There was no bruising, and no foreign blood or dirt or hair beneath Cabot’s nails, though his fingers were mangled and broken. He hadn’t put up a fight. Whatever happened to him happened fast.
The body had a sharp, hot silver smell beneath the stench of spoiling meat.
“How were you contacted?”
Cabot had special wards to notify Justice in the event of his death, and give us an image of his body. Pause. Also, the butler summoned us.
“Does your image show who did this?”
We have suspects.
Tara laced her fingers together. “Someone pulled Cabot’s spine out of his back, through the skin. Death should have been instantaneous, but whatever did this wanted him alive.” She pointed to the discs of bone arranged in a rough circle around the body, like poker chips strewn on a table. “The corpse has been ritualistically encircled by its spinal vertebrae. Necromancers use a more advanced version of the same technique to bind spirits. Doctors use it, too, to keep the patient alive on the operating table. Bone is a powerful focus, especially if it’s your own. With the Judge’s own spine, even an amateur Craftsman could have kept him alive and sane for … I’d guess a minute. If they only wanted to keep his soul bound to his body, and didn’t care about his sanity, it could have lasted longer. Much longer.” It would have felt longer still to Cabot. The heart kept time in the human body. Without its beat thoughts elongated, stretched, changed. She had stopped her own heart as an experiment back at school, under close observation, keeping her brain alive the entire time. For Cabot, seconds of agony would have felt like hours.
Stay professional. Keep your breakfast where it should be, and your voice level.
The Blacksuit cocked her head to one side. Is there any way to call him back?
Tara continued her slow revolution around the corpse. “The body’s a complicated system. Bringing someone back requires the corpse have enough order to build upon, and there’s hardly any of Cabot left. Even if we had the proper equipment to sift his memories, we’d need the organs that bear the imprints of sense experience. The eyes have burst. The tongue, here, well. The brain, missing out the back of the skull. The spine you see, and the heart is gone entirely.” She looked up at the Blacksuit. “Did you really think it was possible he died of natural causes?”
These are strange days. We have had to widen the definition of the word “natural” six times in the last decade.
“Well, whoever did this was a poor student of the Craft, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed the bones—only beginners use such a strong physical focus for something this simple—but she knows enough to keep the dead from talking. Which brings me to another oddity. The body is pristine, or at least no more rotten than it ought to be based on time of death. The Craft used to bind his soul should have accelerated decay.” There was that scent again, the urgent tang of hot silver. She breathed it in, and turned from the body to the thick vegetation. “Do you mind if I look around the garden? The murderer could have hidden the missing organs nearby. Keeping them out of our hands for an hour would spoil them. Our killer needn’t have run through the city in broad daylight with a bleeding heart clenched in her fist.”
I will remain to guard the corpse.
Tara walked off between the looming sunflowers. The garden growth was thick, but not thick enough to dampen all sound. With a shout, she could call the Blacksuit to her.
It was indeed possible that the murderer, whoever, whatever she was, hid Cabot’s heart somewhere nearby. She could also have burned the heart to ash and mixed it with the blood as an additional focus for her ritual. But searching for the heart gave Tara a plausible excuse to investigate without supervision.
The burnt silver smell haunted the garden. She traced it to a point near the terrace’s corner, between a trellis of ivy and a carefully cultivated orchid. Approaching the edge, Tara reached to her heart and drew her knife.
The odor’s source was not hidden behind the trellis, and the orchid provided no cover. Elsewhere in the rooftop garden, vines had been strung overhead to blot out the sky, but here she looked up and saw nothing but clouds. No ambush would come from above.
She leaned over the roof’s edge. Far below ran the street, full of tiny people and tiny carriages. Gargoyles leered at the passersby. At ground level, the carvings were common monsters, sharp-nosed and snaggle-toothed, but as the building rose, their complexity grew. The sharp gouges Tara had seen from below marred the intricate artwork.
The gargoyles one floor beneath Cabot’s penthouse seemed almost alive. To her right loomed a giant with three eyes and a massive tusked maw, each of his six arms clutching a different weapon. To her left stood a similar statue, and clinging to the ledge beside that another, in a different style. The first two were built from planes and angles, while this last gargoyle’s sculptor had carved the curves of its hunched back and powerful torso with an anatomist’s devotion. It was limbed as a man, save for two folded leathery wings and a long tail. A snarl contorted its gruesome, hook-beaked face. The creature was bent like a drawn bow, ready to fly.
Statues. The smell was strongest here, burning in her nostrils. Tara tightened her grip on her knife, and pondered.
This building had been built to a careful pattern, architects and artists weighing each decoration against every other. Nothing was accidental or asymmetrical save for the strange rune carvings, which did not seem part of the original design. Yet to her right there was a single gargoyle, and to her left—
As she turned to look, something long and sharp pressed against her throat, the point dimpling her skin. She swallowed, involuntarily, and her skin almost gave.
“Scream,” said a low voice like crushed rock, “and you die.”
It was amazing, she thought for the second time that day, how imminent death focused the mind.
She remained still and quiet with the gargoyle’s claw at her throat, to show she would not call for help. When he didn’t say anything further, she whispered, “There’s no need to kill me.”
“There is if you scream.”
“What would my death accomplish if I did? As soon as they know you’re here, they’ll be after you, and they move fast.”
“So do I.”
She had to admit that. He was fast, and quiet. She hadn’t heard him climb onto the roof and approach her, for all his bulk. “Killing me will convince them you killed Judge Cabot. No evidence will stand against your murder of an innocent while fleeing the scene of the crime. The Blacksuits will track you to the ends of the earth. They’re tireless.” His claw twitched against her throat. “And you’re tired already.”
“Quiet.”
“How long have you been hanging off this building? Hiding from them? Hoping they couldn’t smell you the way I can?”
“Stop.”
“What’s your name?”
“I am a Guardian.”
She heard the capital letter. “I’m not interested in your title,” she said, as conversationally as she could manage. “I asked you to tell me your name. Because if I’m going to help you get out of this alive, we should get to know each other.”
His breath should have been hot on the back of her neck, but he did not breathe. One cannot breathe with lungs of stone. She fought to control her pounding heart.
“You need my help,” she said. “You’re obviously innocent.”
“What?”
Keep him talking, Tara thought. If you’re wrong, and you’re seldom wrong, then you want him to think you’re on his side. If you’re right, he wants to believe you. Recite the facts. Her throat was dry. Her breath came short. Dammit, be calm. Cool as crystal, as ice. Cool as Ms. Kevarian. “Whoever killed Cabot planned the murder well. Knew how to do it without leaving traces someone like me could follow. The murderer kept Cabot alive, more or less, until you came. You broke that pretty little bone circle, Cabot’s spirit left his body, and bam, his wards went off and the Blacksuits had a nice picture of you looming over his corpse, talons out. It won’t even matter if they were bloody.”