The Mirrored City (11 page)

Vyzad’s voice carried through the marble hall. “The heretic is playing this well. He’s been meeting with the houses which have the greatest rivalry. He’s saving the Patriarch for last. He’s a smart man, and I have every belief he will get what he wants.”

“But Father,” the voice of First Son Jad protested, “he is doubly an abomination. Not only is he a priest of a false god, he is a former Inquisitor. They would have us burned for rejecting their false doctrine.”

Vyzad and Jad walked past the alcove. Vyzad intently explained, “He is a politician. He uses his religious office when it suits him. All that matters is that he believes we will be sympathetic. He will remove our obstacles for us…”

Lyta waited for them to pass and then quietly crept down the hall as they continued their discussion.

She found the door to the inner courtyard and sprinted over to the women’s wing. Making her way to Shannon’s chambers, she threw open the door.

Shannon spun around. “Lyta?”

“I didn’t abandon you. The letter was a forgery.”

Shannon rolled her blue eyes. “Obviously. The letter said you poisoned Bejia out of envy. And I saw that whole wretched conversation with Safina when I was in Dessim. I do check in on them regularly.”

Lyta smiled and reached for her lover. “Thank Ohan. I thought I’d lost you.”

Shannon stepped back. “You broke a Patrean’s neck and killed a confessor.”

“I can explain, but we need to get out of here,” Lyta urged. “We need to go now.”

“Clearly,” Shannon said. “That’s why I’ve been packing for the both of us. But I want the truth when we get to Dessim.”

Lyta sighed. “You will have it. All of it.”

E
LEVEN

Honest Work

M
ADDOX

TASTING MENU

First Course

Crispy Fried Scorpion with Lemon Aioli

Second Course

Chilled Melon and Potato Vichyssoise

Third Course

Live Baby River Eel, Served in Seasoned Wine Broth

Fourth Course

Lamb Rack, Seared with Liquid Sunlight and Leeks

Fifth Course

Crystallized Sheep’s Milk and Honey

—
TASTING MENU, THE HORRIPILATED GOURMAND. PRICE 280 DUCATS (DOES NOT INCLUDE WINE PAIRING)

“HOWDY, ISIK,” MADDOX
said cheerfully as he strolled into the coroner’s laboratory. The smell, though dampened by medicinal preservatives, was like walking into a Backwash butcher shop in summer when meat in various states of rancidness was sold out of the back door. “Gross.”

Three tables were piled with the meticulously rendered bits of flesh from the grisly feast. Isik was hunched over one of them, separating the tissues into piles. He stepped back. “I told you I want nothing to do with your craziness.”

“Relax. I’m here to help your investigation into my murder,” Maddox explained.

“You have to have a license for that,” Isik said. “And a formal commission from the Inspector General. Just because you found this pile of crazy shit doesn’t mean you own this case. Thank you for your civic concern, but if I have any questions, I know where to reach you.”

“The next constellation in the Dark Ecliptic is the Faithless Lover. I have a suspicion of who it’s going to be. The killer is selecting his victims to match the tableau he’s creating. None of these bodies were Leland Buckminster, were they?”

Isik hesitated. “You figured this out yourself?”

“I say this without hubris, but I am probably the smartest person you have ever met when it comes to theurgy.”

“This is not Rivern where the Lyceum, Invocari, and Inquisition could jump into an open investigation,” Isik explained. “We have constables and that is all we have here in Dessim. You should not even be in here.”

Maddox looked at one of the tables piled with body parts: bone fragments, organs, ribs, shreds of skin. He raised his hands and concentrated. The Sword’s intelligence was great at two things, spatial awareness and anatomical weak points. Maddox’s body was a well of untapped force. They made a perfect pair.

“The fuck are you doing?” Isik exclaimed.

The severed bits of flesh floated up into a cloud of whirling mass. Normally it would be impossible for a seal mage to track the motion of so many objects, but the Sword’s exo-brain did it easily, processing each item and rearranging it on the table.

Isik watched in amazement as Maddox reassembled the body. Two thirds of it was still missing, but it had enough of a face. Maddox willed needle and thread to start sewing it back together, working at a furious pace. It was a middle-aged man, dark hair, pale Genatrovan skin.

Maddox leaned back and appreciated his work. Offhandedly, he said, “I studied with Pytheria for a while. She’s senile and possibly undead; we don’t ask. They keep her in a locked tower in Amhaven now, but even at her advanced age she had excellent skill with stitching.”

Isik laughed. “You crazy asshole! That would have taken me weeks. I might actually go home tonight. You see that cot over there? They brought it for me when they dumped all these body parts in my lab.”

“Who the fuck is that?” Maddox asked, examining the body.

Isik scratched his head. “I can get a name if the throat still works.”

Isik placed his hand on the man’s head and intoned some necromantic incantation. “Speak your name,” he commanded.

The corpse jerked to life and uttered a hideous squelching noise that sounded like a live octopus going through a meat grinder.

Isik rubbed his chin. “He said Magar Karadjian. I have eaten at his restaurant.”

“Hope you checked the meat,” Maddox joked.

“I am a necromancer,” Isik said indignantly. “I always know where meat comes from. Sometimes it is a curse. I can never enjoy sausage.”

“What did you see in his eyes at the moment of death?”

Isik folded his arms.

Maddox made puppy eyes and pouted. “You still have two more bodies to assemble. I bet it took you all night just to separate the pieces.” He levitated a severed toe and slowly moved it toward the other table.

“I would kill you, and it would be just,” Isik said.

“Yeah.” Maddox leaned on the table. “You could, but…”

“Fine.” Isik grabbed a stack of parchment and pulled out a sketch.

It was actually a decent drawing. Isik tended toward heavy black lines and didn’t have the precision of a trained artist, but he was better than most.

Judging by the high boarded up window and rough masonry, it looked like a cellar hung with dozens of hooked chains at varying lengths. Four unadorned walls met at roughly 135-degree angles.

“Not much to go on. What was the name of that restaurant?”

Isik rolled his eyes. “Tell you what. You put the bodies back together, and I will talk to the Inspector. You can deal with her.”

The Gourmand occupied a choice corner location on Glutton’s Row, Dessim’s district of restaurants and eateries. The names of some of the other businesses were deliberately awful: the Gravid Gullet, the Murdered Swine, and (Maddox’s personal favorite) The Eternal Feast: Buffet & Vomitorium.

Dessim published the most definitive thesaurus of Thrycean language in Genatrova. They weren’t shy about using it.

Inspector General Colette was a stern-looking woman with steel gray hair and a penchant for smoking thinly rolled Bamoran cigarettes. The smell was worse than the incense that burned everywhere, and it seemed to blow in his face no matter where he stood.

“Here we are,” she announced. “Before we go in, we should go over the ground rules. Rule one, don’t touch anything. That’s the rule. Are we clear, ‘Archwizard’ Baeland?”

“Yeah, I’ll keep my hands to myself.” Maddox rolled his eyes. The Sword had processed a few crime scenes with Heath. It had covered up far more of its own crime scenes with Heath. The fact that the building wasn’t already burned to the ground was a promising start.

“You’re only here because Isik recommended you and Magus Winterholt is insufferable.” She took a puff of her cigarette and let the words flow from her mouth as she spoke.

Colette tried the door and found it locked. She removed a set of tools from her pocket and crouched down to the door handle. She left the cigarette in her mouth, puffing away as she worked. He heard the click of at least three tumblers. The door popped open in a matter of moments.

“Damn,” Maddox commented. “That’s impressive.”

Colette huffed down the last of her dwindling cigarette and tossed it aside. “Bah. I used to be able to do it in half the time. Come on.”

The inside of the restaurant had five large tables in white cloth with full place settings. In addition to the usual assortment of utensils and long-stemmed wine glasses, it held other less conventional implements: a small eel hammer, tweezers, a wavy dagger. Dessim was as devoted to novelty as Baash was beholden to tradition.

“Stay close,” Colette said as she made her way back to the kitchen. The entire far wall of the restaurant was completely covered in wine racks, laden with bottles. The shelves went up so high a ladder was leaning against the wall.

Maddox could smell it before he saw it. The kitchen was a slaughterhouse. The walls were spattered with stains, and the floor was covered in a sheet of dried blood that crunched like autumn leaves beneath his foot.

Sputtering candles in tall glass tubes and flower petals covered a butchers block that had been dressed like an altar. A naked man had been posed as if leaning back in the throes of ecstasy with his head tipped backward over the table. Maddox and Colette walked around the table from either side. He knew what he was going to find.

“By the Host,” Colette gasped. She seemed like a hard woman to startle.

Maddox recognized the boy Lawrence from the alleyway. His face had been removed and sewn to the back of his head. The eye sockets were filled with white roses that had turned partially red from the fluids in his body.

“What’s in his eyes? Roses?” Colette scrutinized the body.

“White roses,” Maddox said.

“They come in white? I’ve never heard of that.”

“They grow in the north,” Maddox said. “Smell it if you don’t believe me.”

“I’ll take your word.” She took out a notebook and wrote something down. “The killer took out the eyes so we can’t use them. That I get, but why cut off the face?”

“Fiction,” Maddox answered. “The Dark Ecliptic. There was a popular story around the 200s that the thirteen ecliptic constellations would be viewed from behind by creatures outside our universe, and recreating their marks here could signal to them to return. The books became co-opted into the forbidden occult literature of the time, but charlatans would put anything that sounded weird enough in a grimoire to make some coin. The Inquisition doesn’t even bother to ban that kind of literature.”

“Dark Ecliptic? Never heard of it.”

“It’s a stupid idea,” Maddox said. “The constellations of the Dark Ecliptic are perversions of the original thirteen. This is the Faithless Lover, the opposite of the Sign of the Virgin. This man was a prostitute, so it makes sense.”

Colette nodded. “The people who owned this restaurant were arranged like a feast.”

“And he’s going in order,” Maddox said. “The next constellation is the Scholar, so its inverse is the Fool. After that it’s the Twins, or in the Dark Ecliptic, the Broken Mirror. After that—”

Maddox was preparing to launch into a lecture when Colette interrupted him. “So next we need to find an idiot?” Colette asked. “That could be anybody in the city.”

“It won’t be just anyone,” Maddox said. “The victims will be perfect for the scenes the killer is creating. It’s an artist, not just a half-assed hedge wizard—”

“It?” Colette asked.

Maddox added, “The killer has three heads and it’s not human. But I know Leland Buckminster is involved somehow. He’d know the literature. I need to do some research. Send a message to my apartments if Isik comes up with anything tangible.”

“Wait,” she protested, “you can’t just walk out in the middle of an investigation!”

Maddox shrugged. “You can’t kill this thing, let alone catch it. Trust me—it tore a hole in my chest, and I am not easy to kill. Just let me know what you find. I need to do some hardcore old magic. But I have a lead.”