Title: The Tower: Chapter Three, Part Two
***
Chapter Three, Part
Two
The second morgue wasn’t quite as neat and kept up as the
first, but it was still a testament to the cultural fastidiousness of Zürich’s
population. There was almost no smell of death at all, and while the walls and
floor weren’t clean enough to eat from, they were a far cry from the charnel
houses of London. This morgue was kept along a dark side street near the red
light district, and while the stars were beginning to disappear overhead by the
time they arrived there, there was still plenty of darkness left to assure a
successful miasma.
The proprietor, a woman this time, let them in silently. She
took the handful of coins that Camille proffered, pointed toward a heavy wooden
door, then took herself off to another part of the house.
“Curious,” Anton murmured.
“Not really. Frau Schumacher and I came to an agreement over
the bodies yesterday. She knew to expect us. And as she is functionally mute
nowadays, I didn’t expect much in the way of verbal interaction.”
“Mute?” Anton blinked. “What happened to her?”
“I believe it was an unexpected side effect of a
particularly nasty spell, but it’s impolite to speculate about such things.
What affects one person one way—”
“—might have a completely different effect on another, yes,
I know.” It was one of the first things any thaumaturge learned in school: you
could predict the outcome of a spell down to the minutiae, that was what all
the symbols and equations and paraphernalia was for. The less you left things
to chance, to variability, the more control you had over the outcome. However,
no spell was completely foolproof, and little things about the people you cast
it on or around, from their emotional state to the clothes they wore to the
changing direction of the wind, might wreak havoc on it. Anton still remembered
an incident when he was young, when one of his fellow students cast an illusion
on another, then promptly began shrieking with horror when the illusion made
the boy appear as a hideously mutilated corpse, instead of simply altered to be
paler.
Camille’s gentle touch on Anton’s elbow broke him out of his
remembrance. “Shall we?”
“Uh, yes. Of course.” Anton led the way into the morgue,
cool and quiet. A dimmed lantern already hung on the wall, providing just
enough illumination to see the two bodies, five feet apart. “Which one first?”
Camille stepped up to the body on the right and checked
beneath the linen cloth covering it. “This one. This is Jackson Clark, our most
adept street mage. One wonders what the finder was being asked to find.”
“The palimpsest, surely,” Anton said as he set up his
equipment again.
“Yes, but by what means? If it is as secret as I suspect it
to be, then there should be no way to locate it directly. The more details with
a finding spell, the better, correct?”
“Always. A resonance spell would have been ideal, but
without coming into contact with the palimpsest there was no way to know the
resonance of it.” Anton chalked the path to the body, then went back and lit
his little flame. Camille kept silent, and a moment later, as the smoke wafted
over the body, the scene played out. It was sadly familiar. The man writhed on
the ground, caught in the grip of an unseen hand, and after a few moments, his throat
was unceremoniously slit.
Camille sighed. “As I suspected.”
“If only some of them had invested the time in learning
defensive spells.” Anton shook his head. “It might have saved their lives.”
“Yet magic is notoriously poor at being quick-cast.”
“Proper defensive spells are not quick-cast,” Anton replied.
“Offensive spells might be, but that is a special branch of thaumaturgy that I’ve
never delved very deeply into. Defensive spells, though, those can be linked to
anything, like this charm I’m wearing to hide my face. They might not be very
powerful, but they could be the difference between life, and…well.” He waved at
the body of Jackson Clark. “That.”
Camille seemed interested, stepping closer as Anton began to
set up for the final death miasma. “Do you employ them yourself?”
“Well, I didn’t before the—the incident on the train.” And
it was a shame, because being better prepared might have saved Anton from several
beatings. “But since then, I’ve begun studying it a bit. The knife, you know,
was a variant on a defensive spell, a very powerful variant. I’d never go that
far, but.” He shrugged. “It certainly pays to be prepared.”
“Indeed.” Camille looked down at Anton warmly, and he felt
his cheeks heat in reaction. “You’ll have to tell me about the fruit of your
studies at a more opportune moment.”
“I-I would be delighted to, of course.” Anton looked down
and cursed himself silently for blushing. Would he never have better control
over his own emotions where Camille was concerned? “Give me a moment.”
“Take all the time you need.”
Anton focused his energies and cast the spell for the last
time. The smoke rose toward the fourth body, the final unfortunate soul who had
been lost to this killer. Anton expected the death scene to be much the same as
the others, but instead—
The man’s body jerked and flailed, staggering to his feet
and dropping down to his knees again as he slapped ineffectually at his chest
and face. His smoky mouth opened in a silent scream, hands clenched like claws
on either side of his head. Something appeared to dart down his throat, and a
moment later, he convulsed and fell onto his side.
The scene repeated. It repeated again. By the third time,
Anton was more than ready to abolish it, and Camille finally nodded. Rather
than looking disgusted, he appeared intrigued.
“Ah, now that is
interesting.”
“He was…” Anton had seen this before, just not as violently.
“He was being eaten alive.”
“Indeed he was. I knew that Garth Killian’s body had been
found somewhat chewed, but—” he
walked over and checked under the cloth “—I didn’t know that it was because he
had been attacked by his own magic.”
“What do you mean?”
“Give me a moment to confirm.” Camille pried the poor man’s
mouth open and peered inside of it. “Yes. There’s a rat down there.”
Anton’s stomach swooped dangerously. “He was forced to
swallow a rat?”
“He was. Mr. Killian was a very effective exterminator—it
was his sole focus. For his own magic to be turned against him, or at the very
least for his spell to be overwhelmed by someone else’s, he must have been
killed by another thaumaturge.”
Anton slowly felt the logical part of his brain begin to
function again with a little bit of distance from the horror now. “It’s hard to
beat someone at their own game. There are intricacies that can only be known through
years of experimentation and practice.”
“Indeed. So, it must have been a very strong thaumaturge, someone strong enough to force their will on a
street mage with little to no damage to themselves.”
“Dangerous,” Anton said. “But possible.”
“The act of someone steeped in contempt for who he was
dealing with, and filled with a powerful sense of his own abilities,” Camille
agreed. “Well. This narrows the field considerably.”
“Where will you look next?”
Camille smiled, the warmth replaced by something sharper. “Why,
at your university, of course.”
