Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [54]
“Patients?” Jeryd looked incredulous. “I was under the impression that this place was a morgue?”
“That’s correct, investigator. However, I prefer a soothing ambience, even for the dead. He’s not the best musician, but people need to earn a coin, given the harsh times ahead.”
“Indeed,” Jeryd replied. He thought he could hear a faint noise behind the sound of the lute. A buzz maybe, perhaps some cultist device to aid the process? Jeryd studied Doctor Tarr in the light of the lantern. He was a man perhaps in his fifties, with a slight stoop, weathered face, thinning blond hair, elegant fingers.
He led them into a smaller well-lit stone chamber with a stone slab in the center. The naked body of Delamonde Ghuda was displayed upon it, a white sheet keeping him decent.
Jeryd and Tryst stood either side of the corpse as Doctor Tarr pulled back the sheet.
“Now, as I stated in my report, investigator, these wounds look most mysterious. I’ve not seen anything like them before.”
“Talk me through your findings, doctor, if you will.”
“Well there were no intrusions to the body, meaning nothing had penetrated it, but, as you can see, there is a significant amount of flesh missing from the torso. Tissue appears to have been removed from this region.” Tarr indicated an area from the base of the neck to halfway down the chest.
“When you say ‘removed,’ what d’you mean precisely, Doctor Tarr?”
“Exactly what I said. It’s gone, removed, without any intrusion by a sharp instrument. I can’t give you any obvious conclusion as to what did this, because I’ve simply never seen anything similar before, nothing like an ordinary knife wound, which is, of course, simple to recognize. That’s why I wanted you to drop by, so you could see for yourself what an interesting case this is. You see, it’s as if the flesh has been removed by some unknown substance that had either consumed the flesh or exploded it outward. The area of wounding is roughly circular, but you couldn’t class this as a crime unless you established whatever the instrument was that caused this unusual wounding.”
As Doctor Tarr went on to speculate on various possible causes, Jeryd began to realize he was wasting his time being here. He would have to go to the Council Atrium itself to find out if the popular Delamonde Ghuda actually had any secret enemies. While he was weighing up the options, Tarr was delving further into medical analysis. Jeryd wanted to leave, as the doctor unnerved him. The lute player merely added to this sinister atmosphere.
“Would you like me to show you some other victims,” Tarr said, “to see how their wounds differ?”
“No thanks,” Jeryd said.
“I’ll just show you one more.”
He showed them four.
They entered a chamber lined with recent corpses. Many of the bodies were male, and over thirty. Their faces were peaceful, their wounds dreadful—two inflicted by swords, one from a mace. One of them had clearly died only moments before Jeryd arrived.
Tarr was almost motherly in his pride. “This one took poison,” he explained, standing next to a body resting on a raised platform. “It wasn’t the poison that actually killed him, because he choked on his own bile. Note the dried blood on his fingertips. He spent his final heartbeats clawing at the stone floor on which he had collapsed.” Tarr shook his head solicitously. It looked as if he wanted to stroke the body to comfort it.
Jeryd shuddered.
They came upon the lute player finally, a young man perched on a crate in the corner of one of the various rooms. The whole place was a network of small chambers. Its complexity reminded Jeryd of the interior of a lung. What is the real point of this musician—to drown out their dying screams?
“We really must be going shortly,” Jeryd decided.
Tarr eyed the investigator fixedly. “I hope you can visit again. Not many people seem as comfortable around the dead as you do.”
“My assistant and I, we’re pretty used to being around corpses. It comes with Inquisition business.