“Then what?” The couch creaks as I lean back. “Someone like you has to have heard something. Anything. What makes his death so important?”
“Not his death, Gideon. I believe it was what he was working on.”
I try to read his eyes, to see if he knows more, but it’s like staring into polished obsidian. “His vault was broken into, yes. I assume whatever was stolen was worth quite a bit. But without the will, I can’t be sure exactly what was missing.”
“I can say without doubt that something Herchsten had, or was working on, is worth more than his whole estate combined.”
“More than his entire estate?” That is news. “Maybe the old man didn’t want to part with whatever it was.”
Two of Maanzethelin’s tentacles twitch. “Or maybe he did.”
I look askance at him. “What does that mean?”
A few seconds pass as my host seems to gather his thoughts. “Tell me, Gideon. What price would you think every plant and tree would pay for the light of the sun?”
“I … excuse me?”
A sigh of a sigh reaches out to me and I feel like I’ve got the brains of an ogre, like something obvious is slipping through the fat fingers of my mind. “Speak plainly, Thelin. Please.”
“You of all people must know that not all Herchsten worked on was for financial benefit to himself.” He’s referring to the time the old man spent with me, of urging me back from that precipice of self-destruction.
“True. But what could be worth so much that it, well—”
“Has no price?” Maanzethelin finishes.
“Exactly. What could be so priceless that it’s, well, priceless?”
His arms spread wide, tentacles mimicking the act. “That, I do not know precisely. But, I can tell you that it is something whispered to be very powerful, that there are many in Wrought Isles who would love to wrap their fingers around something such as that.”
I tap my empty goblet to my lips. Slowly, I venture, “The Magicians Aristocracy.”
“If I were to say which fruit bears seeds,” Maanzethelin says, “I would say that particular one, yes.”
“So that’s why Magistrate is into this. That’s why they are so determined to come after me.”
“I may like you, Gideon, but do you think yourself so important as to be worth their time?”
I narrow my eyes his way and he lifts his long fingers in apology. “I meant no insult, my friend, but you must think on that.”
As if I didn’t already have enough to think about. If it wasn’t me they were concerned about, why insist that I stay out of the way? Why tell me to back off?
I shake my head. “The magistrates are hiding information from Trip, too,” I say. “It’s not just me they’re trying to keep from the case.”
“So you determine you are not their focus, then.”
“But the case is. Anderest is. He’s dead, murdered, and what shouldn’t draw this much attention is. And it wasn’t until I was hired that I started being followed, both by hired thugs and the magistrates.”
It clicks.
By some flayer’s trick or simply by my expression, Maanzethelin sees that I see.
“The granddaughter,” we both say simultaneously, he with conviction, me with curiosity.
“The magistrates told me to tell Vayvanette to back off. She must know something, or they don’t want her to learn something about her grandfather, something his murder would uncover. Something priceless, like you said. Something that even the Aristocracy wants to keep the Watch from finding. Something those thugs were hired to see if I had on me. Something that Anderest would have passed on to her, as his only living heir.”
“A dire predicament, indeed, my friend.”
“Can you tell me anything else, then?” I ask, eagerness in my voice. “Anything I might be missing?”
“If I could, I would.” There is a finality to his words and his tentacles have gone still as stone on his chest. “I have given you all my brood has gleamed from the city.”
Curse it, but I know I can’t push him any further. Not without risking the relationship we have. With our business concluded and idea already brewing as to what I need to do next, I wonder if there is any reason for me to stick around. Maanzethelin seems to be thinking along the same lines for as I begin to stand up to leave he gestures for me to stay.
“I have been having many visitors of late,” Maanzethelin says, as close to melancholy as I’ve heard him ever to be. “But you, I would have you stay a while.”
The warmth in my belly has slowly invaded the rest of my body and the couch is rather plush. I refill my goblet and allow myself to sink back in to the cushiony bliss while Maanzethelin heads back to his cupboard and withdraws another vial of some poor soul’s essence.
He settles back into his chair, a melodious clink chimes between us, and the talk changes to floaty chatter and conversation.
“Where is that morph-imp of yours?” Maanzethelin asks me, sounding as if he’s grinning. “Still around, I presume?”
I do my best to swish around the syrupy liquor in my goblet. Maanzethelin is one of few people who know of my association with Durmet, and, strange as it is, being able to openly talk about my demonic companion puts me at ease.
I smile and throw my free arm back along the couch. “I wanted to bring him along, but Trip stopped by the office earlier today and Durmet made himself scarce.”
Maanzethelin’s head tilts and the tips of his tentacles sway. “I’m surprised the little imp didn’t stick around to harass the good captain. Did he not once present himself as a parrot and defecate—”
“Right on Trip’s shoulder?” I nearly fall to the side as laughter rips through my body in pleasant convulsions. “I swear Trip would have rewritten the law to make killing animals with fireshot entirely legal at that very moment.”
With tears in my eyes, a belly full of the best, and my mind drifting on warm clouds, I enjoy this respite, this singular time where I can be sure I won’t have someone trying to readjust my nose on my face. Which leads me to ask something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time.
“Hey, Thelin, seeing as you have no nose, exactly how do you smell?”
He takes a moment to answer. “I suppose it all depends on what powders or perfume I choose to wear.”
I don’t care who you are, but when a mind flayer tries his cursed best at making a joke, it sends you to the floor laughing on principle alone. It’s almost enough to make me forget what I know I have to do next.
9
NECESSARY
I awake in my bed the next morning with my stomach feeling like it’s full of lead, and my head twice as heavy. I drink my breakfast to lighten the load before climbing down the rabbit warren that is this case. Everywhere I’ve turned, some rodent or snake has come crawling after me, and I’m growing weary of them all. In my experienced eyes, the only reason all these variables are coming at me is because they have some sort of stake in the case—regarding either the murder, the stolen priceless item, or the missing will.
Maanzethelin opened my mind to something much bigger, and it hadn’t taken a flaying to do so. At least not in the conventional way. I’ll have to remember to ask him what in the hells I was pouring down my throat last night.
How one old man could bring about so much chaos after he’s left this life is beyond me. At least Anderest didn’t leave me without some recompense, some small token for my troubles. I slide open my top drawer and pull out the six-spell I retrieved from his vault, and notice a folded piece of paper beneath it. It must have fallen out when I upended the satchel, because it doesn’t belong to me.
I set the wand down and unfold the paper. My breath catches as I begin to read it:
Gideon,
Please forgive an old man his failures. In all I have taught you, I should have been better learned, and I should have stayed my hand.
In my arrogance, I attempted to bend the fundamental laws of magic, to creat
e that which should not be in order to leave my mark upon this world. The price of my arrogance was high, and it is with great shame that I pass my debt to you.
Your eternal struggle with your own liability puts you in a unique position to understand the dangers of what I have created. Please, keep it close to you always. If possible, do what I could not, and destroy what I have wrought.
In trust and affection,
Anderest Herchsten
I read it over again, hands trembling slightly with the knowledge that these are Anderest’s final words to me, perhaps to anyone. And that he writes of what must be a warning, for my eyes alone, sets me back in my chair. Anderest was anything but arrogant during my time spent with him. Caring and possibly over-methodical, yes, but arrogant?
I shake my head.
Anderest always saw failure as an excuse to try harder to accomplish his goals, something he pushed in me as well. But in his final words, Anderest speaks as if his failure was conclusive, the result being what he’d created. With hardened nerves, I fold the letter and set it back in the drawer, then look at the six-spell with new eyes.
Why me? What makes my curse, my liability, unique to what he’d created?
The ivory-handled wand from his vault is much lighter than my own wood-and-iron-banded one, and a quick twist of the butt unlocks the cylinder. With the cylinder separated from the wand, the top of the crystals are exposed, like the tails of burrowing worms. I put down the wand and hold up the ivory cylinder, slowly spinning it this way and that so that each crystal catches the light streaming in from the side window.
All six are charged, telltale subtle glowing colors signifying each element: scarlet ruby fireshots, pale-yellow peridot lightshots, and muddy-green emeralds for windshot. I reach into my drawer and pull out the extra cylinder that had been hiding in the bottom of the satchel. Identical in design to the one I’d pulled from the wand but for the stylized “G.K.” etched into the base. I swear it feels just a dog’s hair lighter than the first cartridge, like it may be hollow. Before I can pick up the first one and do a proper comparison, I’m interrupted by wings and words.
“Nasty piece of craftsmanship, boss. I like it.”
I put the cylinder down and look up to find Durmet flapping his way to me. He has a strip of cured meat in one paw, and a sliver hanging from his mouth. He lands on the desk, and when I narrow my eyes at his mouth, he noisily sucks the sliver of meat through his teeth.
My stomach churns at the sight. “Nice of you to show.”
“You know I don’t like Trip.” He rips off another piece of meat and talks while he chews. “I made myself scarce soon as I heard him fumbling with the back window. How disgraceful. A man of the law breaking into a home like that.”
“He was only here for a short spell.”
Durmet shrugs. “Where did you shuffle off to last night?”
I tell him about the mind flayers’ den and what Maanzethelin had offered.
“And Trip?” he asks.
“Weren’t you around? Listening?”
His voice drops to a growl. “I left just after you insulted me and told him you’d gotten rid of me.”
Ah. The noisome parrot to which Trip and I had been referring. Durmet’s getting sensitive. I don’t bother consoling him; instead I get right into it, running through everything Trip said. When I’m done, Durmet’s finished with his breakfast and is idly rolling one of the ivory cylinders from Anderest’s place back and forth with a clawed foot.
“Sounds like Trip needs you,” Durmet points out, and I think I catch a hint of jealousy in his voice. “He’s probably wishing things went differently back in your earlier years on the Watch.”
“Yeah, well, things are as they are, Durmet. We have a case to concentrate on. And speaking of our case, what news on Vayvanette? If Thelin’s information is correct, she may be in danger.”
He doesn’t answer straight away so I lean forward and repeat my question. Loudly.
He stops playing with the cylinder and his pupils contract briefly to mere slits when he looks at me. Like pulling teeth from a dragon, he slowly recounts what he’d found out.
“She’s, I don’t know, nice? Normal, I guess. Nothing like you.”
“Durmet.”
“Fine, fine.” He starts to pace my desk, meandering circles that take him everywhere and nowhere. “She’s a teacher, like she said, at a warehouse-turned-school up in the Levee. Teaches little whelps of humans, a few dwarven blockheads, a brood of halflings, and a set of elven twins. Why an elf would demean their children to such a base thing as being taught by a human is something I will never understand.”
“So she’s a teacher,” I repeat to get him back on track. The day’s not near long enough to listen to Durmet go on about what he thinks of humans.
He stops his pacing to shoot me a withering glare. “Do you want to know what I found out or not, boss?”
Sensitive, indeed. “By all means. I’m sorry.”
“Hmmph. Like I was saying. She’s a teacher, spends her days at a school not too far south from her cottage.”
“Cottage? Thought she was tight about the coin purse. She earns that much teaching children?”
His wings twitch. “Apparently. It’s a sprawling affair, orchards out back, barn and live-in quarters set along one far side of her estate. Not affluent, but,” he sends his gaze around my humble abode, “better than some I’ve seen.”
I ignore the barb and stare at my hands in thought. “So she has servants and workers?” I should have known. The way she carried herself, straight-backed and delicately firm, she didn’t seem the type to dirty her hands or break a sweat alongside beasts of burden.
“I actually didn’t see that many people about her place,” Durmet says. “If they were there, they were working somewhere I couldn’t get a clear view. Less than a handful were in the gardens. Bushes and plants and trees and all that. Whatever else Vayvanette is into, I can tell you she likes her flowers.”
“Because she grows them? As a pastime?” This is valuable information. Maybe not pertaining to the case, but even so, good to know.
“More than a pastime, I think. Other than the school, she spent an inordinate amount of time at a few flower shops on her walk home. She went out of her way to visit three separate vendors. Whatever she was looking for, though, she didn’t find it and went home empty handed.”
Flowers. A subject I know absolutely nothing about, other than that they are fickle little things. Common sense says put them in dirt, dribble some water on them, and that’s that. The barren patches of soil lining my walkway out front are testament to how flowers defy common sense.
Going back to the subject at hand, I ask, “So, her house proper? Is it just her?”
Durmet blinks and twitches his tail, letting me know he sees right through my casual tone. I’ll take that as affirmation that Vayvanette Herchsten is unattached.
“Was there anything, I don’t know, off about her?” I ask. “Anything that would draw a closer look?”
“She spends her time, and gladly, with mewling children.” He shudders.
“I meant for a non-demon.”
“In that case, no.”
I lean back in my chair, steeple my fingers, and tap them to my chin. Vayvanette doesn’t seem to be acting like someone expecting a huge windfall, but still, Trip’s visit and his questions regarding her weigh heavily on my mind. I wouldn’t be worth my salt if I didn’t question her motives as well. Of course she’d want her grandfather’s murderer brought to justice; any sane person would. Although any sane person would have gone straight to the Watch if it were justice they were truly seeking.
I don’t take Vayvanette as the revenge type, but then again, a death in the family can make a person act irrationally. It’s not a stretch to assume she’d come to me because she didn’t want to see the murderer live a day longer than he’d deserved. I don’t blame her. But I’m also not planning on killing the perpetrator unless the situation merits
it. There’s enough in my lap as it is, and I can’t afford to go around murdering people I run afoul of. Finding him and either bringing him in or handing him off to Trip would be the cleanest way to go about this. It may disappoint her, but that’s how it’s going to be.
I glance at the ivory-handled wand. Why had Anderest kept it? And did he plan on giving it to me? I did owe the man for keeping me from sinking too deep into a place from which I wouldn’t have been able to return. Did that debt require blood to be spilled?
“Boss?”
Was there a little voice in my head that demanded Anderest’s killer to be wiped from this life?
“Boss?”
I snap back, claw my way out of that dark tunnel of dismal thoughts, and focus on Durmet.
“What’s the plan?” he asks when he’s sure he’s gained my attention.
“I need to see what Vayvanette knows. Thelin wouldn’t steer me wrong. Whatever every one’s looking for, Vayvanette is connected somehow. If she’s living comfortably, earning enough on her own to maintain a cottage, then I want to know why she paid me with her grandfather’s belongings.”
“Like you said, maybe she’s tight around the coin purse?”
“Then what is she doing spending coin on something as frivolous as flowers?”
Durmet bobs his head. “Good point, boss. What can you gain from flowers? Waste of coin, if you ask me.”
“I agree. But if the will turns up, she’d be able to buy enough flowers to make a wood nymph jealous.”
“You thinking she had something to do with it, then?”
I don’t want to think it. But I do. Which leads me to say, “I’ll have to ask her about it.” I grab my pen and ink, write out a short but precise note, and blot it dry.
“What’s that?” Durmet asks as he clicks across the desk to me.
I fold the note and offer it to him. “It’s an invite for a meeting regarding the case.”
Durmet stares at me for a beat before taking the note and, as expected, unfolds it to scan what I’ve written. “Sounds more intimate than a business meeting. A walk and then early dinner?”
The Amethyst Angle Page 9
