Death's Heretic

by James L. Sutter

  “Your home is remarkable,” Salim said, with no exaggeration. “Yet it’s hardly defensible, with such an open layout. Surely you both realized this.”

  “We don’t need a fortress,” Neila replied. “Or at least, we didn’t think we needed one. Our safety comes from our station, and the loyalty of our staff. Certainly, any one of them could make off with enough of our belongings to equal a year’s wage. But when that year was up, he’d be out of a job, and those who remained would still have food to eat. No, we pay our staff well, and in return they serve us faithfully. We represent their livelihood, and their families live here alongside us. Our home is theirs, and they protect it as such.”

  Salim nodded. It was a good policy, under normal conditions. But when something like the sun orchid elixir was involved, nothing was normal.

  “Your man spoke earlier of an incident,” he prompted.

  Neila waved her hand, dismissing the idea as she would a servant. “An irritant,” she said. “Before we arrived, no one had owned these woods for generations—a hunting preserve for the queen and her family, but one they were more than willing to sell to Father for the correct price. Ever since we cleared part of the land to construct this house and the fields—recouping much from the timber sales—the fey of the wood have been restless. Clearly they thought of the land as theirs, and they’ve been slow to adjust. Our field hands are harassed with some regularity by the sprites, with tools gone missing and the occasional direct confrontation, but the men are used to it and the fey are slowly learning to accept our presence.”

  “I see.”

  At last they came to a heavy door of nut-brown wood, the first such portal that Salim had seen closed in this aristocratic wonder. Beside it, a halfling servant stood at attention with a salver, upon which rested two crystal champagne flutes. He bowed gracefully, without the liquid so much as trembling in the glasses, and held them out to the two humans. Neila took them both and handed one to Salim.

  “Thank you,” he said, and drank. The water inside was cold enough to make his teeth hurt, the product of either magic or a well-insulated cellar. Neila flicked her fingers, and the servant straightened and left them, his child-sized steps completely silent on the piled carpet of the second story. Neila produced a key ring from the purse on her belt and unlocked the door, then pushed it open.

  “This was my father’s study,” she said.

  The room was lit by sun pouring in through an enormous, arched window that stretched across one wall from the floor to the ceiling fifteen feet above. In front of it sat a wide wooden desk, facing not the amazing view of the river but rather the door to the study. Bookshelves lined the walls, holding both leather-bound tomes and an assortment of curios, from expensive trinkets and carvings in the local style to bottled Taldan warships and racks of fine fencing swords. The carpet was a midnight blue as dark as the sea, and almost as yielding as Salim waded through it, taking in every detail.

  “He was found at his desk?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She stepped lightly around him and led him behind the imposing wooden structure in a wide arc. She had the good sense to keep her distance from it as she did so, avoiding the darker splotches on the carpet that Salim recognized easily. Bloodstains.

  “Who’s been here since you found him?”

  She moved so that she could look out the window, rather than at the desk. “Only the guards and the church,” she said. “The former did a cursory investigation, but didn’t bother overmuch, given the arrangement we had with the Church of Pharasma. When the priests came, they removed the body, and the servants cleaned as much as they could—we didn’t think we’d need to look for clues, once Father was resurrected. But otherwise it’s all as it was.”

  Salim leaned against a corner of the desk. “Why don’t you tell me everything, starting with when he was first discovered.”

  She took a deep breath and turned back around.

  “Father was elated, of course. It was his dream—winning the auction. He hadn’t expected that they’d hold the elixir at the queen’s palace until the deeds to the pledged property could be verified and transferred, but a few days hardly seemed to matter. Time was about to become meaningless. He came up to his study to smoke, as he often did in the evenings.”

  She closed her eyes. “No one heard a cry. It wasn’t until it had gotten quite late that I came to check on him. The door was closed. I knocked, but ...”

  She paused, and he waited silently for her to continue.

  “He was slumped facedown on the desk. There was blood everywhere. I screamed, and servants came running. They summoned the guard, and I sent a runner to notify the church. We knew there was danger, but we hadn’t ...we hadn’t really thought ...” She took another deep, shuddering breath.

  Salim gave her a moment, then prompted her again. “So the guard came.”

  She opened her eyes and met his. “Yes. As I’ve said, they didn’t stay long. You have copies of their report. The clerics came next, but they were primarily interested in transporting his body to the church for resurrection.”

  He nodded. “And when did they inform you that something was wrong?” He realized as he said it that it was a strange way to refer to a murder—presumably something had gone terribly wrong long before the resurrection attempt, but she took his meaning.

  “The next morning. Father had paid them well, and they performed the resurrection promptly—or at least attempted to. When their efforts failed, they began casting divinations to determine the source of the problem. But by that time the scroll had already appeared on our doorstep.”

  “The ransom note. May I see it?”

  She shook her head. “It appeared on our porch from out of nowhere—no one saw it arrive. Olar, the carriage driver, brought it straight to me. It felt solid enough when I unrolled it, but as I read it the paper began to dissipate like smoke, until it disappeared. I only know what it said—that Father’s soul was being held between worlds, and that if I wanted him to return, I must have the sun orchid elixir delivered to a point on the Ethereal Plane coterminous with the southeastern corner of our property—whatever that means.”

  Salim nodded. He’d expected as much. Any kidnapper who could steal a soul from the Boneyard and shift between this world and the eerie half-reality of the Ethereal Plane wasn’t going to simply leave a ransom note around to be traced back to him.

  “At that point, the guard became interested again, and thoroughly questioned both me and the house staff, but stepped back once it became clear that the Church of Pharasma was even more interested in solving the situation, as a matter of professional pride. I’ve been using our remaining funds to support their efforts ever since.”

  “And weighing whether or not to pay the ransom.”

  Neila’s eyes had been drifting back to the window while she spoke, but now they jerked back to him.

  “I love my father!” she snapped. “There’s no decision to be made. I’ve been told by the Pharasmins that I can expect answers. If you prove unable to offer them, then I will have Khoyar deliver the elixir. I will not allow your church’s failure to kill my father.” Her eyes were red now, and the tendons stood out on her neck. “Unless you have further questions for me, Mr. Ghadafar, the servants could use my attention. Take as much time here as you need.”

  She waited a moment, eyes daring him, but he inclined his head. She departed, shutting the study door firmly behind her.

  Salim looked at the closed door and sighed. The woman’s emotions were going to make this more difficult than it already was.

  Kneeling down, Salim examined the desk and the bloodstained carpet. As with the corpse, the wood of the desk had several sets of parallel scrapes and notches, like claw marks.

  While Salim was no expert in assassination—by the time he was brought in to solve a problem, people usually had a pretty good idea of what they were up against, and few undead attacks could be called subtle—he wasn’t particularly surprised. Magically summoned monster
s were quick, powerful, and convenient. Not only did they disappear once the spells that called them into being ended, but the real killer could strike from a distance. If the caster who had taken out Faldus Anvanory were good enough, he could have stood in the yard and summoned the monster directly into the study through the window. Faldus, whose desk faced the door—no doubt because he didn’t like being surprised by people—wouldn’t even see it coming.

  Which, as it turned out, he hadn’t. Something had appeared behind him, torn him to ribbons, and then disappeared.

  Salim held his own hand up to one of the claw marks for comparison.

  Something big.

  He continued to search the carpet and desk for a moment, looking for anything else that might give him a clue as to the beast’s nature, but found nothing. Glancing out the window, he confirmed what he’d suspected—a wide lawn stretching down toward the river. A killer could have stood out there—or floated, or sent his familiar, or ridden a griffon for all Salim knew—and been effectively invisible in the darkness to anyone inside the well-lit manor house.

  One by one, Salim opened up the drawers in the desk, doing his best not to disturb the contents as he rifled through them. Stacks of well-thumbed caravan manifests, transaction summaries, and figures sheets painted a picture of Faldus Anvanory much in accordance with the one his daughter had presented: a man driven to commerce as if the Lady of Graves herself were on his heels. Which, of course, she was.

  The bottommost drawer was locked, which was unsurprising—trust in one’s household staff was a virtue, but too much was foolish. Besides, three years in Thuvia didn’t make the Anvanorys Thuvian, and they probably still expected a certain amount of petty theft from their help.

  Salim didn’t particularly feel like chasing after Neila and asking for the key, but then the gleaming brass face of the keyhole caught his eye. On a hunch, he opened all the other drawers and felt around inside them, this time ignoring their contents in favor of the wood. In the second-highest one, he found what he was looking for. He depressed the catch and pulled on the locked drawer. It slid smoothly open, revealing the real locking mechanism: a carefully geared set of rods controlled by the catch. The keyhole on the front was real enough, but attached to nothing. Only the perfect smoothness of its faceplate, which should have been at least mildly scratched by the key after years of regular use, had given it away.

  Inside was yet another stack of papers, but these were of a different sort—deeds and statements of ownership, all signed and witnessed with the key-shaped wax seal of the Bank of Abadar. Doubtlessly this drawer had been much fuller just a few weeks ago, yet there were still enough paper holdings here to keep the manor comfortably appointed for a hundred years.

  On top of all the papers sat a small painting, just a few inches to a side and bound in a frame of carved and lacquered wood. Salim withdrew it carefully.

  Upon first glance, he thought it was a portrait of Neila, so similar were the two women’s faces. Then he realized that the woman in the painting must be several years older, her face slightly less rounded. Unlike most aristocratic portraits, where everyone looked awkwardly dour, as if suffering from intestinal flux, this woman had been captured at play, relaxing beneath a garden window with a book. The green and gold light from beyond painted her cheeks, and her eyes were bright, as if she’d just looked up from the story.

  The senior Lady Anvanory, no doubt. Salim slid the painting back on top of the documents and closed the drawer.

  Seating himself in the chair where Faldus had been dispatched, Salim took Khoyar’s papers from his inner pocket and spread them over the beautifully finished wood of the desk. The summaries, written in the elegant hand of a Pharasmin priest—no doubt far neater than the barely literate scrawl of the guard’s original reports—had little to offer. One sheet was a summary of the guard’s conclusions, which mirrored Salim’s own: Faldus had clearly been mauled from behind by some sort of large beast which left no trace of itself—likely a magically summoned creature. It probably hadn’t entered through the doorway, or he would have seen it. The second sheet was a record of the various magical interrogations made by both the Church of Pharasma and a banker of Abadar acting on behalf of the city guard. The transcriptions of their interview with Faldus’s corpse offered nothing that Salim hadn’t already uncovered from his own interrogation, though he noted that the guards showed remarkably little interest in questioning either Akhom Qali or Lady Jbade without more evidence than the unsubstantiated accusations of a corpse. Below the transcript was an official statement of the Lamasaran Guard’s opinion that Neila Anvanory herself was no longer under suspicion, having cleared several magical tests investigating both her aura and the veracity of her sworn testimony.

  Salim wasn’t surprised. Though Neila was the obvious first suspect, he was a fair judge of character himself, and everything in the woman’s demeanor said that she was what she seemed to be: a young noblewoman grieving for her father. That had been clear almost from the beginning, and even if it hadn’t, there were a dozen ways Neila could have done away with her father and received the elixir with little question—the current situation was one of the few ways in which she wouldn’t necessarily end up with the elixir. But innocence didn’t mean she was going to be easy to work with, especially if she insisted on dogging his footsteps.

  Salim looked up from his musings and realized that the light in the room had faded significantly since Neila had brought him in here. Already the knickknacks on the bookshelves were half cast in shadow.

  He looked down at the papers. If there was something more to be gained here, he wasn’t seeing it. He’d need to take a more active role in the investigation. Sweeping up the documents, he tucked them back into his robes and exited the study.

  He found Neila downstairs in the dining room once more, giving instructions to one of the cooks. The servant eyed Salim warily, then bowed to her mistress and retreated through a free-swinging door to the steam and chaos of the kitchen. Neila turned and greeted him levelly.

  “Did you learn anything?” She was perfectly composed again, with that crystalline Taldan courtesy that sparkled as it cut.

  “Only how little we know,” Salim replied, attempting to keep his voice light. Nobles in general irritated him, but this one had reason enough to be volatile. She picked up on his manner and seemed to take it for contrition. Her voice thawed slightly.

  “What will you do next, then?”

  He waved a hand toward the door. “Work with what we have—specifically, with Faldus’s own suspicions. The city guard may have been understandably reluctant to question other local powers without direct evidence, but I have no such compunctions.”

  Neila’s eyes were hard and bright. “The Harlot and the Jackal.”

  “Precisely.”

  She smiled, and for a moment he almost thought she’d rub her hands together in anticipation. Inaction clearly pained her. “A fine idea,” she said. “When do we leave?”

  Salim sighed.

  “It’s already evening, and I hardly think either of them would welcome guests this late. I’ll pay my respects to both of them tomorrow.”

  Neila caught the pronoun and stared at him hard, brow furrowed. When he made no move to correct it, she drew herself up slowly and pulled her shoulders back, spine straight as any soldier on parade.

  “Mr. Ghadafar,” she said, “I thought we had an understanding. I see now that I am mistaken. Perhaps it would be best to inform the church that I will not be needing your assistance.”

  She had an iron will, this one, yet the sheer stupidity of her insistence kept Salim from appreciating it. When he answered, he let his own control lapse far enough to show a flicker of irritation.

  “With all due respect, Lady Anvanory,” he said, his tone making it clear exactly how little that was, “you’ve just proven how much you do. Or do you really think that, should either Akhom Qali or Lady Jbade have murdered your father, you would be the best person to interrogate t
hem?” As in their initial meeting, he took a step toward her, forcing her to look up to meet his eyes.

  “Whoever planned this extortion,” he said, “has gone to considerable lengths to cover his trail, using a caliber of magic that would put most wizards to shame. Both Jbade and Qali are undoubtedly expecting me, or someone like me, to contact them. The chance of the killer slipping and revealing something in conversation is, by my calculation, roughly the same as the next rain turning Thuvia into a jungle. Yet I’m willing to try.”

  Another step forward. “Tell me, Lady, what cleverness have you concocted that will make either of them reveal their hand in front of their victim’s daughter?”

  He was no more than two feet from her. She stood her ground, but instead of anger, those high cheeks now flushed with embarrassment. She met his gaze for a long moment. Then she pivoted back and to the side, arm swinging toward the dining table in an after-you gesture.

  “You practice a strange form of courtesy, Mr. Ghadafar. Yet you are undoubtedly correct. I will remain here and eagerly await your reports. In the meantime, I would of course offer you the hospitality of the manor, but I’m sure you’re eager to get back to the church.”

  Despite Salim’s irritation, the absurdity of the statement got the better of him. Suddenly the whole situation seemed ludicrous. He stepped past her to the dining room table, pulled out one of the ornate chairs there, and collapsed into it, one leg hanging over the arm.

  “Miss Anvanory,” he said wearily, “if that church caught fire tomorrow, I could not be happier.”

  The startled look on the woman’s face, mouth open and arm still outstretched slightly toward the table, was priceless. Salim realized he was grinning.

  “You are a strange sort of priest,” Neila said at last, and Salim couldn’t restrain a cough of laughter.