CHAPTER 18 #4
“You don’t know the Butcher’s name,” Reynald said. “But you do know something about him.”
True. Even if I couldn’t account for all of the consequences, even if we did change things, I still had the core knowledge from the books. I knew things about the major players. Facts, quirks, habits, secrets. More, I knew how they thought.
If the future did resist change, it would make things more predictable, not less. The Butcher would stick to his once-a-week pattern. He would target the same victims.
Reynald’s eyes said, It will be fine. We have this. It’s under control.
He’d pulled me out of the sea onto his rock. All I had to do was stay on it.
I took a deep breath and let the angst go. Whatever happened, had happened. Now we had to deal with it.
“Could it be that man from the Garden?” Reynald asked.
“No. The Butcher is older, and dark haired. The man from the Garden has blond eyebrows.”
The serial killer was a subplot. He was mostly mentioned in passing, except for three scenes: one where a character was targeted by the Dog Market Butcher, brought to his lair, tortured, and murdered; the Sun Margrave’s death; and Hreban’s discovery of the Butcher; they were presented in gory second-by-second detail.
“The killer is a man.” I began writing a list under the Butcher’s name. “Dark brown hair, neither too tall, nor too short. Strong, muscular. Between thirty-five and sixty years old.”
The description in the book mentioned shoulders that showed the strength of a mature man. Latour specifically stated through one of the characters that the onset of maturity happened after thirty-five and before the old age of sixty.
“That describes half of the men in Lower Berem,” Shana murmured.
Lower Berem was Hreban’s domain.
“Anything specific?” Reynald asked. “A friend, a spouse, where he’s from, if he’s a soldier or a mercenary?”
I shook my head.
“He duels his victims until they can no longer fight, then transports them to his place, where he tortures them. Ritual is very important to him. Dissecting and displaying the body is as vital as the killing. Usually, repeat killers like him have a type. Their victims look similar. He doesn’t.
He doesn’t care what his targets look like or what their age or gender is, as long as they are famous knights. ”
That’s why his reign of terror was so scary. He was killing people who not only knew how to defend themselves but excelled at it. If he could kill them, an ordinary person wouldn’t stand a chance.
“He’s very good with his sword,” I said.
“How good?” Gort asked.
“Good enough to be a problem,” Reynald said. “I recognized the man he hung in the Dog Market. It was Shuhoven.”
I had no idea who Shuhoven was. The series spent very little time on the victims aside from stating that they were all famous knights.
Half of the time, the books just said things like “another body was found in the morning. The Butcher had struck again” and moved on to the intrigue and Great Families’ machinations.
Gort whistled. “Are you sure?”
Reynald nodded. “I saw the scar.”
There’d been a scar? All I could remember was the mangled organs, the blood, and flies breeding on his insides.
“Shuhoven the Spear?” Will asked.
“Yes,” Reynald answered.
“I heard he retired,” Will said.
“And he has a bad arm,” Lute said. “Had. Had a bad arm.”
Gort grunted at them. “He had two bad arms, and I still wouldn’t have fought him unless I was buying time for you and your mother to get away.”
“Who is Shuhoven?” Kaiden asked.
“A renowned knight,” Reynald said. “He was famous for driving his spear through multiple fighters in one thrust.”
“It’s hard to do,” Will explained. “It takes a lot of strength.”
“Then you have to pull the spear out,” Lute said. “And the bodies don’t want to let it go.”
“Now you’re stuck with your weapon inside another person,” Will said.
“Any asshole can come up and stab you,” Lute said.
They sounded exactly the same. It was like listening to one person whose voice bounced from one speaker to another. Will and Lute, spear experts, coming through in stereo.
“Shuhoven would do it in a single pull,” Gort said. “Unbelievable upper body strength.”
Reynald grimaced. “He was a show-off. He used to do this thing before battles—once the troops lined up, he would stand on his horse. He claimed he needed the height to survey the field.”
“Why did he really do it?” Kaiden asked.
“So the enemy would see him standing there on a horse with his spear,” Reynald said. “I once told him that he made an excellent tar—”
Gort coughed.
“A story for another time,” Reynald said. “The angle of the wounds suggests Shuhoven was upright and moving when they were made, so Maggie is right. The Dog Market Butcher duels with his victims, then he cuts them open and displays the bodies for everyone to see. It’s a message.”
“This is what I did and how I did it,” Will said. “It’s pride.”
“It’s hubris,” Reynald corrected and turned to me. “What about the other victims?”
“I know of two, besides the Sun Margrave: Eliarde of the Silver Eagles and Jeor Baes. But both of them die later. Eliarde is number three and Jeor is number five.”
“He kills Eliarde?” Gort frowned.
Dame Eliarde was Arvel’s second cousin. She hadn’t inherited the Enduring Flame of the main family, but she got the lesser version of the talent called the Amber Coal, which made her both stronger and more durable than an ordinary knight. She was deadly.
“Did he ambush her?” Lute asked.
“No. He fought her,” I told him. “She lost.”
The table went silent. Even if the Magnars all banded together, Eliarde would go through them like Shana’s cleaver through a fish.
“How does Hreban find him?” Reynald asked into the silence.
“The killer has a lair on the coast. That’s where he tortures and slices up his targets.
When he takes Eliarde there, she can hear the surf.
Hreban was buying a warehouse, didn’t like the condition of it, and wanted to see what else was available.
Supposedly he ended up walking into the wrong building with his guards as the killer was cleaning up the gore. ”
Except that if he and the Butcher were in on it together, he would know exactly where to find his pet serial killer.
“Do we know what area of the coast?” Gort asked.
I shook my head. “Somewhere remote where nobody could hear the screams.”
Kair Toren was founded because of its safe harbor and access to the West Ocean. It had literally miles of docks and warehouses. We could search for months and not find anything.
“How does he transport his victims?” Will asked. “He can’t just walk around dragging people and bodies back and forth.”
“In a cart,” Clover told him. “That’s how I would do it. I’d load them into a delivery cart, stack some goods on top, and wear some cheap clothes and beat-up shoes. I could make circles through Kair Toren all day, and nobody would pay me any mind.”
The brothers gave her an odd look.
“And you said he vanished into thin air after killing the Sun Margrave,” Reynald said.
“Yes.”
“Morr beads?” Gort wondered.
“Most likely,” Reynald said.
“What are more beads?” Kaiden asked.
“M-O-R-R. Battlemages carry them,” Will told him. “It’s illegal to use them but they do anyway. They break one, and magic shoves them to a safe spot half a mile away.”
“You’ll be in camp, sharpening your sword, and they pop up out of nowhere, and then you cut yourself,” Lute said.
A very specific example there.
Morr beads came up a couple of times in the books.
They were small black beads with red cracks strung onto a bracelet or a necklace.
When the user crushed a bead, they would be teleported to a predetermined location, but the beads weren’t exactly foolproof.
One of the mages using them exploded upon arrival at the Mage Tower, and then Archmage Damaes got pissed off because the potion laboratory stank like rotting human fluids for days.
“Morr beads cost a lot of money,” Gort mused.
“Not if Hreban is paying your way,” Shana told him.
“So how do we find him, if we don’t know who the next victim is?” Clover asked. “Or do we have to wait for Eliarde?”
“Eliarde is a member of the Silver Eagles,” I told her. “They are an elite knight unit. There are only fifty of them and they are very proud of making that cut. She is . . . difficult.”
Sometimes overtly arrogant people hid severe insecurities, but in Eliarde’s case, her arrogance hid more arrogance.
Her entire family thought their relation to the Arvels placed them above the rest. She was born into a life of privilege, with everyone constantly reassuring her that she was special and entitled to everything she ever wanted.
She was beautiful, talented, celebrated, and cherished, and she was very aware that everyone else was less-than.
“She has an inflated sense of her self-worth,” Reynald said. “She won’t listen to a warning from us and attempting to follow her around until the Butcher strikes will be impossible.”
How could we find him . . . If he had been targeting regular fighters, it would be one thing, but he was targeting knights. They spent half of their time in their HQs and when they did go into the city, it was usually on horseback.
Knights . . . on horses . . .
Ah!
“I don’t know who he kills next, but I do know where he will leave the body,” I said. “He’ll tie it to the statue of the Knight Vanquisher.”
Gort’s eyes narrowed. “That’s six blocks from here.”
Reynald pivoted to me. “Is there a chance he’ll change the location?”
“I don’t think so. He spent months planning the order of his victims and the dump sites. He made drawings. He won’t want to deviate from his plan. It’s a compulsion. He must carry it out exactly as he envisioned it.”
Reynald bared his teeth in a sharp smile, like a wolf who has sighted his prey. “Gort and Kaiden, with me. Will, Lute, stay here. Nobody comes through the front door until we’re back.”