The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (7 page)

Fernand had been a believer. A conservative old fellow, always supporting the traditional ways, always praying before a meal, and always attending Heart Church for services every evening. Sometimes, he’d even made time for morning services. Chris had teased him, and Fernand had not found it funny.
Belief is important, young master,
he’d said stiffly.
If anything, I should be trying to get you to come with me. You, of all people, need something to bring you hope and joy.

Hope and joy would be in short supply in Heart Church today. It would have broken Fernand’s heart to hear that his beloved house of worship had become a murder scene.

Something shoved him.

Startled, Chris swung his gaze over to see Olivia staring at him, lips pressed in a line. “Hello,” she said, not quite friendly. “Do I pay you to daydream?”

Chris ducked his head. “No, ma’am.”

“I didn’t think so! Though if I did, I’d hire you for the position, because you’re very good at it. Now,” Olivia said before Chris could feebly protest. “Please, Missus Milton, continue telling us about the rest of your… ‘family.’”

Mother Greta looked obviously perturbed at being called by her surname. Which was Olivia’s intent. She always managed to find the mode of address that would most irritate the person she used it on. Usually given names. This was a special exception. The priestess smoothed her habit.

“There’s my husband and the Church Father, Otis. We married and graduated from Maiden and Youth status only a few years ago. He’s a good man. Our parents, Harriet and Thaddeus Townsend, are very old now. They didn’t hear anything at all last night, and poor Grandmother Harriet, especially… she’s inconsolable about what happened. She was so close with the children.” Mother Greta hung her head. “Lachlan, of course. Oh, poor Lachlan. He was the most lovely young man. Polite, sweet, generous… oh, but smart, too. He was the perfect Youth. And then, of course, our Maiden. Elisa―that is, Elisabeth―Kingsley.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what Elisa is going to do without him. Lachlan, ah, you can’t replace someone that good.”

“Are you getting all this?” Olivia asked Chris.

“
Yes
,” he snapped back, but when he looked down at his notes, they were a disaster. One scrawled sentence stood out at him, nested in the midst of all those names and descriptions.
Faith did nothing for Fernand
, it read.
Hope and joy and he killed himself and left me.

“Miss Faraday…” Mother Greta began, and Olivia perked up at being solicited a question. “If you please, I don’t understand something. How is it that you’re so sure a spiritbinder is responsible for this?”

“Well, Missus Milton,” Olivia chirped, “I’m so glad you asked that! Fortunately, we have an
expert
on spiritbinding right here!” And then, a little gleam in her eyes, she turned to Chris.

He wanted to argue with her about it, but then sighed. What was the point? She’d win in the end. “I’m certainly not an expert,” he said, setting down his notebook. “Just… my family… there’s ‘binding in our blood, that’s all, and I…”
No one wants a full explanation, Christopher!
He could practically hear Olivia’s voice. So he shook his head and pushed on. “The articles all specify that none of the bound items had been broken. The only things that can free a spirit from a binding are a breakdown of the bond, a spiritbinder actually freeing the elemental, or the bound item being damaged enough that it creates a… a loophole in the binding. A fiaran bound to an ice sculpture to keep it cold, for instance. The terms of her bond would no longer apply if the sculpture shattered, because now there isn’t an ice sculpture to keep cold, and…” They were all looking at him, and he hated that. He pushed on, getting to the ending as quickly as possible. “Nothing was broken and we already established that this was no coincidence, not with that sort of pattern, and so…” He trailed off, letting someone else make the conclusion.

“Someone who wasn’t a spiritbinder could break a bathtub with a big enough hammer and a hard enough swing, but since the tub was fine, the undine wasn’t released from her contract.” Olivia clarified. “Bindings simply break down all the time, but they can’t be helped
along
without shattering the object they’re bound to. So. Any questions?”

Mother Greta shook her head. “No. No, that makes sense. Yes. Our congregation… well, spiritbinders are very faithful. I’m not sure what it is, but I think they’re the most reliable worshippers we have.”

“Young ones, or old ones?” Olivia asked idly, and Mother Greta gave her an awkward sort of smile.

“There are no young spiritbinders, Miss Faraday,” she said gently. “Not anymore.”

Olivia blinked, and then frowned. She hated to be wrong about something, and she shot Chris a look. “Sorry,” she said. “I know one who’s
very
young. Makes it hard to remember the state of things.” And thankfully, before the priestess could press, she continued. “I don’t suppose you keep record of your worshippers?”

“No,” Mother Greta replied. “Of course not. The church is an open door!”

Olivia rolled her eyes. The carriage rolled to a halt.

Chris glanced out his window. Heart Church seemed so much larger up close than it did from a distance. He’d been there only a few times, when Fernand had talked him into it, and he’d never gotten used to just how grand it was. Stained glass representations of the Three and Three stared down serenely at him, and under all of those eyes, for a moment, he questioned his lack of real faith. Didn’t he owe the gods more than he’d given them? Like Fernand had always said?

“Let’s go see this body,” Olivia said.

His thoughts scattered.

They sloshed through water up to their ankles.

The sanctuary had been as beautiful and glorious as Chris had remembered, but Mother Greta had led them away from it into a small side door, which opened into worn, plain hallways with wooden plank floors and walls with copper piping for heat bared to the world. The ground was set half a foot lower than it was in the sanctuary, keeping the water contained. Olivia picked up her scarlet skirts, making a face, while Maris didn’t seem to notice the cuffs of her split skirts becoming soaked within seconds. Some emotion Chris couldn’t place weighed heavily in his chest as he picked through the watery halls. So many times, he’d warned Rosemary that something like this could happen. All it would take was a single moment of failed concentration, and an elemental would wreak vengeance.

“Mother.”

They all turned as one to look. A statue of Deorwynn, the Mother, extended her arms and offered comfort. Her stone skirts were soaked.

There was a flicker of movement in Deorwynn’s shadow. A young woman in a Maiden’s habit stepped out, looking for all the world as if she were leaving Deorwynn’s comforting embrace.

The Maiden was short and slight and pretty, and Chris could make out a few strands of auburn hair from beneath her habit. She was also trembling, and her violet eyes were haunted.

“Elisa,” Mother Greta said, stepping forward and wrapping the Maiden into her arms. They stood like that until Olivia cleared her throat and the women stepped away from one another, looking ashamed. “Elisa,” the Mother priestess said again, “this is… I, that is, I went for assistance in the matter of… Lachlan.”

Sister Elisabeth’s eyes slid past Chris and Olivia and settled on Maris. She licked her lips―they were so thin she barely looked as if she had a mouth. “Police?” she asked, looking askance at Mother Greta.

“And an… investigator,” Mother Greta said, but before those words even settled, Olivia glided forward and seized Sister Elisabeth’s hand to shake it.

“
Deathsniffer
,” she stressed.

“Faraday,” Maris snapped. “That is hardly what I would call
discreet.”

“Oh, don’t be daft, Maris,” Olivia breezed away from the girl and started heading down the hall again. “Little Elisa Kingsley already knows that her Youth didn’t die in an accident.”

The Maiden blinked. She chewed at her lip and then turned and started after Olivia. “How do you know that?” she asked.

“You looked bemused, at most, when you saw Officer Dawson here. If you didn’t know that what happened to Mister Huxley had been foul play, you would have gone wide-eyed and petrified, I’d think.” Olivia twisted her head to give them a little triumphant look. “I suspect that you told the entire family already, Missus Milton?” And then, before the Mother could respond, Olivia stopped suddenly and they all ran up against one another. “This,” she pronounced, “is an
awful
lot of water.”

Mother Greta’s jaw clenched, and then she moved past them and turned into a small room with an open door off to the side. “In here,” she said.

At least, it had seemed like a small room. The door had been modest, old, scuffed, and small, but inside, the room was… palatial. Large enough to fit all five of them easily and have room and then room again to spare, it was the sort of bathing room only seen in the homes of the rich and influential. The Buckley estate’s certainly couldn’t compare. The tile was ivory and white marble, the ceilings vaulted and painted with night stars set in fantastic constellations. Decorated pillars went up to the ceiling, and sculptures of dancing angels were set on marble stands around the perimeter of the room. The toilet was thronelike, the tub was bedlike, and every single thing, including the beautiful ceiling, was dripping with water.

In the middle of the tiled floor lay the body.

Chris reeled back from it. There was no smell, not yet, but Chris had never seen a drowned body before. People didn’t drown in Darrington, an hour away from the nearest river and three from the ocean. Instantly, he saw what Maris and Olivia had meant when they talked about how it changed a body. Lachlan Huxley was… swollen. Bloated. He’d died wearing a dark blue dressing gown, and his skin puffed grotesquely around the edges of the fabric. Where it showed, his skin was the exact colour of the underside of a trout, and his fingers were each the size of a sausage. To Chris’s horror, he would see where someone had grabbed his arm and tried to pull him up, because there were four fingerprints clearly indented into that doughy skin.

He averted his gaze, feeling his gorge rise.

“That’s―” he said without thinking, then bit his tongue. He didn’t know what he was going to say, but Mother Greta’s shoulders began shaking and Sister Elisabeth put her arms around her and buried herself in her bosom. Whatever he would have said wouldn’t have been respectful of their grief.

Grief was a hell of a thing, he reflected, and he thought of Fernand.

Olivia walked to the body, peering down at it. She knelt. She prodded it. Chris could barely watch, but it didn’t seem to bother her. “He was a handsome sort of fellow, wasn’t he?” she mused. “Young, too. Barely older than you, Christopher.” She hummed as she examined the hands. “You’re right,” she said to Maris. “These
might
have been cuts, but look―his fingernails are torn. So there’s just as good a chance he got these marks on his hands from scrabbling at the walls, trying to get out, as he drowned.” She glanced around the room, frowning. “Well,” she said, “I suppose that explains all the water in the hallways. Sorry. I just didn’t expect that you’d stolen the Queen’s bath chamber.”

“When…” Mother Greta wiped her eyes and reached down to stroke Sister Elisabeth’s hair. “When we opened the door, the water all rushed out. All at once. Our poor Father was swept all the way down the hall with it.”

Olivia prodded at the heavy work boots the body was wearing. “Well,” she quipped lightly. “Papa is lucky his holy son was wearing these to weigh him down, or else he would have had a macabre companion in his aquatic journey!”

Mother Greta shuddered. Sister Elisabeth’s eyes widened. Olivia twisted to look at Chris. “Come over here,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact with none of the harsh, sharp malice it would have contained months ago. Olivia had mostly learned how to work with Chris, and he was glad not to have her shouting at him.

He was less glad to get any closer to the swollen body, but he hurried to her side, his notebook held before him. Carefully, she lifted one of those pale, bloated hands. Chris grimaced.

“Oh, don’t,” Olivia scoffed. “You’ve seen your share. Just a little… inflated.”

“Not helping,” he muttered, but he dutifully recorded what he saw in his book.

“What do you think about these?” Olivia asked.

Chris frowned, looking at the strange, dark blotches on his hands. “I… don’t know,” he whispered. He didn’t want his voice to reach either priestess. “I’ve… I don’t really know anything about drowning.” He looked at her, met her inquiring gaze. “What do
you
think about them?” he asked, and she shook her head.

Turning the hand over, she ran the tips of her fingers against the dark spots. They moved slightly, and Chris realized that they were wounds, and the blotches were clotted, dark blood. “Are they cuts?” Olivia asked.

“I don’t know why you’re asking me,” Chris replied, shooting a glance over his shoulder at Mother and Maiden, who stared back expectantly from within their mutual embrace. “You’re the truthsniffer.”