Юлия Авилкина – The Bodiless Shadow (страница 3)
A messenger in the gray uniform of the Inquisition’s postal service stood on the threshold. He looked incongruously clean in the grimy hallway outside her office.
"Ms. Vellen?" The boy held out a thick envelope with a wax seal and a small cardboard box tied with twine. "Sign here."
Kaira scrawled her signature on the manifest, took the delivery, and shut the door.
Inside the envelope was the expected order, signed by Magnus Trey. The dry bureaucratic language granted "civilian consultant K. Vellen" the authority to request information from individuals lacking the highest magical clearance. No "pleases" or "counting on yous." Just a tool receiving its authorization to work.
Kaira set the order aside and looked at the cardboard box. Pinned to the twine on top was a small note, written in a steady, elegant hand with a slight leftward slant. The ink was dark blue.
Kaira blinked, re-reading the note a second time.
She sliced through the twine with a penknife. Inside the box lay a neat stack of heavy paper, covered in that same impeccable handwriting. Soaren hadn't just copied the registry—he’d grouped the names by date and highlighted in red those whose requests deviated from standard protocol. It was the kind of analytical work that would have cost Kaira at least three days of legwork and wrangling with bureaucrats.
At the very bottom of the box was a small linen pouch that smelled of thyme, dried ginger, and something else—pungent and warm.
Kaira felt a strange prickle of irritation mingled with a begrudging sense of gratitude. She wasn't used to people intruding on her personal space, even with good intentions. The people in her life usually demanded results, made threats, or told lies. No one sent her data summaries to save her time, and certainly, no one ever noticed that she was cold.
She dropped the pouch onto the desk, beside the cold coffee pot, deciding there was no way she’d be brewing that tea. It would be a sign of weakness.
But she slid the registry sheets closer.
Kaira buried herself in the pages. Most of the names were unfamiliar—junior researchers, historians, clerks. But on the third page, her gaze snagged on a recognizable surname.
Three days ago, according to Soaren’s summary, a certain individual had requested access to the old municipal utility blueprints and the port's magical distribution schematics. The request was filed by the book, but the "Purpose" column held a blurry justification:
The man who had filed the request was named Einar Larsen. And the man who had officially countersigned and approved it was Councilor Vael.
Kaira tapped her pencil against the desk. Artifact dealers were often interested in old nodes, hoping to find decommissioned or lost junk. But for Vael himself to sign off on a request from a common scavenger? That broke protocol.
She snapped the folder shut and stood up. She had a name and a direction. She needed to hit the streets and find out who this Einar Larsen was and why one of the most powerful men in Avrin was taking an interest in his business.
Kaira pulled on her still-damp coat, cast a glance at the desk, and after a second's hesitation, shoved Darr’s herbal pouch into her deep pocket. Just in case the city decided to rain.
Chapter 3: The First Guest
At noon, Avrin resembled a weary beast trying to shake off its nocturnal torpor. A heavy cargo airship drifted above the rooftops of Nutra with a strained drone, drenching the street in a cloud of steam and the stench of scorched oil. Kaira walked with her collar turned up, weaving through stevedores and street vendors whose voices drowned out the clatter of the trams.
Einar Larsen lived where the solid pavement ended and the rickety footbridges of the "Rusty Belt" began—a district built on old barges and stilts directly over the silty channels. Here, the magic of threads was a rarity. Kaira found the address she was looking for: an old cutter moored to a half-rotted pier, converted into an antiquity shop. Above the door, a sign creaked:
Kaira pushed the door open. The bell overhead answered with a dry, cracked jangle. Inside, it smelled of dust, old copper, and something sickly sweet, like the scent of rotting molasses. Shelves crowded the walls, cluttered with broken gramophones, telescope lenses, and the empty shells of magical capacitors. No one answered.
In the back of the shop, behind a heavy curtain of yellowed beads, something was rhythmically dripping. The sound was too heavy, too thick for simple water. She slowly drew her revolver, feeling the familiar weight of the grip steady her pulse. The beads clinked softly as she pushed them aside with the barrel of her weapon.
Einar Larsen was in the small workshop. He sat in his work chair, slumped over the workbench as if he had fallen asleep while repairing a complex clockwork mechanism. Kaira stepped closer, and a chill crawled up the nape of her neck. Larsen was dead. Around the scavenger's body hung that same familiar, terrifying pattern. His magical threads—the dim, barely perceptible strands of an ordinary man—hadn't been torn; they had been neatly excised from his chest.
Death had been instantaneous. The killer had worked just as cleanly as in the Archive: no signs of a struggle, not a single shattered lens on the table.
But there was one detail that hadn't been present with Councilor Vael. On the workbench, directly in front of the dead man's face, lay an open brass box. Inside, nestled in a bed of red velvet, shimmered a tiny needle no larger than a fingernail. It was forged from a strange black metal that didn't reflect light, but seemed to swallow it.
The old man’s gray head rested upon splayed blueprints. Kaira peered cautiously over his shoulder. It was a resonance map. Three points were marked with red crosses on the port’s layout. One was Pumping Station No. 4. The second was the Cathedral cellars. The third was heavily smeared with Larsen’s blood.
Suddenly, the sharp shriek of an Inquisition steam whistle erupted from the street, followed by the heavy clatter of hobnailed boots on the wooden footbridges. Someone had called a patrol before she arrived. She couldn’t afford to be caught here next to a second corpse—the Inquisition didn't believe in coincidences.
Kaira shot a quick glance at the workbench, yanked a yellowed slip of paper from under the dead man's elbow, and lunged for the narrow back door leading to the cutter's stern. She slipped into the gray fog a split second before the guards kicked in the front door with a crash.
Chapter 4: Magnus Under Suspicion
The rain came after all. It brought no freshness, only beating the coal dust into the cobblestones and turning the familiar harbor fog into a gray, sticky suspension. Water poured from the sky in a solid sheet, washing the grime from the warehouse roofs straight into the overflowing canals.
Kaira stood in the deep shadow of a rusted harbor crane, wedged between two abandoned crates, and watched. The forces of the Inquisition were converging on Einar Larsen's barge. Blue and toxic-white reflections of magical lanterns darted across the filthy, trash-strewn water, snatching the scurrying guards from the darkness. Their heavy, iron-shod boots thudded hollowly against the wooden footbridges. The air trembled from an overabundance of raw, poorly controlled magic—the patrolmen were nervous, generously casting search nets around the barge.
She instinctively pulled her coat tighter, even though it was already soaked through. In her inner pocket, closer to her body, lay the quarter-folded sheet of paper she had managed to pull from under the dead man's elbow mere seconds before the Inquisition appeared.
Kaira knew what was written there by heart. It wasn't a blueprint or a sewer schematic. It was a promissory note—old, brittle, yellowed at the edges from time and dampness. The sum indicated was staggering even by Upper City standards, but it wasn't the number of zeroes that had Kaira's attention deadlocked.
At the very bottom of the document, where the paper had already begun to peel apart, sat the seal of a personal guarantor. Three intertwined swords enclosed in a perfect circle. The personal heraldic mark of Magnus Trey. Date of issue: exactly ten years ago.
Kaira adjusted her collar, peeled herself away from the cold steel support of the crane, and strode away from the cordon. Water squelched in her boots with every step, icy drops sliding down her neck, but she paid it no mind. A single thought ticked in her head, rhythmic as a pendulum.