Void's Tale by Christopher Nuttall (ebook reader wifi txt) 📕

and to who.  The hangover wouldn’t help.  I muttered a quick spell to ensure he didn’t have a bad one, despite the vast amounts of alcohol in his bloodstream.  He’d have to go to the toilet quickly, when he woke, but it was a small price to pay.  And it was the least I could do.

A fight broke out on the floor.  I watched dispassionately as big men exchanged blows, punching and kicking each other over ... over what?  The bartender didn’t seem concerned, even as they crashed into stools and smashed tables ... I had the feeling fistfights were a regular thing here.  I waved at the bartender, summoning him, then passed him a gold coin.  His eyes widened with surprise.  He bit the coin, then pocketed it.

“No one can hear us,” I said.  I cast a complex privacy ward to make sure that was actually true.  Anyone trying to spy on the bar would hear the fight and nothing more, but there was no point in taking chances.  “Tell me about the prince.”

The bartender hesitated, seemingly torn between answering my questions and returning my coin.  I was astonished.  Gold coins were rare, outside the big cities.  I’d just given him more money than his regular patrons were likely to give him in a week.  And yet, he clearly wasn’t sure if he wanted to take the money.   It was hard to believe.  What could scare an entire town?

“He’s a good man,” the bartender said, carefully.  He had to be wondering if I was one of the prince’s men.  “We all adore him.”

I tried not to snort.  There were too many aristocrats who’d take that at face value, who made the mistake of assuming the people cheering in the streets truly loved them.  It wasn’t true.  The crowds would cheer just as eagerly for a usurper, if he took the throne by force.  They knew better than to oppose the man with the soldiers, not openly.  They’d keep their real thoughts to themselves.

“And the truth?”  I pushed magic into my voice, urging him to talk.  “What do you really think?”

“He’s done nothing about the vanishings,” the bartender said.  His hands twisted in his lap, suggesting he was deeply uncomfortable.  “He puts up statues to his own glory, but does nothing about the missing people.”

I asked him a handful of other questions, pulling out fragments of information the bartender hadn’t known he had.  There had been around seventy disappearances in all, as far as he knew, all commoners.  I mentally added the commoner and magical disappearances together and got eighty-two ... at least.  There might very well be more.  People had simply been vanishing, from the streets, from their beds, from their shops ... too many to explain away.  And the prince was doing nothing besides putting more guards on the streets.  It hadn’t done anything to help.

The bartender kept talking.  I listened, thinking hard.  By tradition, such as it was, a Crown Prince controlled Low and Middle Justice, anything below crimes against the state itself.  It was his responsibility to handle the criminal investigation, even if that meant - in practice - delegating the task to someone who knew what he was doing.  Putting troops on the streets might not have seemed a bad idea, and it was certainly a good way to make a show of doing something, but it had clearly been ineffective.  People were still vanishing.  And there seemed to be no rhyme or reason.

I dismissed the bartender with a nod and sat back to consider what I’d been told.  Seventy commoners, perhaps more, had vanished.  They had little else in common.  They’d been young and old, the youngest around five and the oldest around sixty; they’d been from all walks of life.  I could understand kidnapping young women or strong men, but why a random selection?  It made no sense.  If they’d all been taken off the streets, I would have thought the kidnappers were just picking targets of opportunity ... I shook my head in frustration.  Some of the victims had been taken from their beds.

Which is interesting, I thought.  Either the entire house was emptied or the kidnappers used powerful magic.

My heart sank.  Or perhaps not.  My brothers and I had grown up on my family’s estate.  We might have been regarded with scorn and suspicion, but we’d been family.  We’d slept inside bedrooms protected by powerful wards, our needs tended by servants magically bound to the family.  A commoner, on the other hand, wouldn’t have anything like so many protections.  A kidnapper could climb through an open window, pour a sleeping potion into the victim’s mouth and then carry them back outside.  There’d be no need to do anything more complex.  The kidnappers wouldn’t have to bypass wards if there were none ...

I kept my thoughts to myself as I moved from tavern to tavern, asking questions and getting increasingly disturbing answers.  No one really knew what was going on, which didn’t help.  There were rumours of everything from slave traders to cannibals, from vampires to werewolves to things that went bump in the night.  I saw commoners carrying weapons, even though it was flatly illegal; I saw guardsmen patrolling the streets in large groups, unwilling to move on their own.  The fear was ever-present, but I also felt rage.  It was just a matter of time before everything exploded.  And who knew what would happen then?

“Hey, handsome,” a female voice called.  “You want your pipe cleaned?”

I turned and saw a prostitute leaning against the wall.  She looked dreadful.  The streets had taken a toll.  Her skin was pale, almost translucent; her hair was stringy, her half-exposed breasts saggy.  I knew she was younger than she looked.  She’d covered her face with make-up, but it wasn’t enough to hide the bruise on her cheek.  I saw a shadowy figure lurking in the distance ... her pimp, probably.