Necrospect: Chronicles of the Wizard-Detective

by J. B. Markes

  The number of pupils the Tower of Many Tongues had working late into the night was admirable. The manifestation school would be completely still at this hour. Of course, it was my fault. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my own troubles, I might have found the energy to care. Moreover, if I were where I was supposed to be, I wouldn’t be getting interrogated.

  Miss Ives, the Tower of Seeing, come at once. Gustobald’s voice rang out clear in my mind, so vivid that I glanced over my shoulder to ensure he wasn’t standing behind me. The urgency of the message gave me reservations about replying in front of the inspector. I didn’t need him following me to meet a necromancer at midnight.

  “What is this all about, Mr. Raines?”

  “I think it would be for the best if you stayed away from Mr. Bartleby and Gustobald Pitch.”

  “Everyone tells me that,” I said, straightening my robe and retrieving my satchel from the seat to my left. “Frankly, I’m tired of people telling me what I should or shouldn’t do. They’re afraid of necromancy. I’m not.”

  “It’s not about necromancy. One or both of these men has been lying to you—to everyone.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “As we speak, I am in the process of gathering evidence that will greatly shift the dynamics of this investigation. And for what it’s worth, you are one of the few people of whose innocence I am certain.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you were in the infirmary at the time of the murder,” he added, seeing my confusion. “I’ve already spoken to your master. He affirms that you met these men after the crime took place.”

  “How would Master Virgil know?” I asked, but the inspector ignored the question.

  “And because you have committed yourself to aiding Gustobald Pitch in finding the truth, something you wouldn’t have done had you known he was involved, I trust that your intentions are indeed pure.”

  “Show me your evidence,” I said, standing up and slinging my satchel over my shoulder. “If you trust me—and want me to trust you—show me what information you have against Gustobald.”

  “As I said, I have nothing at the moment.” The inspector remained in his seat, his cool demeanor giving me little reason to doubt his words. “But I will. And soon.”

  “You’re wrong, Inspector. With respect.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t muster the inspector’s stoicism. He gave me a grin that told me he knew I was trying. “While you’re wasting precious time,” I said, “I will be focused on finding the guilty party, at which time I will present my own evidence to you. Good evening, Mr. Raines.”

  I felt the stiffness in my limbs as I passed him by, all the while wondering how long he would monitor my comings and goings. I headed for the gate that would lead me to Caller’s Court and the Archseer’s Tower beyond. I glanced back only once to ensure the inspector was still sitting where I left him, and I regretted it instantly.

  Miss Ives, come at once.

  “Miss Ives,” Raines called, and I held my breath as I turned around completely. To my surprise, his brow was furrowed with concern. “There’s been another victim of this cursed affair; the bookkeeper Mathis has taken his own life—or so we are meant to believe. Whoever killed Bevlin Bartleby is surely involved. I know you think Gustobald is your friend, but can you be so sure he feels the same way about you? I can’t stop you from seeing him, but do take care. And remember, there are worse things in the world than necromancy.”

  Chapter 15

  After casting a quick ward to wake myself up, I was moving at a brisk pace through the empty streets. I took Caller’s Court through the city center, where the glow of the Archseer’s spire washed the stars from the sky. I had avoided the area since my last misadventure which had landed me in front of the Council of Masters. There was no telling what trouble I would get into this time.

  Gustobald had never sent a mental message to me before. His idea of urgent differed greatly from that of the rest of the world, but the late hour enhanced my anxiety, so I quickened my steps. There was no one in sight when I arrived at the Tower of Seeing.

  I was contemplating whether I should await his arrival or return to the Tower of Hands—entering the Archseer’s tower alone wasn’t an option—when the necromancer’s strained whisper pierced the night. “Over here!” In the cobbled outer courtyard, there was nowhere to hide in the light of the tower, but it was difficult to spot him; the darkness clung to him like spider silk. “What took you so long, girl? Have you not heard?”

  “The inspector told me Mathis is dead,” I replied. I saw nothing moving in the near vicinity, but Gustobald had already proven my eyes to be unreliable. “What are we doing here?”

  “Mathis jumped to his death from the very top of this tower early this morning. As it happens, we’re standing in the exact spot where he landed. We need to gain entrance to his private quarters tonight, while the tower is empty.”

  “Hold on, how do you know all this? And how can you be sure it’s empty?”

  “A little bird told me.”

  “I need more than that before I go breaking into the Tower of Seeing again. What is this little bird’s name?”

  “My bird is a rat, if you must know. Now we’re losing precious time. The ground floor is clear, but not for long. Onward!” He darted across the yard as quickly as the uneven cobble permitted. He loped from side to side like an overgrown monkey, the tip of his crooked hat bouncing this way and that.

  I dropped my head and stooped over to catch my breath. There were no blood stains on the cobble to indicate where Mathis had touched down, but a lump cropped up in my throat as I contemplated just what I was seeking.

  Half a dozen oaths simmered just beneath my lips, but none were sufficiently solemn for the evening’s events. If the inspector was still following me, I was finished. Blinking my eyes, I whispered the true-sight chant. My blood tingled as my vision shifted. The gloom didn’t recede, but I could see the street cats at play. There were no people in any direction.

  Cancelling the spell to conserve my energy, I followed after the old man toward the entrance. He didn’t hesitate before entering, but ran through with such haste one might have guessed he was being pursued by the Sentinels. I wondered what it was like to be so sure of oneself all the time. What was it that changed in the mind of a wizard upon achieving the rank of expert? A wizard-in-training spent her days from novice to apprentice learning all the rules that the journeymen, experts, and masters completely ignored.

  By this time I was intimately familiar with the Tower of Seeing, so I knew exactly where I was heading. I rushed to the staircase and up to the second floor. Miss Sinclair was still in Sentinel custody and wouldn’t be troubling us, but there were always people coming and going from the ground floor of the tower. There was no way of knowing how long the main chamber would be empty. I didn’t breathe easy until I reached the top of the stairs and the lower floor had disappeared completely from view.

  I came out into the familiar smell of dust and paper. The depository was exactly as I remembered, and I couldn’t resist glancing into the Labyrinth as I passed. Gustobald was standing against the outer wall, waving impatiently at me to catch up. “I trust you’ve brought your wand, Miss Ives,” he said when I was close enough for him to whisper. “It shouldn’t come to that, but you can never be too careful.” When I nodded, he continued along the wall, past the hidden portal which led to the Archseer’s chamber, to a more traditional doorway farther down.

  Mathis’s door was locked, but there were no magical wards in place. Gustobald waved his hand over the lock and the latch clicked. Although he was considered a servant, granting him no official status at the academy, Mathis’s living quarters were much larger than my own. It was a petty sentiment but I couldn’t help but feel slighted, despite the fact that Mathis was now dead and it was possible the killer was monitoring us as well.

  “Look for anything of value,” Gusto
bald said. “No one has come or gone from his private quarters since his death except for a pair of sentinels. Be ready if anyone else shows up to cover their tracks.”

  “Do you think he was murdered, thrown from the tower?” I tripped in the dark and landed hard against a table which had been pushed flush against the wall. “Could we get some light?”

  Gustobald tapped a finger on a small shaving mirror resting on the ledge above the wash basin. The cantrip danced beneath the surface of the glass until it glowed with such force that the entire room was bathed in white. I felt uneasy in the growing light, wondering how much could be seen from the outside through the slats of the shuttered window. Gustobald didn’t seem concerned.

  “Give me a boost,” he said as he reached up and brushed the dust from the top of the wardrobe. I shoved the nearby stool with my foot. Its wooden pegs creaked loudly across the stone floor until it reached the sheepskin rug and overturned at his feet. He shot me a curious look, but I opened the drawer of the table and sifted through the odds and ends.

  There was a hand towel draped over a rung beneath the clay water basin. Soap, lemon water, tooth cloth, razors—the usual items for any commoner’s humble living space. It wouldn’t be long before the simplest cantrips were beyond my capabilities and I would need these base items myself.

  “What put you in such a kerfuffle?” Gustobald asked as he stepped on the stool to get a better look above.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “About Mathis?”

  “I had to hear about it from Inspector Raines. He was harassing me tonight right before I came to meet you.”

  “How would I tell you? I haven’t seen you.” Gustobald’s voice was muffled, but I could hear the caution in his voice. “There’s nothing up here.” He stepped back down into the light to shrug his shoulders. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “Adele Sinclair is still in custody. It might be time to come clean and get her released.”

  “She’s been released. Mathis vindicated her in his death note.” Gustobald pointed to the large sack under the bed, which tumbled to the floor, spilling its contents: a change of clothes, a pouch of dry rations, a large sack of coin, and a leather-bound book. “Miss Ives, if you please. My knees.”

  “Did he confess in the death note?” I asked as I inspected the book, which was relatively thin for its heavy cover. A quick divination revealed the book was safe to read. It was to be expected; commoners rarely had access to sigils of warding. I opened it and found the name Harold Mathis scribbled on the inside cover. “It’s Mathis’s journal,” I said, leafing through. “The last entry was over a month ago; the most recent entries have been removed. We’re at a dead end.”

  “Mathis was packed for a journey.” Gustobald sat down on the stool. “He was going to run. Someone changed his mind and then destroyed any evidence they were involved.”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe the Sentinels took the pages as evidence.” I thumbed through the pages and quickly discovered a common thread. “He writes a lot of bad things about Miss Sinclair.”

  “There’s no love lost between those two.”

  “Gods be good, some of these comments. He’s no gentleman, I’ll say that.” I placed the diary in my satchel for safe keeping and looked to the bookshelf for answers, hoping to find the missing pages tucked in among the tomes.

  Mathis had quite an impressive collection. One spine bearing the name Orinaster caught my eye. I pulled it and fanned through its contents. Orinaster was one of the great names in manifesting. His tomes had been copied and recopied over the ages in order to provide basic instruction to the budding hand mages of the world. Other masters of old were represented, as well: Sethin, Merles, Rylarson, Serra Sol, and many others; all prominent names in their respective fields. “He has spellbooks,” I said, holding up Rylarson’s On the Origins of Transmutation.

  “Doing a little independent study?” Gustobald asked.

  “Pretty sure the Archseer wouldn’t agree to it,” I said, returning to the stacks on the shelves. “Wasn’t that the whole point of having an illiterate overseeing the records in the first place?”

  There was much clutter; for a bookkeeper, Mathis was remarkably unorganized in his personal life. Having no luck with the missing pages, I surveyed the nearby writing table, which, except for a small cleared space by the chair, was completely covered by ink, quills, candle dishes, food dishes, drinking glasses, loose scraps of paper, and more instructional books for the novice wizard. I shifted the papers, revealing remedial formulae written in uneven script. “He was studying, all right,” I said. “Not even close to casting his first cantrip though.”

  “What do you make of it?” Gustobald stroked his braided beard, a habit which increased in frequency whenever his pipe was out of arm’s reach.

  “Well, I think you’re right about one thing. The fact he has coin at all means he was running—or planning to. Otherwise, academy notes would be more convenient. And that’s a lot for a commoner, even one in his position. Maybe someone paid him to steal secret knowledge from the Labyrinth.”

  “Nonsense,” the necromancer said. “He’d never find his way back out. There are no exceptions.”

  “Not even with magical support?”

  “Especially with magical support.” Gustobald punctuated his response with a bitter scoff, as if he held all the answers to that mysterious place.

  “How can it be ‘especially’ if there are no exceptions whatsoever?”

  “No one goes in and comes back out. That much is as certain as your incessant questioning, girl.”

  “What if Mathis only needed to know how to read—to read magic and not cast it. We all learn to read it long before we can put any of it into practice. He’d be able to identify whichever book his employer was looking for, but the Labyrinth wouldn’t hold him when he walked out with it.”

  “A fine theory,” Gustobald said, rubbing his bony knees through his robes. “But it’s been tested.”

  “When was it tested?”

  “I—how should I know? I’m just offering common knowledge. No one—not even a commoner—can ever walk out of that place. No one has been able to fool the artificers of old.”

  Not yet, anyway. Nothing is foolproof. Strictly speaking, the magic would never leave my body. I would be forever bound to it, even as I lost the tolerance to cast it. But the Labyrinth wasn’t fully understood by even the greatest minds of our time. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps a person physically unable to cast magic was the same as a person who didn’t know how. It was a conundrum best put out of mind.

  “We have nothing to go on,” I said. “Not without the missing pages. We have no choice but to wait for Mr. Lazrus’s analysis of the poison. A lot of good it will do us, at this point. The truth might have died with Mathis.”

  “Mathis may have been forced to confess his guilt, but he wasn’t innocent.” Gustobald ran his finger over the window sill. “He was clearly preparing to run when someone compelled him to write this letter and then jump to his death.”

  “Compelled?” I asked. “A mind mage?”

  The necromancer shrugged. “Someone saw him as a loose end, and that person is still out there. We’ll find out who it is.”

  “Let’s hope so.” I crossed my arms against the draft coming from the open doorway. “Before that person comes looking for us.”

  Chapter 16

  The following day I returned to my duties, desperate to take my mind off the Archseer, the inspector, and the commoner Mathis. It felt good to be back in the yard among the shouts and incantations I understood so well. The initiates always overcompensated for lack of confidence with fierce chanting more akin to war cries. I normally would have found it humorous, mainly because I remembered doing it myself in the early years of my study. But try as I might, I was having trouble focusing. Recent events had overshadowed my everyday routine.

  That day began the Multidiscipline Magic Aptitude Group Evaluations, the quarterly join
t exercises known simply as “the games” among junior members of the academy. It was always a chaotic time for everyone involved. The event was intended to allow students to learn more about other schools in order to lay the groundwork for cooperation upon graduating to journeyman, but tensions ran high as pupils balanced their competitive natures against the uncertainty of exactly how much leeway they had to blast their opponents to bits. Officially they had none, but accidents were known to happen.

  The enchanting school was invited to the Tower of Hands for the first day of training, a comfortable matchup that allowed the mancers to safely work out their aggression on illusory monsters. It was unlikely any of them would be injured, as it is impossible for an illusion to harm someone who disbelieves it; and the novice creations of the lowest-ranking mages of the Tower of the Mind left much to be desired.

  “Don’t get overconfident,” I said, moving from person to person. “I’ve seen mancers fall to mind mages before. The key to any illusion’s power lies in the details, so look for the weak spots, particularly any part of the creature that seems discolored or malformed. There’s no end to the tricks initiates use to cover up their poorly conceived images.”

  “Has everyone turned over their wands?” the apprentice Reardon asked, rushing into the wings. “I mean it. Hand them over now or you’ll be disqualified.” When Reardon noticed me for the first time, he stared at me as though I had suddenly shapeshifted into a lizard. “What are you doing here?”

  “She’s giving us pointers,” the initiate Wickam said. “Some of us have never done this before.”

  “It’s not so hard,” Theodore replied. “If it moves, you blast it. If it dies you win.”

  “Be quiet, Theodore,” Reardon said, still looking at me as he collected two more wands from the pupils.

  “What if it doesn’t die?” Elaine asked.

  Theodore clapped his hands loudly. “Then you blast it again.”