Death's Executioner

by Charlotte E. English

  The inspector looked up again. ‘Oh? How do you know that?’

  Tasha explained, and had the satisfaction of winning all of his attention away from the missive. He actually put the paper down. ‘That’s very interesting,’ he said, and Tasha beamed.

  ‘And I have an idea of where to ask next, but that’s what I need your help with.’

  ‘You need my help? Something exists which you cannot handle yourself?’

  Tasha made a rude gesture. ‘There’s a shop in the posh part of town. Art, jewellery, that kind of thing — all from Marja. Proprietors are Marjan too. I bet if you ask them they’d know something about this thing.’ Tasha swished the knife again.

  ‘A canny thought, but why can’t you ask?’

  ‘Fancy place,’ said Tasha.

  Nuritov palpably failed to catch her drift.

  Tasha sighed, and gestured down at herself. Patched black coat, never cut to fit her frame in the first place. Shabby garments beneath. Nondescript cap. She loved her clothes, for they were well-worn and practical and she could do anything in them. But the proprietors of an establishment for wealthy customers would not love them at all, or her either.

  ‘Oh,’ said the inspector. ‘I see.’ His smile appeared, briefly. ‘Konrad’s whole Bakar-House masquerade makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It has its uses,’ she allowed. She offered the knife to the inspector, not without a certain reluctance, for despite its prettiness it was a well-balanced piece and it had a nice heft to it. She’d like to stab a person or two with such a prime weapon.

  Still, needs must. The inspector took it, and Tasha put her hands behind her back before she could snatch it away again. ‘If you ask, I bet they’ll talk.’

  ‘I’m only a policeman.’

  ‘A respectable policeman, and you have a right to ask questions about murder weapons.’

  ‘True.’ Nuritov set the knife down on his desk, and dithered over picking up the letter again.

  ‘So what is that?’ Tasha asked. ‘Besides riveting, which is clear enough.’

  ‘It is from The Shandrigal’s Temple.’

  ‘That… was not what I expected to hear.’

  The smile flickered again. ‘A love letter, was that what you thought? Sadly not.’

  ‘One can always hope.’

  ‘And one does. But no. This is from Katya Inshova, the—’

  ‘—head of The Shandrigal’s Order. I know.’

  Nuritov nodded. ‘She writes to me to express her private concerns about two members of her Order, whose whereabouts are, um, indeterminate at the moment—’

  ‘Missing persons!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me one of them’s Rodion Artemo.’

  ‘One of them is indeed our unfortunate victim of this morning. The other is called Timof Vak, a young man quite recently joined, but whom Katya felt had promise.’

  ‘But Rodion Artemo only died last night.’

  ‘Yet no one among the Order had seen or heard from him for weeks, which I gather was unusual.’

  ‘So why didn’t someone just go to his house and talk to him?’

  ‘Several attempts were made to find him. He was never at home.’

  ‘Curious. Did the neighbours mention that he was absent?’

  ‘No, but it doesn’t appear that he was regularly in touch with any of them. They might well have noticed nothing.’

  Tasha whistled. ‘So he goes missing for weeks, then turns up last night at his own house again — dead, and with a matching set of missing eyeballs.’

  ‘Nicely summed up.’

  ‘Thank you. What about Timof Vak?’

  ‘Same scenario. He has not been seen at the Temple — three weeks, for him — and he hasn’t been heard from. She says she is unsure whether there’s reason for concern, so she writes to me privately.’ He waved the letter. ‘But she has a bad feeling.’

  ‘Why the bad feeling?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Well, she was not wrong. One of them’s dead. What’s the betting Mr. Vak is, too?’

  Nuritov nodded, retrieving his pipe. That meant an interval of deep thought was coming. ‘We will visit his house, soon. Perhaps he’s there.’

  ‘Eetapi?’ Tasha called. ‘Any more unclean deaths in the city today?’

  ‘Or yesterday,’ said the inspector. ‘Or this week, for that matter.’

  Eetapi did not answer.

  ‘Snakie?’ Tasha yelled. ‘Are you even there? I can’t tell.’

  Nothing.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Tasha. ‘Either that or she’s punishing me for something.’

  ‘Proceeding without the snakes, then,’ said Nuritov. He spent a few minutes in a brown study, a process which Tasha watched in fascination. He looked miles away when he disappeared into his own mind like that, and failed to notice that the pipe in his mouth was not lit, and emitted no smoke.

  Then he would abruptly come back to himself, focusing on his surroundings again with the sleepy look of a man waking from a refreshing nap.

  And the eyes would fix upon Tasha with the faintly startled look. Ah. Tasha. Are you still there?

  He did all of this again. Once he had returned from his ruminations, Tasha watched as he absently returned the pipe to his pocket. She hoped he did not tend to do the same thing when it was lit. ‘Shall we go?’ he said.

  ‘Where to? The shop!’

  ‘Later. First, to see if Timof Vak has also arrived home in the night.’

  ‘And mislaid his eyeballs.’

  ‘That, too.’

  Chapter Four

  It was his youth and wasted vigour that made the vision of Timof Vak more disturbing, Tasha decided.

  Vak, of a more affluent background than his Order-mate Artemo, lived in a small but sumptuously fitted-up house about ten minutes’ walk from the harbour and Artemo’s cottage. He’d been engaged in the fur trade, just starting out in the business but already successful. Several specimens of his wares lay strewn about his house: a large, velvet-brown fur covering a wide window-seat, and another of black tints cast over the tall-backed chair in which the man himself sat.

  They’d arrived to find the house locked up. Vak must have had a servant or two to look after him, but no one was home; Tasha had at length been given leave to practice her lock-picking skills upon Vak’s stout front door, a task she fell to with relish. She had it open inside of two minutes.

  They’d found Vak’s corpse in less.

  Silence reigned between the two of them for some time as they took in the grisly scene. Vak was not yet thirty, smooth-faced, with a thick, dark brown beard. His shirt had been fine, once, a pristine white garment sewn of an expensive fabric. Now it was ruined, torn and blood-drenched, gaping in two halves around the deep wound in his chest. Someone had not merely stabbed him, but carved him open; exposed bones gleamed wetly. A bone knife, slightly larger than the first but otherwise its twin, crowned the gory mess.

  Empty, black sockets marred the handsomeness of his face, great gouges where his eyes once were.

  Uneasy in ways she had not been when confronted with the corpse of Artemo, Tasha maintained her silence. Why was it melancholy, this tableau, when the other had not struck her at all that way? Was it only this man’s youth, the sense of wasted potential? Absurd. No one deserved to have their chest carved open and their eyes hacked out, whatever their time of life. Did Rodion Artemo’s advanced age change anything? Just because he was unlikely to have many more years left to him, did not mean that Tasha ought to pursue his murderer with any less zeal.

  The arrogance of youth, Genri would call it.

  She chose not to find out what the inspector might call it.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last, loud and heartily, to cover her unease. ‘What do you make of all this now?’

  Nuritov did not move. ‘I wish Nanda was here.’

  ‘I miss her too, but—'

  ‘No. The only connection we know of between these two men wa
s their membership of The Shandrigal’s Order.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. And they had both been missing.’

  ‘For two, or three weeks respectively. Vak must have died last night as well, that’s my guess. Both arrived home after weeks of absence, unheralded — the servants have not been called back, you see — and both died before morning.’

  ‘It’s the eyes that interest me,’ said Tasha.

  ‘Me, too. And those knives.’

  Tasha said nothing for a moment. A strange, stray thought had just darted across her mind, prompted somehow by the inspector’s words. Those knives. She thought of her walk across the city earlier that day, a bone knife in each pocket. One taken from a human body, and the other… ‘Whose bones are they made from?’ she said aloud.

  ‘What? The knives?’

  ‘Yes. Do you think they are human bone?’

  ‘They could be,’ said the inspector slowly. ‘They are small enough to be carved out from a thigh bone, say, or something of that size.’

  ‘What if it’s something a bit like… what I do? What Konrad did?’

  Nuritov glanced at her, and said sharply: ‘Just what are you saying?’

  ‘The… the knives Konrad made out of the victim’s bones. They were intended to— to bind the two souls together in the Deathlands, were they not? Murderer and victim, for the one to wrest their own justice from the other. What if these knives are also forging some kind of link between souls?’

  ‘The souls of these two men, and whoever’s bones the knives were cut from?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know. And the first knife at least is quite old, the broker told me that, and it looks it. So it must have been made from someone who lived at least a few decades ago. But…’

  Nuritov was nodding. ‘It could be,’ he said slowly. ‘There must be some reason why a bone knife has been used in each case, specially selected over more convenient choices.’

  ‘Maybe whoever used them knows whose bones they were.’

  ‘And knows something about these two men that we do not.’

  ‘To the shop!’ said Tasha.

  ‘Right. Yes. Hm.’ The inspector dithered about for a bit, investigating who-knew-what, apparently without achieving very much. Tasha waited with barely suppressed impatience. Alight with the fire of speculation, she wanted to rush off at once, and pursue her theory. Timof Vak was dead, and he’d stay dead. Did Nuritov have to faff about like this now?

  ‘Can’t you send Karyavin down here?’ she finally said.

  ‘Yes, and I will. Look, though.’ The inspector stooped, and picked up something from the floor near the fireplace. It was a sliver of black charcoal, chalky, disintegrating in Nuritov’s palm. ‘What do you suppose that is doing there?’

  ‘It’s a fireplace,’ said Tasha.

  ‘And this is not coal.’

  ‘Then it’s wood. So what?’

  In answer, Nuritov merely nodded his head in the direction of a large, black receptacle standing to one side of the fire. A coal-scuttle. ‘Oh,’ said Tasha.

  ‘Either something wooden was burned in a fire there last night, and left some residue, or this was brought in from outside. Perhaps on somebody’s shoes.’

  ‘Might have been Vak who brought it in.’

  ‘Or it might have been the murderer.’

  ‘All right. Duly noted. Now can we go?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Tasha gritted her teeth. ‘What now?’

  Nuritov cleared his throat, and jerked his head towards the remains of Timof Vak. ‘Um. Don’t you have something to do first?’

  ‘Aha. Yes. I was… forgetting.’ The rib bone. She eyed the protruding knife with a touch of distaste. The damned thing was in the way — but then again, it was sharp. Wrapping her fist around the hilt, she pulled it out in one swift motion and went speedily to work. Quickly, before unhelpful reflections had time to take hold of her mind.

  Somehow, she didn’t enjoy this butchery at all. It only went to show: the novelty really could wear off absolutely anything.

  Strange, to walk nonchalantly into a shop with the blood only just wiped from the hands, and wrists, and coat. Tasha was not yet a neat butcher; practice would help. She shoved those hands into her pockets and tried to look inconsequential. Not too difficult, being much shorter than the inspector, and female, and grubby; the people who kept these types of shops would look right past her, with someone both much taller and much more respectable to talk to. And nobody would guess how she’d spent five minutes of her life, only a short time ago. Up to her elbows in a man’s carved-open chest, hacking out bones.

  The shop was not merely posh but posh, dripping in grandeur and jewels. The contents must cost a fortune. Tasha looked everywhere with the eyes of pure greed, mentally calculating the value of those diminutive statuettes, that graceful, glimmering necklace, the miniature in oils by the door… her fingers twitched, and she thought of the friendly pawn-broker. Come back anytime, he’d said, with anything.

  No. Today was no day for being light-fingered. She was a responsible police ward — and a sensible Malykant, hah, how bizarre a combination of ideas was that — and she would not disgrace herself or the inspector by purloining, say, that small ring from a high side-table, the kind that slipped onto the smallest of the fingers, coppery and set with an emerald. Easily swiped, easily secreted in her pocket…

  ‘…these rather fine knives,’ the inspector was saying, his voice breaking in upon the flow of Tasha’s reprehensible thoughts. ‘I wondered if perhaps you might—’

  ‘Where did you find these?’ interrupted the shopkeep, in an arrested tone.

  Tasha turned her attention away from the tempting ring, and began to listen.

  ‘I… cannot immediately say,’ said the inspector. ‘They are rare, I take it?’

  ‘Extremely. Rare, and… precious.’ The shopkeep, a tall, willowy woman with Nanda’s icy-pale colouring and a faint Marjan accent, bent over her counter to examine the knives more closely. She was exactly the type to keep a place like this: refined, just the right air of snoot but nothing supercilious, a serenity that might make anybody feel more comfortable about expending vast sums of money on trifles.

  She’d said the word precious with emphasis, as though she was not talking about their mere monetary value at all. Precious. Precious how?

  ‘They are…’ she straightened, and eyed the inspector doubtfully. There was the snoot, all right: the assumption of superiority. ‘Do you know much about Marjan traditions, Inspector?’

  ‘Very little, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Some of them are not so different from your Assevan notions,’ she said. ‘Death, for example. We have our rituals, our ceremonies, for those who have passed on. There is something… extra, for those taken early. Deliberately, and by the hand of another. You comprehend.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Nuritov, ‘that for those who have been murdered, these knives are made.’

  ‘For them, and from them,’ she said, picking up the smaller of the two knives. ‘This little one. So slim, so delicate. Perhaps it would not even require the big bone, of the thigh?’

  ‘What are they for?’ said the inspector, with deceptive mildness. Tasha heard the tension in his tone.

  The shopkeep set down the knife again, carefully. ‘It is believed that the knife will find the one who slew its… original owner? That it will avenge the poor slain soul, and that justice will be found in the beyond.’

  ‘It,’ repeated the inspector slowly. ‘The knife will do that, will it? All by itself? It does not require a guiding hand?’

  ‘Like your Malykant, you mean?’ She shrugged. ‘It is not of much relevance, how the knife shall be delivered. It is only known that it will happen.’

  ‘But,’ Tasha put in, approaching the woman. ‘They’re supposed to be rare.’

  ‘It is a tradition little observed, now. Only in some parts of distant Marja, where savage ways still hold swa
y…’ Her demeanour plainly showed what she thought of such brutal notions, dispensing with the Assevan tradition of the Malykant along with them. Tasha sniffed. Who knew? Someday she might require such savage services herself, and then she’d be grateful.

  The woman’s attention moved to the second of the two knives, the larger, so recently removed from the gaping torso of Timof Vak. Frowning, she picked it up, and carried it close to her face.

  ‘Something amiss with that one?’ said the inspector.

  ‘It is quite new. Look.’ She proffered it for the inspector’s perusal, her slender fingers pointing out disparate parts of the bone blade and handle. ‘No wearing along the blade’s edge, or around the hilt, that might suggest a long life. Only one trifling little bit of damage, here, an indentation — a nick — it has not long since been fashioned, I imagine, and used only once.’

  ‘It has indeed been used once,’ said Nuritov, and the grimness with which he spoke perhaps tipped off the oblivious shopkeep, for she paled, and quickly set the knife down.

  ‘You do not mean to say…’

  ‘It was found, not two hours ago, hilt-deep in the chest of a very dead young man,’ said the inspector. ‘So I must ask you again, madam. According to this tradition, who is supposed to wield these knives?’

  She was shaking her head, her eyes wide. Frightened? Perhaps just because of her sudden proximity to a violent death, or those who had recently left such a scene. Maybe because she’d dismissed the quaint tradition of her people as fanciful and inappropriate nonsense, and must now consider the idea that it was not. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘There is no such person. To have a designated wielder of such a weapon — that is pragmatism, not? That is Assevan. You will not trust to destiny, to fate, to right these wrongs. You must take care of it yourselves. That is not how it is in Marja.’

  ‘Fate?’ sighed the inspector. ‘Fate’s of no use to me, madam. Destiny did not use these knives to slay two Assevan men last night. A real, human hand did that.’

  A strange look came into her face. ‘Of this you are certain?’ she said.

  And the inspector, oddly, hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said, but not before an awkward pause.