Юлия Авилкина – The Bodiless Shadow (страница 2)

"Good night, Ms. Vellen," the archivist said politely. He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket, each one a complex runic weave. "I’ve lowered the external circuits as the Handler requested. We haven't touched anything inside. Be careful; it’s... rather cold in there."

He inserted a key into the lock. It clicked softly, and the heavy door swung open silently. Soaren stepped aside, clearing their path, and lowered the lamp as if marking a boundary he had no intention of crossing himself.

Kaira stepped into the room first.

The spacious reading room was paneled in dark oak. Bookshelves stretched to the ceiling along the walls, filled with books, scrolls, and sealed tubes. A dormant magical lamp sat upon a massive mahogany table.

And in a high-backed leather chair sat Councilor Vael.

Kaira slowly approached, feeling a chill creep beneath her coat. But it wasn't a physical cold. It was the absence of life.

Vael looked as if he had fallen asleep at his work. His hands rested calmly on the armrests; his head was tilted slightly back. His face bore no mask of horror, no traces of pain.

But when Kaira switched her vision to the ethereal layer, she nearly recoiled.

A person was woven from threads—physical, mental, magical. Death usually looked like their fading, a decay, the turning of bright strings into gray dust. Murder via magic looked like a violent rupture—melted ends, tangled knots, chaos.

But here, there was neither fading nor chaos. Vael’s threads had been cut.

Perfectly, methodically, with frightening surgical precision. Whoever had done this hadn't just killed the Councilor. They had neatly extracted his life from the fabric of existence without disturbing a single neighboring fiber. It explained why Magnus felt nothing. There had been no blow. There had only been an excision.

"Well?" Magnus barked impatiently from the doorway. He hesitated to approach the body, instinctively sensing the "dead zone." "What do you see, Vellen?"

"Exquisite craftsmanship," Kaira replied quietly, crouching by the chair.

She began to examine the floor, millimeter by millimeter. Her gaze slid over the patterns of the Persian rug, the legs of the table, the bottom shelves of the nearest rack. The killer had to have stood here. He had to have been in this room to accomplish such a feat.

Kaira squinted. At the very edge of the rug, where the pile met the polished parquet, lay a tiny, barely visible smudge of gray substance. Ash. But not from a cigarette or paper. It was too fine, almost like pollen.

She didn't touch it. Instead, she traced the trajectory from the ash stain to the bookshelf.

The shelves were packed with perfectly even rows of reference books and ledgers in identical leather bindings. Soaren Darr, it seemed, kept his archive in a state of frightening order. But on the very bottom shelf, at knee level, one of the massive volumes sat differently. It wasn't pulled out or knocked over. It simply sat at a two-degree angle, barely breaking the flawless line of its neighbors.

Kaira slowly stood up. The room had been empty. The doors locked. Magic had recorded no intrusion.

But someone had flicked ash onto the rug and placed a book unevenly on the shelf before erasing Councilor Vael from this room.

Kaira turned back to the doors. Magnus watched her gloomily, waiting for answers. Behind his shoulder, in the dim light of the corridor, Soaren Darr stood quietly, waiting for them to finish their work in his archive.

The question wasn't how Vael was killed. The question was what he had managed to read before they came for him.

Chapter 2: Ash and Ink

Kaira returned to her office just as the night began to reluctantly give way to a gray, sickly dawn. Nutra woke up hard, with the hacking cough of factory chimneys and the clatter of the first steam-powered trams.

After the ringing, sterile silence of the Upper City and the dry air of the Main Archive, the dampness of the lower quarters felt almost tangible. It settled on the wool of her coat, seeped into her boots, and left a taste of coal soot on her lips.

Kaira’s office was located on the second floor above a hardware store. There was no magical heating here—the kind that made the lives of aristocrats so carefree. There was only a potbellied cast-iron stove in the corner, an old leather sofa with a slumped back, and a massive desk cluttered with files.

Kaira didn’t bother lighting the gas jet. The pale light bleeding through the unwashed window was enough. She tossed her coat onto the sofa, shivered in the stale air, and, striking a match, lit the burner under a dented coffee pot. Only when the bitter aroma of cheap beans drifted through the room did she allow herself to exhale.

The silence of the Archive still rang in her ears.

Kaira sat at the desk, pulled a tattered, black-covered notebook toward her, and opened it to a clean page. Her fingers, accustomed to the weight of a revolver, gripped the pencil with ease and confidence.

“Councilor Vael. Main Archive. Special Records Sector,” she wrote in a steady hand.

She closed her eyes, mentally retreating to that oak-paneled room. Before her mind’s eye, the perfect, chilling geometry of death emerged once again. The threads hadn't been torn to shreds, the way they usually were in a clash between combat mages. They had been sliced clean.

Kaira opened her eyes and jotted down: “Surgical precision. No residual background. No evidence of a breach in the external circuits.”

The killer hadn’t just bypassed the security—he’d ignored it.

This narrowed the field of suspects to a chilling minimum. To pull off a feat like this, one had to either possess the keys to the Archive or be capable of slicing the protective weaves as delicately as the threads of a human life.

Kaira drew a thick line with her pencil and began to draft a list.

1) Magnus Trey and the Inquisition. Could the Handler have murdered his own superior? Magnus was crude, blunt, and solved problems with the finesse of a sledgehammer. A surgical incision was not his style. His aura screamed of kinetic force, not precision. But Magnus had people. And he could have motives. Lately, rumors of corruption in the upper echelons had been rippling through Nutra—whispers that certain patrols were turning a blind eye to artifact smuggling for a hefty cut. Vael was exactly the type to have launched an internal audit.

2) The Carvers. A radical order that views magic as a curse distorting the natural order of things. They loathed the Inquisition and everything it stood for. Severing a Councilor from the fabric of existence would be right up their alley—a loud political statement. But Kaira was skeptical. The Carvers were zealots. Zealots love leaving a message: symbols carved into the walls, manifestos, blood. Here, everything was too quiet. Too clinical.

3) Internal Archive Staff. She recalled the meticulous archivist in the gray frock coat. Soaren Darr. He had access. He had the keys. He was in the building. Kaira hovered her pencil over the paper for a moment, remembering his calm gray eyes and the pale threads of his aura.

“Too obvious,” she thought, shaking her head. People like Darr—pedantic keepers of dust—don’t kill Councilors. They live by the clock and are afraid of drafts. He had no motive, no fitting psychological profile. If he wanted to kill Vael, he’d sooner slip poison into his tea than erase him from reality with such a complex magical intervention. Darr was just a useful witness, nothing more.

Kaira crossed Darr off the list and returned to the only two leads she had carried away from the crime scene in her memory.

The Ash. A pinch of gray dust at the edge of the rug. It could have been cigarette ash, but Vael didn't smoke, and open flames were strictly forbidden within the Archive. That meant the killer had brought it in. On the soles of his boots? Or was it the residue of a burnt-out spell?

The book. The bottom shelf. A tome, shifted by a mere two degrees. Kaira rubbed her temples in frustration. Why would a killer capable of the impossible bother digging around on the bottom shelf? Unless he was looking for something. Or... putting something back.

Vael had been reading something right before he died. Something that got him killed. And the evidence had been neatly slipped back into its orderly row to hide the very fact that he’d been interested in it.

The coffee pot hissed, sputtering dark foam onto the hot metal. Kaira set her pencil aside, poured herself a mug of the scalding, bitter brew, and walked over to the window.

Outside, dawn had finally broken. Merchants were already laying out dull cod on wet stalls, and newsboys ran past, shouting headlines about evening galas in the Upper City. The rumors of the dead Councilor hadn't reached them yet. When they did, the city would shudder.

She needed official access to the case. Magnus had dragged her in off the books last night, like a hunting dog to pick up a scent. But to ask questions on the streets, she needed a piece of paper with a seal.

The wait dragged on until noon. Kaira had managed to doze off right on the sofa, boots still on, when a sharp knock at the door made her startle and instinctively reach for her holster.