Heart's Blood(25)

She had been wondering. As she sat, and he turned to go back to the workmen, she asked quickly, "What are you doing?"

Her curiosity would get her in trouble one day. In truth, it already had. Too many times.

"Questioning them. They might have seen something." He opened his hands like a book, and pointed at the closed volume on her lap. "Don't fret. I'll tell you everything I learn."

"Thank you." Most men wouldn't. Most men hadn't; not the ones related to her. They'd patted her on the head and told her not to worry.

She opened her book and did as she'd been told. The more she knew, the better she could understand the magic.

Shadows crept across the cobblestones and up the walls as they waited. The cart was emptied and driven away. Other carts came to other buildings. Pearl slogged her way through some twenty-odd pages of Elizabethan prose. She was getting used to the syntax and phrasing, so the reading came a bit easier. It was the concepts that made her brain hurt.

Grey questioned all of the workers who came down the narrow street. Some of them had seen a man in a black suit and top hat opening the padlock and going inside the warehouse. They could give no description other that he was "shortish" and lean. Grey had already told Pearl the murderer was likely a well-to-do man. The working class were more straightforward in their murders, he said. If they wanted someone dead, they'd bash him in the head or stick a knife in his ribs and be done with it.

"This man's purpose was not murder," Grey said. "It was the magic. The choice of victim was random. I believe Angus Galloway was selected because he was available, and had some attribute required by the murderer for his magic."

"What?" Pearl soaked up everything he told her.

"I don't know, do I? Red hair. Or perhaps a man in the prime of life was needed. That's what the investigation is to determine. If we can learn what the killer was trying to do with this perverted spell of his, perhaps we will learn who could have committed the crime, and have someone to point Amanusa's sorcery toward."

I am a sorceress, Pearl thought, but she didn't say it aloud. She knew what his response would be: You're an apprentice. And he would be correct.

She frowned down at her book. "I know you don't have any facts yet, beyond the condition of Mr. Galloway's body and the residue of magic from it, but do you have any idea what the murderer was trying to do? You said at the first that he was trying to call a demon-but, why?"

Grey sighed and toed a pebble away from her keg, eyes focused on his action. "I do not know."

"Didn't you say conjury can't call demons?" Pearl was confused.

"I did. I also said there are idiots-those outside the guild, mostly-who don't believe it. Who say we're trying to keep the truth to ourselves, amongst the privileged few. Books exist-fragments of old manuscripts, or cobbled-together notations from ancient experiments. No matter how we deny the possibility or destroy the books, there's always one book or part of a book that is smuggled away. Hidden and preserved for the next idiot who wants to try to control the power of a fallen angel."

Grey sighed and leaned against the warehouse wall, folding his arms. "It's never been proven-because who would be so abysmally stupid as to attempt the test?-but I believe that the stories and whispers persist because it amuses the rulers of hell to play at obedience to the will of the fool who thinks he has summoned them. For just as long as suits them. Until the demons have wreaked as much havoc and sucked in as many victims as possible.

"Then they crush the conjurer, seize their prizes, and celebrate by wreaking more havoc. Demons are good at havoc."

"You sound rather vicarish." It surprised her. He put on such an air of decadence, depravity, and dissolution. As if he believed in nothing and cared for nothing. But she already knew that was false.

"Do I?" He sounded appalled. "I shall have to remedy that immediately."

Then his dilettante's mask fell away. "Conjurers deal with a reality other than the physical. We know a little of how that realm works. There is good and there is evil. It exists. We have seen it. How can one not believe what one has seen?"

He went silent then, as if shocked by his own vehemence. Pearl took the space to digest what he said.

As she considered, a pair of carriages came rattling around the corner, pulled up, and began to disgorge magicians. The Briganti Investigations Branch had arrived.

Pearl sat on her keg and alternated between reading and watching as the padlock was cut away and investigators began carrying items out. She couldn't go inside to watch because Grey directed the activity from the doorway beside her and he refused to let her move from her keg. She had no opportunity to slip away and do as she wished.

A box wagon with briganti painted in stark white over shiny black appeared a short while after the carriages. Before the padlock on the door of the wagon could be opened, a pair of investigators brought out a sturdy table to load, reeking of spilled blood and sorcery.

Pearl covered her nose, but the smell wasn't physical. She stood, wanting a look at the table. Was it stained to match the crimson magic?

Grey watched her as she stepped toward it, but didn't stop her. She eased a bit closer, until she saw the rust-brown stains soaked into one end of the raw wood, still thick and sticky looking. She'd seen worse, she reminded herself. She shivered, suddenly chilled in the shadows.

I didno' bleed till th' bastard broke ma nose. The whisper came from nowhere straight into her head, Glaswegian accent and all. After he worked his way up through the rest of ma bones.

Pearl yelped, jumped, dropped her book onto her foot, and hopped again because it hurt. Grey was there instantly, helped her to lean against her keg. He took her by the arms and drew her away, out of sight of the table, but not out of range of its stains.

"Are you all right?" He looked her over, head to toe, making her feel entirely peculiar. More than she did already. "You cried out before you dropped the book. What happened?"

"Was he Scottish?" she whispered, shaking, but just a bit. "The victim?"

Grey's eyes widened and he dropped his hands from her arms. "It's probable, given a name like Angus Galloway."

"I heard him." She whispered softer, so quietly he had to bend close to hear, his too-long hair brushing her nose. She told him what she'd heard, her lips at his ear.                       
       
           



       

Grey drew back, frowning at her. He scanned the area, obviously using his other vision. "Keep an eye out, lads," he called. "There's spirits abroad."

"How did I hear him?" Pearl was frightened down to her book-smashed toes. "We weren't-" She gestured at his hands.

"I don't know. We'll puzzle it out later."

"Will we have time? The number of things saved for later seems to be piling rather high."

"We'll find the time. Carve it from somewhere." He turned away to glance at a notebook brought to him by one of his men. He waved it on to the wagon.

"What are you doing with my wagon?" A blustery voice boomed through the narrow street, so loud that Pearl wondered if it didn't shake a few bricks loose. The voice belonged to a big, broad man with luxurious brown side-whiskers.

"Belongs to the Briganti," Grey drawled, suddenly all languid nonchalance. "Last I looked, I was still Briganti. As to what I'm doing with your precious wagon, I'm loading up the evidence of a murder to take it back to council workrooms so we can find the murderer."

"Last I looked, you were the one accused of the crime." The man's chin was clean shaven, but his side-whiskers grew into his mustache in an elaborate design.

"Been proven innocent. By an unimpeachable source. You should know that, Simmons." Grey grinned and winked. "Not guilty of murder, at any rate. Haven't been innocent since I was in short pants."

Ah. This was the Briganti colonel who thought Grey usurped his authority. Grey probably did, every chance he got.

"What about this, sir?" Another young conjurer stood at the door, holding up a coil of rope. Rope saturated with sorcery.

That's what th' bastard bound me with. The mental murmur slid icy fingers down her spine, and Pearl couldn't stop another high-pitched yip.

Tied me to th' table with a rope across ma neck, so if I struggled too much it choked me. The voice paused. Hard not t'struggle when your leg's bein' broke by a great hammer.

She swallowed down another squeak and tugged at her magic-master's sleeve. He looked down at her.

"Take it," she said. "Can't you feel the magic?"

Grey's eyes unfocused for a moment, then he waved it toward the wagon.

"What's that female doing here?" Simmons demanded, chin tucked so deep into his neck that Pearl was surprised he could speak. "No place for a woman, Carteret. You should know that."

"My apprentice, Pearl Parkin. Parkin, Colonel Simmons. Can't teach her if she's not with me, can I?"

"What can you teach her here? Murder investigations?"

Grey's expression brightened. "Yes, exactly. She is an apprentice sorceress, you see, so of course a great deal of her practice will involve murder investigations. Innocent blood, and all that. No reason not to start her in right away, is there?"