Murder by magic: twenty tales of crime and the supernatural

by edited by Rosemary Edghill

  “Good. It’s your turn to buy.”

  PART II

  Murder Unclassifiable

  A Death in the Working

  Debra Doyle

  Debra Doyle was born in Florida and educated in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania—the last at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in English literature, concentrating on Old English poetry. While living and studying in Philadelphia, she met and married her usual collaborator, James D. Macdonald, who was then serving in the U.S. Navy. Together, they traveled to Virginia, California, and the Republic of Panama, acquiring various children, cats, and computers along the way.

  An Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Caselyn mystery story by Haef Teliau

  Translation and footnotes by Sommes Vinhalyn,

  Diregis Professor of Contemporary History and Lecturer in Eraasian Culture,

  University of Galcen

  A Note on the Author: Haef Teliau, pseudonymous author of the Jerre syn-Casleyn mysteries, began his writing career during the early period of the Eraasian Hegemony. Although the highly popular series was not overtly political, both the setting—some three decades before the first Eraasian contact with worlds beyond the interstellar gap— and the overall tone of nostalgia for those bygone days suggest at least an unconscious agenda on the writers part. One of the book-length works, Death of a Star-Lord, was in fact suppressed during the sus-Peledaen purges of 1151 E.R., though later reissues of the series saw the book restored to its proper place in the sequence. —S.V

  High summer in Hanilat, and the climate controls in the Center Street Watch Station weren’t working. Again.

  “I would give a great deal,” said Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Casleyn, “to get out of this office for just a day.”

  “The universe hears you when you say things like that.” Station-Commander Evayan tapped Jerre’s desktop with a broad forefinger. “Check your files.”

  Jerre complied and read through the documents with increasing disbelief. “Lokheran Hall? Wide Hills should have gotten this one, not us.”

  “Wide Hills, in this case, defers to Hanilat Center Street with a sigh of profound relief,” the Station-Commander said. “And you’ve been asked for special.”

  “Why me?”

  “Take a look at the victim.”

  Jerre paged through the form. “Deni Tavaet sus-Arial.1Inner family, senior line. Just what I needed to make my day complete.” He began transferring the documents to a travel pad. “Of your kindness, Station-Commander, send word to the Center Street Circle and ask them for the loan of Rasha etaze2 for a jaunt in the country.”

  “You’ll have to do without this time, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Protocol,” said the Station-Commander. “Look at the file again.”

  Jerre called up the desktop copies; read them; frowned. “Deceased was an unranked Mage in the Lokheran Circle.”

  “And Refayal Tavaet’s baby brother,” the Station-Commander finished. “The Circle claims it was a death in the working. The head of the sus-Arial doesn’t believe them. Hence your country vacation.”

  Jerre couldn’t take Rasha etaze with him to Lokheran, but he could take her to the Court of Two Colors3for dinner and discussion—purely in the interest of laying a proper groundwork for his investigation prior to departing for the Wide Hills District. Over a shared platter of grilled meats and vegetables at a quiet table, Jerre laid out his questions.

  “The first thing I need to know,” he said, “is why Refayal Tavaet considers himself entitled to a say in this investigation.”

  “The dead man was his brother. I suppose that’s enough if you’re sus-Arial.”

  “Deni Tavaet was a Mage. He would have left the family altars years ago.”

  Rasha looked thoughtful. “Well… there’s leaving, and then there’s leaving.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not everybody who goes to the Circles has their name stricken from the tablets and purged from the files.” She sounded a bit wistful. “Some of them even go home for weddings and holidays and things like that.”

  “And you think Deni was one of those?”

  “He might have been.” Rasha skewered a curl of shaved meat and dipped it into the puddle of sauce. “Or there could have been other reasons.”

  One more thing remained for Jerre to do before leaving Hanilat for the Wide Hills District: he paid a social call on Refayal Tavaet.

  The head of the sus-Arial family kept a town house in one of the most elegant of Hanilat’s residential neighborhoods. Jerre presented himself to the doorkeeper-aiketh5early in the forenoon and identified himself as Jerre syn-Casleyn rather than as Center Street’s Inquestor-Principal. Refayal Tavaet might have asked the local Watch for assistance in the matter of his brother’s death; but that didn’t mean he wanted its official presence intruding on his household.

  Jerre drank red uffa6 from a crystal glass and asked the head of the sus-Arial, “Why don’t you accept the Circles account of your brother’s death? Is there bad blood between your family and the Lokheran Circle?”

  “I hadn’t thought that there was,” Refayal said. “But my brother is dead.”

  “I don’t wish to make light of your grief, but he was a Mage, after all.7The possibility was always—”

  “I know all about the possibilities.” Refayal’s voice was harsh; Jerre, listening, supposed that his anger and sorrow might well be genuine. “Deni’s private funds and property go to the Circle. And not even Mages are above temptation.”

  The Lokheran Circle lived and worked in a three-story brick building two blocks off the central street of Lokheran proper.8The Magewho answered was painfully young and earnest, reminding Jerre of Center Street’s recruits-in-training. He made a note to interview her as soon as possible, before her superiors could take her aside and instruct her in what to say; she wouldn’t have been with the Circle long enough to know in her bones which things were spoken of to outsiders and which were not.

  Unfortunately, good manners and standards procedure both required that he speak with the First of the Lokheran Circle before asking to speak with any of its members.

  “I’m Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Casleyn of the Center Street Watch,” he said. “My message preceded me, yes?”

  Her eyes widened. Jerre suspected that she’d never dealt in person with a member of the Watch before this, and that she didn’t know whether to be frightened or embarrassed about it. “Yes, etaz —sir. Lord syn-Casleyn. He’s waiting for you in the downstairs office.”

  Grei Vareas, First of the Lokheran Circle, was a stocky, graying man who could have been own cousin to Station-Commander Evayan back at Center Street. Like the young Mage who had answered the door, he wore everyday clothing in the local style,9a season or two behind the fashions of Hanilat.

  “I’m sorry that Refayal Tavaet is still grieving for his brother,” he said to Jerre. “Nevertheless, Deni’s death was as we reported it.”

  Jerre nodded. “ ‘In the line of duty’ can be hard for family members to take sometimes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Especially if it’s unexpected… Lokheran doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would demand a great working.”

  “No,” said Vareas—lured into confidence, as Jerre had hoped, by the show of sympathy. “Farming, banking, a bit of light industry. The last great working before this one was back in ‘59—the drought year. A fire in the factory district threatened to burn out of control and destroy the center of town.”

  “Before your time?”

  “Almost. I was even younger than Keshaia, whom you must have met.”

  “The little doorwarden?” Jerre took advantage of the opening Vareas had provided. “I’d like to speak with her next, if I may. Purely in the interest of rounding out my report.”

  Jerre met with Keshaia in a small office near the back of the building’s ground floor. The room didn’t seem to belong to any one of
the Lokheran Mages in particular; when he asked Keshaia, she confirmed his suspicions, explaining that the Circle-Mages took turns using it for personal business.

  “Deni also?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He talked with his legalist and his financial adviser at least once a quarter.”

  Jerre had trouble picturing a Mage with a private financial adviser, and said so. Keshaia was an open and unsuspicious young woman—she really hadn’t been a Mage for very long, he thought—and the artfully timed confidence worked as Jerre intended.

  “Deni was a money whiz,” she said. “He played with it, like some people do puzzles or—or build little models out of kits. For a game.”

  “Was he good at it?” Refayal Tavaet was claiming that the Lokheran Circle had killed Deni for his private money; maybe Refayal had a point, after all. Younger siblings who’d left the family altars didn’t usually carry a great deal away with them, but a small competence could grow into a sizable fortune if properly tended. Jerre scrawled a questionon his travel pad and sent the message off to Center Street with a flick of his stylus, then went back to taking notes.

  Keshaia shrugged. “I suppose. He kept on doing it, and he seemed to be having fun.”

  “It takes all kinds,” Jerre said. “I need some background here. How much can you tell me about the working?”

  “The one where Deni… ? Not much. I was there, but I wasn’t a part of it.”

  “How did that happen?” Jerre arranged his features into an expression of nonthreatening curiosity and waited. Given an expectant silence, people were more likely to fill it than not, and Keshaia proved no exception.

  “The really big workings—nobody knows how long one’s going to last once it starts. So you’ll usually have a watchkeeper—somebody who stays out and keeps an eye on things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Trouble from outside. Somebody inside the working getting sick or hurt. Stuff like that.”

  “I see.” Jerre checked his travel pad under the guise of making a note. Center Street had picked up his message; good. “So you—the Circle, that is—knew in advance that this was going to be a major working.”

  “Sort of. Grei etaze warned me it could go on for quite a while, but that was because things might get complicated. It was supposed to be a luck-of-the-town intention, and there’s a lot of threads in one of those, he said.”

  “But no one expected it to grow into a great working?” Keshaia shook her head. “It just happened.”

  Center Street was being efficient today, which was good. Jerre had the reply to his message before the afternoon was out. New information in hand, he went back to talk again with Grei Vareas in the latter’s office.

  “Lord syn-Casleyn.” If the First of the Lokheran Circle was annoyed at having to speak with a man from the Watch twice in one day, he was hiding it well. “Is there anything further we can help you with?”

  “Just a couple of things that I need to clear up.”

  “Of course.”

  Jerre made a show of consulting his travel pad. “First, Keshaia says that nobody expected the—what did she call it?—the luck-of-the-town intention to become a great working. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. The Circle does such workings regularly, as part of our relationship with the town. We anticipated that this one might prove arduous, but nothing more than that.”

  “Does it happen often that a routine working turns out to demand a death?”

  Vareas frowned. “Not a death,” he said. “It isn’t a death that the great working demands from us. It’s a life.”

  “A life, then.” From the Watch’s point of view, Jerre reflected, it came to the same thing in the end—a man who’d been alive when the working started wasn’t alive any longer—but he was willing to grant Vareas the distinction. “Do things like that happen often?”

  “No. But we know that they always can.”

  “Thank you,” Jerre said gravely. “I have one more favor I’d like to ask, etaze. If it doesn’t do too much violence to your Circle’s customs, I’d like young Keshaia to show me the room where the working took place.”

  The Lokheran Circle, it developed, carried out its workings and intentions in a large, windowless room on the building’s second floor. The chamber had clearly been converted to its present use from some other purpose. The three tall windows along its rear wall had been bricked over and then, like the walls themselves, painted solid black. The hardwood floor was also painted black, with a white circle several yards across in the center of it.14The floorboards looked like they had recently been scrubbed clean, but Jerre knew that a good forensic team would find traces of blood on them just the same—Deni Tavaet’s blood, shed in the working, and the blood of whichever member of the Circle had matched him.

  Which would mean nothing at all, he reminded himself. Nobody was trying to hide the fact that Deni had died in the working, and the blood alone wouldn’t be proof even of that.

  He turned to Keshaia. “You were present in this room during the working, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looking at it, but not seeing it from the inside?”

  Rasha etaze had told him once that what she saw during a working was something other than the physical world—other, but not unreal. He was wiling to take her word that there was a distinction; in the present case, it meant that none of Lokheran’s Mages except for the youngest and most inexperienced counted as a reliable witness for his particular purposes.

  “Yes,” Keshaia said. “I had to stay out, to keep watch.”

  “Good. I want you to tell me exactly what you saw. Start with who was in what place when the working began, and go on from there.”

  “All right.” Keshaia walked to a place on the perimeter of the painted circle. “The First was here.” She crossed to the other side of the circle. “Chiwe etaze” —Jerre consulted his notes; Chiew Raiath was Lokheran’s Second—”was over here.”

  “What about Deni?”

  She moved a few steps to the left along the edge of the painted circle. “He was here. Kneeling and meditating on the intention, like everybody else.”

  “And that went on for how long?”

  “I didn’t have a timepiece; I’m not sure. A long time.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The eiran started pulling tight,” she said. “I wasn’t even inside, and I could see them. I wasn’t worried yet, not really; the First had warned me it could be a hard working. I was expecting that he and Chiwe would raise the power, like I’d seen them do before, and that the worst that would come of it was that we’d have to patch one or the other or both of them up in the infirmary afterward.”

  “But it didn’t happen that way,” Jerre said. “Something went wrong.”

  “No, no—not wrong. Workings go the way the universe wants them to go; ‘wrong’ isn’t part of it.” Keshaia paused, then said, “But this one did go—not how we’d expected.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well,” she said, “first Grei etaze got up and said we needed more power, and who would match him. And Chiwe never got a chance to answer because Deni was already standing up and answering for him. And after that”—she swallowed—”after that, it was a staff-fight, like we do every day in practice, only this time for real, with the threads of the eiran going into it and weaving out again and the pattern drawing tighter and tighter until Chiwe got past Deni’s guard and struck him dead. The pattern was done then, and that was the end of the working.”

  Two days later, Jerre syn-Casleyn paid a second social call on Re-fayal Tavaet sus-Arial. The two men spoke, as was courteous, of the weather and other trivial things until the red uffa was brewed and poured into the crystal glasses.

  Then Jerre said, “I’ve made my final report to Center Street.”

  “And?”

  “It was as the Circle told you. A death in the working.”

  “That’s all?” Refayal frowned. “I don’t belie
ve it, syn-Casleyn. I can tell when I’m not being told something, and you’re not telling me something now.”

  “Very well,” Jerre said. He set aside his glass of uffa. “You were intending to purchase Lokheran Premium Container and Packaging. The initial overtures are a matter of public record, and the Financial and Accounting Division at Center Street was able to find them for me with no difficulty. I’m told there was considerable worry in some quarters about whether you intended to break the company up and move its talents and assets elsewhere, or continue to operate it in its current location.”

  “I honestly hadn’t decided yet,” Refayal said. “It’s all moot now, anyway. The Lokheran town council managed to top my offer—they scraped up enough money from somewhere at the last minute, apparently.”

  “Yes,” said Jerre. Refayal Tavaet wasn’t going to like what he heard next, but he’d asked for knowledge and it would come to him in the way that the universe willed—-just as it must have come to Deni himself in the course of the working. Jerre wondered if Refayal would be as willing as his brother to accept that knowledge. Not Center Street’s problem, thankfully; an Inquestor’s work, as always, was merely to report the truth as he knew it and move on. “The money was a gift from the surviving members of the Lokheran Circle, for the health and welfare of the town of Lokheran.”

  1. Deni Tavaet sus-Arial: For Teliau’s original readers, the names in this passage would carry a considerable weight of implication. The “sus-” prefix to the family name indicates birth membership in the higher nobility—either the old (and at the time of the story, still powerful) land-based aristocracy, or the newer, and newly ascendant, star-lords. Inquestor-Principal syn-Casleyn is himself identified by the “syn-” prefix as a member of the lesser nobility; the prefix could also serve (though not in Jerre’s case, as other tales in the series make clear) as an indicator of adoptive membership in a hypothetical sus-Casleyn family.

  2. Etazeis the traditional title accorded to one of the ranked Mages in a working Circle—those who are, in the vulgar usage, “Magelords.” The title is loosely equivalent to “Master” or “Mistress” among Adepts, though not all Mages will carry the rank. Rasha Jedao of the Center Street Mage-Circle is Jerre syn-Casleyn’s regular consultant on cases involving Magecraft.