Dragon Precinct (2 page)

Danthres had last been to the Dog and Duck three years ago, when a suspect in a murder was staying there. Since then, it had been refurbished—at least, that was how it seemed as she looked through the large crowd that had gathered around the outside, barely held in check by three guards wearing the Dragon crest on their leather armor. If nothing else, the wooden sign that hung from a small pole over the front door was newer and fancier. Where it used to be a crude painting of the two animals for which the inn was named, now much more sophisticated renderings of a canine and a waterfowl were carved directly into the wood.

Another guard was standing at the perimeter of the crowd, and walked briskly over to meet Danthres and Torin. After a moment, Danthres recognized him as Jared, one of the brighter guards assigned to Dragon—which meant that he could occasionally, if absolutely necessary, form a complex sentence.

“Mornin’, Lieutenants. C’mon, I’ll get you two inside.”

“What’ve we got?” Torin asked as the guard started pushing the gawkers aside to clear a path so the two lieutenants could actually reach the front door.

“Y’ever hear of a guy named Gan Brightblade?”

“Who hasn’t?” Torin said, sounding impressed.

“Me,” Danthres said, totally unimpressed. “Who is he?”

Sparing Danthres an incredulous look as he pushed two tall men aside, Jared said, “He’s one’a the greatest heroes of our time, ma’am.”

“I think Captain Osric served under him once, in the old days,” Torin added, referring to the current Guard captain, who had replaced Brisban. “He’s dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

Remembering the report, Danthres asked, “But not in a bar brawl?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re not getting out of those three coppers, Danthres,” Torin said.

Most of the crowd’s utterings were white noise to Danthres. Years of living in the cacophony of Cliff’s End trained her to ignore most background noise for her sanity’s sake, as the elven half of her heritage gave her above-average hearing. But she did catch comments here and there: “Gan Brightblade’s dead!” “I hear tell ’twas those damned elves!” “Nah, it was Chalmraik the Foul! I heard ’em talkin’ about ’im!” “Chalmraik’s dead!” “Guard’ll take care’a it.” “Guard’s a buncha shitbrains!” “
You’re
a shitbrain!” And so on.

The noise died down as they crossed the threshold and Jared closed the large wooden door behind them. Danthres saw that the lobby remained more or less unchanged after three years, except perhaps that it was cleaner and there were a few more cushions against the wall. At present, the space was empty. Directly in front of her, parallel to the back wall of the room, was a large wooden desk, on which sat a fairly elaborate eagle quill that Danthres pegged as a total fake, a battered old ledger, an unnecessarily brightly polished bell, and an inkwell. Behind the desk was a pegboard, about half taken up with keys, and a doorway covered in a curtain, which Danthres assumed led to some kind of staff-only back room. To her left was the staircase leading up to the rooms on the second floor; to the right, the wide entrance to the bar/dining area. Danthres could only see partly into the latter—along with the kitchen and storage area that serviced it, the dining area took up almost the entirety of the ground floor—but what she saw were several people seated on the benches at the long wooden tables, who were more subdued than one would expect from patrons in a bar. Several guards from Dragon were visible around the perimeter of the room, as well.

“I assume,” Danthres said, indicating the dining area, “that the patrons have all been gathered in there?”

Jared nodded. “Except for a few we let go back to their rooms, yes, ma’am.”

Danthres put her head in her gloved hand. “Go upstairs—take a couple of the bigger guards with you—and get
everyone
out of their rooms. Assuming, of course, they haven’t already jumped out the window and lost themselves in that mob out there.
No one
is allowed upstairs who isn’t employed by the Guard, is that clear?”

Nodding so enthusiastically Danthres thought his head would fall off—
which would not noticeably depreciate his brain power
, she thought—Jared moved toward the staircase.

“After you do that,” Torin called to him, “send someone back to Dragon—Sergeant Grint’s still running the day shift, yes?”

Jared smiled. “Unless the old bastard’s choked on his own bile since roll call this morning, yes, sir.”

Torin returned the smile. “Assuming that to be the case, have him send all his slowest and stupidest guards here, and reassign all the fast smart ones to double their foot patrols. Half the population of Dragon is gathered outside, and most of the remaining half will get it into their heads to take advantage of it.”

“Will do, sir.”

Danthres saw the sense in Torin’s request, though not in his making it—it wasn’t their duty to do Dragon’s job for them, after all—and was about to say so when a deep voice came from behind the front desk.

“Ah, Lieutenants ban Wyvald and Tresyllione. It is well to be both of you seeing.”

Turning, Danthres saw a short man with a large mustache: Olaf, the Dog and Duck’s owner. Danthres had first met him fifteen years earlier, when she first showed up in Cliff’s End.

Most people who came to the port city either had someplace else to go or nowhere else to go. Danthres had most assuredly been in the latter category, so when she arrived, she had stayed here until she secured a more permanent dwelling. The Dog and Duck had been the first lodgings she found in town that she could afford but did not smell like someone had died in them.

Olaf had changed very little in the intervening decade and a half. His head was still bereft of hair, save for the massive thatch between his nose and upper lip—indeed, the only significant physical change from fifteen years ago was that the huge mustache had gone from black to white. As he came out from behind the desk, Danthres had to blink from the glare of the sun shining through the windows on the staircase and reflecting off his pate. His bald head combined with his narrow shoulders, protuberant belly, and skinny legs to give him the air of a small egg balanced on a large egg balanced on two sticks.

Olaf was a native of the islands to the east, and his grasp of Common hadn’t improved in fifteen years either, though Danthres suspected that it was an affectation on his part and, if pressed, he could speak the language as well as anyone in the Lord and Lady’s court.

“I’m surprised to see you in such a good mood,” Torin said, “given the circumstances.”

“The circumstances, she is wonderful,” Olaf said, a grin trying to peek out from under his voluminous mustache. “Two years ago, I say to myself, ‘Olaf,’ I say, ‘remodel, you need to do.’ New mattresses, new curtains, new furnishings, better kitchen, new sign—even I am hiring a musician to play bar nights. All is good, close inn for month in winter when nobody come anyhow. I think this will be good, come in droves, will the people. So I close, and three more inns, they open and my business they steal! Last year been awful, but now—now it is good. ‘Come to the Dog and Duck,’ they will say, ‘the final place resting of Gan Brightblade.’ So you tell Olaf what to do, and do it, I will. I have gold mine here. Perhaps platinum mine, even.”

“I’m thrilled for you,” Danthres said with as little sincerity as she could muster. “What room is Brightblade in?”

“Room 12, right at stairs of the top.”

“Good.” She looked around for Jared, but he was probably still upstairs rousting patrons. Another guard stood at the entrance to the dining area. “You—has someone called the M.E.?”

The guard blinked several times. “I think so, ma’am.”

“Someone did,” Olaf said. “Came by did one of those mage-birds with message that magical examiner would arrive in an hour and a half.”

“When was this?” Torin asked.

“Half an hour ago.” Olaf frowned. “Why so long does it take? He is wizard, yes?”

“Yes, but a Teleportation Spell takes a great deal out of him,” Torin said, “and doesn’t allow him the energy to do the peel-back.”

“Still,” Olaf said, “so long it should not take to be walking from castle, no.”

Torin grinned. “How long it takes Boneen to arrive somewhere generally has little to do with travel time and more to do with his mood. Anything over an hour usually means we woke him from a nap.”

Danthres shook her head. The M.E. was a mage on loan to the Guard from the Brotherhood of Wizards, and Danthres long suspected that the cantankerous old bastard got the assignment as much to get him off the Brotherhood’s own hands as anything. “An hour and a half means he was in the middle of an especially nice dream. I see no good reason to wait for him. I want to check the room before we start questioning people. Olaf, if you could wait down here—we’ll want to talk to you after we’ve looked at the scene.”

“Of course, Lieutenant Tresyllione. If you need anything, to Olaf you will come.”

Shaking her head with amusement, Danthres headed upstairs. She noted that the stairs did not creak as much as they had when she’d been here before, a characteristic she attributed to Olaf’s renovations. She could see why he would be irritated at the downturn in business following such extensive work, and why he would view the death of some grand hero as a good thing—especially given the crowds outside. If nothing else, the bar would probably be the hot spot of Dragon’s nightlife for at least a few months.
Which means we’re going to be looking into a lot of bar brawls here for the next year.

Another guard from Dragon stood outside the room, and gave the lieutenants a respectful bow before opening the door for them.

Olaf’s renovations were especially obvious in the room. Three years ago, the mattresses had been no thicker than a wafer, with modest pillows; the curtains had been burlap; and both the water basin and the desk were cheap balsa. Now, though, the mattress was far fluffier, the curtains were linen, and the basin was metal. The desk, Danthres noted, was still balsa, but it had been varnished to look like oak, and she was willing to bet that someone with less acute eyesight than hers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Something about the room bothered her, though.

Lying on a patch of floor between the bed and the desk was the large body of a human, half-dressed—a mail hauberk and cotton tunic lay on the bed in a heap, along with a very large sword. Armor, shirt, and weapon all looked to have been dropped on the bed by someone in the process of getting undressed. Danthres assumed the body to be that of Gan Brightblade.

“Have to admit,” Torin said, “this was not how I expected Brightblade to go.” He laughed. “This will play merry hell with bards across Flingaria. After all, people like Gan Brightblade don’t die of broken necks in their lodgings, they die on the battlefield, valiantly saving the world from evil wizards or goblin hordes or the like.”

“Goblins don’t travel in hordes,” Danthres said.

Torin shrugged, conceding the point. “But if they did, he’d be at the forefront of those trying to stop them.”

Danthres looked over at the guard who let them in—an older foot soldier with gray-and-white stubble. Standing a post unshaven was technically against regulations, but that sort of grooming nonsense was usually only seriously enforced in Unicorn, and in headquarters when Osric was in a bad mood. “The cleaning woman found him like this?”

“Aye, ma’am,” the guard said. “She came in with her key, ma’am. She be down in the kitchen, ma’am. Shall I fetch her, ma’am?”

“No, not yet.”

“If she came in with the key, it means the killer locked the door,” Torin said.

“Not necessarily. She probably would have assumed the door to be locked and gone for the key without even trying the handle.” Danthres peered around the room. “Maybe he fell down? Tripped?”

Torin snorted. “Gan Brightblade has been called many things, but clumsy isn’t one of them.”

Pointing at the top of the body’s head—specifically the gray hair at his temples—Danthres said, “He’s not as young as he was.”

“Perhaps, but the angle’s all wrong—of both the body
and
the neck. For his head to have snapped that way, he’d have had to have fallen against something on his right, but the only thing on his right is empty air.”

Danthres looked over at the desk. Balsa was still generally hard enough to break a neck, even as thick a one as Brightblade’s. But Torin was right, in that he would never have fallen down to the floor from there into the position in which he now lay. Assuming the scene hadn’t been disturbed, in any event.

Then, finally, what had been bothering her burbled to the surface. “The room smells wrong.”

“He hasn’t been dead long enough,” Torin said.

Shaking her head, Danthres said, “Not that. It smells too—too clean.”

Torin laughed. “That’s Brightblade. Any other soldier, you’d expect the smells of the earth, but Brightblade was famous for bathing and grooming almost daily. I seem to recall the captain complaining about it more than once—it made the other soldiers look bad.”

Danthres nodded absently. She smelled some kind of polish coming from the direction of the bed, and realized that it was from the armor that Brightblade had removed.
He polished his mail. Amazing.

“Something’s wrong here,” Torin said.

“Something
else,
you mean,” Danthres put in with a snort.

“Brightblade wasn’t the type to go down without a fight. If he
was
killed, it was by someone who caught him completely unawares. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be half-dressed with his sword on the bed. Which means it was probably someone he knew and trusted.”

Danthres got down on her knees in order to get a better look at Brightblade’s neck. “Look at that.”

Torin did likewise on the other side of the body from her. “What am I looking at?”

“His neck.”

Grinning, Torin said, “That much I determined on my own.”

“No finger marks. His neck wasn’t broken by hand.”

“Which brings us back to him falling over—which doesn’t work. Unless, of course—”

“Don’t even
think
it.” Danthres sighed and got back up. “I
hate
magic. And the last thing I want is the Brotherhood taking over the case. They’ll make a complete troll’s ear out of it, and then blame
us
when they can’t solve it. That’s the last thing we need right now.”