With Lady Solhart still riding north, delayed here and there by storms but doggedly endeavoring to see her grandchild, Lucius had no time to prepare for her arrival. The Warden Blades had been called to service by the Headmaster, not to merely patrol the city. That rather public duty was nothing more than cover to receive the trickle of information that Theo’s network could extract from the whispers of the city. The headmaster demanded that if they were to be imposed upon his campus, then it would be their task to address the situation of his missing professor.
To call him missing was nothing but subterfuge. They knew exactly where he was, for he had been found by his maid that morning, removed of his head. Given his proximity to so many valuable heirs of the kingdom, it was the Warden Blades that had jurisdiction to hunt down such threats to the nobility even though the victim himself was of common birth.
“A clean cut. Could you have done that?” the Blade of Night, Jon Brume asked. He was a slight man with little training in etiquette. His manners had been honed through a rough and violent life, including nearly five years in the prison island of Donjon. Theo had done everything possible to rehabilitate the man’s appearance, but only an angel could have fixed the scars and nothing could have fixed his eyes.
“Obviously, I could have,” Lucius said, ignoring the body to join Theo at the desk.
The knight laughed. “Fearless, aren’t you?”
“Your prodding is a waste of time,” Lucius said. “It means you want to be able to justify yourself to the king after you kill me but both of you are smart enough to realize you can’t pin this on me when the only evidence is that the killer is strong. It’s not even a feat to cut the throat of an old man.”
“I couldn’t have,” Brume said as he dug through the professor’s pockets, but found nothing unusual.
Lucius scoffed, but didn’t call the man weak. The reason Brume couldn’t have cut the man’s head off was simply because the Blade of Night only knew how to fight with daggers. The man practiced dueling with sabers, but even the simplest of techniques were crude and wavering when he tried them.
Theo said, “After that stunt in class, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Feugard boy had done this. He’s quite childish. Do you think he has the cunning to do this, though?”
Laid out across the dead professor’s desk was a trio of books. The first was The Good Prince, an instructional text of some notoriety published some time in the mid 600s. Originally given directly to Feugard family, but later copied and republished with the more problematic chapters removed. Lucius had read the original text, pertaining to the uses of tyranny, but the abridged version was best known for espousing the utility of being seen to be religious and preferably by genuinely being faithful to the gods. While many men had written treatises on how a prince should conduct themselves, The Good Prince was the most famous and was unabashedly sycophantic to the nobility.
The second book The Strategicon of The Dragon, a compendium of tactics and maxims written by the last emperor of Drachenreach. The man had been a genius, but had been forced to break relations with Aillesterra because of the rising theocratic faction. To fight a three-front war against the southerners, the central kingdoms, and raiders from Skaldheim, mercenary armies had been necessary and they were only as loyal as the pay was plentiful. Unfortunately for him, his most enduring legacy was nothing more than a standard element of noble libraries in Vassermark, all the way on the opposite side of the map.
Finally, there was the historical edition of Sapphira’s holy scriptures, that is an abridgement of the official text to only contain parts pertaining to the history of Vassermark. Still available to this day and little needs be said of it, beyond the impression the collection was intended to make.
“A loyal man,” Theo said.
“Perhaps. We don’t know that he didn’t buy these used. For that matter, we don’t even know they’re his. The books were placed atop the blood, so after he was killed,” Lucius said.
“There are gaps in the shelves,” Theo said, gesturing at the wall of books.
Lucius opened each of the selected texts, merely flipping through to see if any parchment had been inserted, but he noted only a few corner folds to indicate chapters. He recognized most of the chapters immediately because they were the most useful for study in their respective fields. Snapping them shut once more, he picked up the books and carried them to the shelf. Aligning them to the gaps, two fit but nothing could be said of the third. Most of the shelf was barren, matching a stack of books by the man’s nightstand. “Brume, could you read me those titles?”
The Blade of Night read through them, tossing one book after the next into the bed as he named a series of playwrights and poets, most of which were familiar to Lucius and some he couldn’t recognize Theo did.
“Well read,” Lucius said, his gaze on a simple book squeezed between a pair of heavy codexes covering the exceedingly dry subject of mineralogical studies from across the kingdom. What captured his attention was the cheap nature of the text, not even with leather to wrap it shut, the publisher had bound the book in rough parchment unsuitable for anything other than starting fires, but it was a writer he was well familiar with.
Jacque Mordare
“At least it’s clear why the headmaster contacted me,” Theo said as he began walking around the room.
Brume laughed. “Gee, someone offed a royalist. Guess we should call the people protecting the royalists!”
Lucius allowed himself a smirk as he joined Theo at the window. They were on a second story. The professor’s pay either hadn’t been much, or had been squandered on something other than a living space because the apartment sat atop a barber shop in a cramped road in the heart of the city. “Do we know when the maid worked?”
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“She found him when she came in for her morning duties, left the previous night after dining with him. About ten hours of cold night unaccounted for.”
“Simple man, no family?”
Brume laughed. “Men like you make it hard for simple men to get wives.”
Lucius said, “Keep your jealousy to yourself, Brume.”
He laughed. “Women aren’t my type, Solhart. However, that–”
“Brume,” Theo cut in. “If you touch that doctor, I’ll personally cut your cock off and ship it to Donjon to be put back in your old cell.”
“You’d have to take it off his corpse. Not me. I wouldn’t be able to get there fast enough. Sera would kill him,” Lucius said as he walked to the other window in the apartment. Perhaps once, it had overlooked a proper alley, but now it was barely even exposed to the snow. Less than an arm’s length away was the plastered wall of the neighboring building. The windows were misaligned, but close. “They came in through here.”
Theo said, “Lucius, if you’re going to say something about handprints in the snow, I’ll have to teach you about the city’s rats.”
“The only rats that can open windows are the kind I tend to crucify.”
Brume walked over and joined him at the window. “You’d get along well in Donjon,” he said, breathing on the pane of glass and rubbing it off for a better view.
Theo ignored them. “In all likelihood, the killer was someone the professor knew and would invite inside without much fuss. There was no sign of forced entry and the killing blow, if we assume it was done by a trained fighter, would have been swift. We can’t rule out the possibility a stigmata was involved to gain the man’s confidence.”
“Sorry, boss,” Brume said before opening the window and leaning out. “Killer came in through the window and didn’t know what they were doing. Maybe a kid. There are gangs in the city that make kids do things like this to join. Whoever it was didn’t clean up the mess they made,” he said, holding out a handful of paint chips taken from the opposite window sill.”
Lucius strolled out of the room as Theo stared at the evidence. The man demanded, “Where are you going?”
“Where do you think? Next door,” he said, and left. The next building over was derelict with signs of somebody abusing the furnishings. A number of chairs had been broken to splinters and used in the hearth and Lucius found the culprit dead in the study. Filthy rags were wrapped around the corpse, now frozen to the body with blood. He had been stabbed through the heart, his fall upsetting a small bookshelf empty of books. Lucius found charred leather in the hearth and shook his head.
“Must have been mad,” he said.
“Should have sold those books and bought better clothes,” Brume agreed. “At least we don’t have to smell the rot though.”
“Are we done here then? The killer came in through a house nobody watches, else the vagrant would have been arrested for trespassing. We’re not going to learn anything unless someone brings in a diviner.”
“And report what?” Theo asked.
“Report to whoever owns the house that they have a mess to clean up. I’m done wasting my time here. Have fun trying to dream up a thousand different blessings that might have helped somebody commit such a mundane murder. I have classes to attend,” Lucius said, leaving the residence. Brume was ordered to follow him and Lucius permitted that only so far as the doors of the academy. At the entry, he turned to face the other knight. “Get lost.”
Brume shrugged. “I’ve got orders.”
“And are you going to tell Theo you left me alone? Because, I’m not. I thought I reminded you what I do to rats. I’m headed to the library and if I catch you skulking about, they’ll never find your corpse.”
Brume grinned, but took a step back. “I await the day I’m told to kill you. I love seeing men confident in their blessings brought to their knees and made as weak as anyone else.”
“I don’t need my stigmata to fight you, and as soon as you’re dead, it will be back,” Lucius said, and watched as the Blade of Night departed. Both knew who would win in an honest fight, but the Blade of Night was one of the few that could win in an ambush. His blessing was a curse. Dampening most other blessings and outright preventing many. A knife in the dark from him could be the end of Lucius, if the king so ordered. That was a roll of the dice not to be tested yet.
To say that the observation of Lucius was not what the king had intended would have been an understatement. The knights had not been prepared for a son of a noble family to act like a bandit king. If he killed one of them, he would be put to death, and yet he kept them in check with the certain knowledge that the first to cross him would die. It wouldn’t end with his death either, even if they could kill the undying.
By all accounts however, the man had other things on his mind in those days. The man, who just a year prior had pickled himself in wine for lack of immediate duty in the Misty Isles, had his attention on his newborn. He expected to find the squealing babe disturbing the library, but Aisha’s arms were empty save for a quill. Unlike nearly everyone else brought to the city by the surging nobility, Aisha had actually been employed by the academy nearly on the spot. The library was filled with donated texts, many of which were in the old Giordanan tongue which couldn’t be read by any of the current scholars. She had the task both of copying the old text, as well as providing translation notes, and was paid well for it.
“What are you doing working?” he asked, leaning against her chair and scanning the documents.
“Earning favors,” she said, adjusting a magnification lens as she copied down another couplet from yellow parchment to white. The moment she dotted the punctuation, she turned to kiss him and asked, “Why aren’t you working?”
“There’s a victim, but no killer to be killed, yet.”
“There’s been a lot of victims. Leomund says there are more fights in the taverns. A grain merchant was trampled just yesterday.”
“I don’t want you going to the markets anymore. We’ll figure something else out. Where’s Alex, though?”
“He’s safe,” she said with a sly smirk. “Probably sleeping with Lupa right now, if Kajsa hasn’t made herself at home.”
“So I have you to myself?”
“Mister Tullus has me first,” she said, wetting her quill again. “If I get this finished for him by tomorrow night, he’ll reserve a box for us at the theater whenever we wish. That should help solve at least one of your problems, won’t it?”
“Ah,” he said, settling into a chair beside her. “My dear… sweet… mother… is about to arrive.”
Aisha scowled. “Aria says she’s sweet, but if she treats me like a concubine…”
“Don’t worry, I have a plan to distract her.”
“If she doesn’t immediately do what Aria did.”
“Well, there’s always plan B.”