Charra smiled thinly. “And entirely legal as always, Magus Evangeline.”
“Oh, I am positive that we wouldn’t find a single thing out of order,” she replied. “If I may offer a word to the wise: I would keep my eye on this one. Your lover, is he?”
“Ha!” I blurted. “As if.”
Charra stared daggers at me. Eva’s eyebrow quirked.
“I have better taste than that,” Charra said. “He’s all yours, if you want him?”
“Perhaps another time,” Eva said. “I am on duty at the moment. Good day to you both.”
After we turned the corner, Charra stopped and wagged her finger at me. “I thought you were supposed to be laying low? Be wary of that one, she would snap you like a twig.”
I rubbed my arm. “I’m already aware of that. Have no fears of me dipping my wick there.”
She led me to a near-deserted tavern called The Fuddled Ferret. We sat at a bench and ordered ale, being entertained in the loosest sense of the word by a hungover bard in a colourful patchwork coat plucking the strings on his lute in vague accompaniment to the lacklustre tale he was telling to two snot-nosed pups staring up at him, rapt with wonder.
After the drinks arrived she busied herself sorting her map and papers while I listened to the bard’s tale. A poor rendition but it still evoked golden memories. I knew this story welclass="underline" The Journey of Camlain Calhuin had been one of my mother’s bedtime stories. Young as I’d been, the sense of wonder my mother’s tales evoked in me was still vivid. It had been one of the last before the voices in her head finally drove her to fevered madness and death. This dreary-tongued bard was mangling it. Perhaps it was a cultural thing between the Clanholds and the Setharii, but this version had none of the details that made my mother’s so real to me: it lacked her gritty humour as she told of the time Camlain learned which mushrooms were safe to eat, and which gave him explosive squats, or how he’d tried and failed and tried again to learn hunting and fishing on his epic journey north. It had been as instructive as it had been fascinating to hear Camlain Calhuin grow from boy into doomed hero. This bard’s hero was seemingly born with the innate ability to be the greatest at everything without putting in the sweat to learn, and I suspected that none of this bard’s heroes ever took a shite, ate a dodgy meal, got ill, or had wounds that took months to heal. Pah, a pox on that! Still, it was a happy reminder of my youth.
“Are you ready?” Charra said.
We barely touched our drinks as I related what I’d discovered in Lynas’ warehouse and the Templarum Magestus, and what I’d learned from the information broker and gang boss in the Scabs.
“Why chase him through the Warrens and kill him there if they could just steal what they wanted from his warehouse?” I said. “If the Skinner had wanted to murder him beforehand then he would have. No, Lynas had been snooping into something, I’m sure of it.” I massaged my temples, trying to recall the fractured details of the vision. “Something big. He bought us time, paying with his life.”
Charra cleared her throat and studied the map in front of us. It was fairly crude and the further away an area was from main thoroughfares like Fisherman’s Way the less detail it depicted. The Warrens was mostly just blank space with a few older points of note marked. It would be nigh-impossible to keep a map of the Warrens current: by the time you finished such a time-consuming task you would find entire areas had already changed due to fire, collapse and construction.
“While you were up in the Old Town I compiled all the information I have on what occurred on the fourteenth of Leaffall,” she said. “This…” she swallowed, “this is where Lynas died.” She had marked Bootmaker’s Wynd with an X, smudged where a charcoal stick had broken from pressing down too hard.
I clenched my jaw as resurgent terror drifted to the surface of my mind. I felt the ghost of the scalpel’s bite and our hot blood pattering down across our face. “The air smelled of blood and smoke as he pounded on doors asking for help.”
Her finger pressed down on a circle, not far from the first mark. “This old abandoned temple is within running distance of Bootmaker’s Wynd. It burnt down that same night, which explains the smell of smoke.” Two marks were next to it. “Multiple fatal stabbings here and here, a small-time alchemic-dealer named Keran and his gang, the Iron Wolves. Could be coincidence. Could be that Keran and his men saw something they shouldn’t. Normally I’d say good riddance to the filth.”
I gulped ale like water. “Did anybody live in that temple?”
“A few years back the area was ravaged by a flesh-rotting plague and it’s been abandoned ever since. Rumour claims it’s cursed. It was a rat-infested shithole by all accounts, occupied by a dozen or so alchemic addicts. None survived the fire so far as I know.”
“Whose temple was it?”
“I suppose that it must have been inherited by the Hooded God after Artha died…” She let the comment drift off unsaid, studying me.
I examined the map, trying to trace Lynas’ likely route. “I still don’t know what happened that night.” Not yet. All I knew was a deal had been cut amidst fire and blood. She had no need to know that I left to keep Lynas, Layla and her safe. I wasn’t about to lay guilt on Charra that wasn’t her fault.
I cleared my throat. “Assuming he started from the temple, the quickest way for Lynas to get to a public place and any hope of help was through the streets near Bootmaker’s Wynd.” If only you had made it my friend.
“Where do we go from here?” she said. “We know Lynas was working with Bardok the Hock, who is apparently newly flush with coin, and we know Bardok works with the Harbourmaster at Pauper’s Docks. The Harbourmaster is in the pocket of the alchemic syndicates and not exactly inclined to be friendly to me, but if all these murders are linked then the Skinner is a bigger threat to all of them than I am.”
“True. Can you can get me in and out of the docks under the sniffers’ noses?”
“Of course.”
“Well then, it’s settled. First we investigate that razed temple to see if there is anything left to uncover, pay that slimy git Bardok a visit on the way back and then, if needs be, we find out what the Harbourmaster has to say. We’ll leave him to last, no point putting ourselves in danger if we don’t have to.”
She nodded agreement and fingered the hilt of the short sword at her hip. “Drink up. We have work to do. If Lynas bought us time then I won’t waste it. Whatever it takes.”
It was so good to work with people who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty.
The reek of burning still lingered around the site of Artha’s old temple. The blackened stonework had once been part of a proud and martial edifice, albeit latterly left to decay and swiftly hemmed in by cobbled-together wooden structures propped up against its walls. Ironically, that very sodden decrepitude had been what had saved most of the surrounding buildings from the worst of the blaze. We circled the site, kicking over the occasional cracked stone or burnt cinder. I squatted down and touched fragments of an arrow slit and a spiked iron rail twisted by heat, but if Lynas had indeed been here on the night he died I felt nothing, not a whisper of magic or hint of his emotions. Fire was the great devourer, and hungry tongues of flame had destroyed anything that might have been imprinted on the surroundings.
“Not much left,” Charra said, stating the bloody obvious.
“There must be something here. Some clue they’ve overlooked.” I picked up a sodden doll made from straw and flicked off grey ash. It had been bound into a human shape with clothes of coloured rags, two twists of yarn carefully woven and teased into the hairstyle a proper Old Town lady might wear.