Chapter 128: Analysis of Clues
The detective’s profession was a deeply unpopular one. It sounded a prestigious, intellectual calling, but the reality was a constant, grinding misery. It meant trafficking with difficult clients, satisfying their strange and troublesome demands, from the trivial matter of a lost cat to the high-stakes game of pilfering state secrets.
They lived in a state of perpetual danger, wading through the muck of death and conspiracy, their eyes pried open to the blackest pits of the human heart. A long career in the trade often ended not in quiet retirement, but in a violent, untimely death, or a slow, corrosive descent into the very criminality they were meant to uncover.
Moreover, the detective’s art was a demanding and fickle mistress, a craft that feasted on talent. It was not a trade for every man. To fail a client’s expectations was to earn nothing, and long, lean years without a single case were the bitter norm.
Thus, to become a senior detective, let alone a famous one, a man first needed the raw material of genius, then the fortitude to withstand the endless assault of danger and the soul-staining corrosion of human darkness. He also needed a devil's own luck.
And perhaps, most of all, he needed a certain… passion. A love for the profession that was, in its truest sense, a love for the darkness itself—a craving for the bloody, thrilling stimulation of an impossible puzzle. Only then could one hope to reach the highest, most shadowed echelons of the trade.
Sebastian de Cervantes was just such a man. He possessed a predator’s senses, a wolf's nose for the scent of blood, and a deep, insatiable hunger for cases of labyrinthine, bewildering complexity.
In a way, he considered himself a kindred spirit to the very serial killers whose grotesque tableaus he so often studied. They were two sides of the same tarnished coin, walking opposite paths. They were the architects of the puzzle; he was the one who solved it. But at their core, they were both lovers of the game.
The bizarre case now laid out before him was, without a doubt, a perfect meal for his peculiar appetites. Sebastian felt a thrill of instinctual excitement, a passion that had lain dormant for a long, long time.
But the scene was a charnel-house, a chaotic mess, and the other detectives seemed at a loss for where to even begin. Just then, one of them suggested, “No, there are too many variables. We cannot work independently. Let us begin at one point, hear the initial intelligence, and then, together, we may begin to unravel this thread by thread. What do you say?”
“Agreed.” The others nodded. To survey the scene methodically, they would start with the outermost ring of bodies—a grotesque mixture of paupers and bloated, waterlogged corpses. The forensic expert had already gleaned some information. “These are drowners,” he began, his voice flat and professional, a sterile sound in the fetid air. “Undead, formed by long immersion in contaminated water.”
“The paupers were all bitten to death. Numerous claw marks and bite wounds, that part is straightforward. The drowners, however, were mostly killed by edged weapons. There are knife wounds, and one was even decapitated by an axe. It suggests the paupers were armed, likely a gang of some sort,” the forensics man reported, his tone clipped.
“Mostly?” Sebastian’s voice was soft, but it cut through the gloom, seizing on the single, crucial word. “So not all of them were killed by edged weapons?”
The other detectives had noticed it as well. Most of the drowner corpses were a ruin of chaotic, overlapping cuts, their forms mangled beyond recognition. It spoke of a battle of pure, frenzied desperation, the paupers hacking blindly, striking again and again in a panic-fueled rage.
But a few of the drowner corpses were different. Their wounds were few, their bodies largely intact, as if they had simply… stopped.
“That’s right,” the expert confirmed. “While we are no experts in black magic or necromancy, we can surmise that these few were not killed by physical means. Perhaps the necromantic spell was dispelled, or the one controlling them was killed.”
“The one controlling them?” Sebastian asked, a flicker of doubt in his voice. “You believe a spellcaster orchestrated this massacre?”
“Yes. Gentlemen, if you would come this way. Here lie our fallen comrades.” The expert gestured to a nearby alcove. Several peelers in their green uniforms lay on the ground, their death masks a grotesque tableau of agony, their hands clutching at their throats, their bodies soaking in a pool of foul, black water.
“Is this… death by drowning?” an experienced detective asked, his eyes narrowing as he took in the scene.
“Yes, and no,” the expert said grimly. “They did indeed die of asphyxiation, but there is no river-weed or mud in their mouths or noses. It does not appear they ever entered the water. And their lungs… their lungs are filled with, ah… corpse-water.”
The expert looked physically ill as he said it. The fluid that had streamed from the dead peelers’ orifices was a thick, viscous ichor, as if they had been rotting from the inside out.
Sebastian, however, seemed entirely unfazed. “If it were a simple drowning, the lungs would not have taken in so much water. So it wasn’t a matter of someone holding their heads in a ball of magical water, or forcing them under. It was more like…”
“Someone used magic to pump the corpse-water directly into their lungs,” Officer Rothes finished, his voice a low growl. “Or rather, to create the water from within.”
“Indeed,” the detective with the handlebar mustache added, stroking his magnificent whiskers. “As far as I know, there are several water-based spells that can achieve such an effect. The fact that it was a viscous corpse-water suggests it was accomplished through a form of necromancy.”
“At the time of the attack, these peelers must have been forming a defensive line inside the alcove, fighting off the drowners. And from the water marks, it’s clear the drowners all crawled up from the river. They were ambushed by a spellcaster hiding in the shadows.”
The forensic expert pointed to the pile of mangled drowner corpses in front of the alcove, their bodies riddled with bullet holes.
“Hmm, that’s another thing I was wondering about,” Sebastian said thoughtfully. “I had assumed these drowners were a natural phenomenon. Is it possible one of the drowners themselves cast the spell?”
“Unlikely. Drowners are low-level undead. They have no intelligence to speak of, let alone the talent for spell-casting,” the expert countered. Officer Rothes, however, took the question seriously. “Why do you ask?”
Sebastian affixed a single-paned monocle to his eye, the glass catching the lantern light as he stared down at the waterway. “This river… the pollution is staggering. It is thick with resentment and a chaotic, churning magic. A living person who drank from this would, sooner or later, become one of the undead. I imagine any corpse soaked in it would naturally become a drowner. And…”
Sebastian looked up at the sky, at the twin moons hanging like bruised fruit in the blackness. “Tonight is a night of the twin moon convergence. The concentration of magic in the air will be rising to a sharp peak. An attack by drowners is not, in itself, surprising.”
“But that doesn’t explain the magical death of the peelers,” the expert argued. “And we have found traces of more than one magical attack. In fact, there are several. Over here, for instance.” He gestured to the river’s edge, where another peeler’s body lay, soaked to the bone.
“We just pulled him up. No one dared go into the water, so we used a long branch. He has very little water in his respiratory tract, but there are bullet wounds in his chest. The bullets are our own.”
“So, he wasn’t drowned, nor was he killed by magic. He was shot by his own comrades before he fell into the water?” another detective mused. The irony was a bitter, chilling thing. The ones who had drowned had never touched the water; the one who had fallen in had died of a bullet.
“That is our hypothesis,” the expert said, his hand sweeping across the vast, dark, and bloody scene. “And there are traces of magic on the opposite bank, and further down the waterway as well.”
Comments (1)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.