Come the morning, after breakfast, we set off to the Royal Assurance to make good on our agreement to aid them in a murder investigation. A Sergeant Suminar Malati walked us north from the market square to a row of terraced houses roped off from the curious, and there (with all the cheer of a woman handing you a bill) she passed the whole business into our hands and left us to it.
Inside we found an alchemist, Griffo Clayhanger by name, now face-down in a heap of purple powder upon his own workbench. The air about him was sharp with brimstone. A prudent person would have retreated and assessed the scene from a safe distance. Applied stout leather gloves before handling possibly dangerous elixirs. Not Horton. That great inquiring mind and towering intellect. He wets a finger, dips it the purple powder, and tastes it. Well, dear listeners I also fell over in shock. I'll spare you the particulars, save to say the world turned some very pretty colours for him for a while after.
I
decided to call next on the neighbours. I went to the left and met a
man so eager to talk he'd must have spent years with his ear to the
shared wall between his and our murder victims cottage. From him I
learned that Griffo had had a frequent caller often at dusk (a pretty
young woman the man told me), and that the night before the killing
there had been a baby crying fit to wake the dead. A second woman,
older and hooded, had called and the neighbour thought she left
carrying the child away into the dark. Griffo and the hooded woman
had spoken together in no tongue he'd ever heard before.
Missenbar,
meanwhile, managed to draw a half-burnt scrap of parchment from the
cold fireplace, and on it a single word still legible in the Orcish
tongue: ‘bamagat’,
which for those of you unfamiliar with the Orcish tongue means
underground. I know a little of languages, and I knew this one was
not a place, but a password. The name of a hidden road that spirits
the endangered away to safety.
Upstairs
the tale deepened further. An empty wicker cot, a child's picture
book "The Very Hungry Carrion Crawler", and a sealed letter
holding a coin. A coin older even than myself, if you can believe
such a thing. On the coin was a lion-faced figure and the words
‘Until the fall of the gates’. It was Horton, having recovered
from his dalliance with the purple powder who in the end found the
truth of the murder. A needle of bone no bigger than an eyelash,
caught in the dead man's collar, and the little dark wound it had
left in the back of his neck.
Horton, meanwhile, was sent
to charm the little old lady on the other side of out victim's
cottage. She welcomed him kindly and set before him a mushroom
omelette. Now Horton is a growing lad and likes his food, so he ate
it. Not long after finishing the first few forkfuls the rest of us
heard a terrible crash, loud enough to bring down the roof. We
decided we should investigate, and found Horton stretched senseless
on the floor with a great dark-furred shape attempting to haul him
away by the hair heading toward the back door…
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