“Try it upside down?” Nimona suggested.
ACCESS DENIED.
Ambrosius narrowed his eyes at the ID card reader. He was a knight now - shouldn’t that let him into the archives? Maybe the systems hadn’t been updated yet…
“Hey, you’re not allowed back here!” the voice of an archives worker made Ambrosius jump, “This is a high-security area. You need special clearance to be here.”
“I’m a knight. Isn’t that clearance enough?”
“Not for there.” The worker jerked his head towards the locked door. “If you want to retrieve something, you can fill out a request form with the receptionist.”
Ambrosius grimaced as the worker shooed them from the room. Not more paperwork…
The pink, dog-shaped hallucination by Ambrosius’s side spoke up as soon as they were out of earshot.
“Go wait for me outdoors - I’ll look around back for any windows.” she said with a wink before trotting off around the corner.
Ambrosius wondered what she’d say if she returned - since she was a figment of his imagination, she couldn’t know anything he didn’t, windows included. He glanced back at the room he’d come from. What was he doing anyway? Sneaking into the archives was a bad idea. He could ‘dig’, as Nimona had put it, another way. And he could figure out that other way over breakfast at the tea shop across the street.
~ ~ ~
Ambrosius tried to ignore the judging glances from the other patrons when he entered the shop. No doubt his appearance at the execution yesterday had made the news. He knew he’d hear it from The Director when he went in for work tomorrow - stuff about ‘damage control’ and ‘keeping an appearance worthy of the Goldenloin lineage’, yadda yadda. It was stifling.
He scanned the tea shop menu. Ballister had always ordered the same thing whenever they’d come here; earl gray with milk (not creamer) and sugar. Nobody else Ambrosius knew used milk - his mom had liked it that way and gotten Ballister hooked on it the first time he’d visited. Ambrosius had thought Bal was just humoring her at first, but he’d continued to order it after she’d died. Now there was nobody left to order it...
Ambrosius ordered the earl grey with milk and sugar. He may as well have ordered nothing; once he got it, he couldn’t bring himself to drink it. All he could think about were the two people who used to order this very thing, both dead and gone. The last time he’d seen either of them had been distressing - his mom sick in bed with her hair shorn off, Ballister being dragged away after shooting the queen…
Eventually, Ambrosius reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper packet the size of his fist. ‘Bal’ had been written on it in ink - the only label he could think to give the handful of ash. He held it in his hands. He and Ballister had been inseparable since childhood - even now, Ambrosius couldn’t leave him behind to sit on a nightstand.
His thoughts were interrupted by a woman in a lab coat sitting down opposite him.
“I got it.” She grinned at him. She had Nimona’s voice.
Ambrosius shoved the ash packet back into his pocket, curious about this new form.
“Got what?”
Nimona held up a matching ID badge. “I’m the archives manager! I’ll just walk you in - the real manager’s out and won’t notice her badge is gone for at least an hour.”
It would have been a good plan if Nimona had been real, Ambrosius thought. Just then, a man in a matching lab coat walked up to the table.
“Oh, Priyanka, I thought you were in your office.”
Ambrosius blinked in surprise. He looked up at the man.
“What did you call me?”
“Not you.” The man looked at Nimona. “I could have picked up your order for you.”
Ambrosius’s jaw fell open.
“You can see her too?!”
The man gave Ambrosius a confused look.
Nimona spoke up. “I’ll let you know next time.” she said in what Ambrosius guessed was the manager’s voice.
Ambrosius’s head was spinning so hard, he didn’t notice the man leave. He reached across the table and prodded manager-Nimona’s shoulder.
“You’re real?”
“What, did you think you were imagining things?” Nimona snorted, back in her original voice. “Hooo boy, that explains so much.”
“This doesn’t make sense - you were a girl, then a dog, then—”
“Don’t forget the cat. You gonna drink that?” she pointed at the tea.
When Ambrosius didn’t answer, Nimona popped off the lid and guzzled it down.
“Hoo yeah, good combo. Anyway, you coming?”
“You… what are you?”
“I’m Nimona.”
“But you—”
“Listen, we can sit here talking, or we can get into the archives before the real manager gets back. Are you coming or not?”
Alarm bells were going off in Ambrosius’s head. Nimona was Wrong. He’d never heard of anyone in the kingdom able to change form at will. Where had she come from? From outside the wall? Impossible. Nobody could live out there because of the monsters - huge, hulking creatures with ravenous hunger - and the wall hadn’t been breached for as long as it’d stood. By all logic, Nimona shouldn’t exist. And yet here she was, offering him a chance to get some closure about about the man he’d loved. That couldn’t be wrong… could it?
~ ~ ~
Sure enough, Nimona was able to waltz right into the high-security archives with Ambrosius in tow. Ambrosius tried to play it cool as best he could, but guilt and anxiety pounded in his head. This was a security violation. A necessary one, he told himself - he was doing this for the good of the kingdom. If Bal had been telling the truth, then there was still a murderer on the loose. He couldn’t let that happen, right? And it wasn’t like he could have stopped Nimona from breaking in if she’d wanted to. He was just taking advantage of the situation.
The vault was bigger than he’d expected - rows upon rows of tall shelving units and cabinets labeled from ‘A’ to ‘Z’. There were several windows in one wall letting light in, all of them close to the ceiling and looking securely locked. Otherwise the only source of light was the old buzzing lamps above.
The sword was in a drawer in the B section, under ‘Boldheart’. The charred pieces were laid out on white felt, easy to see even in the flickering lights. Ambrosius carefully picked up a piece of the hilt, remembering the clang it had made when he’d knocked it from Ballister’s hand. He could remember it clearly now, the way the sword had fallen to the ground, shattering into pieces. The way Ballister had looked at him in shock - not the eyes of a murderer, but the eyes of a man horrified.
“Anything jumping out at you?” Nimona interrupted the flashback. She was back in her original form - the punk teenager one.
Ambrosius set the piece down, trying to calm his anxiety jitters.
“Honestly? I don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
Nimona looked down into the drawer.
“Well by the looks of it, it wasn’t a real sword in the first place. Someone took a sword-shaped shell and stuffed a blaster inside.”
That’s what the official write-up had said too. The write-up hadn’t mentioned how realistic the shell had been. The lengths the maker had gone to make it look like the original was phenomenal. Despite it's broken state, Ambrosius could see everything, right down to the scratches on the pommel, had been duplicated perfectly. The only difference was that the replica was hollow inside.
“There’s no way this was a store-bought prop,” he mused, “It had to have been commissioned from a workshop or something.” That didn’t sit right. Where would Bal have gotten the money to pay for it?
“So we are looking for a third party here.” Nimona said gleefully. “A whole workshop of people trying to overthrow the monarchy…”
“Unless they didn’t know what the sword was for. With that many people, someone would have gotten caught by now.” Probably.
“So if they didn’t know when they made it… maybe there’s a maker’s mark or something somewhere?”
It was as good a hunch as any. Ambrosius pulled out his phone and switched on its flashlight. He shone the light on the drawer as Nimona examined the pieces one by one.
“They really did a good job collecting all the pieces.” She muttered. “There’s almost too many to- HEY!” She held up a piece triumphantly - a chunk of the base of the blade. Sure enough, there was a tiny logo stamped into the metal - a crossed hammer and sword. It was just small and faint enough to be missed if you weren’t looking for it.
Nimona held the piece under the flashlight.
“Look familiar at all?”
Ambrosius had no idea. He did a search on his phone for logos matching the description… Bingo.
“‘Arms & Hammer’ - it’s a workshop in the shopping district. By the looks of it… custom swords are their specialty.”
“That’ll be a lot of orders to sort through.” Nimona huffed, “But if we find out who commissioned it, we find the perp.”
Ambrosius was still mulling over the question of who could have paid for the sword. Someone with money had to be behind the assassination. Or maybe several middle-class people. Suddenly, Bal being innocent like he’d claimed seemed less far-fetched.
Ambrosius was about to mention it when the sound of a door banging open echoed through the vault.
“I could have sworn it was you!” the voice of an archive worker resonated off the walls. “She had your ID and everything!”
“Well it wasn’t me.” said the voice of the real manager. “And whatever prankster it was is in a world of trouble.”
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