“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with this book, The Sleeping Dragon,” Eresthanon said. “Why would murder be required for it to change hands?”
The magus, Heathcote-Scott, drew in a breath. “It is a most potent grimoire created by the Drakon for their own use and may, in fact, be unique. I am not an academic so I can’t speak much to the contents, but it has intrigued and drawn scholars of our order since we discovered it in our possession.”
“So you inherited a treasure stolen from dragons and, rather than return it or try to get rid of it, you tried to hide it in New York City, the financial capital of the world?” Aaliyah asked, incredulous. “It’s a wonder it took this long for a multiple homicide over it.”
Heathcote-Scott at least had the sense to look mildly abashed. “The research opportunities weren’t something the order could bring themselves to surrender, especially given the likelihood of hostilities from the Drakon if they discovered our existence in the first place.”
“Fine, whatever,” Aaliyah said. “No use crying over spilled Gatorade. For right now, we’re going to need you to come outside with us to coordinate with our people. Can you show us another route down that doesn’t trample through my crime scene?”
“That depends. Where, precisely, would we need to avoid?”
After describing the locations of the bodies, Heathcote-Scott told them he could avoid most of them. They had to choose between the rear entrance, which the intruder had likely used, and the front, where there was a body in the foyer. The magus assured them they wouldn’t have to come within ten feet of the bodies on the grand staircase, however, so they chose that route.
Heathcote-Scott closed the door to the private library then led them through the halls. Before long, they arrived at a hall running along the front of the building; tall windows looked down on the street below. A door in the corner turned out to be a small elevator, accessed with a talisman and spell the magus kept hidden from them. It was a tight fit with three of them, but Eresthanon had the slim build of elves and Aaliyah’s only nod to being anything other than diminutive were her hips, breasts, and wiry muscles.
It let them out in the closet of a reading lounge on the ground floor. The elevator turned back into a normal closet as soon as they had all stepped out, before the door had even closed. From there it was a short walk to exit from the door under one of the grand staircases in the entrance hall, the one without corpses strewn about on it.
Although Eresthanon watched closely, Heathcote-Scott didn’t visibly demonstrate any strong emotions at the bodies, even the one they had to pass within a couple steps of in the foyer to get through the front door.
Aaliyah stopped them when they were in the small gated space outside.
“Say, we saw you had a room with a bank of scrying mirrors,” she said. “Any chance those are recorded or can be rewound?”
“Sadly not, Quaesitor. As I understand it, interweaving the enchantments that restrict any form of scrying or monitoring is an atrociously complex task even for artifacts hardwired, as it were, into the schema. To permit recording or transmission beyond the chantry’s confines would be prohibitively difficult.”
“Never thought to use cameras?”
Heathcote-Scott gave a small, rueful smile. “We are not nearly as adept at security with information technology so it would have created a worse vulnerability than benefit.”
“Shit,” Aaliyah groused.
She led them to the gate and waved over one of the firefighters, directing them to bring over the incident commanders on the scene. When the two officers joined them shortly afterwards, Aaliyah made introductions.
“Captain Lehman, Lieutenant Rafferty, this is Percival Heathcliff-Scone,” she said. “He’s a representative of the people who own this site and you’ll need to coordinate with him to make sure the Magical Response Unit has the needed access. The first thing is we need to get those bodies removed so they can be examined.” She turned to Heathcote-Scott. “They’ll be returned to your order to be laid to rest according to their wishes.”
“Heathcote-Scott, and thank you,” the magus said, bowing his head slightly and giving no indication of offense at having his name mangled.
“The next thing is to get people in there to pick up any forensics we can,” she continued, pulling out her notepad to jot some notes. “Everything’s pretty much on the path leading upstairs and hard to miss, but Mister Heathcote-Scott can also show you to back entrance that was used to vacate the premises and-”
“Quaesitor, if I might interject?” Heathcote-Scott interjected, then continued. “We are glad to cooperate with the Vigiles in its pursuit of this culprit, but would also like to state that this chantry is both an abode and a place of study. As such, we would prefer no one outside our order enter any private spaces, including the fifth floor beyond the antechamber.”
Aaliyah turned to the magus with an expression that wasn’t outright hostile, but wasn’t far from it.
The magus went on. “As you and the Tribune can attest, the intruders violated the Four Pillars in common areas.”
“What they were after was on the fifth floor, however, and the most promising information we’re likely to get as to the identity of those responsible would come from examining how they bypassed your order’s defenses there,” Eresthan observed.
“I can promise that we will conduct a thorough investigation of our own on that very subject and pass any relevant information along, Tribune, but surely you’d agree that the theft itself does not constitute a violation of any of the Pillars. The theft may have been the reason behind these heinous crimes, but it is largely incidental in the greater scheme of things.”
“Fine,” Aaliyah snorted. “Just make sure you provide Captain Lehman with a point of contact in case we need to get in touch.”
“Rest assured, Quaesitor, that I shall be personally remaining in town for the foreseeable future to oversee the repairs to our chantry,” Heathcote-Scott said, offering them another small bow as they left him with the two embedded officers.
Aaliyah gave some notes to the police lieutenant, Rafferty, on what to look out for — including a note to make sure they collected as much of the stone dust left from the attacks as they could — then grumbled all the way back to their cars. She stopped when they were back at her motorcycle.
“Alright, we should go over what we know so far,” she said. “There’s an all-night diner not far from here at 1st and 62nd that should be quiet this time of night; ditch the windbreaker in your trunk and meet me over there.”
She mounted her bike and gave Eresthanon little choice but to follow. He dropped the police jacket in his trunk since Rafferty was still busy with the scene and made his way southeast. He was slightly delayed since it was more difficult to back his sedan out onto Madison Avenue, but there was little traffic so it didn’t take him long.
The Fancy Eats Diner was on the ground floor of a four-storey building of whitewashed brick on a corner lot. It had a narrow red awning for trim over tall windows and a classic marquee of raised neon block letters above that.
The interior was classic Americana, something right out of the fifties or sixties — red-and-white naugahyde benches with a V-back pattern in the booths, white laminate tables, and chrome trim on the furniture and walls. There were no mini-jukeboxes on the tables, but they wouldn’t have been out of place.
He spotted Aaliyah sitting at a booth in a corner near the front of the diner, facing a window looking out at the street, and stepped inside to join her. Seconds after he was seated, the night waitress came by and left menus with them.
Aaliyah didn’t want to talk until they had ordered, so Eresthanon went through the surprisingly robust menu.
Eresthanon opted to go with a classic — a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake. It was his first time at a diner in this Cycle and couldn’t pass up on the opportunity for something so iconic. He might even order a slice of apple pie for dessert, if he wasn’t feeling overly full. Aaliyah ordered a massive ham and cheese omelette, four sides of bacon, and coffee.
After the waitress had taken their orders and brought drinks — including a large carafe of coffee; the waitress seemed to know Aaliyah — the Quaesitor withdrew a small, stone cube. Eresthanon could see the delicate tracings of runes and channels on the polished surfaces; they seemed to form a network of enchantments that would disguise vocal sounds in some way in a limited area. He couldn’t see enough to know whether the enchantment worked on speaking going in or coming out of its radius, but he guessed the latter.
“That’s an interesting device,” Eresthanon observed. “Something from the Vigiles?”
“As if,” Aaliyah scoffed. “The VC is no better than most eidolons when it comes to security; if it’s not a castle, tower, volcano lair, they barely bother with security, let alone counterintelligence. Anyways, let’s get to business.”
“Yes, before we review the case, I was hoping you could answer a couple of questions I had about procedure?”
Aaliyah gave him a wave of the hand to indicate he should go on.
“Thank you,” he said with a nod. “Why did we enter the chantry before it had been cleared and secured by the MRU? That seems like an unnecessary risk.”
“The MRU are well-trained, well-equipped, and well-coordinated, but more often than not they’re low-grade magi or eidolons that don’t have a lot of innate personal oomph. In highly dangerous situations, like our crime scene tonight, as soon as there are two MRU agents on scene one will do a preliminary sweep looking for the injured or any immediate threats.”
“As Delman did.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Aaliyah nodded. “If they think there’s an elevated threat level at an incident, they’ll inform the incident commander on scene. Then they’ll either mobilize heavy hitters from the MRU or they’ll wait for other agents with the potency to handle greater threats. Their primary responsibility is to secure the scene so there’s no threat to bystanders or the Third Pillar.”
“Secrecy from and safety of the mundane,” Eresthanon mused. “A sensible policy.”
“Any more questions on how we operate?”
“Just one. The looking device you used in the maze,” he said.
“My magic borescope, yeah. What about it?”
“Why didn’t you employ that device on the rooms we had to breach?”
“The short version is: expedience and tactical advantage. The first is obvious enough, I hope, but the second is a little more complex. Let’s say there’s a hostile inside. A borescope under a door is pretty easy to spot, so it runs the risk of ruining a chance to leverage surprise. Since we had to go in any way, it was best not to risk letting any potential hostiles know when we were preparing to breach.”
“I assume it’s better for windows, vents, and other unobtrusive locations that don’t draw the eye,” Eresthanon mused.
“Or for getting an idea for the position of multiple targets, which we didn’t have to worry about,” she agreed. “Any more questions?”
“Not at this time, thank you,” he said. “Besides, our food is about to arrive. The service here is quite fast.”
“Late night, no crowd, a staff who knows what they’re about,” Aaliyah said, placing a hand on the napkin dispenser to cover the stone cube. “The place might not be ritzy, but they do good work.”
The last comment earned Aaliyah a smile and thanks from the waitress, who had just walked up to deliver their food. When she’d gone, Aaliyah uncovered the cube.
“Let’s get to it,” Aaliyah said. “So, start with a rundown. What do we know?”
Eresthanon took a bite of his large cheeseburger and used the time to organize his thoughts. He wanted a good summary of what they had learned without adding too much extraneous detail.
“An unknown individual, or possibly individuals, killed seven magi in the course of breaching the security of a chantry belonging to a highly secretive and magically potent order of magi, taking approximately half an hour from the start of the assault to their exit from the chantry. Their target — assuming the intrusion and killings weren’t the primary motive — was a rare, possibly unique grimoire called The Sleeping Dragon, which was likely obtained from the Drakon by force at some point in the past.”
“That’s a good synopsis of what happened, but what else do we know? What can we infer or deduce?”
“The Susurrat Solis is particularly secretive because they fear retaliation from other Creaturae. They or the order they derived from likely have old connections to the Vigiles, as well, dating back to its founding, which would make them the subject of additional scrutiny even if only to make sure they had no undue influence in our ranks.”
Aaliyah waved a bit of egg on her fork at him. “Why would it matter if they used to have some connection with the VC?”
“Because if this potential conflict between the magi and drakus escalates, it will serve as a reminder of that past and might drive others to see an opportunity to settle old grudges,” Eresthanon said.
“I know wizards have been one of the primary enemies of the lizards, but what does the Vigiles have to do with that?”
“Are you not familiar with the First Reformation of the Vigiles at the end of the fifteenth century?”
“A little?” she replied, waffling her hand from side to side. “One of my mentors early on was a big history buff, but he was such a dweeb about it that it kinda put me off. That was when the Council of Archons was created, I think.”
“More formally known as Synedrion Eidola, yes,” Eresthanon agreed. “As I am sure you’re aware, at least one of the three Archons is required to be a Creaturae, rather than an otherwise normal human magi. Do you know why that is?”
Aaliyah considered for a moment as she ate a piece of bacon, her brows furrowed in thought. “It has something to do with making sure everyone understood we applied the law equally. I feel like I used to know more about this but I guess I purged it from the old memory banks. Probably to avoid turning into some kind of history dork.”
“Indeed, we must exercise constant vigilance against dorkiness,” Eresthanon said drily. “You aren’t far off; the First Reformation was a result of more than a century of brutal warfare — initially between the Drakon and various human orders, both magi and knightly — after the assassination of the former’s leader. After decades of sporadic conflict between the drakus and various mage orders, the bloodshed escalated; many factions of Creaturae took up arms against a number of orders but against the Vigiles, as well.”
“What? Why?”
“The Vigiles Creaturae began as a collaboration between the orders,” Eresthanon said. “Even after seven centuries, there were almost no members who were, themselves, Creaturae. Its membership was drawn almost exclusively from praeternatural humans. When it came out they had not only maintained closer ties to their parent orders than was known, but were helping to cover the crimes of their fellows through dereliction, the reaction was swift and harsh.”
“Dereliction,” Aaliyah said. “They were sandbagging investigations where eidolons were the victim and magi the likely perps?”
Eresthanon dipped a fry in ketchup. “Precisely. We heard Heathcote-Scott referring to us as their old associates, which suggests the connection, and the enchanting matrices in the core of the armor golems almost certainly came from one of the orders who founded the Vigiles and were known for their work in that field.”
“Alright, that’s good background on the finger-wigglers, but we’re getting off track. What else do we know about the crime, especially our doer?”
“The culprit was able to bypass the chantry’s static defenses very quickly, suggesting they either had familiarity with the sanctum or some manner of key to gain access, perhaps both,” Eresthanon said. “This extends beyond getting through the doors, however, they also knew where their target was and how to navigate the maze on the fifth floor.”
Aaliyah nodded. “Good. What else do we know?”
“The wounds on the victims were inflicted with tremendous blunt force. This could indicate a powerful artifact, an extremely specialized magus, a particularly gifted savant, or a Creaturae capable of such strength.”
“A savant?” Aaliyah asked. “I’m not familiar with that term.”
“It’s a kind of wild talent, but instead of their innate magic answering to their increasingly unstable will, it’s almost completely internalized to enhance their natural capabilities. Most savants are somewhat broad in how their magic is focused, directed to bolstering their physical or mental capabilities, but in some rare instances an individual will be even more specialized, so you might find a strength, perception, or reflexes savant.”
“Oh, okay, I think I’ve heard of that. So why don’t you think our perp could’ve been some mook with a potion?”
“I would consider that a powerful artifact, though I think it’s improbable. Magic that enhances the body which is then enchanted to be carried and transferred by an item will rarely be able to achieve the kind of puissance we saw from the attacks at the chantry. While it is possible, I think that is far less likely than, say, a cudgel enchanted to increase some aspect of its physical nature at the point of contact for greater impact.”
“Anything else?” Aaliyah asked.
“The grimoire that was stolen could provide us more insight if we knew more about what it contained, but I was forthright with the magus, I have never heard of this particular work.”
“Fair point,” she said. “So, there’s a lot we don’t know but I think we have enough information to form some ideas about where we should be looking. Tell me your thoughts on that.”
“My inclination is that our first avenue of investigation should be to dig into the private dealings of the local members of the Susurrat Solis, especially those who worked at the chantry itself,” he said.
Aaliyah raised an eyebrow. “Walk me through it.”
“Given the demonstrated familiarity with and ease of access to the chantry, including its most secured areas, I suspect their information came from either personal familiarity or someone feeding them information who had that personal familiarity.”
“So you think it’s an inside job?”
“It’s the only sensible explanation, to a point,” Eresthanon said. “The principal may not be a member of the chantry or even the order, but it boggles the imagination to think the perpetrator could get in and out so easily without inside information, which suggests accomplices with the appropriate knowledge.”
“Accomplices, or dupes,” Aaliyah said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the first or last person killed was the person on the inside and were shocked to discover their payday turning into their last day.”
“That’s well-reasoned, but aren’t we more likely to find new leads by seeking accomplices? After all, we have no effective way to narrow down who might be the mastermind.”
“Sure we do,” she replied. “Think about it. Who’s likely to have people with the physical and magical ability to take on that many magi, has a history of conflict with the magi, has the means to drop bribes so big it could turn a mage from some secret old wizard club, and would have an interest in getting back a book that belonged to them in the first place?”
“You think it was the dragons?”
Aaliyah shrugged. “That’s my instinct, yes.”
Eresthanon couldn’t dismiss Aaliyah’s theory; he had considered the possibility himself and hadn’t entirely discarded it. But there were incongruities in his knowledge of the Drakon that left enough room for doubt he could have driven his car through it.
“I am no draconic scholar, but this action seems out of line with the general methodology the Drakon employs. Outside of open conflict, they are usually defensive, even passive, and, from what little I know of them, they tend to rely on clandestine action rather than anything so… brazen as this assault.”
“You heard what Heathcote-Scott said when he didn’t know we were listening, right?” she replied. “They have a new leader; new leaders mean new ideas. Usually that’s just a slightly different flavor of shit sundae or some pointless new bureaucracy, but sometimes it means radical changes in operating procedures.”
Aaliyah took another bite of her eggs. “We also know a bunch of the Gandalf crowd are hiring up mercs in anticipation of some conflict with the dragons; what if the snakes struck first?”
“Heathcote-Scott also said their efforts at divination suggested the threat posed by the dragons was relatively low and only revised that estimate based on the theft,” Eresthanon said. “The Susurrat Solis were already paranoid about retaliation from the greater Creaturae community and all the more so when it comes to dragons.”
“Which warrants consideration but I don’t see how it hurts our investigation to look into the dragons as a primary suspect. It’s not like we won’t also go over as much personnel info about the wizards as we can, even if it’s just to try tracking the money to build a stronger case.”
“As you say,” Eresthanon agreed. “What’s our next step? Is there anyone in the Drakon who will speak with us? How does one even find a dragon, save in a bank?”
Aaliyah grinned maliciously. “Oh, I know exactly where to go and who to talk to. And the best part is: it will put those scaly dinks right on the backfoot.”