wrists, they swallowed their quips and gawked in forlorn silence.
One of the boys, a puny but bold child near the back of the knot, hefted a loose piece of paving stone and mentally targeted the soldier’s skull, which was unprotected by a helmet or even hair. He cocked his arm back to throw, but a gentle hand stayed the assault. The boy yelped in surprise. Few men were stealthy enough to sneak up on the streetwise group and not alert any of them.
Artus Cimber, however, had once roamed the same hopeless alleys and burrowed for safety in the same abandoned hovels those urchins now called home. His years as a world traveler had honed the survival skills he’d gained there-and tempered them with a bit of wisdom besides.
“That’ll only make things worse,” Artus said. He took the would-be missile from the boy’s fingers and let it drop.
The clatter of stone on stone drew an angry look from the guardsman. “What’s going-?” When he saw the man standing among the children, he cut his words short and shook his head. “Cimber. Still hanging about in the gutter, I see. Shouldn’t you find some friends your own age?”
“I keep making them, Orsini, but you keep arresting them.” As Artus started across the muddy, cobbled way, he asked facetiously, “What’s he supposed to have done, let the wrong opera cape get wrinkled in the cloak room?”
“He’s done the only crime that matters,” was all Orsini said.
The reply made Artus stutter a step. He’d known Sergeant Orsini since his own days on the street. The man had a surprisingly flexible view of the law for a Purple Dragon as the king’s most redoubtable soldiers were known. Orsini had let many a thief escape detention, so long as their need was obvious and their crime motivated by survival, not greed. But there was a single offense the soldier took seriously: murder. He pursued men and women accused of that particular crime with a passion that bordered on blind fury. It was almost as if each murder were somehow a personal attack on him.
“I stand accused of slaughtering the inestimable Count Leonska,” Uther confirmed.
“It’s about time someone got around to that,” Artus muttered. Then, more loudly, he asked, “Why do they think you beat the count’s other ‘admirers’ to the deed?”
Uther arched one wickedly pointed brow. “Because I am the butler, and the Stalwarts’ library contains one too many Thayan murder mystery. It’s happened at last-I am reduced to a clichй. They should all be very proud of themselves.”
“You left out the fact that you were the first person on the scene of the murder,” Orsini added. His voice was harsh, his whole body tense. “And half the club had previously heard you threaten Count Leonska’s life.”
The details Uther offered in reply were directed at Artus, not the guardsman. “One of the winged monkeys had escaped from the library,” he said. “I was pursuing the creature through the back halls, hoping to recapture it before Lady Elynna’s leopard caught its scent. During that endeavor I chanced upon the sounds of a disturbance in one of the rooms. When the door was eventually unlocked, in front of another witness.” The butler placed obvious emphasis on this fact, but Sergeant Orsini didn’t react in the slightest “The count’s body was discovered… in a rather unpleasant state.”
Uther did not bother to explain his threat on Leonska’s life. There was no need. Artus had been in the Stalwarts’ game room the day the count, using methods he’d perfected in his years as a mean-spirited drunkard, provoked a very public and frighteningly angry reaction from Uther. It was rare for the servant to rise to any bait dangled before him by a clubman-so rare that the incident remained vivid in the minds of everyone who’d witnessed it.
“Well,” Artus said after a moment, “we shouldn’t have too much trouble clearing you.”
“Am I to conclude from your use of the plural that you will help prove my innocence?”
Orsini tugged on Uther’s arm, hoping to move him toward the barred carriage waiting up the alley at the main thoroughfare. The guardsman might as well have tried pulling the Stalwarts Club from its magically secured foundation. “Don’t waste your time, Cimber,” he said. “The city watch will do its own investigation.”
Uther stared briefly and sternly down upon Orsini’s bald pate. “That is precisely the reason I need someone with a feathersweight of intelligence to find the true killer.” The words were snarled in such a way that the soldier was left to ponder just how deep the butler’s demonic facade ran.
“I’ll do my best,” Artus said. “I hope my lack of standing in the club doesn’t cause a problem.”
“That you are not a Stalwart is all the more reason for me to desire your aid,” the butler replied. He easily shrugged off Orsini’s now halthearted grip and placed his hands on Artus’s shoulders. “This will not be an easy defense to build. There are the side effects of my condition to consider, as well as the location of the murder.”
“Which was?”
“The Treaty Room.”
With that, Uther started down the narrow alley. Orsim had to hurry to keep pace with him, taking three steps for each of the butler’s two long strides. Artus watched them go, though only vaguely. His mind was already focused on the complexities of the task before him.
The misfired spell that had warped Uther’s form left him immune to any and all further magic, including those incantations the city watch used as a truth test against a suspect’s claims. Magic would wrest no clues from the crime scene, either. The Treaty Room had been rendered “magic dead” just days after Uther’s misfortune, and by the same world-rattling events that had caused the innocent spell to misfire and transform him. The instability in magic caused by the crisis known as the Time of Troubles had left the Treaty Room a magical void, a place where no spell could be cast and enchanted items simply failed to function.
Artus was still considering ways in which he might get around those obstacles when he entered the Stalwarts Club.
A few members milled in the entry hall, but most had gone back to whatever had drawn them to the club that day. A mournful fellow from Armot named Grig the Younger debated the finer points of Mulhorandi entrapment spells with a pair of dwarf women, twins who had both been named Isilgiowe for some reason that eluded even them. Sir Hamnet Hawklin expounded upon the hunting rituals of the Batiri goblins of Chult to Gareth Truesilver, newly commissioned as a captain for his heroics during the crusade against the Tuigan horde. In a nearby corner, an elf maid named Cyndrik tallied the money she’d gathered for the Lord Onovan Protection Fund, even though that hapless Dalesman had been quite fatally bitten in half by a gigantic lizard several months earlier.
They wrangled over topics and championed causes for which few outside the club spared even a moment’s thought. It was that collective energy that drew Artus to the Stalwarts. The intellect and effort focused upon obscure matters by those famous explorers, those noted seekers of adventure, quickened his mind and reinforced his commitment to his own consuming quest-the search for the legendary Ring of Winter, the existence of which had been written off as utter fantasy decades past. At the moment, the passion for the esoteric that Uther found so chilling about his employers was, in fact, bolstering his ally’s resolve to prove him innocent.
Artus threaded his way between the people in the entryway, but found himself facing a loud and impassable obstruction just a few steps down the corridor. A beautiful mountaineer named Guigenor, her temper stoked to the intensity of her long red hair, confronted one of the most influential of the Stalwarts’ inner circle. Her wild gesticulations kept Artus from trying to slip past; the ceaseless, seamless character of her tirade yielded no opportunity for him to politely ask her to let him by.
“Are you feeble?” she snapped. “Are you blind? Uther had the motive and the opportunity for murder. He was standing at the Treaty Room door, alone, when I came across him. You could still hear Leonska moving around in there-drunk, but very much alive.”
Without slowing for the space of a single syllable, Guigenor repeatedly battered the oak paneling with her fist. It wasn’t a very good simulation of the noises she’d heard from the Treaty Room, but she was aiming for impact, not accuracy As such, the dramatics proved a success; there were suddenly people lined up four deep on both sides of the blockage, listening to her prosecution.
“But does Uther use his strength to break down the door?” Guigenor continued. “No! He sent me for keys, for Torm’s sake! What’s Uther doing without his keys? It’s obvious-he had them all along. He sent me off, used his set to unlock the door, slipped into the room, and slaughtered Leonska. Then he sauntered back out, relocked the door, and waited for me to return with the spares. Any dolt-except you, perhaps-would see that there’s no other explanation!”
There was a moment of stunned silence at the tirade’s end. The placid-seeming older man at whom this verbal barrage had been aimed simply shook his head. “You are overwrought at the death of your mentor, my dear,”
