she surveyed the hallway again.
There were three doors on the right and four on the left. If each floor had roughly the same number of rooms, it would take them a very long time to clear every nook and cranny of the house. Add in the almost-certain presence of bullshit wizard traps and they’d be at it until they retired. They needed something to speed up the process without increasing their exposure.
She turned to the elf. “You got any ways to detect movement or magic within the past thirty to sixty minutes?”
“The enchantments in this building would make attempts to detect magic fruitless, but I believe I have something that will suffice,” Eresthanon said. “Assuming your goal is to mitigate the need to check each individual room?”
Aaliyah nodded, glad her new partner was proving not to be a total dummy.
Eresthanon began performing a complex spell, or perhaps a series of spells. His movements were neither big nor flashy and he was quiet throughout, a sign he was skilled beyond the norm, even for elves. Much as she might not have wanted a partner, it was nice to have someone watching her back who complemented her status as a woman of tremendous corporeal violence.
In less than half a minute, Eresthanon had finished casting. He turned and walked to the railing, looking out over the atrium again. He hummed in thought for a moment before turning back to Aaliyah and examining the hallway once more.
“I believe I have a trail,” Eresthanon said. Then he pointed, first at the closest door on the right then the furthest door on the left. “It continues through the hallway to the stairs, but there was movement from those two rooms within the past half hour.”
A heavy sigh escaped Aaliyah’s lips. Any hostiles still in the building were most likely on a higher floor, but exposing a flank she knew had seen movement recently was un-acc-fucking-cceptable. All the doors were closed, of course, because life had to be the biggest pain in the ass it possibly could.
The odds should be in their favor checking rooms with recent movement, but there was always a risk when breaching that things could go sideways. It was a risk she felt they had to take.
There was nothing to be done for it but to do it, unless she wanted to wait for daddy Khaldun to send some big strong men to do her job for her, which meant now was the time to take that first room.
“Keep an eye down the hall, then follow me in hard once I’m through the door,” she said, careful to keep her tone low so the words wouldn’t carry.
They moved towards the door.