City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [39]
‘Morning.’ Jeryd slung his outer garments on a chair by a corner table, then took off his hat.
They were certainly not a particularly friendly bunch, this lot, but he didn’t know whether this was normal behaviour in a city so far north.
‘Morning.’ Eventually, a grey-bearded man with tiny eyes spoke to him. ‘Rumel, I see?’
‘You see right,’ Jeryd muttered in response, then to one of the serving girls, ‘Black tea and a pastry, please.’
‘We don’t get many rumels visiting this place,’ grey beard remarked coldly.
‘That right?’ Jeryd lowered himself onto the chair with a groan. Still not getting any younger.
Grey beard stood up, and his companion, a blue-masked woman wrapped in a matching cloak, looked away, probably embarrassed. ‘Not sure you understand me, friend.’
Jeryd stared back at him, conscious now of his coarse dark skin, of his tail, of his glossy black eyes. He hadn’t dealt with any of this kind of shit for a long, long time. ‘You’ll have to forgive me.’ He undid the top buttons on his jerkin to reveal his Inquisition medallion, featuring its iconic angular image of a crucible. ‘Investigator Rumex Jeryd, pleased to meet you. New to the city, you see, so I’m not yet sure which of these places are full of bastards – or not. I’m still finding my way around.’
‘Oh,’ grey beard replied, backtracking desperately. ‘Well . . . I can see . . .’
‘All you can see is a rumel, right? I understand. And if you don’t like that, you can just wait half an hour until I’ve finished one of these delicious pastries, or I can haul your arse into a cell overnight, where you might or might not get beaten unconscious by one of the inmates. Now, then – is that enough to impress your fancy woman, friend?’
The waitress brought over Jeryd’s order, just then, with a cheeky smile on her face that said she was enjoying the show. He winked at her.
Grey beard sat back down, to commence a terse and angry argument with his female companion. Sure rumels constituted a minority across the Archipelago, so Jeryd had had to deal with racism before, a while ago, but Villjamur was enlightened now, so he just didn’t expect to encounter it in any major city elsewhere. At home they’d closed down the last humans-only tavern before he was even born. Perhaps things really were different, this far north.
As he chomped into his pastry – a wonderfully sweet creation with honey bleeding from the middle – and sipped his tea, he found the mood in the room becoming much more amicable.
*
Arriving at his desk by eight each morning, he found his groove quickly, getting some of the good tea available, then chatting to the few enthusiastic Inquisition staff, and getting stuck into things. They began to respect him – and he knew it. It wasn’t tough to work out why, because Jeryd seemed the only one to actually care about solving crimes – a fact that somewhat surprised himself.
He asked for some unsolved crimes, and files soon piled up on his desk.
He scanned the papers for anything that might help with the Haust case. There were the usual cases you got in any big city: theft, rape, assault, murder. Yet more people had been reported as missing recently, though no one had found the time to pursue the fact. There’d also been an interesting increase in the number of porno golems being distributed – cultists were manufacturing these doll-women via gangs as an alternative for the desperate males of Villiren, so that prostitutes would not die of pneumonia from having to stand outside in the chilling temperatures. Jeryd was sickened, though not surprised, when someone hinted that this trade might have been sanctioned by the portreeve, and the Inquisition were advised to ignore the seedy industry.
The previous evening’s murders: there had been four reports of dead bodies found with puncture wounds in the neck, the corpses shrivelled, but they had