Three Blacksuits stood in the ornate lobby on the gold-thread Skeldic rug: two male, one female. Light shone through the crystal ceiling off their molten obsidian skin. Tara checked an indrawn breath when she saw them. Justice’s minions. That was what Ms. Kevarian had called them, back at the dock.
She told herself to relax. She had done nothing wrong.
Of course, in her experience, this rarely meant one had nothing to fear from the authorities. Forcing a fog of bad memories aside, she stepped into the lobby, chin high and hands clasped primly before her. She had changed on the
Kell’s Bounty
from her bedraggled sea-soaked clothes into her second, and far more formal suit, an executioner’s black against her nut-brown skin. She was glad of the suit’s severity as three blank reflective faces confronted her. She returned their stare.
“I want to speak with Judge Cabot.”
Judge Cabot is not available.
The figures’ lips did not move, but Tara heard three voices nevertheless, or the nightmare echoes of three voices, not-quite-sounds on the edge of hearing.
What business did you have with him?
“I…” Dammit, she would not be quelled by a trio of professional security nightmares. Steel yourself, woman, and get on with it. You’re not a farm girl come to beg for favors. You have a purpose here. “I’m a Craftswoman from the firm Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, here to speak with Judge Cabot. Do you know when he will return?”
Yes.
They raised their faces toward the skylight with a unity even more unsettling than their voices.
He will return when the moon is broken and the land fades, when the waters rise and burn to steam, when the stars fall and the Everburning Lord rises.
“Ah.” She paused, thinking. “He’s dead.”
As of this morning.
She heard a high-pitched and prolonged scream behind the double doors that led into Cabot’s apartment. “Who’s that?”
The butler.
She waited.
He discovered the body, and thus is likely to be involved. We are ascertaining the details of the event.
Discovered the body? Involved? “You think Cabot was murdered.”
It is likely. Considering the condition of the body.
Another scream. This one broke into deep, powerful sobs.
“Sounds like it hurts, this ‘ascertaining.’”
Most do not find it pleasant, but Justice must be served. After we are done, we will ease his memory of the pain.
“Tidy.”
Economical. Pain is a valuable resource, and should be used sparingly.
Tara crossed her arms and looked from one to the next to the last. Murder. Because Judge Cabot was involved in a perfectly routine, if large-scale, Craft proceeding?
If she returned to Ms. Kevarian with this scrap of information, she’d be sent right back to learn more. Besides, she was on the scent.
“Listen. My boss wants me to see Judge Cabot. How do I know he’s not still alive and telling you to lie to keep me out?”
What purpose would that serve?
“How should I know? I can’t go back to my boss empty-handed. She’d use my skin for shadow puppets, and if I was lucky she’d let me die first, and then she’d come looking for whoever stood in my way.”
That is unfortunate for you.
“My point is, it will take a lot more than some screams to convince me you’ve really got a murder scene here.”
You believe we would lie?
“I’m new in town. I see a trio of moving statues and I don’t know what to expect.”
We are Justice. We have rules.
This wasn’t working. Change tactic. They like rules, do they? “What are your rules, then?”
The just heart is lighter than a feather.
They raised their faces heavenward again.
We weigh hearts.
“Ah.”
The Blacksuits seemed comfortable with silence. The repeated cries from the Judge’s apartment did not appear to perturb them, either.
“There are other rules, right?”
The Book of Regulations is twenty pages long.
“Not so bad.”
Appendix A is three thousand one hundred twelve.
Pause.
We will not repeat them aloud. Copies are on public display at the Temple of Justice as a service to the City.
She tried to press past them as they spoke, but they moved, more like flowing lava than people, to block her way.
We are not permitted to let you pass. Our examination of the scene is incomplete.
Tara was about to give up and storm off, cursing cities and law enforcement and Elayne Kevarian for good measure. She turned around and raised her foot. Had she set it down, the momentum of that step would have carried her to the street and on with the rest of her life.
She turned back to the sentinels.
“You’re examining the body?”
Yes.
“You know how to do that?”
We are waiting for experts.
“I’m an expert.”
They said nothing.
“I’m a Craftswoman. A graduate of the Hidden Schools. I’m as competent to judge the state of a corpse as anyone in the City.”
You are not approved by the Council of Justice, nor certified as an examiner.
“The examiner isn’t here, though, is she? I am. Every minute you spend waiting in the foyer, you lose valuable information. Evidence decays faster than the corpse, and your killer is racing to cover her tracks.”
The information of which you speak will be gathered by the proper authorities.
Tara smirked. “What proper authorities?” She extended one arm, palm up, and pulled back her sleeve with the other hand. At first, there was no way to tell if the Blacksuits were looking, their pupils invisible beneath their ebon shells, but they turned toward her when the sunlight began to die. Tara’s forearm had been brown and unmarked when she pulled up her sleeve, but as shadows deepened and the world went gray, traces of silver light appeared on her skin.
Her glyphs resembled spiderwebs laid by machine. Precise lines wove around her arm, spirals devouring spirals, hermetic diagrams inscribed with the script of half a dozen languages, most of them dead. A repeated symbol interrupted this pattern along the course of her radial artery: circle, nested within triangle, within circle, the mark of the Hidden Schools. The glyphs’ light was strong enough to cast shadows.
The Blacksuits retreated a fraction of a step.
“I’ve come a long way,” Tara said. “I can help. Now, please, let me inside.”
*
She nearly threw up when she saw the body, but she wasn’t about to give her Blacksuit escort the satisfaction. Blasted thing would probably lock her up for vomiting all over a crime scene.
Judge Cabot had been what an older century would have called a portly man, the kind who hit his second chin at the age of twenty-nine and decided there was no point going back. His figure was—had been—toroidal, narrow shoulders broadening to a wide chest and a wider belly before tapering to inverse—cone thighs, thin, strong calves, and eight-inch feet. Birthmarks dotted his shoulders and arms, and he had a nasty scar on his right hip from some accident or botched attempt at medicine. His body was pallid, and not particularly hairy.
Tara saw all this because Judge Cabot’s robe and dressing gown had been torn away, along with much of his flesh. He lay in pieces on the garden floor, in a pool of his own blood. The part of her that was her father’s daughter quailed and hid in a far corner of her mind. What remained was a consummate professional. At least, that’s what she told herself.
“What do you see?” she asked the Blacksuit.
It is immaterial. We are interested in your observations.
The initial trio of Blacksuits had divided, one to watch the foyer, and two to escort her. The second split off, presumably to help interrogate the butler, as they crossed the oak-paneled sitting room. The third brought Tara through a glass door into a rooftop garden of fluorescent flowers and miniature date palms. Elaborate Craft focused sunlight and trapped humidity to transform the roof into a private rainforest. The effect was not perfect—the air had the proper sticky weight, but there weren’t enough flies. In a true jungle, that congealing red puddle would be writhing with vampiric vermin.
Here there was only the blood. And the limbs. And the face.
The Blacksuit stood ten feet back, near the door, watching. It was a woman, when it wasn’t working.
What can you tell us?
Tara stepped gingerly around the blood pool. At its edge she saw ceramic fragments, and a discoloration in the deep red tide. He had been drinking tea. And now he was dead. No. Focus on the details, not the horror. This was just another cadaver, like any of the others she had studied back at the Hidden Schools.
Ms. Kevarian had intended Tara’s visit to the Judge as a test, a chance to demonstrate her ability to work alone. It could still fulfill that purpose.
The smaller shards of clay were covered with dried or drying blood; Cabot’s head rested atop one piece. This much the Blacksuits almost certainly knew: he had been surprised, dropped the cup, and fallen.
There was no bruising, and no foreign blood or dirt or hair beneath Cabot’s nails, though his fingers were mangled and broken. He hadn’t put up a fight. Whatever happened to him happened fast.
The body had a sharp, hot silver smell beneath the stench of spoiling meat.
“How were you contacted?”
Cabot had special wards to notify Justice in the event of his death, and give us an image of his body.
Pause.
Also, the butler summoned us.
“Does your image show who did this?”
We have suspects.
Tara laced her fingers together. “Someone pulled Cabot’s spine out of his back, through the skin. Death should have been instantaneous, but whatever did this wanted him alive.” She pointed to the discs of bone arranged in a rough circle around the body, like poker chips strewn on a table. “The corpse has been ritualistically encircled by its spinal vertebrae. Necromancers use a more advanced version of the same technique to bind spirits. Doctors use it, too, to keep the patient alive on the operating table. Bone is a powerful focus, especially if it’s your own. With the Judge’s own spine, even an amateur Craftsman could have kept him alive and sane for … I’d guess a minute. If they only wanted to keep his soul bound to his body, and didn’t care about his sanity, it could have lasted longer. Much longer.” It would have felt longer still to Cabot. The heart kept time in the human body. Without its beat thoughts elongated, stretched, changed. She had stopped her own heart as an experiment back at school, under close observation, keeping her brain alive the entire time. For Cabot, seconds of agony would have felt like hours.
Stay professional. Keep your breakfast where it should be, and your voice level.
The Blacksuit cocked her head to one side.
Is there any way to call him back?
Tara continued her slow revolution around the corpse. “The body’s a complicated system. Bringing someone back requires the corpse have enough order to build upon, and there’s hardly any of Cabot left. Even if we had the proper equipment to sift his memories, we’d need the organs that bear the imprints of sense experience. The eyes have burst. The tongue, here, well. The brain, missing out the back of the skull. The spine you see, and the heart is gone entirely.” She looked up at the Blacksuit. “Did you really think it was possible he died of natural causes?”
These are strange days. We have had to widen the definition of the word “natural” six times in the last decade.
“Well, whoever did this was a poor student of the Craft, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed the bones—only beginners use such a strong physical focus for something this simple—but she knows enough to keep the dead from talking. Which brings me to another oddity. The body is pristine, or at least no more rotten than it ought to be based on time of death. The Craft used to bind his soul should have accelerated decay.” There was that scent again, the urgent tang of hot silver. She breathed it in, and turned from the body to the thick vegetation. “Do you mind if I look around the garden? The murderer could have hidden the missing organs nearby. Keeping them out of our hands for an hour would spoil them. Our killer needn’t have run through the city in broad daylight with a bleeding heart clenched in her fist.”
I will remain to guard the corpse.
Tara walked off between the looming sunflowers. The garden growth was thick, but not thick enough to dampen all sound. With a shout, she could call the Blacksuit to her.
It was indeed possible that the murderer, whoever, whatever she was, hid Cabot’s heart somewhere nearby. She could also have burned the heart to ash and mixed it with the blood as an additional focus for her ritual. But searching for the heart gave Tara a plausible excuse to investigate without supervision.
The burnt silver smell haunted the garden. She traced it to a point near the terrace’s corner, between a trellis of ivy and a carefully cultivated orchid. Approaching the edge, Tara reached to her heart and drew her knife.
The odor’s source was not hidden behind the trellis, and the orchid provided no cover. Elsewhere in the rooftop garden, vines had been strung overhead to blot out the sky, but here she looked up and saw nothing but clouds. No ambush would come from above.
She leaned over the roof’s edge. Far below ran the street, full of tiny people and tiny carriages. Gargoyles leered at the passersby. At ground level, the carvings were common monsters, sharp-nosed and snaggle-toothed, but as the building rose, their complexity grew. The sharp gouges Tara had seen from below marred the intricate artwork.
The gargoyles one floor beneath Cabot’s penthouse seemed almost alive. To her right loomed a giant with three eyes and a massive tusked maw, each of his six arms clutching a different weapon. To her left stood a similar statue, and clinging to the ledge beside that another, in a different style. The first two were built from planes and angles, while this last gargoyle’s sculptor had carved the curves of its hunched back and powerful torso with an anatomist’s devotion. It was limbed as a man, save for two folded leathery wings and a long tail. A snarl contorted its gruesome, hook-beaked face. The creature was bent like a drawn bow, ready to fly.