The kennel was an ugly sight, but not in any of the ways Kylian had expected. The dogs were cowering and emaciated, whimpering helplessly instead of barking when he approached.

Dead man or not, there was no excuse for the kennel to be in this state. He’d have to talk to Aldous later about someone taking over the master of the hounds’ duties even temporarily.

Someone had stopped by to fill their food; what they hadn’t done was clean the place.

The whole kennel had a fetid stench; animal excrement had built up in the pens, and was filthily mixed with the hay that made their beddings. It had clearly been neglected for some time.

Hadn’t Sir Envont gone missing two days prior? How could someone do such a terrible job?

It almost felt worse that the dogs were actually alive. Kylian could understand someone who ignored their duties entirely. It would be gross and wicked to leave dogs to starve to death; but to actually come in and ‘care’ for the dogs like this was the mark of a sick man.

A sick man who had disappeared completely, apparently.

Kylian found himself lamenting the mandatory knights’ reports. It certainly took gall to write ‘all’s well.’ Before they’d left Fontaine’s office, Kylian asked to glance through the reports himself, and sure enough they’d been turned in as recently as two days ago.

The reports were collected daily from chancery safes, by a herald who makes his rounds through the entire castle. If the report were forged, it would have to be by someone who’d stolen his seal.

Kylian did not believe it beyond the pale.

“Isn't it a little strange for a place this unimportant to be built into the keep?” Ailn asked. “I would’ve thought a kennel would’ve been built into the outer walls.”

“You’re mostly on the mark. Rather, it wasn’t important enough to warrant any new construction. You’ll notice how many flights down we had to take—it’s simply a repurposed dungeon.”

“Well, that certainly explains the look of it,” Ailn mumbled.

Built into the former dungeons deep below the west end of the keep, the kennel was a dreary and unpleasant place long before any dog waste had made it even worse.

All in all, the kennel gave off an impression that was just as sinister as it was disgusting. Part of what made it feel so insidious was the stark contrast: between its innocuous entrance and the disquieting, lengthy descent that followed.

It was hard to ignore the undertones of going down and down into a dark, godforsaken place that smelled of excrement and hinted at death. Kylian found himself wondering if the environment had simply made Envont go mad.

Ailn scanned the length of the kennel, peering occasionally into the pens which lined its sides. No matter which pen he came near, the dogs within whimpered pathetically.

“How many dogs were supposed to be in this kennel?” Ailn asked.

“Twenty-four,” Kylian replied.

“Hm. I count fourteen.” Ailn furrowed his brow. “The knights’ going theory is that they were eaten? Is that a thing shadow beasts do?”

“Wolf-types have been known to do so,” Kylian said.

“Interesting,” Ailn said. “So, if I really had been attacked by shadow beasts, they should have tried to eat me.”

“From what I understand, yes,” Kylian said. It had bothered him too, that Ailn lacked bite marks entirely.

Ailn reached out to one of hounds, trying to coax it over. But all it did was push back further into its corner and yelp.

“They’re still this scared two days after?” Ailn asked. “That’s a little surprising.”

Now that he mentioned it, Kylian also found it odd. He’d heard of hunting hounds attacked by wolves that were sprightly the next day. Shadow beasts were certainly terrifying, but…

Ailn stayed silent as he watched the dogs for a while. Calloused as he could be, even he looked a little sad about it.

“It takes a lot to make a dog act that helplessly—especially hunting dogs like these. More than anything, it takes time…” His words slowed as he got to the end of his sentence, and his eyes seemed to sharpen.

For a second, there was something more there. Something simmering beneath all his indifference. Kylian felt like he’d barely caught sight of it, but Ailn had already wordlessly shifted to his usual easygoing attitude.

Blue eyes, with a seemingly clear surface, amiable as ever. Back to business.

“These are the pens that were attacked?” Ailn asked, coming to the very back corner of the kennel. Three of the pens were open.

Their fences showed no damage. Rather than an attack, it seemed more like the kennel master had simply been irresponsible; the sensible presumption was that the dogs had escaped.

“Allegedly,” Kylian said, looking for any sign of violence. “Though… it certainly doesn’t look like it.”

“Odd, indeed.” Ailn glanced all around the kennel’s floor—in the pen, and outside of it.

Kylian was certain they were struck by the same oddity. There was no blood. Not in the pens of the dogs that had allegedly been attacked, nor anywhere outside of them. For the kennel master to be killed and not leave a drop of blood was one thing. But near a dozen dogs?

“No one mentioned any escaped dogs on the day of the attack?” Ailn asked.

“None.”

“Or even in the past few weeks?” Ailn walked over to one of the pens that still had dogs, and his face scrunched up as he got closer to the smell.

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“There are no reports of such a thing, no.”

“Then we’ve got the curious incident of the dog who didn’t bark in the middle of the night,” Ailn said. He stared at the whimpering, penned up dogs who weren’t barking in the day either.

“The attack was around sundown, Ailn,” Kylian said.

Something about the way Ailn spoke seemed suspiciously plagiarized.

“... Don’t you think you’re being a bit too pedantic?” Ailn scowled. “The point is, we’ve got dogs who disappeared without so much as a bark. And a kennel master who disappeared, too.”

“The most sensible explanation is that he ran away,” Kylian said, musing to himself. “But why?”

“That’s one sensible explanation. Just one,” Ailn said.

“Do you have another one?” Kylian asked.

“I don’t,” Ailn admitted. “Not yet. Say, can’t we just dig up the shadow beasts' corpses and look through their stomachs?”

“A shadow beast’s body fades away when it’s killed,” Kylian replied. “...You wouldn’t make us dig up actual corpses, would you?”

“If the situation called for it, I would.” Ailn said.

“That’s…” Kylian felt his stomach churn at the thought. “I suppose there’d be no justification for avoiding it.”

But he couldn’t help but feel relieved he wouldn’t have to cut through a rotting creatures’ stomach to look for the bones of Sir Envont.

----------------------------------------

Sir Envont’s room was just adjacent to the kennel. Rather, it was an appropriation of the warden’s room, the same way the kennel was an appropriation of old dungeons.

Hence, it didn’t have a door; it had a gate of wrought iron. That made it feel rather like a dungeon cell itself, though unlike a cell the mechanism for locking it was from the inside.

The gate looked worn down—battered even. If the shadow beasts truly had attacked and killed the kennel master, then this was the closest thing to physical evidence he’d seen.

“That’s odd,” Ailn said, frowning. “It’s worn down from the inside…”

Kylian also found this perplexing. And that wasn’t the only odd item at the scene.

Rope was half tied around its latch, one of its ends blackened and frayed. Ailn examined it for a moment, before swinging the gate back and forth a few times.

Presumably he was checking for an innocuous explanation. Certainly, the only halfway plausible one Kylian could think of was that the wrought iron gate would swing freely and make noise.

He didn’t find that theory particularly convincing.

“A bit weird to have rope here… don’t you think?” Ailn asked.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Kylian said honestly.

“Could the burnt ends on the rope be from holy aura?” Ailn looked at Kylian.

“Nothing disqualifies that explanation, certainly,” Kylian said. “Though… I can’t imagine a reason to do so.”

“You’re right,” Ailn sighed. He gave a shrug. “Doesn’t do us any good to treat everything like nails just because we found a hammer.”

They entered the room.

Considering most of the knights slept in a common room including Kylian himself, there was much to be said about having a place to oneself. The room was probably larger than most of the barracks’ private chambers even.

That said, it was musty, damp, and seemed to Kylian quite unliveable. The mattress was simply left on the floor, and the hay inside looked lumpy. On top of it, and all over the room really, were bottles and bottles of wine.

The knights’ salary wasn’t meager, but the sheer number of bottles meant it must have been where he spent all of his money.

The room lacked a desk. Instead, a trestle table that would typically be used for dining was stuffed in the corner. Kylian would have thought he’d used it for meals alone, except that he could spot splotches of ink atop it.

“Looks like Fontaine wasn’t lying. Sir Envont really was incorrigible,” Ailn said.

“It would appear so,” Kylian said, frowning. He shifted the mattress to the side, which released dust from underneath. It filled both of their lungs, leading to coughing fits.

“That’s awful. Damn,” Ailn said, still coughing a bit. “What were you trying to find?”

Kylian cleared his throat a few times, and gathered himself.

“I wondered if whatever parchment he must have been writing was left under the bed. They’re certainly nowhere else in the room,” Kylian said, eyeing all the bottles rolling around on the floor.

“No, they’re not,” Ailn said thoughtfully. He walked over to the trestle table.

As it was pushed into the corner, the area underneath it was fairly shadowed. It wasn’t dark enough that it would conceal an entire stack of parchment, or even a single scroll, but Ailn found a small object underneath.

“Is this the seal stamp for the master of hounds?” Ailn asked.

Kylian peered at it.

“It’s the same seal on the reports, yes,” Kylian said. The seal was a simple paw print over a shield.

A minor position in the Order wouldn’t need the elaborate designs that could be expected from the seals of the knight officers. That said, he recognized the design of the shield on the stamp: a thin kite shield with a three-pointed top.

This was definitely of the Azure Knights’.

“How hard would it have been to forge this seal on the knight reports?” Ailn asked.

“The simpler design would certainly be easier to duplicate fraudulently,” Kylian frowned. “However, I’d be surprised if any craftsmen in Varant would be willing to attempt it. Forgery of that kind is a capital punishment.”

“That’s pretty strict,” Ailn said with a whistle.

“The need to rein in craftsmen to ensure authenticity is the same for any knight order,” Kylian said. “Perhaps the need is even more dire for those nearer the capital, where political gamesmanship abounds.”

“...Makes sense.” Ailn started making his way out. He scrunched his nose as the fetid stench from the kennel over yonder hit the both of them. “Hard to say how helpful this was, just yet.”

“I had hoped it would be more fruitful as well,” Kylian admitted.

The timing of Envont’s disappearance was hard to dismiss as coincidental. But he had a difficult time reconciling its relevance to the attack.

“Sir Fontaine did mention he kept poor company,” Kylian muttered, thinking to himself. “Perhaps, he was an internal saboteur. He neglected the kennel because he’d never intended to stay, and absconded immediately after the attack.”

The two of them trudged up the long series of stairwells. Soon enough, they emerged from the kennel’s nondescript entrance, which had been tucked away into a subtle recess at the very west end of the keep.

Stepping out, they found themselves in the west arc of the bailey. The air was cold, but at least it was fresh.

“It’s almost as eerie leaving as it was going in,” Ailn said. He glanced around. “There’s just something about coming out from a creepy place into the normal world outside.”

Then he looked back at the keep.

“...Thinking about it, we’re not too far from the Great Hall,” Ailn said, thoughtfully.

“I’d imagine the kinds of prisoners who occupied that dungeon were political,” Kylian noted.

“Makes sense,” Ailn said. “If I were a noble, I’d probably like to keep the enemies of state close at hand.”

“You are a noble, Your Grace,” Kylian reminded him.

“In name, sure,” Ailn agreed. “Doesn’t seem to mean much if I don’t even live in the castle.”

That, Kylian agreed with.

“Let’s go check out my cottage, actually,” Ailn said. “I’ve got a gut feeling.”

“A gut feeling?” Kylian asked. The two of them took a turn, exiting the keep into the west bailey. “It’s understandable you’d wish to see your abode with your own eyes. But I’m curious what you’re hoping to find.”

“I’m not sure,” Ailn said. “It’s a strong feeling, but not that specific.”

Ailn fiddled with his wrist, and his eyes knitted together in his usual pensive wince.

“Something tells me I’m gonna need to understand myself a little better, if I’m ever gonna solve this case,” he said.