It seemed that the fellow Mags had been talking to wasn’t just a bug collector. When Mags got there, he was helping another man go through the dead folks’ belongings, and not just sort through them, but take them apart. Hems were opened on clothing, linings torn out, mattresses were cut open, any object was picked up, examined minutely for—
What? Why were they poking and prodding, closing their eyes and running their fingertips over things?
The bug-fellow opened his eyes to see Mags staring at him, perplexed. He cracked a very slight smile. “Secret compartments,” he said, without waiting for Mags to ask him the question. “And if you have Mindspeech, would you kindly tell Nikolas that if he eats himself up over this, I am going to drag him out of his bed later today and beat him senseless? That seems to be the only thing that gets through his thick skull.”
The other man uttered a smothered chuckle.
“But—how?” Mags asked. “How’re ye lookin’ fer stuff that’s s’posed t’be hid?”
“Well, if we had found one, I could show you, but in general, we look for something that seems to be solid, or solidish, but is a little too light. That’s why we are weighing these things in our hands. We look for drawers or compartments that are too short. We close our eyes and use our fingers, hunting for concealed seams and test to see if what seem to be solid panels will actually move. Thus far, I am sorry to say, we have found nothing.”
“This place has been cleaned,” the second man said, with an air of one pronouncing a judgment. “I don’t think we’ll find anything unless these lads thought they might be betrayed and hid something, or the killers made a mistake. I don’t think either is likely. That fire was cleverly and carefully set. The room was sealed to keep the stink from getting out too much; there’s pitch all around the doors and windows, and it would have set up around the front door once they closed and locked it. They didn’t need to break the seal to set the fire; you said they came in the back way. There would have been remains, but nothing that could have been identified, and anyone investigating would have seen four drunks in the front of the house, and what was left of the table in the kitchen, and figured a perfectly ordinary bunch of fools left a candle stuck to a table soaked in grease and were too drunk to notice when it set a fire. I don’t think anyone that thorough is likely to have been careless with his victims’ belongings.”
“Me neither,” Mags said glumly. He explained more-or-less what he had picked up from the killers, and the second man nodded, as if not surprised.
“I don’t know what we have here, exactly,” he said, closing his eyes and running his fingers over the back of a hairbrush. “Spies, I’ve seen before; caught one or two. Killers for country or for hire I’ve seen, though we usually don’t intercept those, the King’s bodyguards do. But I have not encountered anything like this. The first lot that came in—the ones that I believe you and your friends uncovered, Mags—were well trained to a point, but most of them were gentlemen trained as spies, not professional spies, and they were just not prepared for Valdemar. It was bad enough when one of their number went mad, but it got worse when that second madman popped up.”
“Got no ideer where ’e come from,” Mags said ruefully. “ ’Tis like mebbe when ’e was s’posed t’be hangin’ ’bout th’ others, but whatever made th’ fust mad sent ’im mad too. An’ they didn’ know ’e was conkers till they got ’im t’ketch Bear so’s Bear c’d take care’a th’ mad’un, an’ then ’twas too late.”
The second man shrugged. “That’s as good an explanation as any. Well, whoever sent them in the first place didn’t make the same mistake twice. They found out about Valdemar, they got people who could pass as natives, and gave orders that the mess be cleaned up as thoroughly as possible.” He paused as he put the unlit lamp he had been examining aside, after he had emptied it of oil so he could be sure there was nothing hidden in the bowl. “They planned. They took their time. They were absolutely methodical. They might not have arrived with exact orders but with the discretion to do whatever had to be done. I think—no, I am sure—they knew they were going to kill these four within moments of talking to them and realizing what a hash they’d made of things. They probably had been given contingency plans and a free rein when they left—wherever they came from. But these four never saw it coming. They thought they were passing the job on to a new team and that they could go home.”
::Ask him how he knows that,:: Nikolas said instantly.
“Nikolas wants ter know how you knowed thet.” Mags waited, head tilted to one side, watching the two Guardsmen. “But I reckon ’tis thet.” He nodded at the empty pack that lay crumpled at the head of the bed.
“You see—” said the first to the second. “That’s what Niko’s been waiting for. Not just Mindspeech. Not just someone clever and agile. There are Trainees by the dozen who have those qualifications. He’s been waiting for someone who can observe and think and not just assume things.”
The second nodded. “You’re right,” he told Mags. “It was the empty pack. And do you know why?”
“ ’Cause it don’t b’long there,” Mags said. “Pack should’a been stowed, prolly wi’ th’ others, outa th’ way. Who needs packs, iffen yer settled in? Iffen feller had it with ’im fer some reason, like ’e were keepin’ somethin’ needful in’t, it’d be at foot of bed, not th’ head, or off t’ side, mebbe i’ corner.” He thought of all the times he’d been briefly in the rooms of other Trainees, all the packs he’d seen. Always, empty ones were stowed on a shelf that was awkward to get to, anywhere out of the way. Always, if they held something the owner wanted to keep in them, they were at the foot of the bed, where they wouldn’t get kicked or tripped over.
Never where that one was. Unless . . .
“Reckon ’e were packin’ up,” Mags said thoughtfully. “Mebbe him an’ t’others cooked up a big meal t’git rid’a stuff that’d spoil. Thet’s when th’ others done ’em, after thet meal. Then they come up here an’ went through ev’thing, jest t’make sure. Prolly where they got thet book an’ stuff they sold Nikolas.”
“Good,” said the second with satisfaction. “And that is why I am fairly certain they heard the Weasel was making inquiries after they did this, not before. Probably shortly after. They would have made several passes through this place, making sure that nothing was left behind. If they hadn’t heard that someone was asking about their victims, they would simply have left this as a mystery—four men, dying after a big meal in this neighborhood—the Guard would have written it off as accidental. Maybe some of the food had gone bad. Maybe they picked the wrong mushrooms. If we tested for poison, we wouldn’t have found anything. No one would have been called on to investigate, the men would have been buried in the Poor Grounds, and that would have been that. But then they heard that someone was snooping about, and they realized they were going to have to clean up a bit more thoroughly than they had first thought, because someone would be smart enough to put four dead bodies together with the fact that the Weasel was looking for information. So they planted the story that these men had left town and set the fire, figuring it would take some time before the Weasel found his buyer. By that time the fire here would have destroyed all signs that there was anything other than four common laborers living here, and no one would associate what the Weasel wanted to know about with this place.”