A Murder of Mages (44 page)

Idre was up, swinging her fist like a hammer. “I heard you were dead, slag. When I came back, they all said you were dead.”

“I just went away.” Now Satrine was in her full sense, ready to brawl. Idre wasn’t going to get the better of her again.

“Ran away, eh? Couldn’t face me.” Heavy, wild punches. Nothing touched Satrine.

Satrine dashed into range, throwing two hard jabs at Idre’s side. “Never was about you.”

She didn’t get out in time. Idre got a solid hit across Satrine’s jaw. Satrine lashed back, a hard swing out that connected across the side of Idre’s head. The big woman went reeling.

The crowd cheered for more.

Satrine leaped at the dazed woman. Despite Idre’s bulk, Satrine was able to knock hard against her, throwing her further off balance. Idre took another wild swing. Satrine was nowhere near it.

“All I wanted was you out of my life!” Satrine shouted. “Let it alone!”

She threw another punch, everything she had left in her arm, knocking most of the sense out of Idre. Her old rival dropped to her knees. Satrine kicked Idre in the back, pushing her the rest of the way to be facedown in the street.

Two whistles blew all around her.

“All right, break it up,” the familiar voice of Inspector Mirrell droned. He and Kellman came through the crowd, a couple of footpatrol with them.

Kellman nudged the insensible Idre with his boot. “Iron and box this one. Overnight for brawling. She gives you trouble tell her we might pink her for interfering with an inspector’s investigation.” One patrolman chained Idre’s wrists, while the other looked expectantly at Satrine.

“What about her?”

Mirrell and Kellman both had card-playing faces as they circled around her. She couldn’t get any sense off of them. “What about her, indeed?” Mirrell said. “You boys don’t mind if Darreck and I take something of a personal interest in her, do you?”

“No, sir,” said one of the patrolmen, his grin a little too wicked.

“Good,” Mirrell said. “And, boys? Let’s keep her involvement quiet, all right?”

“Mouse quiet, sir.”

“Then let’s be about it,” Mirrell said. He grabbed Satrine by the arm, and Kellman took the other side, and they led her off into an alley.

If this was what they wanted, Satrine wasn’t out of fight yet. As soon as they were out of sight from the street, she wrenched herself free from Mirrell’s grasp and pulled up her arm to drive her elbow in his face. He caught her arm again before she could deliver the blow.

“Hey, hey,” he whispered. “None of that, now.”

“You think I won’t fight back?”

“Blazes, Tricky,” Kellman said, letting go of her arm. “We already saw what kind of fight back you can give.”

“Then . . .”

“Kid said you think Jinx is in trouble. Bookshop guy is the killer?”

Mirrell nodded. “So tell us what you’ve got.”

Satrine pulled the book out of her waistline and started to explain.

Consciousness came slow and ugly for Minox, pain coursing through his head. Bit by bit, he became more aware of his circumstances. He had been stripped of his clothes. He was strapped to a metal table, hanging head down at an uncomfortable angle. He felt the same draining sensation he had experienced when he had come into contact with the killer’s spikes, but he did not feel like any spikes had been driven into his body. He wondered if the magic effect of the spikes was so profound as to cause actual numbness.

When he finally opened his eyes, he was surprised to see sunlight. Glancing around, best he could, he could not quite determine where the light was coming in. He was in a stone chamber of some sort. The masonry reminded him of his earlier trip through the sewer system.

He finally spotted the source of the sunlight. There was a mirror, lined up with a chimney shaft of some sort, aligned to send the light at him. Meticulous. Ritual. The killer—Nerrish Plum—had his fourth victim.

Minox found his voice. “Plum! Where are you?”

Plum’s face appeared in front of Minox’s eyes. “No need to scream, Inspector. Also, no purpose. No one other than me will hear you.”

“So your purpose is to kill me in another of your ritualized murders,” Minox said.

“Indeed,” Plum said. He moved around so he could sit on the stone in front of Minox, as if they could have a friendly chat, despite Minox hanging nearly upside down. “You do have a sense of what I’m doing.”

“I have a sense it means something to you,” Minox said. “But killing four innocent people is nothing but senseless.”

“Innocent, really?” Plum gave an uneasy chortle. “I’ll grant that you, dear Inspector, probably do not deserve this fate. But the others? They could hardly be called innocent.”

“So they did something to deserve what you did?”

“More or less.”

“That’s why it was easier to kill them, correct?” Minox knew he was trying to catch a rabbit out of the hutch attempting to reason with the man, but he had little other choice, not if he hoped to survive.

“Easier than what? I mean, Harleydale was a challenge, sawing through those hands. Took longer than I thought. But it had to be done. All has to be done.”

“But you’re hesitating with me.”

“Hesitating? Saints, no, Inspector. I’m waiting. There is a difference.” He pointed to the mirror. “You have until the sun sets.”

“Why, Mister Plum?”

“Well, the ritual has to happen at sunset. I don’t make the rules.”

“But why the ritual, Mister Plum? What purpose does it serve?”

“Yes, of course,” Plum said. “Even facing death, you need to figure out the reason behind it all. It’s only natural, I suppose. And an answer is the least you deserve.”

Minox struggled to keep himself awake, the draining feeling threatening to pull him back down to inky blackness. He had Plum talking now, and that bought him some leverage. And he did have a morbid curiosity to know how all the murders made sense in Plum’s mind.

“Do you know how my wife died, Inspector? It was three years ago, during the Circle Feuds. It happened
right on those steps of the Light and Stone house. You did know several local people had been killed in the crossfire of mages fighting each other on the streets.”

“I knew, but I didn’t know details,” Minox said. “So that’s why you killed Jaelia Tomar there. Where your wife died.”

“Well, that’s what it had to be, of course.” Plum got to his feet and walked out of Minox’s field of vision. “Met and married, dead and buried. That’s what I figured out, you see. She died on those steps. Not that anyone was held accountable.”

“Charges were filed, and successfully prosecuted—”

“For the whole feud, not for the lives lost, Inspector. Not the individual, precious life ripped too soon from me!”

Plum was agitated. Minox needed to change the tone of the conversation. “Met and married, you said. You met her in that alley?”

“Six years ago. Would you believe, both heading to the backhouses? What a way to start a romance.”

“And married at Saint Limarre’s?” The locations all made sense now, fitting the mad logic behind the killings. All that remained was his own death here . . . and buried. “Where are we?”

“The underground world beneath our city is fascinating, Inspector. I must confess, I’ve only scratched away a tiny portion. But this mausoleum dates back to, I think, the fourth century. I may be wrong. And to think, it’s a mere thirty feet underground, nearly below my shop.” He moved back into vision, taking another look at the mirror. “I will admit, it makes timing the sunset a challenge, but what can you do?”

“Your wife wasn’t buried here,” Minox asserted.

“No, not originally,” Plum said. “But she’s been here long enough, I would think.” His eyes went to a spot under Minox’s head. Minox strained to crane his neck to see. On the ground underneath him lay a shamble of bones, laid out over a chalk-drawn symbol. The symbol, drawn with long, elegant lines, had four points marked with circles. Glass jars sat on three of the circles: two with hearts, one with hands and eyes.

“What the blazes are you doing, Plum?”

“Two hearts, on wings of fire. Hands of stone, eyes of light.” Plum approached Minox and ran a finger along his bare chest. “No circle keeps us apart. Body and blood.”

The man had clearly lost his mind.

“Mister Plum, I realize that you’ve suffered a great loss, and it’s understandable you wish to enact vengeance upon the Circles that caused your grief. But this won’t change what has occurred. Killing me won’t bring your wife back to you.”

Plum crouched down, face to upside-down face with Minox. “Oh, no, Inspector Welling. That’s exactly what it will do.”

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Mirrell said.

“I don’t disagree,” Satrine said.

“It’s batty as all blazes,” Kellman said. “But it does kind of work, you know?”

“It sounds like one of Jinx’s theories, is what I think,” Mirrell said. “But these mage murders have been so strange, it would need a Jinx theory to work.”

“I’m not saying the poem is anything more than a love poem,” Satrine said. “But an unhinged mind might have sought meaning in it, and came up with action to match it.”

Mirrell raised an eyebrow. “So you’re arguing that this crazy idea is sensible because the killer is crazy?” He glanced over at Kellman.

“That’s good enough for me,” Kellman said.

“All right, then,” Mirrell said. “Let’s check out the bookstore.”

The door was latched and shades were drawn when they arrived. Satrine looked at the sun. It would be setting in less than an hour. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

“That may be,” Mirrell said. “But we’ve got limits of what we’re allowed to do based on a crazy hunch. Shop is closed.”

“It is odd for a shop to be closed this early,” Kellman said. He looked around the street. “Nothing else is.”

“Odd, sure,” Mirrell said. “But not actionable. Sticks got to play by the rules, Tricky. We can’t just go into a house or shop without just cause.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not a stick anymore,” Satrine said, taking off her coat. She wrapped it around her hand and punched through the glass. She reached through the broken pane to unlatch the door.

“Why, Inspector Kellman,” Mirrell said in a flat voice. “It appears we are observing a possible robbery in progress.”

Satrine opened the door and entered the shop. It looked much the same as it had this morning.

“It certainly appears that could be the case,” Kellman said from the street outside, matching his partner’s tone. “Perhaps we should investigate more closely.”

“We would be negligent in our duty to do otherwise,” Mirrell said, and entered the shop. “Anything?”

Satrine scanned the floor. Something caught her eye, and she picked it up. “The proverbial nail in the shoe.” It was the broken nib from Welling’s pipe.

“Not distinctive or damning enough,” Mirrell said.

Satrine’s eyes went back to the floor. Lines in the dust. Something heavy had been dragged into the back room. Something like a full-grown man.

“This way,” she said, following the trail to the back room.

The back room was a cramped office, with a tiny desk and a hole torn into the floor. A rope was tied around the desk that led down the hole. On the desk was a pile of clothes: Constabulary coat and vest, and a belt with crossbow and handstick.

“Blazes,” Kellman said. “Jinx really is in trouble.”

For once, Satrine wished she hadn’t been right.

“Look at all this,” Mirrell said, pointing at the wall. Satrine had been so focused on Minox’s situation she hadn’t even noticed. The wall was covered in papers, small notes and diagrams, maps of the city and the underground tunnels, charcoal sketches of the Tomars, Harleydale, and Welling, other notes in characters Satrine couldn’t recognize.

“Blazes,” Kellman said. “And I thought Jinx’s slateboards were crazy.”

Mirrell went over to the rope, drawing his crossbow. “Come on, Darreck. Let’s go save our guy.”

“Your guy?” Satrine said. “You don’t even like him.”

“I don’t,” Mirrell said. “But his heart’s Green and Red, and that’s all that matters today.”

Kellman pulled out his own weapon. “I’ll take point.”

“I should do that,” Satrine said.