The Fair Elaine: A Kethem Novel

by Dave Dickie

  Still, it was a better theory than the mystery ship.

  So they kill the Holders. Invisibility spells, from what I knew, only worked if you moved slowly and were careful about touching objects. Which meant the spell would fail when they slit the Holder’s throats. So, no longer invisible, they have to clear the deck before they can safely teleport off. Or, more likely, they can’t leave witnesses who have seen them.

  But what about Maizon? Had he been working with them? Had they kidnapped him? It was unclear. What was clear was that, if I was correct, there was a highly trained kill squad with a hell of a lot of sorcerous firepower that I might run across at some point. I needed to up my game a bit.

  Yimmy was looking at me curiously while the cogs were spinning in my head. “Ok, thanks for all that. It’s been helpful. And I have some business for you,” I said.

  “You looking to put something in the queue?” Yimmy asked. Yimmy worked off of a short list of items on commission, but they tended to take weeks to complete, so even a few ahead of me would put delivery of a new request out several months.

  “I need something faster than that,” I said. “You’re in the club. I know there’s custom work that ends up unclaimed that you and the other independent artificers put on a shelf. What’s the chance you could lay your hands on some of it?”

  He nodded quickly. “Sure, but it's catch as catch can, never know what’s up for sale, and there’s no discounts.” That last bit made no sense to me; unsold inventory is just wasted space. But at the moment, I didn’t care.

  I pulled out three of the Grafton ten thousand rimii chits. His eyes went a little wide. “Price, not an issue,” I said.

  He smiled and looked at the chits a little greedily. “Sure, Gur, whatever. You want a list, it’ll take a bit of time to find out what’s out there. You want to tell me if there’s stuff you know you want, I can buy it on the spot so it’s locked in.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Armor spells. Sorcerous defense spells. Missile protection. Anything offensive you can find. Distress teleport.” And then I thought about the Sambhal temple. “And demon protection.”

  His eyes went wider. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Gur?” Then he slapped his hand over his mouth, an instinctive reaction. His mother did not like cursing. He took his hand away. “Demon pro? The other stuff… well, I can probably get you something, maybe all of it, but that’s going to run more than thirty thousand.” I pulled out a few more chits and handed them to him. He shook his head. “Demon pro… no one’s going to have that. I mean, you know it’s more of a theoretical spell that a real one, right?”

  “No, actually, I don’t Yimmy. What do you mean?”

  “Well, there have been a few demons down the years, spells gone bad and stuff, but maybe once a decade you hear about something like that. There’s not enough for anyone to try stuff on, so there’s nothing on the books for it. I could try to whip something up, but I can’t promise what kind of effect it will have.”

  I almost said to forget it, but something held me back. There’s playing the odds, and that works very well if you had any idea what they were. I was still feeling my way through this thing, and if you didn’t know the odds, you just grabbed anything that might give you an advantage. I gave Yimmy two more chits. “Front of the queue, take what you need for the priority handling.”

  He looked at them doubtfully, then shook his head sorrowfully and took them. “Protection spells are easy. Not much of a mana sink required to kick them off. I’ll have something in a week. Give me a few minutes to write up the contract.” Yimmy, like most artificers, was a stickler about written contracts, which made sense given the one-of-a-kind type of items he produced. The last thing he wanted was to spend a month creating a custom magical item and then have the client refuse payment because it wasn’t what they asked for. Yimmy said, “Contract is going to stipulate a best effort kind of deal. I think it will work, but I seriously hope you never have to use it. ”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Chapter Ten

  It was the next day, sunny and still warmer than usual for the fall. After visiting Yimmy I’d spent a fruitless afternoon trying to find out what I could about the other Holders that had been on the mission without revealing that I was working for Grafton Hold. Commoners asking questions about Holders usually ended up being a direct line to a jail cell unless there was a very good reason. I’d done as much as I could with the Hold’s support staff, all commoners. Or at least any that were willing to trade gossip for coin or beer or both. Nothing that seemed relevant had come out of it, and I went back to my apartment.

  My digs were mid-sized, occupying the second floor of a brick building on the Plaza of Reinous, a large circular cobblestone roundabout with a fountain in the center and a ring of restaurants that constantly tried to push the boundaries of their outside tables further into the plaza. The fountain featured the statue of a stern looking Reinous in robes with a shield in one hand and a dagger in the other, something I found entertaining because Reinous died when a building he was in collapsed, and because the dagger and shield combination made no sense at all.

  The bottom floor of my building was a small retail space for everyday sorcerous items that closed at five, which suited me perfectly. The outside door to my apartment was in the back of the building, in a narrow alleyway barely wide enough for a carriage, which also suited me perfectly. It opened to a small alcove and a staircase that went up to a small landing and a door to my actual living space.

  I walked in the outer door. In the alcove was a large envelope with a wax seal bearing the Grafton glyph, and under it a signature that took me a while to make out because the cursive writing was so messy. I finally realized, more from context, that it was Valont’s. Inside were likenesses of the five Silver Rings, images burned into special paper with spells, along with short biographies that were no more enlightening than the information I’d gathered from the Holder’s servants. I frowned as I looked at Maizon. There was something curiously familiar about him, but I couldn’t place it. He had dark eyes and hair, a square chin, bushy eyebrows. There was a softness to him that seemed oddly out of place, like he was the kind of guy that smiled at puppies and kittens. But again, I couldn’t say why it seemed out of place. He was an accountant. Maybe an accountant that liked puppies. Nothing odd about that. Then I thought about his trip to Ohulhug territory and it hit me again. That was what was out of place. “What were you doing there, Maizon?” I asked out loud. Speaking Ohulhug was an unusual skill, but he couldn’t have been the only one, and someone less suited for a mission like that was hard to imagine.

  My empty apartment declined to answer me.

  Inside, I cooked a meal of sausage and sautéed spinach and added a bit of local coarse brown bread. Then I laid down in my bed and waited for inspiration to come. Sleep arrived first. When I woke up in the morning, sun just peering in through the window, I decided the next step was to examine the bodies. Given they were due for disintegration in three days, there was a bit of a fire burning. That, and preservation spells were not a hundred percent effective. Which made the issue of smell a bit of a concern.

  You can’t just waltz up to Uncle Wolf and ask to examine bodies. Even pretending to be a grieving relative will only get you so far, and the priests of Uncle Wolf were notoriously good judges of character. Skulking was not a good option.

  Fortunately, I had a more direct path to getting what I needed. I took a carriage to a street near the docks, stopping at a red brick building with wide, expensive glass windows and brilliant white trim, wooden doors painted in a variety of pastel colors, with stone stairs decorated with lions, gargoyles, badgers, and other real and mythical animals. Upscale apartments, in other words. I paid the driver, who went looking for another fare. I found the door I wanted, a robin egg blue job with the number 23 in beaten copper nailed to the outside. I knocked. After a few minutes, the door opened and Daesal stood looking at me.

  Dae
sal is, at first glance, an attractive, medium height young woman with striking eyes, long brown hair and a permanent look of curiosity on her face. That was the case on second and third glances as well. You had to spend some time with her before you started to realize that she was not what she seemed. Not that I had any idea what she actually was, but a normal young woman was definitely not it. She was smart as a tack, a competent enchanter, and had been educated in a variety of seemingly unrelated areas with no rhyme or reason to it that I could see. She was as comfortable talking about pre-fall Lanotalis Empire military uniforms as she was about recent breakthroughs in telekinesis spells. But the strangest thing, by far, was that she was the daughter of a Gold and Silver Ring in one of the Holds in Salta, which was a long way from Bythe. In fact, she was a Silver Ring herself. You had to look carefully to see the slightly lighter shade of skin where it was supposed to be resting on her finger. How she had convinced the Hold to let her run off and do… well, I wasn’t entirely sure what she did in Bythe… was beyond me. Why she would want to was beyond me as well.

  She had on a long electric blue dress that stopped an inch off the ground, conservative and expensive, along with tasteful jewelry that also looked expensive, and a half hood, half shawl made out of fine wool, which also looked, needless to say, expensive. It looked overly warm for the coming day, but Daesal always seemed to run colder than normal people. I’d never seen her sweat. She also had a walking staff with a hunk of crystal embedded at the end. Some enchanters found a physical channel for their spells made it easier to cast them successfully. Daesal seemed to fit into that category. But then again, maybe she just did it to make a statement. Or to look fashionable. Even though we had worked a lot of jobs together after we’d first met I still found her motivations hard to fathom.

  She looked at me and said, “Gur.” She leaned a little forward and I could see her nostrils flair. “You are working a job.” I wasn’t sure if that was a question or a statement of what she’d picked up with that little sniff.

  “I am,” I said.

  “You have been to the docks,” she said.

  “I have,” I said.

  That was definitely the sniff, but how she could pick up a scent from more than 24 hours ago after a bath and a change of clothes was a mystery. I waited for a moment. Daesal would occasionally lick the back of my hand if she was curious. Her sense of taste was even more discriminating than her sense of smell. Her sense of socially appropriate behavior, a little less so. It was because of those bloodhound sharp senses we’d met, or more precisely, why we had become acquaintances, after a run in with a few street thugs that had been shaking down a set of old shopkeepers in a part of the city that had seen better days. She’d been wearing jewelry in a place she shouldn’t have been. I had been tailing the thugs, trying to get a sense of the size of the crew and who was leading it. That’s where I found out she was also quite good with a dagger.

  Daesal was a very well rounded individual.

  She cocked her head and looked at me strangely. She hadn’t blinked once. It was kind of eerie. But then, that’s Daesal. “You are worried. You think you are not up to the job.”

  “I’d say more concerned than worried,” I said.

  Then she did blink, but it seemed deliberate, like a little pretend tell that she was thinking about what I had just said. “Tell me about it.”

  “Don’t you want to talk about the weather a bit before we jump right into it?” I asked.

  She looked up at the clear blue sky, then back to me with a puzzled expression on her face. “The weather?”

  "It was a joke, Daesal.”

  She flushed a little. “Yes, of course. Would you like to come inside?”

  I followed her in. The front door entered into a tiny alcove with another door on the other side. The inner door was locked. It allowed deliveries to be dropped off when she was away. Inside the inner door, the apartment was one of those thin, multilevel places with a narrow staircase leading up to the next level. The ground floor had a front sitting room, a small dining area, and a kitchen. It was all very tidy, with tasteful furniture, a few paintings and a glow lamp with a sorcerous light source, all expensive but generic. No portraits of the family, no knickknacks, no mementos of home. She gestured to a chair and I sat.

  “Tea?” she asked. She had one of those Elementalist fire runes inscribed on a flat stone oven top and could heat things on command. I shook my head no. She sat and watched me attentively. I did a fast recap of everything that had happened so far. When I was done, she said, “So, if I follow, you have taken a job with the head of Grafton Hold to clear one of his Holders, and by extension, his Hold, from a crime. The crime in question is the theft of a sorcerous item of unknown power, along with the death of four other Holders and a group of seamen, occurring as their ship was entering port. You have surmised that they were attacked by a highly trained group of warriors with the aid of large quantities of either spells or artificer’s devices. It is not clear if Grafton’s Silver Ring Holder is complicit in the theft or not. You believe the Sambhal temple is involved, but you are not sure how. Is that accurate?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “I see,” she said. “And how can I aid in this investigation, for I must admit, you have piqued my curiosity.”

  I grinned. I thought that might happen. “I want to look over the bodies and affects. It’s a little easier if a Holder is asking.”

  She nodded, serious as always. “Ahhh, the old mistress-servant ploy.” I nodded. “Then we should be about it,” she said, standing. She gathered a few things, including her Hold ring, which she slipped on her finger, swapped out the shawl for a longer cloak with her Hold’s glyph sewn in, and we exited out to the street. The Kydaos temple was a few miles away so I waved down a carriage.

  During the ride we made Daesal’s version of small talk. “The Sambhal temple. The women were attractive?” she asked.

  “Very,” I said.

  “Did you want to have sex with them?” she asked.

  I swallowed my laugh. Daesal’s lack of reserve in socially appropriate behavior was equally matched by her lack of conversational boundaries. “Minus the glamour, the answer is still very much yes.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “And yet, it sounds like this Sariel was making herself available to you, but you chose not to avail yourself of her.”

  I nodded and said, “That seemed to be the case. But while Sariel was very attractive, there’s always a price to pay for that kind of… relationship.”

  “Not a monetary one,” said Daesal.

  “No. Or maybe that as well, but more significantly, there’s a connection, an obligation that I don’t take lightly. Not something I want to feel with someone I don’t know well, and definitely not someone I don’t know well that is involved in a case I’m working. You need a clear head,” I said.

  “You, but not everyone feels this way,” she replied.

  I nodded. “Not everyone.” Not most people, I suspected. But that started me wondering about Kyung-chul and Leppol. About the Sambhal temple and Holders in general. Sure, nothing would leak out about it, no price to pay on the home front, no chance of blackmail. But that didn’t mean there weren’t strings attached. I wondered what kind of power Kyung-chul had over the Lord Holder. It would be subtle, but that didn’t mean weak.

  We spent the rest of the thirty minute ride on less awkward topics and the carriage finally slowed, then stopped. The doorman let us out.

  The Kydaos temple was a squat black building, maybe forty feet high, and it looked like a fortress. It had slits for windows, tall ones but they still looked like they were meant as arrow slots, not to let light in. It had wide metal doors and an entrance that looked like a giant wolf’s head with an open mouth, fangs stretching from the top jaw and curving down to become cleverly disguised columns to support the roof. It always felt like you were being swallowed alive when you walked through the front door. Kydaos was another religion I didn’t ge
t. The god of war. Why was he a wolf? And the mojo channeled through his priests, who were referred to as Uncle Wolf when you spoke to one, seemed like an odd mix. Healing was part of it, and that made some kind of sense. But preservation and disintegration of dead bodies seemed like an odd combination. They could generate a wave of killing fury in a battalion of troops, and they could make two sides in the middle of slaughtering each other suddenly drop weapons and hug.

  Like I said, I don’t get it.

  But Kydaos and Uncle Wolf were the de facto handlers of the dead, in battle or otherwise, and the temple was where the bodies from the attack on the Fair Elaine had ended up.

  As we walked up to the entrance, Daesal put out an arm to stop me. She closed her eyes and looked down for a second. When she looked back up, it was a different person, a Silver Ring from a Hold looking at commoners. She marched forward, steps determined and purposeful. I walked behind and to the right of her, trying to wear the half fawning, half lofty attitude of a Silver Ring manservant. The fawning part didn’t come easily.