I wasn’t very impressed with the marshal’s offices in town. To be frank. The place was a dump. The office was a tiny single-room building sandwiched between a bakery and a cloth store. Most of the available space was taken up by a wooden desk that somehow managed to wobble despite evidence of several attempted re-balancings.

In most cities of any real size, being the imperial Marshal was a cushy job. The pay was good, and the perks were better. None of that found its way to the Asani branch. I half expected to find my predecessor decomposing underneath the pile of letters and complaints I found on the desk.

The majority of the notes were insults and curses against the tyranny of imperial rule, as opposed to the tyranny of Sect rule. Asani did not have any of that fabled imperial comradery yet.

I pulled out the draws and found an odd assortment of nick-nacks. There was a picture of a woman. It looked faded with age. Probably not a recent lover. I doubted she would have moved to Asani with him when my predecessor got this posting. There was a half-finished carving of a train. The wood chips that had been whittled off of the wood had accumulated in the draw. I grimaced. That was not an endorsement of the riveting life of a small-town marshal.

The last drawer had a bottle of tequila in it with a dusty glass. I pulled it out of the draw. The bottle was still half full, so I swept the complaints to the side and sat down. The chair was deeply uncomfortable. The padding had worn down to accommodate a different person.

It was clear that my predecessor had spent a lot of time in this office. The photograph and half-finished train also made it clear that he had left suddenly. The Emperor’s appointment letter had not made clear exactly why there was no imperial presence in town but I was starting to suspect foul play.

I kicked my legs up onto the desk and poured myself a generous glass of tequila. Before I could take a sip there was a knock at the door. “Enter,” I called remaining in my lazy legs kicked up position.

A small man with glasses and black hair poked his head into the room. When he saw me, he sighed in satisfaction. He scuttled into the room and sat in the chair across from me. “I am sorry to catch you off duty Marshal,” he said gesturing to the tequila in my hand, “but I really could not find another good Imperial in this sun-blasted town.”

I took a deliberate sip of the tequila before placing the glass down. Something about this man had my intuition going haywire. He seemed harmless enough, I could not even sense any cultivation from him but those cheap business clothes he was wearing did not quite cover up the taught muscle underneath. It was the set of his shoulders and the powerful grip he kept on his briefcase that gave away his training.

The man noticed his appraisal and commented with a smile, “An observant man. I suppose that is useful for someone in your line of service. You need not worry Marshal. I am here on business for the Emperor. My assignment is to assess the feasibility of using the portal world to give the town a more stable water supply.”

I chuckled and responded, “Good luck messing around with the portal. The Sun Gate Sect has kept that portal on lockdown for centuries. They maintain a monopoly on any resources found within it.”

I took another sip of tequila. The man frowned and shook his head before saying, “I have a letter from the office of the Emperor himself. They will not refuse me access. Besides, by Imperial decree, all portal worlds within the bounds of the empire are Imperial property.”

I shrugged and said, “Give it a go then.”

This was not welcome news. Asani could certainly use more water but the Emperor appointing two officials in such a short period meant he was planning something for the town. I had been a part of enough campaigns in the army to know that the Emperor’s plans were often deadly to the civilians.

I shook that thought off. Why was that my problem?

The man gave another pointed look at the tequila and said, “Well I will not take up any more of your valuable time than necessary I just wanted to ask exactly where this portal world is. My instructions were not specific.”

“It is right at the top of a cleft that runs up the Sun Gate Sects hill. You cannot miss it The Sun Gate Sect has a big gaudy red and gold gate marking the edge of their property.”

The man nodded. “Thank you, marshal,” he said while standing, “oh and this was outside your door. I hope I have not delayed any important business.” He handed me a note and then left.

I was still contemplating the strange bespectacled man when the contents of the note stopped my musings in their tracks. It read:

Marshal

There has been a massacre at the Baked Moon tavern.

Regards

A Concerned Citizen

I sprang from my seat and high-tailed it out of the door. The note could not have been there for long. I had only been in the office for a few minutes, and I had not seen it when I came in. Luckily the Baked Moon was not far away and I skidded around the corner on the loose dirt road in time to see a group of outer disciples from the sect about to enter the tavern. “Whoa there!” this is a crime scene. Step back.

The disciples paused but sneered at me. The oldest of them a wiry man at the peak of the qi gathering stage said, “We know it is. That is why the Sect sent us to investigate. The Sun Gate Sect does not tolerate crime in its territory.”

I approached the group calmly now, no longer running. I tapped the marshal badge on my lapel and replied, “This town is under Imperial control. Any murder is under my jurisdiction, and I do not want a bunch of useless sect bullyboys mucking up the scene.

The wiry leader scoffed and postured, “The Sun Gate Sect does not recognize any Imperial authority.”

A small crowd had gathered around us and was already whispering speculation about who would back down. This chest-beating display was wasting time, so I drew my colt and flared my cultivation outward. The sect members were either too unskilled to detect my cultivation or too stupid to bother trying but when I made it obvious, their faces went white.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Too proud to appear cowed in front of the audience the wiry man began, “So what if you are strong, we will wait here for…”

I cocked back the hammer on my pistol and felt the world slow as my intent focused. Against these morons, I didn’t need the extra time, but it was a natural function of the gun. I casually lifted my weapon and shot the wiry man in the foot.

He collapsed to the ground and screamed. The bullet had gone straight through, but it must have shattered some bones as it went. The foot was pretty mangled. The rest of the disciples reached down to their weapons but paused when they realized that I was not going to attack them all.

“Tell your sect that there is a new marshal in town and I graciously decline their offer to assist me in my duties. Now leave!” I said infusing a bit of qi into my voice for effect.

They scrambled away dragging the beleaguered comrade with them. I looked around at the frightened crowd and said, “Nobody else comes in until I say they can.”

Without waiting for a response, I entered the tavern circulating my cultivation to heighten my senses as I did so. The first thing to hit me was the smell of blood. It was omnipresent. There was a dead body right by the door. The hostess had been running when someone caught up to her. She was laying face down in a pool of blood. The blood was mostly dry, so this had not been done in the last couple of hours. Most likely it had happened yesterday evening.

That was an ominous realization. The Baked-moon was a popular tavern and had likely been full when this happened. The building was split into two floors. The regular customers drank and ate in the common room downstairs. It was a wide-open space and looking around I could see at least fifteen corpses slumped at tables or crumpled to the floor.

I cautiously made my way around the room looking at each body in turn. Every person had died in a slightly different way. One man had his throat pulled out and dropped next to him on the table. A woman had suffocated in her blood when a fist had caved in her ribs. There were no consistent wounds.

This kind of slapdash casual killing could only be done by cultivators and as far as I could tell all the victims were mortal. There were no defensive wounds only the hostess by the door had had time to run. Everybody else had been killed where they stood or sat. Several cultivators must have been moving around the room with qi-enhanced speed.

I bristled for a moment at the unfairness of the scene. These people had been enjoying a night out when a disaster of uncaring maliciousness struck them. They had had no chance. My blood started to boil before I reminded myself that this was the way things were. Fairness was a construct sought out by the weak to comfort themselves from the brutal reality.

It was harder to convince myself of that when I saw that one of the bodies was a kid no older than nine. His head had simply been crushed by a cultivator mashing his hands together.

Perhaps to the people who had done this the lives of mortals did not matter. More like cattle than people. That was certainly a common enough opinion among cultivators. At least that was one thing that the Clockwork Emperor was trying to change. Every person in the Empire cultivator or mortal had the same rights and murder was murder.

I took in the brutal spectacle on the ground floor one last time before making my way upstairs. Justice might be a fictional concept but now that I was marshal, I had to hunt these people down. I felt the conflict of my heart demon stirring inside me, but I pushed it down. I did not have to be some kind of avatar of good to follow orders. Hunting down these degenerates was just part of my duties now. Besides, until I figured out a way to advance my cultivation, I had nothing better to do.

The upstairs section of the tavern was more upmarket. It was a series of private dining rooms that the well-off patrons could hire to get away from the riffraff. Right by the top of the stairs was the body of a server. His blood had sprayed the walls as someone had come up from behind and ripped his head off.

A quick look around confirmed that the upstairs section had been empty except for one room. The whole floor had likely been rented out then. That was only done for high-priority business meetings. I would have to go down to check the books to see if the person who had rented the upstairs section had left a name.

The one occupied room was a tale of far more sedate brutality. The door was open, and the table was covered in lavish food. After a night of sitting uneaten, it had started to turn but the Baked-moon had pulled out all of the stops for these guests.

The room was empty apart from a single body slumped onto the table.

The man was well-heeled and did not look like an Asani local. He was wearing a fur cloak and fine leather boots. That was an outfit better suited to the far north of the Empire. In the South, everybody wore loose-fitting robes and sandals. It also suggested that he was a cultivator. If he could not keep the heat from touching him then it would be ridiculous to wear that outfit in the desert heat of Asani.

His cultivation was further evidenced by the fact that he had a chance to react before he was killed. Not that it did him much good. He had made it as far as infusing his legs with qi judging by the dents in the floorboards underneath his feet. Before he could take further action though his neck was snapped. His body was slumped over into a plate of food, but his eyes were staring unblinkingly at the ceiling, his head wrenched around a full one hundred and eighty degrees.

I took a minute to fully absorb the scene. After a while, I think I had a pretty good idea of what had happened. I had seen enough drug deals gone bad in my past life to recognize the tableau.

This had been some kind of business meeting. Another cultivator had sat across from the dead man in the chair that was pushed back. He had a bodyguard with him that waited by the door while they talked. The dead man had shown off the product and then the man across the table had given some sort of signal to his bodyguard who quickly sprang behind the dead man and broke his neck. Unfortunately, the server had walked into the room just as the murder took place. The bodyguard and his employer had chased down the server and had ripped his head off at the stairs. Then deciding that it was better to leave no witnesses they had massacred every patron downstairs.

The fact that I had arrived at the scene so long after it took place, and it was still undisturbed meant that they had done a good job. Nobody who was in this tavern last night was still alive.

A smell other than blood caught my attention and I lifted the dead body. His chest was covered in some kind of white powder. It had the consistency of coarse stone grains, and I could feel that it was qi rich. This must be a portion of the product the meeting was about.

Looking around on the table I found a clean glass and carefully scraped some of the white powder into it. I had no idea what this stuff was but so far it was my only real lead. I doubted that the murderous pair would have left any easily followed trail of footprints from the tavern back to their lair. I would have to have the stuff identified and that meant looking up an old contact I would rather not see.

I let the body fall back onto the table and made my way back downstairs. There was a small office that kept copies of the business records of the tavern, and I swiped the ledger from it. I also had a look around the kitchen and was met with another grisly blood-soaked mess.

What was unfortunate was that whoever the pair of cultivators had been they had not been challenged in any meaningful way. All of these killings had been done with brute strength which were within the capabilities of any cultivator. The only thing I could tell reliably about them was that they had been above the qi gathering stage. They would have to be to move so quickly. Apart from that they were no tell-tale signs of a particular technique which might be used to identify them.

Carrying my glass of powder and the ledger I walked outside. The crowd was still there no doubt wondering what was going on. I was not the best person to break bad news, so I just ripped off the band-aid, “There has been a massacre inside. My investigation of the scene is complete, so, someone call the coroner.”

I walked off while the crowd started to gasp and peeked through the door of the tavern. I heard several people throwing up when they saw the inside. Asani had likely not seen this kind of brutality in decades. The Sun Gate Sect was the only real power in town and was not often goaded to extreme violence.

I caught myself smiling mirthlessly as I lit a cigarette. At least the world felt honest and grimy again.