Chapter 17: Chapter sixteen

 I’ve been observing Rane for two months and I now realize my mistake. When I first began my surveillance, I was concerned that he may discover me. But, as the weeks went on and his schedule remained the same, I came to believe that my cover was secure. I confirmed with independent sources and was sure, as far as I could be, that he didn’t change his behaviour when I began to follow him either. Based on this, I made my previous reports on the assumption that he was unaware of my observation. I have now come to believe that this is not the case, and he has been purposefully taking misleading actions since before my operation began. This suggests that Rane either knew about my mission before it began, or he simply assumes he is being watched at all times and takes steps to mislead his observers.

I don’t know which possibility I find less appealing.

• Shadow surveillance report of Darrian Rane, General in the Salitian army.

 

The Shadows moved, and Darrian moved with them.

There were two high priority messages in the same night. Messages on the light network only received a high priority designation when they were something critical to Inveritus security. Apparently, a Shadow was dead and some Yarrls were threatening their salt supply. The death of a field agent wouldn’t be enough to merit high priority, so the salt supply from Salitos must be more valuable than Inveritus was willing to admit. Tavat’s salt mines must be running low. Interesting, but not relevant to the task at hand. If Ferrous was the kind of man Darrian thought he was, then this type of situation in his home country would be likely to draw his attention. All Darrian had to do was find him.

Of course, finding a shapeshifter in a city of over thirty thousand people presented a challenge. He would need to begin with places that were likely to be near the action. He had Branton’s men split up and go to local taverns with money and instructions to eat dinner, drink a moderate amount, and keep their ears open for gossip. How well that would work remained to be seen. In Darrian’s experience, men often differed greatly in their definition of “moderate” when it came to drinking. Still, it was better than them sitting on their hands while he did everything himself. They were being paid to be here after all.

While they did that, Darrian went to the warehouse where Rockspar salt was stored before being sent off to its final destination. Getting salt out of Rockspar was an arduous process involving carrying it through a narrow, and dangerous, mountain pass. This limited the amount of salt that could come out of Rockspar at a time, so it was stored in a Cadersville warehouse until merchants and envoys could come to collect it. If there was a threat to Inveritus’ salt supply somewhere in Cadersville, then the place where the salt was stored seemed the best place to find it.

He found little. Well, to be more accurate, he found a large warehouse full of sacks of salt. It was a wooden structure with only one entrance and no windows. Darrian paid the guard to take a look around inside and spread a few more coins around to loosen the lips of the locals. He didn’t get anything useful for his trouble though. The only thing that appeared to be amiss were some scorch marks on one of the walls, as if someone had held a flame to it but it had never truly caught light. That was interesting, but not any kind of credible threat. Nobody working nearby had seen what had happened or anything suspicious. It was a dead end.

Next Darrian checked the hospital. Taverns were all very well for local gossip but if people were involved in violence, the hospital would likely know about it. Particularly as Cadersville had combined their hospital with one of those new mortuaries that had come in under the Good King. All corpses that showed signs of violence were taken there and inspected by the local sawbones for information that could be passed on to the local sheriff. It was an intelligent system that helped manage crime effectively, or at least it had been until the king had died and the country had lost all sense of stability. Now it just meant another person to be bribed by the local crime boss.

Still, it was worth a stop.

The hospital was a two-storey stone building with two exits located at the edge of town so people could escape the smell. Darrian entered from the front. He stepped into a room filled with fifteen beds, six of which were occupied with patients. There was a set of stone stairs that wound up to the second floor in the southwest corner of the room and a door on the north wall that likely led to the mortuary. On the other side of the room to Darrian, a man was tending one of the patients. He had a grey beard and wore the red jerkin of a doctor. Though he was perhaps sixty, the muscles of his arms stood out as he worked. Fit then. Likely ex-military.

Darrian circled around and approached the man from the front. He did this both to make a better first impression and to size up the doctor before talking to him. The patient had a rather bad compound fracture in his leg, with the bone jutting out of the skin to an alarming degree. The doctor’s hands moved quickly and efficiently as he reset the bones, probably Inveritus trained, though his face was beaded with sweat. At first Darrian thought the patient was unconscious but as he drew closer, he realized the man was awake, he was just remarkably calm for one going through such a painful procedure. The man had a look of a miner about him, and there was no way he would be able to afford the expensive drugs it would take to numb him.

Darrian took a closer look at the doctor. From his perspective there was an orange imp dancing on the man’s head while blowing raspberries, but he ignored this and focused on his hands.

Yes, no matter what the doctor was doing, his left hand remained open. He was a painshaper. That, in itself, wasn’t overly strange. The capital had several painshapers in its hospitals, and some of the richer noble families even had them on staff. But he had never heard of one actually performing medicine while they were absorbing pain. That was almost madness. Just as heatshapers could cook their hand if they absorbed too much heat at once and forceshapers could crush it, painshapers experienced the pain they absorbed through their Siphon as they took it in. Most painshapers tried to be stinking drunk whenever they had to do this, and failing that they were usually too busy screaming to do much else, let alone set a broken leg.

“Isn’t there someone else who can do that?” Darrian asked, genuinely curious.

“There is if I want it done wrong,” the man replied, his eyes never leaving his work. “If I want it done right, I gotta do it myself.”

“But you’re absorbing his pain, correct? Doesn’t that get in the way of the steady hands and steady mind that medicine requires?”

He shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

Darrian nodded and put that line of inquiry to the back of his mind for the moment. He produced the writ Branton had given him and showed it to the man. It named him as an official investigator for the capital and was signed by the heads of the highest noble families in Salitos. It was the closest thing to a royal decree one could get in Salitos since the Good King died. “I need to speak to someone who works in the mortuary here. Is that you?”

The man nodded. “Marcus. What do you need?”

“I need to know about any deaths in the past ten days.”

Marcus finished setting the man’s leg and stepped away from his bed to talk, though he looked to still be absorbing the man’s pain. “We’ve had eight deaths in that time.”

“Could you tell me about them please.”

“Two were infants. You know how that goes.”

Darrian nodded and made a ‘go on’ gesture.

“A slave took a tumble in the mines and cracked his head open. Bar fight got out of hand and someone got stabbed. Someone got ripped in half outside of town.”

“Ripped in half?” Darrian asked.

“Yes. Looked like he was tied between a pair of horses or something, no rope marks though.”

“Who was he?”

“Not sure. Wasn’t from around here.”

Darrian nodded. Could have been the dead Shadow. Though ripped in half was an odd way to die. He motioned for Marcus to continue.

“A man was found crushed in the Thums orchard, apparently a tree fell on him.”

“You say that like you’re sceptical.”

“Injuries didn’t look right for a tree falling on him. Plus, the folks who came for the body weren’t exactly upstanding citizens. He was hit with something big and heavy though.”

Darrian nodded. “And the other two?”

“Servants from the Bermont estate. Apparently, the lord found them stealing from him and killed them for it.”

“You have that scepticism in your voice again.”

“I wouldn’t dream of disbelieving a lord,” Marcus said, his voice dry.

“I would, and I have the authority to besides. So, you tell me why someone like me might be sceptical of that, and I’ll make up my own mind.”

“Well, Lord Bermont is much more suited to using a spoon on a pudding than a sword on a man if you take my meaning. Whoever killed these two cut them to pieces and, by the looks of their hands, didn’t give them a chance to defend themselves neither. The cuts were strange too. Not like a sword. A sceptical man might find those facts interesting.”

“Indeed I might. Thank you Marcus. This is very useful information. Is there something I can do to repay you?”

Darrian didn’t much care about repaying Marcus for simply doing his duty, but it never hurt to get in good with someone who seemed to be uncommonly competent.

“You’re Darrian Rane right?” Marcus asked.

“I am. Do we know each other?”

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Marcus shook his head. “Only saw you once. Didn’t recognize you at first. You spared my nephew’s life during the Landsteiner Rebellion. It’s me that should be thanking you.”

“He was one of the rebels?” Darrian asked.

“He was a soldier that broke ranks and ran when he was instructed to hold Landsteiner Bridge.”

Darrian had intended for those soldiers to run. It had been part of his plan, kept from the soldiers themselves in order to make it more convincing. Those that stayed had been massacred. Darrian had sent a good number of that company to their deaths that day. It had been necessary of course, but he still felt uncomfortable being thanked for not executing the people who had, unknowingly, followed his plan. The orange imp was leering at him from Marcus’s shoulder. It was loving this.

Darrian said his goodbyes and left.

He had four suspicious deaths to look into. One ripped in half, one crushed in an orchard, and two killed at the Bermont estate. He had been planning on talking to Lord Bermont at some point anyway, so he decided to start there.

Before he left, he turned to Marcus.

“I don’t suppose you want a job, do you?”

 

 

The Bermont Estate was to the east of the mines, close enough to check in regularly, but not so close that the Lord’s home would be disturbed by the sights, sounds, and smells of the miners. The estate encompassed a relatively small amount of land with only a few trees and a pond with ambitions of lakehood. Certainly not enough land for hunting on. The greater lords to the west would likely look down their nose at an estate of this size. Darrian didn’t much care for the size of estates, but these things tend to affect how nobility conduct themselves to an almost alarming degree.

Darrian arrived on horseback and a servant boy came to tend to his horse while a higher-ranking servant came to ask whether he had an appointment in a tone of mild condescension. Darrian showed him his papers and informed him he was here to speak to Lord Bermont immediately. He said this in a tone that brooked no dissent and the servant practically leaped to show him in. The house itself was a three-storey wooden building with two exits visible from the front. Darrian estimated he could make it out the servants’ exit from the entrance hall in less than fifteen seconds if he needed to.

Darrian found Lord Bermont in the dining hall, stuffing himself with roast meat. He was a huge heap of a man, jiggling in his chair as he reached for more food. Darrian found it hard to believe he could stand unassisted, let alone kill two servants.

“What do you want?” Lord Bermont snapped, focusing his piggy eyes on Darrian.

Darrian took an immediate dislike to the man. He produced his documentation and showed it to Bermont, taking care not to let him touch it, lest he cover it in grease.

“I’m here investigating on behalf of the capital. I need to ask you a few questions.”

“The capital,” Bermont spat. “Bunch of two-faced nancy boys bickering over who gets the biggest share of the kingdom.”

“Whatever your views Lord Bermont, I need to ask you a few questions. Let’s start with what happened to your servants.”

Bermont spat again. “Thieving bastards. Ever since the king died, whole country has gone to shit. It’s gotten so a man can’t even trust his own valet.”

Darrian made a non-committal noise. “What happened to them?”

“They tried to steal from me. I caught them and put them to the sword as is my right.”

“Yes. But, how did you do that?”

Bermont stood up. He might have looked quite intimidating if not for the food stains marring his silk clothing. “What’s that mean?”

Darrian wasn’t intimidated. This man looked to only be a danger to a feast table and Darrian had seen just two armed guards on the estate, both stances that spoke of mediocre training. He looked Bermont in the eye as he spoke.

“It means you are a very fat man and it seems unlikely you killed both of them by yourself without sustaining any wounds of your own.”

“No wounds!” Bermont practically roared. “That treacherous shit almost killed me.”

He pulled his robes apart and revealed a disgusting belly stretched to what Darrian was sure must be the limit for a human, and also a recent wound that had been stitched closed.

“Bastard did this to me while I gave him what he deserved. Still, better than the other one. He just cried and begged for mercy like a craven.”

“Who closed the wound for you?” Darrian asked.

“My personal physician of course.”

“And may I speak to this physician?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“He’s on his way to Inveritus for more learning or something. Suppose I’ll have to use the doctor in town while he’s gone.”

“I suppose you will,” Darrian said. “Okay, can I see the weapon you used to kill them?”

“My sword?” Bermont asked. “I suppose.” He drew the blade he was wearing at his side and laid it on the table. It was a perfectly normal short sword of Salitian make, stylized with pointless gold filigree. Exactly the sword a noble would carry.

Darrian nodded. “Have you seen or heard about anything unusual going on in town lately?”

“I don’t spend my time worrying about what the peasants are doing.”

“Thank you,” Darrian said. “I’ll just need to talk to some of your servants and then I’ll see myself out.”

“Be quick about it,” Bermont said, settling himself back down and going back to his meal.

Darrian left the dining hall and made straight for the main exit. He had noted where the stable boy had taken his horse and he went there at the quickest pace he could manage without raising concerns from the servants. He mounted and rode off at a pace that would probably raise eyebrows, but hopefully not alarms.

He was sweating. The imp was doing a jig on his horse’s head. Darrian had found the man he was looking for. He was sure of it. Ferrous had played his role well, used his position and reputation as being thoroughly unlikeable to try to throw Darrian off. But he was too ready to prove his own innocence. Wearing a sword in one’s own house was uncommon but not unheard of, but combined with his physician being suddenly unavailable, the observations Marcus made, and the fact he had dropped a subtle reference to the country being better under the Good King, it all added up to him being Ferrous Pax. A lord was the perfect cover. He could do almost anything he wanted, and no one would question him. Now Darrian had to get to his men as quickly as possible and get them back there before the skard escaped.

Or, given that Ferrous had been a Justice in his own right, before he realized Darrian was onto him and cut him to pieces.

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