City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [110]
‘I’ve no idea.’ Brynd found he was dealing with too much that he knew too little about these days. ‘They could be indeed, because we’re not really that certain of our enemy. But it’s not just soldiers that have gone missing. Civilians, too.’
‘A fact we must remember,’ Jeryd confirmed. ‘This isn’t specifically an attack on the military. And you have soldiers out on street patrol regularly, yet they’ve not seen anything like this before, right?’
None of his men patrolling the city had reported anything. Perhaps they feared they would be considered insane. Brynd shook his head in frustration.
‘Then it looks like we got ourselves one bastard-cunning killer on the loose,’ Jeryd grumbled.
People began moving through the streets as the community gradually woke up, carts rumbling towards the iren, fiacres carrying passengers across the city. Those passers-by wearing masks turned to face the small group with fake and comical expressions.
The rumel investigator set off along the nearby streets a little, pacing back and forth.
Five minutes later Brynd heard Jeryd shouting his rank.
The Night Guard contingent ran to see what the matter was. Jeryd was crouching by a pile of waste, gesturing at the base of the nearby wall.
A mutilated man lay crumpled in cold blood. Rats and trilobites had been picking at his corpse, but what was still evident was that something had cleaved him open with ferocious force. The Dragoon’s uniform, ripped to shreds, was all Brynd needed to see.
*
Jeryd liked Doctor Machaon a great deal more than Doctor Tarr, who still resided back in a dark corner of Villjamur. He’d only met the latter a few times, but had become more than depressed at listening to his ruminations about death. Doctor Machaon, on the other hand, seemed positively joyous at the case now lying before him. Around forty years old, with rubicund cheeks and a belly that made even Jeryd feel trim, the investigator took to him instantly.
‘Such exotic wounds!’ Machaon crowed. ‘Quite a savage end for this poor fellow.’
Machaon’s workroom was to be found in the Ancient Quarter, not too near the bistros for temptation to disturb his work. The Onyx Wings were in full view from the west-facing window. An array of coloured lanterns and flambeaus lit up the room even further. Charts sprawled across the walls, bottles were ready to burst off all the shelves. There was a tray full of chisels and enterotomes and saws and cutters, and in the centre of the room was a table on which the body of the victim had been placed. A lamp hung above it.
Machaon had already flexed the corpse’s joints and searched for abrasions or bruising on the skin. He explained that he was now looking for lividity, and jotted something down in a notebook lying open to one side.
‘I’m convinced this one’s a murder,’ Jeryd told him, pressing the doctor for an opinion rather than waxing lyrical about the nature of the wounds.
Machaon opened a small jar and sprinkled some blue powder onto a white plate. Then he took a sample of blood from a major vein and squirted it on the powder, still humming to himself. ‘And you are most correct in that, Investigator Jeryd. Most correct. But in all my years as a physician, I cannot recall seeing a wound such as this.’
Jeryd waited for Machaon to continue with the post-mortem, soon oblivious to his presence in the room.
‘Doctor, do you know what caused it?’ Jeryd pressed again.
Go on, say it.
A spider.
‘I would suggest . . . judging by the way the torso has been severed, the width of the initial bite, exposing his organs thusly . . . and accounting for what rodents and trilobites have done to it overnight . . . this was nothing human. Nothing rumel either. Nothing caused by a weapon such as a sword or axe.’
‘Don’t tell me, some kind of monster?’ Jeryd offered sarcastically.
‘That is my best guess, indeed!’ Machaon exclaimed.
Shit, Jeryd thought. He seemed to be