CHAPTER 18 #2
Three guards in chainmail with teal and black surcoats marched up from behind us, toward the crowd.
The leading guard bellowed, “Part!” and the crowd opened in front of them.
They strode into the gap, and I ducked in after them.
Clover and Reynald barely had time to squeeze in behind me.
I turned sideways and pushed my way to the front.
The press of bodies eased, the crowd ended, and I halted on the edge of it.
In front of me, across twenty yards of clear ground, stood a simple open-air pavilion with a clay tile roof resting on ancient wooden beams. A row of timber columns held up the roof.
Every column had two bracers, one on each side, that stretched from it at an angle to support the rafters.
The corpse hung from the central column.
The sight of it was so shocking, it didn’t seem real. There were other people around it—guards, a knight in chainmail and teal tabard—but I saw only the body.
The dead person was a man, middle-aged, naked, his arms tied to the bracers of the pillar.
His head drooped, his salt-and-pepper hair falling forward over his face.
His torso was split from his collarbones to his groin, the skin and muscle pierced by hooks attached to twine and pulled back, the twine disappearing behind the column.
He was laid open like a book, all of his insides on display.
The horror of it was so heavy, it bounced from my brain.
My mind needed a moment to come to terms with the visual input.
I stared, numb, while my eyes catalogued everything in excruciating detail: bare muscle, bloodied bone, a mangled liver, the gory sack of the left lung that seemed almost chewed on, the cut to the right thigh that had drenched the leg in blood . . .
“Dame Gler,” one of the older guardsmen was saying, “we need a ladder . . .”
The officer of the City Guard, a knight of about my age, didn’t seem to hear him.
She was standing there frozen, trying to process the body.
The cluster of people around us was quiet, almost afraid to speak.
The crowd had formed a crescent around the grisly scene, held back by some animal instinct, as if coming too close would somehow infect them.
This wasn’t a true crime show with carefully blurred bodycam footage. This was real life. The stench of blood was so thick, I could taste it on my tongue. Flies crawled on the exposed lungs and intestines . . .
A hand landed on my shoulder. I jerked, turned, and saw Reynald looking back at me. Next to him, Clover gaped at the body, her face pale, her eyes shocked.
My brain restarted all at once. The meaning of what I was seeing penetrated though the shock and punched me with an icy fist.
He was early. It was too soon.
Why now? Was it because of something I had done?
Oh god. I should’ve seen this coming. Everything was going wrong.
Reynald leaned toward me. “Talk to me.”
I would have to tell him. Fuck.
“Maggie?” he prompted.
“We’re in trouble,” I whispered.
Around me the crowd pressed tighter as more people came in.
We had to get out of there. I spun around.
Reynald caught me by the arm. “Slowly.”
He was right. The killer was probably nearby, watching the spectacle right now. We didn’t need to draw attention to ourselves.
I took Clover’s hand and nodded. Reynald glowered at the crowd blocking our way. Somehow, despite the tight press of the bodies, people parted before him, and we followed. A moment and we were in the clear.
I took off toward the exit, forcing myself to maintain a stable pace, with Reynald hovering over Clover and me like a hawk. We walked in complete silence, weaving through the current of shoppers, until we cleared the gates and the stone demon dog on top of them bared his fangs at our backs.
Outside of the market, I sped up as fast as I could without running. Clover chased after me. Reynald broke into what my dad used to call double time.
“What’s going on?” Clover asked.
“We have a problem,” I told her.
“How bad?”
“Very bad. We have to get home right now.”
We turned around the corner. Reynald put his arm in front of me as if he’d braked suddenly while driving and wanted to keep me from flying through the windshield.
A group of riders on gray horses with white tails stomped their way down the street, two per row.
They wore polished gray breastplates and cloaks the color of fresh blood.
The single rider in front carried a banner on a tall spear: black, scarlet, and gold.
A carriage followed them, drawn by a single massive gray horse.
Ornate but not delicate, blocky, with thick walls, it was the medieval equivalent of an armored limousine.
Nothing like what you would imagine Cinderella might ride in.
The curtain on the window was pulled aside, and I could see the passenger. Ulmar Hreban.
The carriage passed us. Hreban looked at us, obvious boredom stamped on his face. His gaze slid over me, and for a moment I looked straight into his eyes. They were mean, menacing, and empty.
The carriage rolled on, another pair of knights following it.
Hreban, here, at this moment, of all people. It was as if Kair Toren were taunting me. Every time I dared to get even the slightest bit comfortable, the city reminded me where we stood.
I wouldn’t take this punch lying down. I would stop this from happening no matter what it took.
We gathered in the kitchen at the big table once again.
I looked at the stack of papers in front of me. When we were cleaning, Clover and I had found a board made of soft wood. Derog used to pin the guard shift schedules to it. I put it up on the wall behind me. I would need visual aids to keep it all straight.
Reynald had explained the dead body. The faces looking at me were grim. Our world had come to terms with serial killers, but Rellas had no frame of reference. That kind of horror was raw and shocking.
Reynald sat at his usual place on my right. He had promised me that he would stand by me. He’d given me his word. I was about to kick that promise off a cliff.
I took a deep breath.
“People tend to kill for a specific reason. The most common are greed, passion, or revenge. The perpetrators seek to benefit from the murder, and they often know their target. The man who left the body in the Dog Market isn’t like that.
His victims never met him. Their deaths do not benefit him. He kills because he likes it.”
I had learned way too much about serial killers during my brief stint in criminal justice.
This one hit all the marks for the organized category: He planned his crimes in advance, he went about killing in a methodical fashion, he abducted his victims to torture them in a safe location, and he improved with each crime. He was a monster.
“This killer derives pleasure from his murders, first when he fights his victims, then when he dissects their bodies, and finally when he watches the effect his handiwork has on other people. He doesn’t feel remorse, and he can’t be cured of his urges.”
“So he needs to be put out of his misery,” Shana said.
“Yes. He will kill a new victim every week. Every Firsday, he will display them in the same way he has done in the market.”
I took a nail and pinned the piece of paper with dates on the board.
My fingers shook a little. This was not the way I wanted to deliver this explanation.
I’d wanted to have a plan in place, so when I explained what was about to happen, I could immediately shift to “and this is how we stop it.” I had expected to have time to formulate that plan, Divine fucking damn it.
“The murderer will choose different public locations, but he will display each body exactly the same way he displayed the first. Splayed open. There will be a total of six victims.” I held up six fingers.
“So this one and five more. I don’t know his name or where he comes from, but people will call him the Dog Market Butcher. ”
I wrote “Dog Market Butcher” on the piece of paper I had attached to the board. This would’ve been much easier with dry-erase markers.
“How does it involve us?” Will asked.
“I’ve told you before that Hreban has great ambitions. He seeks the throne. By midwinter, King Sauven will give Hreban nearly unlimited power. The Order of the Redeemer will back Hreban, and he will drown the kingdom in fire and blood.”
“Sauven was always a few arrows short of a full quiver,” Gort said. “But that is too far even for him. I could see him raising Arvel like that, but Hreban?”
“Sauven Savaric isn’t in his right mind,” I said. “He has fits of paranoia and they are getting worse.”
“It runs in the family,” Shana said.
I nodded. “It does. Sauven isn’t oblivious. He is aware of what is happening, which is why he’s trying to hammer out a solid foundation to support his son, Crown Prince Kiel. To Sauven, dynasty is everything.”
And every time Sauven would cobble together some kind of rickety scaffolding to hold his firstborn up, Kiel would wreck it with his arrogance and narcissism, but that was a topic for another day.
“Sauven trusts very few people these days, the most important of whom is Colart Jenicor.”
I picked up a picture of a heraldic shield I had cut out from one of the scrolls in my study and pinned it to the board. A golden sun with stylized rays rising on a field of black.
“The Sun Margrave,” Reynald said.
“Who is the Sun Margrave?” Kaiden asked.
“He’s the man who leads the Justice Chamber,” Clover told him. “When people commit crimes against the kingdom, he is the one who brings the cases before the High Court.”
“Margrave is a military title,” Reynald explained. “It means lord who defends a border. The Sun Margrave also guards a boundary, the one between lawlessness and order.”