Nights of Villjamur

NINE

Investigator Jeryd stepped into his chambers, bleary-eyed. The sun had been up for a short while, not that you could see it yet. His head was mostly clear – an impressive feat considering the amount of whisky he’d imbibed. He never let it get too far and always knew when to stop. He’d seen too much of what happened to the lives of alcoholics to prevent the same from happening to him. No, if you drank all the time, that meant you wanted to use it to control your life, as if that was the only solution, and Jeryd was not looking for control, merely one night of escape. Two hundred years of it had taught him that you could never control the world around you.

He slumped into his fine wooden chair with a grunt, and for a brief moment contemplated giving up his career. How had things come to this? His tail felt stiff, his body ached. As he rested his head in his hands he was staring directly at an envelope on his desk until it came into focus.

Marysa’s handwriting.

Fumbling with eagerness, he tore open the letter.

He read it anxiously.

She wanted to meet him for dinner at the end of the week at one of their favourite bistros.

He tossed the letter on the desk, reclined back in his chair. So she wanted to meet him? That was a start. The Bistro Júula was where he had first taken her for dinner immediately after they had been married in a Jorsalir church. A dimly lit place, with wooden floors, patient staff, and crammed with large potted ferns that gave each table a degree of privacy.

He heard the bell tower strike thirteen: midday already, and he was meant to be meeting Tryst to look more closely at the body of Councillor Ghuda.

Jeryd swore at the horse that splashed an icy puddle onto his breeches. Tryst, a good armspan away, stared at Jeryd in faint amusement as the offending carriage proceeded into the distance.

The iren across the road was packed. Cold in the shade of a nest of architectural monstrosities, dozens of stalls lined the cobbled streets edging this trading centre of the city, not far from the Council Atrium. The investigator’s hands were clasped behind his back as he glanced casually at the arrays of food imported in from the surrounding agricultural communities where cultists had been treating crops to help yields survive the bad weather.

Noticing a display of several pots, vases, ornaments, he made a mental note to investigate some of the antique shops further away in the city’s expensive iren district during his lunch hour. Maybe he could find an interesting object for Marysa, something to impress her when they met for dinner. Moving on, he guided Tryst up a spiral passageway leading to the next level of the city.

Along some of these higher roads they encountered some huge flies that must have just swarmed in, their wings a handspan wide. They were feeding near the stables of the chancellor’s horses. They made a rather pleasant drone, and in a mildly disgusted way, he admired them. Usually they were harmless enough, occurring in twos or threes, the pterodettes keeping their numbers in check. It was not known if these giant insects had some collective consciousness, but he remembered investigating an odd incident last year, where a two-bit stage cultist used some of these creatures in his routine, to aid with his levitation. One night the insects picked him up, led him to a window, then promptly dropped him to his death. No one in the audience seemed to care that much at the time.

The investigator and his assistant reached a low wooden door set in an unimpressive stretch of limestone. Whereas much of the upper city was decorated and ornamental, this thoroughfare was plain to the point of functional. A remnant from earlier days, perhaps, in a city that had changed its perspectives innumerable times.

Jeryd knocked, turned to Tryst and explained, ‘This should bring some leads, I hope.’

Tryst was silent.

‘It was the Big Date last night, wasn’t it?’ Jeryd leaned against the wall, folded his arms.

‘Yes, it was nice,’ Tryst murmured. ‘But we didn’t kiss at the end.’

‘Bloody hell, it doesn’t always have to end with a kiss. You should be happy it didn’t end with a slap.’ He banged on the door again.

This time it opened, and a man with a haggard face beckoned the two of them inside, his white gown stained an alarming red down the front. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you gentlemen waiting, but I was in the middle of cleaning a corpse. My name’s Doctor Tarr, and I’m pleased to meet you.’ He offered a wrinkled hand.

Jeryd eyed it uncertainly, and introduced himself and Tryst. So this was Tarr, then, a man who dealt daily with the dead. Jeryd wondered if he would be as jolly or remote compared to the other doctors he had worked with in the past. They were certainly an odd bunch, these people who chose to spend their day away from the living.

‘It’s interesting to finally meet you, after reading so many of your forensic reports these last couple of years,’ Jeryd said. ‘And interesting that we should meet over Councillor Ghuda, certainly my biggest case.’

‘Yes, yes, Delamonde Ghuda is a most interesting case.’ Doctor Tarr gestured for them to follow him.

There were no windows in the room they entered, which was lit poorly by lanterns. Due to a proliferation of dried flowers and herbs, the odour wasn’t as bad as Jeryd thought it would be. There was faint melody coming from another room. ‘You employ a musician here?’ he asked in surprise.

Doctor Tarr stopped. ‘Why, yes, of course.’ He glanced at the investigator with mild disbelief. ‘The patients wouldn’t like it if I dismissed our lute player.’

‘Patients?’ Jeryd looked incredulous. ‘I was under the impression that this place was a morgue?’

‘That’s correct, investigator. However, I prefer a soothing ambience, even for the dead. He’s not the best musician, but people need to earn a coin, given the harsh times ahead.’

‘Indeed,’ Jeryd replied. He thought he could hear a faint noise behind the sound of the lute. A buzz maybe, perhaps some cultist device to aid the process? Jeryd studied Doctor Tarr in the light of the lantern. He was a man perhaps in his fifties, with a slight stoop, weathered face, thinning blond hair, elegant fingers.

He led them into a smaller well-lit stone chamber with a stone slab in the centre. The naked body of Delamonde Ghuda was displayed upon it, a white sheet keeping him decent.

Jeryd and Tryst stood either side of the corpse as Doctor Tarr pulled back the sheet.

‘Now, as I stated in my report, investigator, these wounds look most mysterious. I’ve not seen anything like them before.’

‘Talk me through your findings, doctor, if you will.’

‘Well, there were no intrusions to the body, meaning nothing had penetrated it, but, as you can see, there is a significant amount of flesh missing from the torso. Tissue appears to have been removed from this region.’ Tarr indicated an area from the base of the neck to halfway down the chest.

‘When you say “removed”, what d’you mean precisely, Doctor Tarr?’

‘Exactly what I said. It’s gone, removed, without any intrusion by a sharp instrument. I can’t give you any obvious conclusion as to what did this, because I’ve simply never seen anything similar before, nothing like an ordinary knife wound, which is, of course, simple to recognize. That’s why I wanted you to drop by, so you could see for yourself what an interesting case this is. You see, it’s as if the flesh has been removed by some unknown substance that had either consumed the flesh or exploded it outwards. The area of wounding is roughly circular, but you couldn’t class this as a crime unless you established whatever the instrument was that caused this unusual wounding.’

As Doctor Tarr went on to speculate on various possible causes, Jeryd began to realize he was wasting his time being here. He would have to go to the Council Atrium itself to find out if the popular Delamonde Ghuda actually had any secret enemies. Whilst he was weighing up the options, Tarr was delving further into medical analysis. Jeryd wanted to leave, as the doctor unnerved him. The lute player merely added to this sinister atmosphere.

‘Would you like me to show you some other victims,’ Tarr said, ‘to see how their wounds differ?’

‘No thanks,’ Jeryd said.

‘I’ll just show you one more.’

He showed them four.

They entered a chamber lined with recent corpses. Many of the bodies were male, and over thirty. Their faces were peaceful, their wounds dreadful – two inflicted by swords, one from a mace. One of them had clearly died only moments before Jeryd arrived.

Tarr was almost motherly in his pride. ‘This one took poison,’ he explained, standing next to a body resting on a raised platform. ‘It wasn’t the poison that actually killed him, because he choked on his own bile. Note the dried blood on his fingertips. He spent his final heartbeats clawing at the stone floor on which he had collapsed.’ Tarr shook his head solicitously. It looked as if he wanted to stroke the body to comfort it.

Jeryd shuddered.

They came upon the lute player finally, a young man perched on a crate in the corner of one of the various rooms. The whole place was a network of small chambers. Its complexity reminded Jeryd of the interior of a lung. What is the real point of this musician – to drown out their dying screams?

‘We really must be going shortly,’ Jeryd decided.

Tarr eyed the investigator fixedly. ‘I hope you can visit again. Not many people seem as comfortable around the dead as you do.’

‘My assistant and I, we’re pretty used to being around corpses. It comes with Inquisition business.’

‘There’s far too many that like to avoid being reminded that life tends to be a little shorter than we’d like.’

‘Some think it’s too long,’ Jeryd said. ‘Suicide is less rare than you’d think, especially with the ice age on the horizon and families being split because of the lack of accommodation in the city.’

Tarr walked over to inspect a young woman. ‘This one was raped, slaughtered, left on her doorstep.’ Her face was pale, calm-looking, as if her death came as a relief to the terrible moments leading up to it. ‘What a waste every time this happens. Very few people have a true appreciation of life. If we realized death might come upon us at any moment, do you think we’d waste time arguing or fighting or being idle?’

‘You can’t force people to appreciate such things,’ Jeryd said. ‘They’ve got to come to terms with it for themselves. And I suspect that it’s rumel nature too, as well as human, not to want to think about it. It’s all too sobering for most of us to cope with. Now, we really must be on our way. Do contact me if you need anything from us. Good day, Doctor Tarr.’

Tarr watched the two investigators leave, closed the door, then headed back into the chambers. He found the lute player. ‘You can stop now. They’ve gone.’

Tarr heard that hum again, louder than before. As the lute player disappeared into the darkness, leaving Tarr alone, where he waited until the humming ceased.

Dartun Súr entered the chamber.

The cultist leader had been working somewhere else in the building, the doctor did not know where. Maybe it was that damn strange cloak that allowed him to hide so effectively in the shadows. Tarr felt the tall man bearing down on him.

‘Dear doctor, that was a wonderful tour you gave our investigator.’ Dartun gripped the other man’s shoulder.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘So, what else’ve you got for me today? I’ve just finished working on that last fellow.’ Dartun clasped his hands, and looked eagerly around the room as if he were in an iren.

‘Another one?’ Tarr said.

‘Yes, we must keep busy, you know,’ Dartun said. ‘That’s what I was doing in the other room – just a bit of practice on an older corpse. And that was a nice touch of yours, covering it up with the lute player.’

‘Well, I couldn’t have the investigator poking around and getting suspicious. You should have warned me you were coming. The lute player was the best I could do. I bet our friend Jeryd now thinks I’m totally insane.’

Dartun clasped his hands together. ‘Can’t have the Inquisition prying around too much. I heard you saying you had some fresh ones? The fresher they are, the easier they are for me to work with.’

‘But those ones all have families,’ Tarr protested. ‘We’ve not had any unclaimed bodies arrive today.’

‘That’s a bit of an inconvenience, really.’ Dartun frowned, rubbing his chin. He ambled around the room, his boots loud on the stone. ‘Listen, d’you think I could reserve the next unclaimed one that comes in? I’m having to… begin some other schemes of mine very shortly, and I might need to leave the city very soon. And I could do with a few more corpses, no questions asked.’

Tarr hated Dartun for this secretiveness, but he had been embroiled in it for far too long now. And it was no longer out of choice, since every time Dartun made a suggestion, it seemed to come across more as a threat.

‘Right,’ Tarr said, ‘look, I’ll try and keep one for you, but you know this really is most abnormal.’

‘So are most things, doctor.’ Dartun turned, something flashed in his hands, and even before he walked into the wall he had vanished.

‘Why can’t he just use the door like everybody else?’ Tarr muttered.