A Parliament of Bodies

by Marshall Ryan Maresca

  Miss Morad shook her head. “This proceeding is not subject to—”

  Cheever interrupted her. “The rights afforded to every free man in Druthal since 1015? And the protections that mages explicitly should receive—regardless of Circle membership, Mister Olivant—since the decrees in 1023? Let alone that this hearing is implicitly unbalanced.”

  “Unbalanced how?” Minox asked. Cheever’s performance here was interesting, and while he appreciated the points the young man was making, he wondered if Cheever was doing him more harm than good.

  “You mean, besides the fact that Miss Morad is both your prosecutor and judge? Where is the impartiality?”

  “Enough, Mister Cheever,” Miss Morad said. “I am authorized by the Archduke of Maradaine—”

  “Who does not have the authority to undermine Inspector Welling’s rights.”

  Miss Morad fumed at that. “I have no intention of violating his rights!”

  “Good,” Cheever said. “Then you shouldn’t mind that I’m here to confirm that independently.”

  A young clerk came in with a tea cart. As she placed the tea on the table, Cheever leaned against the wall.

  “I think,” Minox said carefully, “that for the purpose of making sure that the integrity of this proceeding cannot be questioned, it would be ideal for Mister Cheever to stay.”

  “I suppose,” Miss Morad said. “If for the sake of appearances, if nothing else. Unless you object, Mister Olivant?”

  “Hardly,” Olivant said. “But we’ve wasted enough time. Can we begin?”

  Chapter 9

  ONE WOMAN AND three men sat in chairs around a conference table, huddled close to each other with blankets around their shoulders. Cups of tea sat in front of them, all untouched.

  Satrine came in closer, giving a small nod to the two patrolmen to step outside.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Inspector Rainey. I know . . . I know you all have been through an ordeal, but it’s critical that I ask you some questions while everything is still fresh in your minds. Is that all right?”

  “It’s fine,” one of the men said. “I’m . . . I’m Harding Fain, and I think I’m the ranking person here.”

  “Stop making it about rank, Harding,” the woman whispered. “No one cares.”

  “It’s important that we—”

  “Please,” Satrine said, taking a seat across from them. Jerinne stepped up behind her. This girl seemed intent on shadowing her, staying at her side. Satrine didn’t mind—having an armored knight with a shield and sword at her arm gave her a certain authority, on top of what her uniform and vest offered her. “That isn’t something we need to focus on.”

  “Told you,” the woman said.

  “Let’s start with what happened to you. When did you . . . when did it start?”

  “Today is the third, yes? It’s Ene?” Harding asked. “I was home in my apartment on the evening of first of Oscan—it was Ren—having supper—”

  “Alone?” Satrine asked.

  “I live alone, yes. And I remember eating and then . . . then it’s gray.”

  “Similar,” one of the other men said. “Though I was with my wife. I don’t—do you know if she’s all right?”

  “My husband isn’t,” the woman said, her voice choking. “He . . . he was . . . the demonstration.”

  Satrine instinctively reached out and took her hand. The woman gripped back hard.

  “As best as you all can remember, you were home on Ren night, and then you don’t remember what happened next?”

  They all nodded.

  “And then what?” Satrine asked.

  “We woke up on the Parliament floor,” Harding said. “All of us, stripped to our skivs and shackled to each other at the ankle. And we had contraptions strapped to our heads.”

  “Devices like the one you were in?”

  “Not as elaborate,” the man at the end said. He had been quiet all this time. He was young—they were all young—but he looked like he was barely out of university. “They were like bear traps, but with a child’s springbox on it.”

  “Something like a springbox?”

  “No, the actual toy,” the woman said. “And all of them were slowly unwinding, playing their lilting music. The room echoed with that and the click-click-click of the springs.”

  “We all woke up down there, surrounded by crates,” Harding said.

  “Crates?” Jerinne asked.

  “Wooden crates, stacked on the floor. The Parliament chairs and tables had all been pushed to the sides.”

  Satrine scowled a bit at Jerinne, then turned back to the group. “You all woke up down there together, all eighteen of you.”

  “Twenty-two,” the woman said. “You couldn’t see anyone’s faces because of the contraptions—they were like masks—but there were twenty-two of us, each with a number written on the front of our masks.”

  “And you couldn’t speak while it was on,” the youngest said.

  “So you couldn’t identify each other?”

  “I could identify my husband,” the woman said. “He . . . he has—had—a scar on his chest that— It’s distinct.”

  “The demonstration,” the man with the missing wife said.

  “Tell me, as best you can, what happened next,” Satrine said.

  Harding spoke up. “When we woke, we started moving, struggling. Several people were in a panicked state. No one could scream, but we all could hear that—that sound of the springboxes. It was . . . I never . . .” His voice faltered for a moment. “Then he appeared on the balcony.”

  Satrine stopped herself from saying “Sholiar”—she still had nothing but Dayne’s word that that was the man’s name, and she wasn’t about to feed it to witnesses and poison that well. “He who?”

  “He was—you couldn’t quite see him, because he was wearing a mask—like a theatrical mask in the old plays? And a robe. So there was no sense of how big he was, what his shape was. He was just this figure up in the shadows in the gallery.”

  “But when he spoke . . .” the young man said hauntingly.

  “Yes,” Harding said. “He told us that we had to open the crates and start building. Build that machine. And if we didn’t . . .”

  “The demonstration,” the young man said.

  All three men looked to the woman, as if they expected her to tell this part.

  “The man in the gallery,” she said, her voice a rasp, like all possible screams and tears had long since been spent, “he said if we didn’t do the work, didn’t build to his orders, then the springbox would pop. And then a . . . he played a few notes on a flute, and suddenly one of the springboxes started unwinding much faster. My husband. The tune of the springbox raced. Duh-da-de-dah-de-dah-dah-dah. And then . . . and then . . . the springbox popped. And the contraption sprung open, tearing his head apart.”

  After a moment of horrified silence, Harding spoke again. “Needless to say, we worked. The man called out numbers and gave instructions of what everyone was supposed to do. The few times anyone balked or slowed, he’d play just a note or two on the flute. And everyone went back to it.”

  “For hours,” the man with the wife said. “We must have worked on it the entire Saint’s Day.”

  “It was genius, really,” Harding said. “Every crate didn’t just hold parts of the machine. The crates themselves became part of it. Everything folded up, connected, nothing wasted.”

  So that answered one key question—how the device was built on the floor. The victims were forced to build it themselves.

  “Once it was done, then what?”

  “When we were done, there were those eighteen chairs, those eighteen terrible chairs,” Harding said.

  “He told us the only way to get the devices off our heads and the shackles off our ankles was to fill the chairs. And that once
all eighteen chairs were full, the last three could leave.”

  They all sat silently, looking at the floor.

  “What happened?” Jerinne was the one who asked.

  No answer.

  “What happened?” Jerinne was in a state, her face turning red. Satrine glared her down and waved her off. The last thing she needed right now was a half-cocked Tarian Initiate.

  The young man spoke up. “We grabbed each other, forced each other into the chairs, strapped people in. All of us.” He looked down the line. “All of us. We fought.”

  “We fought to survive!” Harding said. “Every one of us.” He looked at Jerinne, his eyes wet. “You would have done the same.”

  “I’ve taken an oath to the contrary,” Jerinne said.

  “All right,” Satrine said. “I understand. And when you were fighting each other, what did the man do?”

  “Laugh,” the woman said. “And when all eighteen seats were full, the headpieces and shackles just . . . fell off. But not on the last three. He told them they had to wind the cranks and set the cords and chains that connected the machine to the doors. Once they did that, he guided them to the last door and . . . they left.”

  “Still with the devices and shackles?” Satrine asked.

  Everyone nodded.

  Likely the three in the boiler room. They hardly got a clean escape.

  “All right,” Satrine said, getting to her feet. “Have you all eaten? Other basic needs cared for?”

  Heads shook at that one.

  “All right,” Satrine said. She went to the door and called over the patrolmen. “Make sure they all get fed and cared for, and then escorted home. They’ve been through enough.” She looked back to them. “I’ll want to interview you all again later, but for today . . .”

  “Thank you, Inspector,” the woman said. “I’m sorry we’re not more help.”

  “Don’t be sorry about anything,” Satrine said. “You don’t owe an apology to anyone after today.”

  She thanked the victims and left. Out in the hallway, Corrie was waiting with Leppin. The examinarian was looking as troubled as she’d ever seen him; a sheen of sweat bled through his leather skullcap. She would have thought that if anyone could handle this horror unscathed, it would have been him.

  “What’s the word, Leppin?”

  “Ugly,” he said. “I’ve got nine bodies on the ground, and . . . half of them, I got no way to identify them.”

  “We’re not that rutting bad off with this,” Corrie said. “The ones we know—Enbrain’s nephew and the survivors, they’re all clerks and attachés here, assigned to specific members of Parliament. The rest of the victims. . . . Those poor bastards are probably from here too.”

  “Makes sense,” Leppin said. “Plus we got that one marshal.”

  “Him we can identify,” Satrine said. Looking to Corrie, she said, “I need a list of all the victims, alive, dead, here, and in the boiler room.”

  “Boiler room?”

  “There were three victims in there,” Satrine said. “Not as bad off as these folks, but still survivors of something horrid.”

  Corrie looked a bit confused. “No one’s mentioned them, but these rutting bastards are still all mixed up. They might have been sent to the hospital wards already. I’ll sort it out.”

  “And the machine itself?” Satrine asked Leppin.

  “Like the rest of the Gearbox deaths, it’s now inert. A lot of it got wrecked in the boiler explosion and its own gears grinding itself up.”

  “That was Minox,” Corrie said.

  “What now?” Leppin asked.

  “When the machine was poised to kill another,” Satrine said. “Welling apparently held the machine in place—all the moving parts—with—”

  “Ayuh, yeah. Blazes. That’s quite a thing.”

  “Ain’t it just, though?” Corrie said. “And now he’s gonna get cat-dragged over it.”

  Satrine ground her teeth. She wished she had Minox here. He might have spotted something with these witnesses, some bit of their story that didn’t fit, or some element that gave him one of his flashes of insight. Right now she just had one answer, but still so many questions. “Let’s try and focus on our job here,” she said. “It’s what he would want us to do.”

  “Inspector!” Dayne came running up the stairs. “We’ve got trouble with the marshals!”

  * * *

  While Miss Morad began an opening statement for the sake of the scribes on the other side of the curtain, Minox’s thoughts were on the Parliament, the machine, and how this Sholiar character could have possibly achieved what was done there. It was impossible to achieve alone. Not merely the manpower—saints knew that there were plenty of people who would do the job for the right crowns—but the opportunity. Through intention or negligence, someone in the King’s Marshals or one of the Parliament’s administrative staff allowed this atrocity to happen.

  Miss Morad wasn’t saying anything of note or consequence, anyway.

  “Now, I’d like to begin with direct questions to you, Inspector Welling.”

  “As you wish,” Minox said.

  “I’m reserving the right to object to lines of questioning,” Cheever said.

  “Object all you want, Mister Cheever,” Miss Morad said. “Inspector, state your name and rank for the record.”

  “Minox Welling, Inspector Third Class.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “Keenan twenty-fourth, 1189.”

  “Saint Helspin’s day?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And your mother is Amalia D’Fen Welling, daughter of Minox D’Fen?”

  “Also correct.”

  “You were named after your maternal grandfather?”

  “That is also correct,” Minox said. It was getting tedious confirming things that Miss Morad already knew, and were part of the public record.

  “But hardly relevant,” Cheever said.

  “Establishing all our particulars,” Miss Morad said. “Your father was Rennick Welling, formerly a sergeant in the horsepatrol of Keller Cove.”

  “Correct, but in the last three weeks of his life, he was on temporary loan to Benson Court, riding the night shift.”

  “That . . . is not in the record,” Miss Morad said, looking over the papers in front of her. “Do you know why that might be?”

  “I cannot answer accurately, but I can speculate that it was due to an informal arrangement between the precinct captains.”

  “But it does explain why he was in Benson Court when he died, officially in the line of duty.”

  “I object to this,” Mister Cheever said. “I can’t see how it applies to the Inquiry at hand.”

  “I am establishing the inspector’s history within the Constabulary.”

  “Inspector,” Cheever said, “when did your father die?”

  “In 1207.”

  “Eight years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “And were you there?”

  “No, of course not,” Minox said. “At the time I was starting my first assignment as a patrolman, on horsepatrol in Inemar.”

  “Miss Morad, can you confine your ‘establishing’ to events that directly involve the inspector, and preferably of recent history?”

  “Humor me, Mister Cheever, that I have a point. Inspector, you were just starting that assignment here in Inemar in 1207. Day shift in Inemar?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Your first assignment after your cadet year was not, in fact, night shift horsepatrol in Benson Court?”

  “No, absolutely not,” Minox said.

  “Can you explain this assignment letter in your file?” She passed it over to him, which Cheever snatched, glanced over, then passed to Minox. It was a letter dated 1207, assigning him to the Benson C
ourt Stationhouse, on the night shift.

  “I’ve never seen this before,” Minox said. “I can’t attest to the authenticity of this letter, but I can say I never received it. I have no idea where it came from.”

  “There’s no stamp on it,” Cheever said. “This wasn’t enacted.”

  “But it was written, until your father made a deal to get you assigned to Inemar on days, instead.”

  “That’s entirely possible,” Minox said. A Constabulary assignment to Benson Court on the night shift would have been incredibly dangerous, especially eight years ago when they were having the Warehouse Rows. That was exactly how Father had been killed, interrupting a heist of one of the old navy warehouses. And he had been an experienced constable, years in the saddle. He must have . . .

  Minox found himself with tears in his eyes. He wiped them away.

  Finding his voice, he said, “I was not aware of any such arrangement, but I cannot deny its plausibility. Rennick Welling was a dedicated officer of the Constabulary who believed in doing everything he could to protect the people of this city. Including me.”

  “So,” Miss Morad said, “thanks to your father, you were assigned here. Made Sergeant in 1210, then Inspector Apprentice in 1212, and Inspector Third Class in 1214.”

  “You have all the information in my file,” Minox said. He did his best to regain his composure. He wasn’t sure what Miss Morad was doing, but he suspected that she was trying to emotionally manipulate him. Possibly as a test to see if he would lose control of his magic as a result.

  He must not let her have that.

  “My next question is, why take the inspector path instead of going for lieutenant, command of a squad?”

  “Because inspector was always my goal, ma’am,” Minox said. “Even as a page, I had a knack for examining crime scenes, finding evidence, piecing together the mysteries. I’m sure there’s commendations in that file along those lines. I was not lacking for recommendation when I applied for Inspector Apprentice.”

  “No, certainly not. And when did your magical abilities manifest?”