Murder by Magic (12 page)

One more thing remained for Jerre to do before leaving Hanilat for the Wide Hills District: he paid a social call on Refayal Tavaet.

The head of the sus-Arial family kept a town house in one of the most elegant of Hanilat’s residential neighborhoods. Jerre presented himself to the doorkeeper-
aiketh
⁵
early in the forenoon and identified himself as Jerre syn-Casleyn rather than as Center Street’s Inquestor-Principal. Refayal Tavaet might have asked the local Watch for assistance in the matter of his brother’s death; but that didn’t mean he wanted its official presence intruding on his household.

Jerre drank red
uffa
⁶
from a crystal glass and asked the head of the sus-Arial, “Why don’t you accept the Circle’s account of your brother’s death? Is there bad blood between your family and the Lokheran Circle?”

“I hadn’t thought that there was,” Refayal said. “But my brother is dead.”

“I don’t wish to make light of your grief, but he was a Mage, after all.
⁷
The possibility was always—”

“I know all about the possibilities.” Refayal’s voice was harsh; Jerre, listening, supposed that his anger and sorrow might well be genuine. “Deni’s private funds and property go to the Circle. And not even Mages are above temptation.”

The Lokheran Circle lived and worked in a three-story brick building two blocks off the central street of Lokheran proper.
⁸
The Mage who answered was painfully young and earnest, reminding Jerre of Center Street’s recruits-in-training. He made a note to interview her as soon as possible, before her superiors could take her aside and instruct her in what to say; she wouldn’t have been with the Circle long enough to know in her bones which things were spoken of to outsiders and which were not.

Unfortunately, good manners and standard procedure both required that he speak with the First of the Lokheran Circle before asking to speak with any of its members.

“I’m Inquestor-Principal Jerre syn-Casleyn of the Center Street Watch,” he said. “My message preceded me, yes?”

Her eyes widened. Jerre suspected that she’d never dealt in person with a member of the Watch before this, and that she didn’t know whether to be frightened or embarrassed about it. “Yes,
etaz
—sir. Lord syn-Casleyn. He’s waiting for you in the downstairs office.”

Grei Vareas, First of the Lokheran Circle, was a stocky, graying man who could have been own cousin to Station-Commander Evayan back at Center Street. Like the young Mage who had answered the door, he wore everyday clothing in the local style,
⁹
a season or two behind the fashions of Hanilat.

“I’m sorry that Refayal Tavaet is still grieving for his brother,” he said to Jerre. “Nevertheless, Deni’s death was as we reported it.”

Jerre nodded. “‘In the line of duty’ can be hard for family members to take sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“Especially if it’s unexpected . . . Lokheran doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would demand a great working.”
¹⁰

“No,” said Vareas—lured into confidence, as Jerre had hoped, by the show of sympathy. “Farming, banking, a bit of light industry. The last great working before this one was back in ’59—the drought year. A fire in the factory district threatened to burn out of control and destroy the center of town.”

“Before your time?”

“Almost. I was even younger than Keshaia, whom you must have met.”

“The little doorwarden?” Jerre took advantage of the opening Vareas had provided. “I’d like to speak with her next, if I may. Purely in the interest of rounding out my report.”

Jerre met with Keshaia in a small office near the back of the building’s ground floor. The room didn’t seem to belong to any one of the Lokheran Mages in particular; when he asked Keshaia, she confirmed his suspicions, explaining that the Circle-Mages took turns using it for personal business.
¹¹

“Deni also?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He talked with his legalist and his financial adviser at least once a quarter.”

Jerre had trouble picturing a Mage with a private financial adviser, and said so. Keshaia was an open and unsuspicious young woman—she really hadn’t been a Mage for very long, he thought—and the artfully timed confidence worked as Jerre intended.

“Deni was a money whiz,” she said. “He played with it, like some people do puzzles or—or build little models out of kits. For a game.”

“Was he good at it?” Refayal Tavaet was claiming that the Lokheran Circle had killed Deni for his private money; maybe Refayal had a point, after all. Younger siblings who’d left the family altars didn’t usually carry a great deal away with them, but a small competence could grow into a sizable fortune if properly tended. Jerre scrawled a question on his travel pad and sent the message off to Center Street with a flick of his stylus, then went back to taking notes.

Keshaia shrugged. “I suppose. He kept on doing it, and he seemed to be having fun.”

“It takes all kinds,” Jerre said. “I need some background here. How much can you tell me about the working?”

“The one where Deni . . . ? Not much. I was there, but I wasn’t a part of it.”

“How did that happen?” Jerre arranged his features into an expression of nonthreatening curiosity and waited. Given an expectant silence, people were more likely to fill it than not, and Keshaia proved no exception.

“The really big workings—nobody knows how long one’s going to last once it starts. So you’ll usually have a watchkeeper—somebody who stays out and keeps an eye on things.”
¹²

“What kind of things?”

“Trouble from outside. Somebody inside the working getting sick or hurt. Stuff like that.”

“I see.” Jerre checked his travel pad under the guise of making a note. Center Street had picked up his message; good. “So you—the Circle, that is—knew in advance that this was going to be a major working.”

“Sort of. Grei
etaze
warned me it could go on for quite a while, but that was because things might get complicated. It was supposed to be a luck-of-the-town intention, and there’s a lot of threads in one of those, he said.”
¹³

“But no one expected it to grow into a great working?”

Keshaia shook her head. “It just happened.”

Center Street was being efficient today, which was good. Jerre had the reply to his message before the afternoon was out. New information in hand, he went back to talk again with Grei Vareas in the latter’s office.

“Lord syn-Casleyn.” If the First of the Lokheran Circle was annoyed at having to speak with a man from the Watch twice in one day, he was hiding it well. “Is there anything further we can help you with?”

“Just a couple of things that I need to clear up.”

“Of course.”

Jerre made a show of consulting his travel pad. “First, Keshaia says that nobody expected the—what did she call it?—the luck-of-the-town intention to become a great working. Is that correct?”

“Yes. The Circle does such workings regularly, as part of our relationship with the town. We anticipated that this one might prove arduous, but nothing more than that.”

“Does it happen often that a routine working turns out to demand a death?”

Vareas frowned. “Not a death,” he said. “It isn’t a death that the great working demands from us. It’s a life.”

“A life, then.” From the Watch’s point of view, Jerre reflected, it came to the same thing in the end—a man who’d been alive when the working started wasn’t alive any longer—but he was willing to grant Vareas the distinction. “Do things like that happen often?”

“No. But we know that they always can.”

“Thank you,” Jerre said gravely. “I have one more favor I’d like to ask,
etaze.
If it doesn’t do too much violence to your Circle’s customs, I’d like young Keshaia to show me the room where the working took place.”

The Lokheran Circle, it developed, carried out its workings and intentions in a large, windowless room on the building’s second floor. The chamber had clearly been converted to its present use from some other purpose. The three tall windows along its rear wall had been bricked over and then, like the walls themselves, painted solid black. The hardwood floor was also painted black, with a white circle several yards across in the center of it.
¹⁴
The floorboards looked like they had recently been scrubbed clean, but Jerre knew that a good forensic team would find traces of blood on them just the same—Deni Tavaet’s blood, shed in the working, and the blood of whichever member of the Circle had matched him.

Which would mean nothing at all, he reminded himself. Nobody was trying to hide the fact that Deni had died in the working, and the blood alone wouldn’t be proof even of that.

He turned to Keshaia. “You were present in this room during the working, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Looking at it, but not seeing it from the inside?”

Rasha
etaze
had told him once that what she saw during a working was something other than the physical world—other, but not unreal. He was willing to take her word that there was a distinction; in the present case, it meant that none of Lokheran’s Mages except for the youngest and most inexperienced counted as a reliable witness for his particular purposes.

“Yes,” Keshaia said. “I had to stay out, to keep watch.”

“Good. I want you to tell me exactly what you saw. Start with who was in what place when the working began, and go on from there.”

“All right.” Keshaia walked to a place on the perimeter of the painted circle. “The First was here.” She crossed to the other side of the circle. “Chiwe
etaze
”—Jerre consulted his notes; Chiwe Raiath was Lokheran’s Second—“was over here.”

“What about Deni?”

She moved a few steps to the left along the edge of the painted circle. “He was here. Kneeling and meditating on the intention, like everybody else.”

“And that went on for how long?”

“I didn’t have a timepiece; I’m not sure. A long time.”

“Then what happened?”

“The
eiran
started pulling tight,” she said. “I wasn’t even inside, and I could see them. I wasn’t worried yet, not really; the First had warned me it could be a hard working. I was expecting that he and Chiwe would raise the power, like I’d seen them do before, and that the worst that would come of it was that we’d have to patch one or the other or both of them up in the infirmary afterward.”

“But it didn’t happen that way,” Jerre said. “Something went wrong.”

“No, no—not wrong. Workings go the way the universe wants them to go; ‘wrong’ isn’t part of it.” Keshaia paused, then said, “But this one did go—not how we’d expected.”

“In what way?”

“Well,” she said, “first Grei
etaze
got up and said we needed more power, and who would match him. And Chiwe never got a chance to answer because Deni was already standing up and answering for him. And after that”—she swallowed—“after that, it was a staff-fight, like we do every day in practice, only this time for real, with the threads of the
eiran
going into it and weaving out again and the pattern drawing tighter and tighter until Chiwe got past Deni’s guard and struck him dead. The pattern was done then, and that was the end of the working.”

Two days later, Jerre syn-Casleyn paid a second social call on Refayal Tavaet sus-Arial. The two men spoke, as was courteous, of the weather and other trivial things until the red
uffa
was brewed and poured into the crystal glasses.

Then Jerre said, “I’ve made my final report to Center Street.”

“And?”

“It was as the Circle told you. A death in the working.”
¹⁵

“That’s all?” Refayal frowned. “I don’t believe it, syn-Casleyn. I can tell when I’m not being told something, and you’re not telling me something now.”

“Very well,” Jerre said. He set aside his glass of
uffa.
“You were intending to purchase Lokheran Premium Container and Packaging. The initial overtures are a matter of public record, and the Financial and Accounting Division at Center Street was able to find them for me with no difficulty. I’m told there was considerable worry in some quarters about whether you intended to break the company up and move its talents and assets elsewhere, or continue to operate it in its current location.”

“I honestly hadn’t decided yet,” Refayal said. “It’s all moot now, anyway. The Lokheran town council managed to top my offer—they scraped up enough money from somewhere at the last minute, apparently.”

“Yes,” said Jerre. Refayal Tavaet wasn’t going to like what he heard next, but he’d asked for knowledge and it would come to him in the way that the universe willed—just as it must have come to Deni himself in the course of the working. Jerre wondered if Refayal would be as willing as his brother to accept that knowledge. Not Center Street’s problem, thankfully; an Inquestor’s work, as always, was merely to report the truth as he knew it and move on. “The money was a gift from the Lokheran Circle, for the health and welfare of the town of Lokheran.”

Cold Case

Diane Duane

Diane Duane has written more than thirty novels, various comics and computer games, and fifty or sixty animated and live-action screenplays for characters as widely assorted as Batman, Jean-Luc Picard, Siegfried the Volsung, and Scooby-Doo. Together with her husband of fifteen years, Northern Ireland–born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, she lives in a townland in the far west of county Wicklow in Ireland, in company with two cats and four seriously overworked computers—an odd but congenial environment for the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination.

She gardens (weeding, mostly), collects recipes and cookbooks, manages the Owl Springs Partnership’s Web site at
http://www.owl springs.com
, dabbles in astronomy, language studies, computer graphics, and fractals, and tries to find ways to make enough time to just lie around and watch anime.

A
fter Rob pulled up in front of the house on Redwood, he sat there in the front seat of the car for a few moments, drinking what remained of his coffee and looking the place over. It was the only single-family house left on this block, and one of very few remaining for some blocks around in this neighborhood—almost all of the rest of the buildings were apartment buildings now, or at the very least duplexes. As he swigged the second-to-last gulp of coffee, Rob tried to imagine what the neighborhood had been like when this house was built, fifty or even seventy years ago: wide lawns, wide new sidewalks, decorously spaced white stucco houses with red tile roofs, tidy front walks leading up to them, poinsettia and dwarf orange planted by the houses or on the lawns . . .