“You’re not a child. Even if you’re not part of the conversation, you should be paying attention.”
Eblin rolled his eyes and exaggerated as he flexed his leg. “You had it in hand.”
“Stop it. That didn’t hurt.”
Eblin straightened up and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
The old man rolled his eyes and turned away, growling under his breath as he outpaced Eblin, leaving the younger man to meander along behind.
They didn’t get back until well into the afternoon. But, really, except for packing their gear and getting things ready for the raid, there wasn’t much to do. Jacques left early, muttering something about needing a pick-me-up, and ordered Eblin to straighten things and look over a few contract proposals.
“What do you want me to look for?”
Jacques didn’t look back. “Something worth our time. Don’t recommend anything without a decent budget.”
The door closed with a bang.
Eblin stared after his mentor for a long moment. Then, with a shrug, he sat at Jacques’ desk and pulled out a stack of clipped papers from the letter box.
He could see right away that most of the proposals were from the City Guard. Missing persons, minor thefts, mana tampering, that sort of thing. One of the mana tampering sounded like theft as well, just from the surface report, but why anyone would steal used mana was beyond him. Once a signature was applied through usage, mana became useless. Except to act as it was set to or to release into the ether.
As interesting as some of these cases sounded, he put the Guard reports aside for now. The budgets were low, low enough that Jacques would growl at him for suggesting them as their next job. And many of them were old enough that the trail would have gotten cold by now, making their job even more difficult.
Here was one from House Devonshire. He rolled his eyes.
A lost puppy? Really? No, knowing the mistress of that puppy, he wasn’t surprised. What disgusted him was that the budget was almost twice that of a regular missing persons case. Reluctantly, he put it in the consider pile.
House Mendon wanted someone to tail Roryce. Again. He put that in the consider pile. Anything to help his friend out. And getting paid for it wouldn’t be bad, either.
It was getting late, closing in on sunset, when he finally sat back and stretched. The rejected pile was larger than the other two, but he’d made a decent list for Jacques to consider, as well as a pile of City Guard cases and the Mendon case that he’d take on alone. Two years ago, Jacques would never have allowed it. Now, with more experience behind him, Jacques would just check in while Eblin went about his business.
If he was lucky, he might be able to pay Roryce back some of his outstanding debts.
Bang, bang, bang!
Eblin nearly fell out of his chair as someone suddenly pounded on the door. Heart racing, he jumped to his feet, then took a deep breath before calmly opening the door.
Outside stood a messenger boy. He looked up with a grin and held out a note.
“Bronze, please.”
Eblin paid the boy, holding back a wince at the small coin leaving his purse, then opened the letter as the boy scampered off. The child didn’t get far before Eblin called him back.
“I need you to take this to another address,” he instructed, taking out another coin and handing back the letter. Since this money would be reimbursed, he didn’t wince.
The boy brightened and eagerly dashed off.
Meanwhile, Eblin grabbed his pouch and opened his drawers, stuffing said pouch with the things he might need, including the guidebook (which barely fit in the outer straps), his signature reader, Jacques’ mana detector, and a few evidence bags.
He really should keep a second pouch ready to grab and go, but until he could afford a spare bag, he made do with reusing this one.
It was dark by the time he reached his destination. And somehow Jacques had made it first. The old geezer probably smelled money in this case and consented to use a coach instead of running over as Eblin had. Barely looking up from talking to the lead investigator, Jacques was holding out a reimbursement coin for Eblin by the time he jogged up to them.
By the sound of it, Jacques hadn’t beaten him there by much.
“... in the kitchen?”
Eblin took the coin as he tuned in.
The investigator shrugged. “Probably an attempted robbery, caught in the kitchen before it reached anything worth taking,” she said, sounding snippish. “All this fuss for a bunch of orphans.”
Sucking in a breath, Eblin took a better look at the building, keeping an ear on what was being said.
So, this was the Ma’Shite Orphanage. As expected, it was more functional than grand.
“Was anything taken?” Jacques asked, leaning on his cane.
The woman shook her head. “No. One of Ma’Shite’s servants interrupted the act before it got too far, which is why we think the creature had only made it as far as the kitchen.”
“Have you interviewed the servant?”
Eblin didn’t look away from the building. There were lights on everywhere, and he could see the silhouettes of children peeking out the windows of the upper floor. He spied a young woman with golden hair and nodded in a friendly way to her. To his surprise, she flinched and drew back, letting the curtain fall, but it was immediately pushed back by a pair of childish faces.
When the silence went on too long, he finally looked at the investigator and quirked a winning smile at her. “Is there something wrong, Michelle? Is the servant dead?”
She scowled at him. “Mister Trovinski,” she said curtly, “if I have to tell you to call me Inspector one more time—”
“But you’re too lovely to be reduced to ‘inspector.’”
The woman gritted her teeth and pointedly turned back to Jacques, answering his question in a growl. “You’ve heard that Ma’Shite keeps a pet, right?”
Eblin tensed before Jacques finished blinking. “Come again? Are we talking about another demon? How did he get a permit for that?”
Michelle sighed and ran an agitated hand through her hair. “No, something easier to get than a demon. Ma’Shite keeps an amicus. A second-phase amicus at that. Apparently he had it on guard duty when it, she, discovered the intruder.”
Jacques whistled and glanced at the building with more interest. “I hadn’t heard.” Then, more quietly and to himself, “Normally you acquire a second-phase amicus if you intend to make a statement or as a sacrifice. Ma’Shite doesn’t buy cruelty as decoration.”
I had, Eblin thought grimly, missing most of Jacques’ grumblings.
“If it’s a second-phase amicus, then it won’t have the sense to talk to us. Maybe we should move on to inspecting the kitchen instead.”
Jacques was about to walk around the inspector when Eblin cleared his throat.
“Amicus Nark is sane enough to talk to,” he said evenly. “Can we arrange an interview, Michelle?”
Both Michelle and Jacques stared at Eblin blankly for long enough that he felt a need to chuckle.
“I occasionally roam other circles,” he said lightly. “Ma’Shite restored the Amicus’s reason before employing her. Now that that isn’t a problem, can we get an interview?”
Michelle hesitated. “Not yet. It, she, was injured during the attack, and Ma’Shite is refusing access to her until she’s healed.”
“How long will that be?”
Privately, Eblin added to himself, how much is Ma’Shite willing to spend on an amicus?
“Tomorrow. She’ll be seeing some healers and should be on her feet before this time comes again. However, he indicated she might not be happy about talking to us, and he won’t force her to.”
Healers. The man was willing to spend a lot, apparently. Interesting.
Eblin let out a slow breath and shrugged, a little relieved. If he didn’t have to talk to her, he’d rather not.
“Where is Ma’Shite?” Eblin looked around.
The Inspector grimaced. “He came for the amicus and left.”
“Very well, I'll stop by the Ma’Shite estate tomorrow,” said Jacques briskly. “For now, let’s take a look at the kitchen. Could someone bring me the person in charge of this place?”
As far as Eblin could see, the kitchen hadn’t been touched.
That is, beyond the usual bustle of putting out a fire.
Inspector Michelle had had similar training to Eblin and Jacques. However, since Jacques was the senior and expert here, as well as the one Ma’Shite probably requested, the woman took a step back and let Jacques give the orders. Some of those orders were directed at his apprentice.
While Jacques did his thing, including talking to the orphanage director when he arrived, Eblin took out the mana detector. After strapping the clear crystal to his wrist, he held out the tuning fork to scan the area.
Strangely, the further into the fire zone he cautiously stepped, the fewer mana traces there were. At the point where the demon had clearly been, where the stone floor had turned not only black with fire but glossy from the implosion of its insides, there were no mana traces at all.
None.
Frowning, he crouched down, vaguely aware that Jacques had gathered more people and was asking more questions. Eblin kept sweeping the tuning fork back and forth, watching the crystal for the color coding that indicated mana density.
There simply was nothing.
Perturbed, he put the tuning fork in the same hand as the crystal and opened his pouch with the other, pulling out the signature reader. It looked like a magnifying glass, the kind his grandmother used to use instead of glasses when she wanted to read fine print.
Instead of magnifying the objects he pointed at, it instead showed a swirl of patterns.
His eyes had been trained years ago to discern the pattern meanings, though he could only do a surface examination on the spot since he could zoom in for deeper layers that got more complicated underneath. They picked up the presence of mana, and then twisted it into shapes similar to fingerprints, shapes that indicated who or what had cast the mana.
‘Who’ was more common than ‘what.’ A low-level drake might leave a signature, but sentient beings were the ones most likely to use magic in a traceable way.
It was complicated, with some twists only occurring for humans, some only for elves, some for trolls, and so on. On top of that, the twists and turns became even more complicated the deeper into the pattern you went, identifying not just the species but the specific caster.
What he did with the reader was identify and then record the traces he wanted. Once recorded, he often left it to experts to sift through registered mages and find the exact signature match.
But now, he stared at the glass and its foggy surface.
‘Fog,’ with the absence of patterns, meant there was no mana at all. Or, rather, the only mana present was what rested harmlessly in the ether and not worth scanning.
Baffled, he held the glass in one hand and the detector in the other as he slowly backed away from the blast zone.
Nothing, nothing, a little here, traces there… It wasn’t until he was almost out of the kitchen that he started finding the normal amount of traces.
What in all the tears was that?
A blast zone like that should have had more traces of mana, not less. Possibly broken signatures, but still more.
Baffled, he began sweeping down the connecting passages, looking for other strange traces. Just in case.
When he found a spell pocket, he crouched. It was attached to a piece of the wall instead of something more obvious, like a lamp.
While this wasn’t unusual for a security system, he’d been half-listening to the details of the security system that Jacques was prying out of the orphanage director. Acting on a hunch, he swept the reader over the spot, then stared, open-mouthed.
“What in all pitts and tears is this?” he whispered, slowly moving the glass back and forth over the patch.
He'd never seen anything like it.
The mana signatures were there, but they were condensed and twisted together. Like someone had thrown different colored crayons in a pot, half melted them and gave them one stir, leaving the colors distinct but in clods.
He took several recordings of it, then moved on.
As he walked down the passage, waving around his instruments and alternating his attention between them, he found another clot of mana that was unusual.
This one made a chill run down his spine, and he crouched to get closer to it.

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