Cast In Ruin Part 13

"And there's no chance at all that this is somehow the same corpse and it's just been moved around?"

"None. The Lady houses our de facto morgue at the moment. I did not feel it wise to contain the bodies within the heart of the Tower; she feels it is safe to house them in the s.p.a.ces in which we entertain. There are, at present, seven bodies laid out. Magic has been used to both safeguard and preserve them, and if you wish to examine the actual-"

"I do." She didn't, but that was true of half the things her job required.

"Tiamaris, has anyone else gone missing?" Kaylin asked as they walked at a brisk clip down the wide halls.

"How, precisely, would we determine this?"

She cursed. In Leontine. There was no missing persons department in the fief. There was no official way of making reports, and even if there had been, no one would actually make them.

As if he could read her mind, he said, "Within the next two years, a full and official census will be taken, and the records that result will be housed in the Town Hall."

"The what?"

Tiamaris raised a brow. "While I understand that human hearing is not as acute as one could desire, I believe you heard me."

Kaylin turned to Morse. Morse offered a very fieflike shrug. He was the boss; she wasn't arguing.

"We will also," he added, "build a more martial hall which will house my police force. Neither project is viable at the moment, given the manpower being diverted to the interior border-but we are still left with this particular problem."

"The first death occurred-or rather, was discovered-how long after the Norannir arrived?"

"A day."

"Tiamaris, they've only been here for what, two days? Three?"

"Three."

"So the rest of the bodies-"

"Yes. All of the seven have been discovered in the past two days."

"Do you think you've missed any?"

"Possibly. The Lady judged it unwise to stir unrest in this regard, and a more thorough investigation would almost certainly cause unrest at this point."

Kaylin snorted. "Morse?"

"I've asked a few questions in the right-or what used to be the right-places." She shrugged. "So far, nothing-but it's only been a day, and I've mostly been at the borders, same as the rest."

Kaylin nodded. Tiamaris and Tara now stopped in front of a door that was as wide as any of the others in the Tower; it was less ornate. It, like the other doors, was completely free of door wards; it was also free of handle or k.n.o.b. This wasn't a problem for Tara, who merely nodded at it. It opened.

Going from a dining hall that the Imperial Palace might boast to a room with corpses lying across two of three large stone slabs-in a lower than normal temperature-was a little like arriving as a guest and being thrown into the dungeon. Straightening her shoulders, Kaylin took one short breath, expelled it, and headed toward the bodies.

Severn joined her. They were fully clothed, and at that, in the same dress; the dresses themselves had taken some damage, although most of it was cosmetic. "Nothing changed when you removed the dresses?"

Tara frowned. "No. Not noticeably."

Severn cut a piece of cloth from the hem of one dress, marked it, and slid it into his pouch. He did this with the hem of each of the dresses. Kaylin clipped hair samples. "So, at the moment we have no clear idea if anyone else has disappeared."

"Many people are missing; many died in the incursions. There is no system in place at the moment to account for them all."

"Have you consulted the Norannir?"

Tiamaris raised a brow. "No. Why?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to tie these deaths-if they are that-to the Norannir, but the timing seems suspicious."

"The dead woman is-or was-human, a race that they'd not encountered before their arrival here."

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, repet.i.tive 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 b.u.mp, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 ba.s.s 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.