Changes

::I’m purt sure they was gonna get kilt anyway, sir,:: Mags interrupted, as he watched these odd Guardsmen finish combing the room, then spread out to the rest of the house. ::Thet was how them others thet I was follerin’ was thinkin’ anyroad. Ye fail, ye die, leastwise, if this new lot gits sent t’clean up yer mess.:: He paused. ::Coulda jest been coincidence too. Or they coulda bin killt, an’ then these others heard ’bout you lookin’, an’ figgered t’ pass on that th’ fust ones’d got away an collect them some money at same time.::

::Maybe,:: Nikolas replied, then went silent.

Well, Mags had done his best, and if Nikolas was going to brood about this, there wasn’t much he could do about it. All things considered, through, if he were a ruthless killer who could not only send searchers on the proverbial wild hare hunt and make some money at the same time? He’d do just that.

That might have been why they decided to burn down the building with the bodies in it rather than just leaving them for someone to find. Having someone find the bodies of four people who were supposedly leaving the country at a brisk pace would certainly alert the authorities that there was someone else in town who not only had provided the misinformation but had probably done the murders in the first place.

These Guardsmen fascinated him, despite their grisly avocation. Obviously they expected to learn something from the things they were collecting, but what? He followed the bug collector up to the second story. The air was much better up here. He didn’t even need his mint-soaked scarf.

There were plenty of lanterns up here as well, which gave him a very good look at the two Guardsmen who were left. They looked remarkably alike—not as if they were from the same family, exactly, but as if they had been picked precisely to be unmemorable. They both had hair and eyes of the same neutral brownish, faces that were neither round nor square, short nor long, both were of middling height and weight, neither had any distinguishing features. Rather like Nikolas in a way, although with Nikolas, a good deal of his ability to be “invisible” rested with his training.

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.