The Emperor's Mask (Magebreakers Book 2)

by Ben S. Dobson

The guards at the gate—two large human men—stood to attention as Indree came near. “Constable Inspector,” one of them said. “We haven’t let anyone in since you left, as ordered.” His tone was surprisingly crisp and formal for a hired man.

  Indree nodded her approval. “Open the gates,” she said. “If anyone else comes asking around after we’re in, don’t let on that anything is out of the ordinary. And notify me if anyone shows unusual interest.”

  One of the guards turned and laid his palm against a glyphed copper panel set into a gate pillar. The glyphs flared silver-blue—checking his Astral signature, Tane surmised—and then the huge gates swung inward with a loud creak. Indree led them through, and the slight tingle of a ward ran over Tane’s body as they passed into the estate. Apparently the bluecaps had already added their names to the list of exemptions. On the other side, a long hedge-lined road led toward the manor house.

  “Those weren’t Rosepetal guards, were they?” Tane said, glancing over his shoulder. “You’ve got constables on the gate in borrowed uniforms. And you’re all in plainclothes. The bluecaps must really want this kept quiet.” Now that he was looking, he noticed a dozen other men and women scouring the grounds among shaped hedges and magically-landscaped ponds and the like—also constables, Tane was sure, despite the lack of signature blue caps.

  “Not just us,” said Indree. “Like you said, the Rosepetals are a great house of the Senate. This is a sensitive matter.”

  “And Chief Durren assigned it to you?” Tane raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were on the verge of being demoted.”

  “Lady Abena personally requested I lead the investigation. I suppose she trusts me, after the… the Nieris matter.” She swallowed there, and looked down. She and Tane had both lost a friend to the former University chancellor’s conspiracy, but Indree had taken it much harder—she’d known Allaea all her life. “He didn’t like it, but the Lady Protector outranks the chief constable.”

  “Is good woman, Lady Abena,” Kadka said. “Knows talent. You are best choice.”

  “Thank you, Kadka.” Indree gave her a slight smile.

  Kadka shrugged. “Is true. Most bluecaps I meet are stupid poskan—”

  “Thank you, Kadka,” Indree said again, and glanced pointedly at the constables escorting them.

  Tane chuckled under his breath. Better change the subject. Kadka didn’t always take the hint, although she was improving. He gestured ahead. “Are we headed for the main house, or somewhere else on the grounds?”

  The manor towered just ahead now, a four-story home with huge gabled windows along the roof and a great marble stairway leading to a front door large enough to admit a full-grown manticore. Everything on the Rosepetal estate was oversized, it seemed. Sprite homes were usually built to accommodate guests larger than their hosts, but this seemed like overcompensation.

  “Inside,” said Indree. She led them up the stairs to another pair of guards, who threw open the doors at her order.

  No telltale tingle of a ward prickled Tane’s skin as he passed inside, which was inconceivable for a Senate house. The Rosepetals could afford far better than the simple protections around the outer estate. They must have taken the house wards down for the investigation. It was the only thing that made sense.

  There was no one inside but more out-of-uniform bluecaps, scouring the house with detection spells and divinations. The Rosepetals and their servants would already have been taken to Stooketon Yard for questioning. As far as Tane knew, both Elsa Rosepetal, the senior senator of the house, and her son Byron, the junior, lived on the family’s main estate. It was strange to think of either one sitting in a shabby interrogation chamber at the Yard. But maybe they aren’t. I don’t know who the victim is yet.

  Following Indree through the house, Tane couldn’t help but note the juxtaposition of large and small occupying the same space: ornate nine-foot tall doors with smaller sprite-sized ones cut into their centers; a massive curving stairway to the upper floors with perches along the railing for the tiny and winged; a study containing a great oaken desk beside its miniature twin on a raised pedestal, so that whoever occupied them would be at eye level with one another. All of it was illuminated by silvery magelight—not the simple globes Tane had become accustomed to at the University, but chandeliers and wall sconces of sculpted bronze and artfully shaped glass. The manor had clearly been designed and decorated to show that the Rosepetal’s wealth and importance far outmeasured their diminutive stature.

  On the third floor, yet another pair of guards met them outside one of the manor’s huge doors. It was closed—along with the smaller opening at its center—but Tane had glanced into some of the rooms along the hall, and it wasn’t hard to guess that this door led to someone’s personal chambers, just like the rest.

  “No one’s disturbed the scene?” Indree asked.

  “No one, Inspector Lovial,” answered one of the guards, a white-haired elven woman. “Only the diviners have been inside since you left, and they didn’t touch anything.”

  “Good,” Indree said. “We’re going in.” She motioned them aside, and pushed open the door, holding it for Tane and Kadka. “Just me and the Magebreakers.” She smirked at Tane, there. “The rest of you, wait here.”

  Tane stepped inside, with Kadka just behind. The door opened into a small outer chamber that lacked the rest of the manor’s concessions to the larger races. Save for a single full-sized chair against the wall, the furniture was all sprite-sized, sitting on raised platforms. A desk, a reading chair and book table, a reclining couch by one window, all small enough to seat a child’s doll. Recessed into one wall was a little bookcase filled with quarter-sized books.

  “Looks empty,” said Kadka. “Like someone leaves too fast, forgets some things.”

  She was right. It was the smallest room they’d yet seen, but even so none of the furnishings took up much space—it had a certain abandoned look to it.

  “Probably hard to avoid when you’re a foot tall and insist on living in a house this size,” Tane said, still looking around. A painting of two dragonfly-winged sprites hung above the tiny fireplace—a younger man and an older woman with similar features. Byron Rosepetal and his mother Elsa, almost certainly. The room must belong to one of them. The victim. But which one?

  There was no sign of a murder, though. He raised an eyebrow at Indree.

  “He’s in the bedroom.” Indree pointed at the doorway across the chamber. “Go ahead.”

  He. So it’s Byron. With growing unease, Tane strode through the next doorway, Indree and Kadka just behind.

  He wouldn’t have thought so much blood could come out of a man so small.

  Byron Rosepetal lay on his small bed on a dais at the far side of the room, but he was unrecognizable as the man in the painting above the fireplace. A bronze spike had been driven down through his face, pinning it against the pillow. On a larger man, it might have left the facial features intact, but a sprite’s head was small enough that the inch-wide spike had crushed it almost from ear to ear. Some death-spasm had crookedly unfurled one dragonfly-like wing from his back, its natural iridescence masked by the matte wine-red of dried blood. The same color stained the sheets and the mattress and the dais, running over the edge to pool on the floor below.

  Tane’s stomach heaved, and he looked away.

  But not before noticing one last detail: the spike through Byron Rosepetal’s face wasn’t a spike at all.

  It was sculpted into the shape of an archaic mage’s staff, with a crown encircling the head.

  The sigil of the Knights of the Emperor.

  Chapter Three

  _____

  TANE COULDN’T MAKE himself look any closer. Spellfire, there’s nothing left of his face.

  Kadka was less squeamish. She stepped up to examine the body, and out of the corner of his eye, Tane saw her bend down to peer at the staff-spike jutting from the victim’s head. “Is same symbol on Nieris’ badge, yes?”

  “It is,”
Tane confirmed, swallowing against nausea. “The Mage Emperor’s sigil. Or it was, once. Now the Knights of the Emperor are using it. If we believe they even exist.” The ex-chancellor had supposedly been one of those Knights, and killed Allaea for them in an attempt to sabotage the Protectorate’s first airship. He’d claimed there were more who would carry on the work, but after the incident aboard the Hesliar, neither Tane nor the constabulary had been able to trace the order any further. To find any sign that they existed outside of Nieris’ broken mind.

  Until now.

  Still trying to avoid the grisly scene at the far end of the room, Tane glanced at Indree. “Is this why you brought us here? I thought you said we were suspects. I never found anything more than you did about the Knights of the Emperor.”

  “It’s more than that,” Indree said. She stepped forward to grab Kadka’s arm, preventing her from touching the spike. “Let me show you. Tane, you’re going to have to look.”

  Reluctantly, Tane turned toward the body once more. If he unfocused his eyes, it almost looked unreal, like a toy—a scene laid out by some deeply disturbed child. He wasn’t sure if that made it better, or worse.

  Indree took a handkerchief from her breast pocket and covered her fingers, then reached out and gave the crown at the end of the spike a half-turn. It moved easily at her touch, clearly designed to do so. A band of copper ran around the outside of the crown, etched with a series of glyphs that flared a sudden silver-blue.

  A face appeared, suspended in the air above Byron Rosepetal’s ruined one. Or rather, a mask. It was metallic, probably brass, featureless but for two slitted eyeholes that glowed from behind with silver-blue light. Etched down the middle, the Mage Emperor’s crowned staff stretched from chin to forehead, separating the smooth oval into two halves. The eye-slits appeared to be staring directly at Tane. He took a step to one side, and the mask shifted to follow his movement. An illusion. It has to be. Even as he thought it, Kadka swept her fingers across the space, and they passed freely through.

  Suddenly, a deep, distorted voice boomed from behind the mask. “The Emperor Who Will Be is soon crowned. And on that day, it is not the mages who will break.”

  The mask flickered out of existence.

  Silence for a long moment, and then Tane said, “‘Not the mages who will break’. You think that’s about us. Some kind of taunt for the Magebreakers.” He scowled, and not only because he’d said ‘Magebreakers’ aloud. He didn’t much like the idea that a man might have been murdered to send him and Kadka a message.

  “I think so,” said Indree. “There are rumors about what you did to Nieris, and if these Knights of the Emperor are real, they can’t be pleased about it. But all my superiors can see is that you’re involved somehow. Chief Durren wants you brought in. I hoped you might know something, or find something I didn’t. Something to send the investigation in another direction.”

  “So our reactions pass muster, then?” Tane asked, quirking up an eyebrow.

  “I never really thought you’d killed someone, Tane. You know that. But I had to do this right, for appearances.”

  “And real killer doesn’t turn so green at sight of blood, I think,” said Kadka, with a toothy grin that was far from appropriate for the situation.

  Tane shot Kadka a glare, and then looked back at Indree. “Fine. I don’t have the first idea who did this or why, but if there’s something to find we’d better find it before some idiot decides to arrest us.” Ugh, that means I’m going to have to get closer, doesn’t it? Reluctantly, he approached Byron Rosepetal’s bed. “What have you got so far?”

  “His mother came to check on him when he didn’t come for breakfast this morning, and found him like this,” said Indree. “Divinations on the body say he was killed last night, about an hour before midnight. But that’s all. He was asleep when he died, so no final memory. And our diviners can’t find a trace of anyone on the murder weapon at all.”

  There wasn’t much to see in the bed or on the floor. Just blood. “None?” Tane looked over his shoulder at Indree with a raised eyebrow. “You mean it was masked, or…”

  “Not masked,” said Indree. “There’s just nothing there, like no one had touched it before it went through the victim’s head.”

  “Mask is meant to hide traces, yes?” Kadka asked with a furrowed brow. “This is different? How do you know?”

  “It’s hard to erase the past,” said Tane. “Masking traces on an object usually just means blurring Astral signatures so they’re hard to follow. In the black market they’ll purposely pass goods between enough hands that any meaningful signature gets lost in the noise. But if there’s no signature but the victim’s… either no one has touched this thing for a long while, or whoever did is somehow invisible to divination.”

  “Like you,” Indree said, looking thoughtfully at Kadka.

  Kadka raised her hands. “Not me. Was with Carver.”

  “No, of course you didn’t kill him,” Indree clarified. “But we could be looking for someone like you. Full-blooded orcs are hard to divine, but I’ve managed it before—it would have to be another half-orc.”

  “Possible,” said Tane, “but where did they come from? I’ve never even seen one besides Kadka. Or heard of one, for that matter, outside a few undetailed accounts in texts at the University. And I get the impression there aren’t many even in Sverna. Isn’t that right, Kadka?”

  Kadka nodded. “Happens, but rare. I never meet another.”

  “So for all we know, the Astral invisibility could be a random fluke of birth, unique to her,” said Tane. “And even if there’s another half-orc in Thaless with the same ability, it would only explain getting by detection spells. Physical wards still stop even Kadka when she lacks the right permissions, and I promise you no half-orc has open access to a Senate house.” Tane wasn’t entirely sure how Kadka’s magical elusiveness worked, but it only seemed to apply to Astral detection. A ward didn’t need to search the Astra—if a creature was physically touching it, it didn’t need to know anything but that they lacked proper permission.

  “I suppose it’s not very likely,” Indree admitted. “Look, I’m grasping for any lead at all. We haven’t found anything remotely solid. That’s why you’re here.”

  Tane gestured at the staff-spike jutting from Ulnod Stooke’s body, and winced again at the sight. “What about the gem?” There was a small topaz embedded in the handle, mostly unclouded. “You have to be able to divine the mage who powered it. There’s no hiding that.”

  “We followed it up,” Indree said. “A bulk supplier from the Stooketon Circle markets. We’re questioning her, but most likely it’s just one of thousands like it sold every day.”

  “So you really haven’t found anything?” Tane asked. “No witnesses, no triggered detections?”

  “No one in the house heard anything,” Indree said. “None of the guards saw anyone enter the grounds or the house. No detection spells were triggered. By all appearances, nobody was here at all. But someone killed this man, and it certainly wasn’t a suicide. And whoever did it, they passed through formidable wards around the house and the estate. The Rosepetals can afford the best.”

  Tane glanced over his shoulder at Indree. “Portals are blocked on the grounds too, I assume.” That was standard practice for any suite of security spells—portals were exceptionally dangerous. And in the wake of the Nieris scandal, wards against them had been tightened all over Thaless.

  “They are,” Indree confirmed. “Not even the family can open one, unless they lower the blocking spells.”

  Tane nodded. “So the question is, how did the killer get in?”

  “Here,” said Kadka. She was peering at a large window that opened onto a lower section of gabled roof. “Came in here. Sill is scuffed.” She tested the lower pane; it lifted easily. “And unlocked.”

  “Of course it is,” Tane muttered. “Why bother to lock things when you have wards? Magic never fails.”

  Indree ignored hi
m and gave Kadka a nod. “I noticed the same thing. But there are guards all over the estate in addition to the detections and wards. How anyone got to this window unseen, I haven’t the faintest idea”

  Tane glanced around the walls, noting the ward glyphs near the ceiling. “The wards are keyed to Astral signature?”

  Indree gave him a short nod. “They’re down for the investigation. You probably noticed when we came in. The outer estate wards work off a simple guest list, which is easy enough to manage, but this one is too much trouble to add permissions to.”

  “I use something like it for my office,” said Tane. “As close to flawless as it gets. No badges to steal or semantics to abuse.” Spells and wards worked by making requests of the Astra, the plane of magical energy that lay behind the physical world, and the Astra interpreted instructions very literally. Precision and specificity were key. In this case, the ward was set to allow passage only by specific Astral link. Every guest had to provide a divination focus—hair, blood, fingernail clippings—to be added to the ward’s exemptions.

  “I always wonder with powerful wards, why do they not stop more? Air.” The corner of Kadka’s mouth turned up to reveal her teeth. “Clothes.”

  “They’re usually keyed to sentient things,” Tane explained. “That glyph there”—he pointed to the ward glyphs, at a circle with the upper arc of a half-circle inside it—“basically means ‘everything sentient’. There are refinements from there, and inclusions. Let through harmless animals, keep out common dangers like fire and lightning. As you so tastefully suggest, anything more would cause problems. But for anyone capable of higher thought, there’s no way around a ward like this. If it doesn’t recognize your Astral signature, you’re not getting in. That’s a distinction used often in spellcraft—sentient versus non-sentient. Wards mostly care about the former, but the latter is a common safety precaution. There are plenty of spells and artifacts you don’t want to be able to hurt people.”

  “Like Irondriver’s stove,” Kadka offered.