"Where the hell are all our servers?" demanded Smith, struggling out to the center buffet with an immense tray that bore the magnificent Ballotine of Sea Dragon. Diners exclaimed in delight and pointed at its egg-gilded scales, its balefully staring golden eyes.
"The servers? Whanging their little brains out in the bushes, what do you think?" Crucible replied sourly. He took the ballotine from Smith and held it aloft with the artificial smile of a professional wrestler, acknowledging the diners' cheers a moment, before setting it down and going to work on it with the carving knife.
"We've got to get more people out here! Where's Burnbright?"
"She ran off crying," said Crucible, sotto voce, producing the first perfectly stratified slice of dragon-goose-duck-hen-quail-egg and plopping it down on the plate of a lady who wore nothing but glitter and three large artificial sapphires.
"What?"
"Asked her what was the matter. She wouldn't tell me. But I saw her talking to that doctor," muttered Crucible, sawing away at another slice. He gave Smith a sidelong sullen glare. "If that bloody greenie's been and done something to our girl, me and the boys will pitch him down the cliff. You tell his lordship so."
"Hell--" Smith turned wildly to look up at the lit windows of the hotel. Lord Ermenwyr, like most of the other guests, was seated on his balcony enjoying the view of the fireworks. Cutt and Crish were ranged on one side of him, Stabb and Strangel on the other, and behind his chair Agliavv Willowspear stood. Willowspear was gazing down onto the terrace with an expression of concern, apparently searching through the crowd.
"Smith!" trumpeted Mrs. Smith, bearing a five-tiered cake across the terrace with the majesty of a ship under full sail. "Your presence is requested in the lobby, Smith." As she drew near she added, "It's Crossbrace from the City Wardens. I've already seen to it he's got a drink."
Smith felt a wave of mingled irritation and relief, for though this was probably the worst time possible to have to pass an inspection, Crossbrace was easygoing and amenable to bribes. Dodging around Bellows, who was carrying out a dish of something involving flames and fruit sauce, Smith paused just long enough to threaten a young pair of servers with immediate death if they didn't crawl out from under the gazebo and get back to work. Then he straightened his tunic, ran his hands through his hair, and strode into the hotel, doing his best to look confident and cheerful.
"Smith!" Crossbrace toasted him with his drink, turning from an offhand examination of the hotel's register. "Joyous couplings. Thought I'd find you joyously coupling with some sylph!"
"Joyous couplings to you, too," said Smith heartily, noting that Crossbrace was in uniform rather than Festival undress. "Who has time to joyously couple when you're catering the orgy? You've got a drink? Have you dined? We've got a Sea Dragon Ballotine out on the terrace that's going fast!"
"Business first," said Crossbrace regretfully. "Little surprise inspection. But I expect you're all up to code, eh, in a first-class establishment like this?"
"Come and see," said Smith, bowing him forward. "What are you drinking? Silverbush? Let me just grab us a bottle as we go through the bar."
The inspection was cursory, and went well. No molds were discovered anywhere they didn't belong. No structural deficiencies were found, nor any violations of Salesh's codes regarding fire or flood safety. Crossbrace contented himself with limiting the upstairs inspection to a walk down the length of the corridor. Then they went back down to the kitchen, by which time they'd half emptied the bottle of Silverbush and some of the guests on the restaurant terrace were beginning to writhe together in Festival-inflamed passion.
"And you've got to see the drains, of course," Smith insisted, opening the door into the back area. Crossbrace followed him out readily, and looked on as Smith, with a flourish, flung the trap wide.
"Look at that!"
"Damn, you could eat out of there," said Crossbrace in admiration. He took down the area lamp and shined it into the drain, as the distant sound of erotic enchantment drifted across the water. "Beautiful! And that's an old pipe, too. City records says this place was built back in Regent Kashlar's time."
"S'right," affirmed Smith, refilling Crossbrace's glass and having a good gulp himself from the bottle. "But they built solid back then."
Somewhere close at hand, hoarse panting rose to a scream of ecstasy.
"Didn't they, though?" Crossbrace had another drink. "What's your secret?"
"Ah." Smith laid a finger beside his nose. "Scourbrass's Foaming Wonder! See?" He waved a hand at the ten canisters neatly stacked against the wall.
"That's great stuff," said Crossbrace, and stepped close to read the warning.
Smith heard, ominous under all the giggling and groaning, the sound of someone running through the kitchen. The area door flew open, and Pinion stared out at him, looking panic-stricken.
"Boss! Somebody's gone and died in--"
Crossbrace straightened up abruptly and turned around. Pinion saw him and winced. "In Room 2
,"
he finished miserably.
"Oh, dear," Crossbrace said, sobering with alchemical swiftness. "I suppose in my capacity as City Warden I'd better have a look, hadn't I?"
Smith ground his teeth. They went back upstairs.
"He'd ordered room service," Pinion explained. "Never called to have the dishes taken away. I went up to see was he done yet, and nobody answered the knock. Opened the door finally and it was dark in here, except for the light coming in from the terrace and a little fire on the hearth. And there he sits."
Smith opened the door cautiously and stepped inside, followed by Crossbrace and Pinion. "Mr. Coppercut?" he called hopefully.
But the figure silhouetted against the window was dreadfully motionless. Crossbrace swore quietly and, finding a lamp, lit it.
Sharplin Coppercut sat at the writing table, sagging backward in his chair. His collar had been wrenched open, and he stared at the ceiling with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth, rather as though he was about to announce that he'd just spotted a particularly fearsome spider up there.
On the table across the room were the dishes containing his half-eaten meal. The chair had been pushed back and fallen, the napkin dropped to the floor, and a small table midway between the dinner table and the desk lay on its side, with the smoking apparatus it had held scattered across the carpet.
"That's
the
Sharplin Coppercut, isn't it?" said Crossbrace.
"He's the only one I know of," groaned Smith, going to the body to feel for a pulse. He couldn't find one.
"Saw his name in the register. Dear, dear, Smith, you've got a problem on your hands," stated Crossbrace.
"Oh, gods, he's stone dead. Crossbrace, you know it wasn't our food!"
"Sat down to eat his dinner," theorized Crossbrace, studying the dining table. "Had his appetizer; ate it all but a bit of parsley. Drank half a glass of wine. Working his way through a plate of fried eel--that's your house specialty, isn't it?--when he comes over queer and needs air, so he loosens his collar and gets up to go to the window. Bit clumsy by this time, so he bumps over the smoking table on his way. Makes it to the chair and collapses, but dies before he can get the window open. That's the way it looks, wouldn't you say?"
"But there was nothing wrong with the eels," Smith protested. "I had some myself this aftern--" He spotted something on the table and stared at it a moment. Then his face lit up.
"Yes! Crossbrace, come look at this! It wasn't food poisoning at all!"
Crossbrace came around to look over the corpse's shoulder. There, scrawled on a tablet bearing the Hotel Grand-view imprimis, were the words AVENGE MY MURD.
"Oh," he said. "Well, this puts a different light on it."
"Somebody
killed
him," said Smith. "And he took the trouble to let us know!" He felt like embracing Coppercut. An accidental death by food poisoning could wreck a restaurant's reputation, but a high-profile revenge slaying in one could only be considered good publicity.
"So
somebody
killed him," said Crossbrace thoughtfully. "Gods know he had a lot of enemies. Poison in his wine? Poisoned dart through the window? Could have been a mage hired to do the job with a sending, for that matter. Look at the coals in the fireplace, what'd he want with a fire on such a warm night? Suspicious. Maybe a smoke efrit suffocated him? Lucky break for you, Smith."
"Isn't it?" Smith beamed at the corpse.
"But it makes a lot more work for me." Crossbrace sighed. "I'll have to get the morgue crew up here, then I'll have to investigate and question everybody, which will take all bloody night. Then I'll have to file a report in triplicate, and there's his avengers to notify, because he must have kept some on retainer ... and here it is Festival time, and I had an alcove booked at the Black Veil Club for tonight."
"That's a shame," said Smith warily, sensing what was coming.
"It cost me a fortune to get that alcove, too. My lady friend will be furious. I think I'm going to do you a favor, Smith," Crossbrace decided.
"Such as?"
"It's Festival. I'm going to pretend this unfortunate incident hasn't yet happened to stain your restaurant's good name, all right? We both know it wasn't food poisoning, but rumors get out, don't they? And the funniest things will influence those clerks in the Permit Office." Crossbrace swirled his drink and looked Smith in the eye.
"But we do have a famous dead man here something's got to be done about. So I'll come back in two days' time, when Festival's done and everything's business as usual. You'll have a body for me and not only that, you'll have found out who, where, when, how, and why, so all I have to do is arrest the murderer, if possible, and file the paperwork. I'll have a Safety Certificate for you. Everybody wins. Right?"
"Right," said Smith, knowing a cleft stick when he saw one.
"See you after Festival, then," said Crossbrace, and finished his drink. He handed the glass to Smith. "Thanks."
Having sworn Pinion to secrecy and sent him down to serve food, Smith finished the bottle of Silverbush and indulged in some blistering profanity. As this accomplished nothing, he then proceeded to examine the room more closely, while the sounds of a full-scale orgy floated up from the terrace below.
There was no trace of anything suspicious on the uneaten food, nor anything that his nose could detect in the wine. The empty appetizer plate had held some sort of seafood, to judge from the smell, but that was all. No hint of Scour-brass's Foaming Wonder, which relieved Smith very much.
He dragged Coppercut's body to the bed, laid it out, and examined him with a professional's eye for signs of subtle assassination. No tiny darts, no insect bites, no wounds in easily overlooked places; not even a rash. Coppercut was turning a nasty color and going stiff, but other than that he seemed fine.
Straightening up, Smith looked around the room and noticed that the low coals were smoking out in the fireplace. He approached it cautiously, in case there really was an efrit or something less pleasant in there, and bent down to peer in. The next moment he had grabbed a poker and was raking ashes out onto the hearth, but it was just about too late: for of the gray ruffled mass of paper ash there, only a few blackened scraps were left intact. Muttering to himself, he picked them up and carried them out to the circle of lamplight on the table. Writing. Bits of scrolls?
Spreading them out, turning them over, he found that some were in what was obviously a library scribe's neat hand; others in a rushed-looking backhand that consistently left off letter elements, like the masts on the little ship that signified the
th
sound, or the pupil of the eye that stood for the suffix
ln.
Two hands, but no sense: He had the words
journeyed swiftly to implore
and
so great was his
and
unnatural,
also
ghastly tragedy
and
swift anger
and
they could not escape.
Only one offered any clue at all. It said
to the lasting sorrow of House Spellmetal, he
--
The name
Spellmetal
was vaguely familiar to Smith. He knit his brows, staring at the fragment.
House
Spellmetal. Somebody wealthy, some dynasty that had suffered notoriety. When had that been? Ten years ago? Fifteen? More? Smith attempted to place where he'd been living when the name was in the news. And there had been a scandal, and the son and heir of House Spellmetal had died. A massacre of some kind, not a decent vendetta.
Smith turned and stared at the fireplace again. Now he noticed the scribe's case sitting open in a chair. He went over and peered into it. Three-quarters empty, though it had clearly held more. Someone had pulled out most of the case's contents and burned them.
"Blackmail," he said aloud.
He looked speculatively at Sharplin Coppercut. Closing the scribe's case and tucking it under his arm, Smith went out and locked the door behind him.
The dead man lay on his bed, staring up in horror. Below his window bosoms jiggled, thighs danced, bottoms quivered, tongues sought for nectar, and slender Youth kicked off its golden sandals and got down to business. Life pulsed and shivered, deliciously, deliriously, in every imaginable variation on one act; but it had finished with Sharplin Coppercut.
Mrs. Smith had retired when he went to her, and was sitting up in bed smoking, calmly reading a broadside. The staff inhabited the long attic that ran the length of the hotel, divided into several rooms, far enough above the garden for the sounds of massed passion to be a little less evident as it filtered up through the one narrow gabled window.
"Not going out, Smith?" she inquired. Her gaze fell on the case he carried, and she looked up at him in sharp inquiry. "Dear, dear, have we had a contretemps of some kind?"
"You said Sharplin Coppercut isn't a food critic," said Smith. "What kind of journalist is he, then?"