Cast in Ruin (11 page)

Kaylin nodded. Severn marked the hesitance. “You’re going to need some sort of uniform for your policing forces,” she told the Dragon Lord.

“The thought had occurred to me. It is not a practical concern at the moment.”

“It will be,” was Kaylin’s resigned reply. “Because we’re going to need to wear something when we hit the street.” She glanced at Severn and added, “We’ll need a few things, and I want to consult with some people in the office before we start asking questions. Will that work for you?”

Tiamaris nodded. “I will expect a report of your findings.”

The seven identical women had been arranged in a standard corpse pose, arms to the side, legs straight, neck straight—and in their two rows, they looked like macabre dolls. They also looked entirely real. If they had been examined without clothing, the clothing had been returned to them. Humor drained from her voice; she turned to Tiamaris, one-time Hawk and now Dragon fieflord. “Have you done a cursory exam?”

“Magical?”

She nodded.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It revealed nothing—to me. I am not as subtle as Lord Sanabalis, and Lord Sanabalis, for political reasons, chooses to absent himself from the Tower.”

“Will you do a cursory scan now?”

“This is something,” Tiamaris said as he now approached the row of four bodies to Kaylin’s left, “you should be able to do in the very near future. How is the candle going?”

Her answer was a very short Leontine word; it made him chuckle.

“You are inordinately gifted, in ways none of us fully understand. But the candle—”

“Bodies?” she said pointedly.

He nodded, losing the brief grin. Lifting his hands, he held them palm down over the two middle bodies laid out on the center slab. This wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary, but every mage had their own small tics or focus-aids, and at least he wasn’t using a physical object like a wand. Then again, he had once had Sanabalis as a teacher, and anyone who tried that with Sanabalis would probably be missing limbs.

She watched him carefully. He murmured mantric, repetitive syllables, softly enough she had to strain to catch them. “He discovered nothing the first time,” Tara told her.

Kaylin nodded and kept on watching.

“What do you think you’ll see that he doesn’t?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why—”

“Every mage sees magic in a different way. Even me. Don’t ask me why. Sanabalis says we interpret what we see because if we didn’t, we’d probably go mad. But—if someone is really bookish or word based, he most often sees letters or words or symbols. If someone has really acute visual sensitivity, he’ll see colors. Someone who has a strong sense of touch or smell will feel or scent things. It’s more complicated than that. But according to Sanabalis, they’re all seeing the same thing—they just…comprehend it differently.” It had sounded lame to her the first time she heard it; it sounded less lame now, but she sympathized with the expression on Tara’s face.

“So. You believe that your…interpretation…and my Lord’s differ in significant ways?”

Tiamaris, who should have been so focused he wasn’t listening, gave a suspiciously well-timed snort.

“It’s why you’ll often see more than one mage at important Imperial investigations. We’re not entirely certain how much our interpretations differ, but they will, and something in our paradigm might give us insight or information that the others lack. The reverse is also true.” She grimaced and added, “That’s the theory. Let’s see how well it works in practice.”

In practice, as it turned out, it didn’t work at all. Although Tiamaris was in fact drawing enough magical power that Kaylin’s skin began to goose bump, nothing rose from the corpses: no nimbus of light, no runic sigils. Because she wasn’t the one casting the detection spell, she was free to move, and did.

“What is it?” Severn asked.

She glanced at him. “You’re frowning.”

“Was I?”

“Yes. In the way that produces pronounced furrows across the bridge of your nose.”

“Oh.” Kaylin didn’t pay all that much attention to her facial expressions because she couldn’t see them herself.

“There’s no obvious—”

“No sigil, no. No obvious artifacting. No shadow. But…” She shook her head.

“You notice something,” Tiamaris said.

“Yes—but if you ask me what, I’m not sure I can answer.” This had never been popular with any of her fellow Hawks.

“Try,” was his terse and familiar response.

Everything looked the same to Kaylin. There wasn’t anything she could put her finger on. “Are you doing the whole sweep or is it local to the actual corpse?”

“Both the corpse and the dress.”

She nodded again. For fifteen minutes she poked—literally—and prodded, and she was no closer to an answer. “Turn it off,” she told him, still staring. He did. She knew the exact moment when he did because something subtle
faded.

“Tiamaris, can you do the scan again?”

He rumbled. She took that as a yes, and kept her eyes locked on the face of corpse number four. “What do you see?”

“They’re—they’re brighter when you’re casting.”

“Brighter?”

“It’s subtle. But the color of the skin and hair—it’s more vivid.”

He came to stand beside her. “Is it the same across all the bodies?”

“I think so.” She glanced at Severn. He shook his head. “Tara, did you notice anything?”

Tara was frowning. She was concentrating hard enough that her eyes once again resembled onyx, rather than the usual mortal variety.

Tiamaris began to cast, and this time, Tara, like Kaylin, watched. Kaylin had no idea at all if a Tower could actually see and understand the whole of what was there without somehow translating it into an unknown frame of reference.

Kaylin was frustrated; the actual
casting
of the spell made no obvious difference, but when the spell was allowed to fade, something
did
drain away. Tiamaris noticed it this time.

“It is subtle,” he said. They were the wrong words for the sudden shift of his tone. Kaylin glanced over her shoulder and froze; his eyes had gone at once from a pale, comfortable gold, to the burning edge of orange. The wrong edge. Pushing Kaylin aside, he bent over the corpse and lifted the closed lids of her eyes.

To Tara—in a
very
quiet voice—Kaylin said, “You said you’d examined the bodies?”

Tara nodded, but her gaze was now affixed to Tiamaris’s face.

“Was there anything unnatural about the eyes?”

“You saw them.”

“I mean, to you.”

“No.”

Tiamaris held the lids open between two fingers and began his spell of detection and identification for the third time that day. It was impossible not to look at the eyes of the corpse. They were, like the eyes of any corpse Kaylin had seen, cloudy; the original hazel color of the iris was still evident, but very murky.

Tiamaris spoke the syllables of his focus in the deep and rumbling bass of true Dragon; she could feel it in the soles of her feet. As Kaylin watched the eyes he held open between two large and careful fingers, she stopped breathing. The cloudiness receded; they looked, for a moment, like living, sightless eyes. The pupils didn’t shift shape or position; the eyes themselves didn’t move.

But the irises were now a completely clear and brilliant gold.

They stayed that way for another fifteen minutes before Tiamaris let the spell drop; she knew the moment he did be cause clouds overtook the corpse’s eyes and the color dimmed, once again, into a very human hazel. Kaylin had seen a handful of Dragons in her life, and by law, they were required to be in their more or less human forms; no Dragons she had ever met had hazel-colored eyes.

No human she had ever met had eyes that shade of gold.

She waited until he once again drew the lids down over the dead woman’s eyes. His own were now a heated orange; he was agitated. He didn’t, however, show it in any other way; his voice was brisk, his expression smooth and neutral.

There was a lot of awkward silence packed into the longest five minutes ever. Kaylin finally broke it. “You can’t think she was a Dragon?”

“That would not have been my first thought. It would not, given our initial examination of the bodies, have been my hundredth.”

“And now?”

“I…do not know, Kaylin.” He stepped away from the bodies. “Magically unaugmented, she is human, perhaps five years older than you are now. I do not know what the eyes signify.” He shook his head, as if to clear it.

Kaylin looked at the dead woman. Or at one of them. “I would never have guessed,” she finally said. “But I’ve never seen a female Dragon before.”

“There is a reason for that. However, it is quite probable you have
not
seen one now.”

The Other Dragon, as she’d called him, was waiting outside the Tower grounds when Kaylin and Severn emerged. Tiamaris and Tara had chosen to escort them out.

Sanabalis offered Tiamaris and Tara a deep bow. “On the morrow,” he told his former student. Tiamaris grimaced, but nodded and turned back toward the interior of the Tower.

Sanabalis rose. “Well?” he asked Kaylin.

“Tara’s determined to teach me proper table manners.”

He raised a white brow. “While that was not entirely what I meant, I approve. Did the subject of the investigation come up?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

She hesitated; the sudden change in the color of Tiamaris’s eyes urged her to be cautious. “Why did you call this a subtle Shadow incursion?”

“I am not convinced that it is not.”

“I’m not convinced that it
is.
”

“Then you will approach the investigation with an open mind.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“There is always something I am not, as you put it, telling you. Suffice it to say, the investigation is, to my mind, enough of a priority that even Lord Diarmat will accept the necessity, should the matter arise.”

“Sanabalis—”

“And before you make pointless accusations,” he said, lifting a hand, “let me assure you that none of the information I am currently refusing to part with has any direct bearing on the investigation itself. I admit that I find it disturbing.”

“Good. Disturbing enough to help me leverage a small item or two out of the Imperial mages?”

He raised one brow. “That, I feel, is a matter for the Sergeant to decide.”

“The Sergeant will say no—the fiefs aren’t in his jurisdiction.”

“Possibly. What, exactly, do you hope to leverage—as you put it—out of the Imperial mages?”

“Just a crystal. A small one.”

Both his brows rose. “You want a projection crystal.”

“Just one.”

“Private Neya, Sergeant Kassan would in all likelihood deny the request if you were working on the investigation into the Exchequer himself. Do you have any idea of the expense you would be incurring?”

“No,” she replied, entirely truthfully. “But I know they’re both rare and useful.”

“The reason they are rare in spite of the fact that they’re demonstrably useful is the expense and difficulty of their creation. What, exactly, do you hope to demonstrate?”

“Not demonstrate, exactly. I want to take it into the streets and I want to show people what she—what they—looked like when they were alive. I have two things in mind to start. One, we cast it entirely as an important missing person and two, we
also
attempt to find out if anyone has gone missing within the last three days.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Even if the corpses
are
corpses—and I want Red to come and inspect them, or I want them exported to the Halls—that
can’t
be what they originally looked like. Sanabalis, there are seven
identical
bodies. Even if they were somehow sisters, there would be distinguishing birthmarks, moles, differences in teeth—something. There isn’t.” She hesitated again, and Sanabalis’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve done a magical analysis?”

“I? No. I have not entered the Tower where the bodies are kept.”

“But you’ve seen the bodies?”

“I’ve seen three of them.”

“And?”

Sanabalis, however, had run out of patience. He now adopted his teacher voice. “You were in the Tower. You were no doubt allowed to inspect the bodies. You have already, in the course of your duties, displayed an uncanny sensitivity to magic. Did you, or did you not, notice anything of significance that would indicate the bodies themselves were enspelled?”

His eyes had gone from gold to bronze, and his expression was very pinched.

She had no ready answer. His eyes narrowed, but his gaze remained a steady and comforting bronze. This wasn’t the usual definition of comfort when dealing with Dragons, but in comparison to the livid near-red of Tiamaris, it would do.

“What, exactly, were you looking for?”

She grimaced. “Sigils. Signatures.”

“You did not, of course, find them.”

“No.”

“What does this tell you?”

“It doesn’t tell us that magic isn’t involved,” she said firmly.

“No?”

“No.”

“Private Neya, while it is entirely true that I fail to tell you everything that might satisfy your apparently boundless curiosity, this is not a situation in which turnabout is, to coin a human phrase, fair play. What occurred in the Tower?”

“Tiamaris had already examined the bodies for vestiges of magic.”

One pale brow rose. “Of course he had.”

“He said he found nothing. But I asked him to cast the spell again, in my presence.”

“Good. The results?”

“I…don’t understand the results,” she admitted. “But he wasn’t very happy with them.”

“You said he had cast the spell once and received no useful information.”

“Yes. But—”

“You will be the death of either yourself or me. My preference at this point is obviously yourself.” Sanabalis began to walk, and Kaylin joined him. Severn walked to her left.

“Usually I notice sigils, physical signatures. That wasn’t the case here. I almost noticed nothing.”

“Almost?”

“There was no difference. When the spell was invoked, I noticed no change. It was when the spell faded that I did. But when I mentioned this to Tiamaris, he cast the spell again—and this time,
he
looked. But he—he looked at the woman’s eyes.”