“I don’t understand the importance, Bellona,” Sentarus voiced while stroking his beard.
“I’m telling you, something’s not right about this,” Bellona exclaimed, slamming her fist on a desk covered in papers as the sound reverberated through her office. “There’s no way that there was a sword fight and no one happened to see it.”
“I appreciate your dedication, but you have to understand the circumstances,” Sentarus tried to calmly explain. “There was a festival and it was late in the day in a district with low foot traffic at the time. Add the bystander effect to that and I can understand how a fight in an alley got overlooked.”
“But no one saw or heard anything,” Bellona added, once again pounding the desk. “That is unheard of. You can’t tell me that a fight like this just went unnoticed where even my patrols missed it.”
“You can’t take this personally,” Sentarus explained. “This is human nature you’re dealing with. I know you have your sense of duty, but things happen; you don’t need to beat yourself up over it.”
Bellona bit back her anger. At the very least, he was right; getting mad at herself or her men would get them nowhere. “If we didn’t see it, then we didn’t see it,” she whispered hesitantly, almost as though the words themselves left a sour taste in her mouth.
“And there’s nothing we can do but be better next time,” Sentarus finished with a firm pat on Bellona’s back. “I understand your frustration, I really do. But we cannot allow ourselves to become lost in it. You’ve spent the past few days trying to get information; go home and rest and let’s finally bury the poor man.”
Bellona shook her head. “Arylos wanted to examine the body,”
“And yet he isn’t here,” Sentarus explained. “Either his Khymr duties have him tied up or he would prefer to spend the holiday at home, and something tells me it’s the latter.”
Suddenly, the door burst open and a familiar tall man with red eyes and pale skin under a black long coat entered. “Be careful of what you wish for, old boy,” the man said in a familiar growl and a wicked smile on his face.
“Arylos, you certainly know how to make a timely entrance, don’t you?” Sentarus commented with a smile.
Arylos’s response was cut short by the sounds of running footsteps in the hall outside, which warranted a smile from Arylos. He stepped to the side and a guard came running through the door, unable to catch his breath.
“My Lord,” the exhausted guard wheezed. “I am terribly sorry, I tried to stop him. But he just shoved us aside and made an unrepeatable comment about your choice of decor.”
Arylos smiled and let out a noxious laugh that reverberated through the air.
Sentarus rubbed his eyes and Bellona chuckled, knowing exactly what Arylos’s comment was. Sentarus waved off the guard. “It’s fine, we were expecting him anyway. You may return to your post.”
The guard bowed and quickly left the room. “You really should learn etiquette, Arylos,” Sentarus sighed. “As far as these people are concerned, you’re a man just like everyone else and must abide by the same laws, and you really should if you intend to live here.”
“I haven’t seen my old friend in a bit,” Arylos explained in a light tone of voice.
Sentarus glared at the Titan. “I swear if you came here just to make some unreasonable request you’re sorely mistaken.”
“I wouldn’t say helping you with your investigation is unreasonable,” Arylos explained. “Iris finally let me return to work so I came here first to sort this out.”
Sentarus thought for a moment before nodding toward Bellona who began collecting some papers and a set of keys from her desk. “You better be careful, Arylos,” Sentarus warned with a smirk. “It sounds like that girl has you whipped. People will start thinking you’ve gone soft.”
“What can I say?” Arylos admitted with a shrug. “I’ve always had a soft spot for broken, unwanted, and discarded things.”
Sentarus let out a chuckle as Bellona approached Arylos, handing him papers for him to read and beckoning him and Sentarus to follow her. “I’ve spent the past few days trying to gather what information I could,” Bellona explained while walking down the hall with the men. “Each person we questioned said they didn’t see or hear anything. I find it hard to believe a sword fight this violent went unnoticed. Someone must have heard something at least.”
“That is pretty odd, but not unheard of,” Arylos answered while looking through the papers, trying to make sense of Bellona’s attempt at Kaiyumian writing which he already struggled with. “Could you have made these any harder for me to read?” he commented while squinting.
“I’m sorry,” Bellona cut in with a bit of blood rushing to her ears. “The script here is similar to Templarius at its core, but the complex symbols and how they represent sounds and meaning is beyond me, and don’t get me started on how complicated those characters can get.”
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“You know they’d say the same about your language,” Arylos commented, ultimately giving up and handing the papers to Sentarus for him to decipher for him.
Bellona took the two to a locked metal door. She used her keys to unlock it and it opened into a cold and dry cellar with corpses laying on tables covered in white sheets. She took the men over to one of the tables in the corner and removed the sheet from the body.
Arylos recognised the man immediately; his aged appearance with his black hair and beard and sturdy features. Even though the blood was cleared away, his torn skin and damaged jaw pointed to a violent fight. He approached the body closer and found, as he had heard, deep wounds that could have only been made by a sword and a large hole in his chest where the man’s heart was, now devoid of the organ.
Arylos lifted the man’s arm and found gashes there too; some deep enough that the blade that made them left a mark in the bone but not cutting through. Arylos concluded that this meant the attacker was strong, but not as strong as something like a Templarian. This pointed to a man.
“What do you think?” Sentarus asked.
“Shh!” Arylos hissed, still trying to collect his thoughts. He had seen wounds like this and it seemed to have been done by a human, but the idea that the gashes could get this deep without fully breaking bone concerned him. He continued his investigation, finding deep cuts in the man’s abdomen but not in any places that were vital. He even noticed that the cuts on his abdomen were near extraneous organs that would have only resulted in blood loss. These were non-fatal injuries, meant to cause pain more than anything. The wound to the chest definitely seemed to be the cause of death.
Arylos recalled a meeting with Garris he had this morning about the attack at one of the Khymr’s inns. He recalled the report that was given to him, remembering the burnt pages and piecing together the swirling letters of the Khymr language. He remembered the report of men hacked apart with deep sword thrusts, but their wounds were more violent than this.
One thing stood out to him. The corpse of the inn Taskmaster had an arm cut cleanly off and stabbed through the heart, but no other injuries were found on him. The overall wounds were different, but the heart stabbing was the same.
He then felt something was strangely familiar about all of this. Something that nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that something was wrong. He did the calculations in his head, trying to determine a similarity or if it was just coincidence. It would take some time for him to come to an internal consensus so in that time, he needed more information to weigh the odds.
“When I saw him, he had a sword,” Arylos explained aloud. “Where is it?”
Bellona went away for a moment and returned with the silver sword in question from a table on the other side of the room. Arylos held the blade and drew it, examining the blade.
“No blood,” he immediately noticed.
“That was my concern too,” Bellona added. “If you look at it, it’s been damaged, likely from the fight. And yet there’s no blood on it outside of the hilt which could only be his own.”
“That means this was a one sided fight,” Arylos concluded, examining the dented edge and examining the blade’s length, noticing a slight curve to the left. Was that damage or a defect in the blade?
Arylos ran his pinched fingers along the edge, feeling the angle of the edge and finding the dents and scratches from the fight. “I’m willing to bet most of the damage on this sword came from the fight rather than past use,” he concluded aloud as he felt the severe dents. “So this meant he himself was good at parrying, or his attacker was. Two swordsmen of decent skill, but only one was injured. And the attacker went for non-vital parts first, as if he was trying to drain his target of strength before killing him. That doesn’t say murder to me; that’s torture.”
“But why?” Bellona asked, trying to piece together the fight in her mind. “Why take the risk of being caught and go through all that instead of just killing him?”
“Enjoyment maybe?” Sentarus suggested. “Or maybe he was trying to get information.”
“Information seems logical,” Arylos concluded while sheathing the sword. “But again, why the risk? And what if the man ran away? That would ruin the whole interrogation.”
“What if the situation was controlled?” Sentarus suggested. “What if he planned his attack specifically so no one would notice? And the body was found in a one-way alley; maybe that was a part of the plan to prevent escape?”
And there it is, Arylos thought to himself as he returned the sword to Bellona. He finished his examinations and the result was not satisfactory at all. The idea made him sick to his stomach as he prepared his next move.
“Do you have someplace Iris can stay?” Arylos asked in a deep growl. “She can’t be with me for the time being.”
Sentarus and Bellona looked towards each other in shock. “Is something wrong?” Bellona asked.
Arylos let out a shuddered breath. “Just pray that I’m wrong. If my theory is true, then there is a powerful immortal in the city looking for me, and he’ll do anything he can to get to me; Iris won’t be off limits to him and this fight will be between him and I.”
“Is it Baldr?” Sentarus asked.
“No, someone worse,” Arylos replied. “Someone far more persistent than Baldr. Someone who won’t hesitate to take a cheap shot if he needs to.”
“You can fight him though, right?” Bellona chimed in.
“I can, but she won’t be able to,” Arylos answered as he turned to the others. “Just give Iris someplace to stay; that’s all I can ask. Just until I can prove myself wrong or take care of this matter.”
“She can stay at my place,” Bellona offered with a firm nod.
“You could also stay here, Arylos,” Sentarus offered. “Stay here in the palace where my guards can help. That way Iris doesn’t have to leave home.”
Arylos considered the offer for a moment. “I’ll be putting your guards at risk. He’ll just kill them without a second thought.”
“Who is it you’re concerned about?” Bellona asked.
Arylos lowered his head, knowing that this would expose one of his darker secrets. Yet he needs help, any help he can get. And if this meant exposing one of his many sins, so be it.