TR: 17

Chapter Seventeen: The Notes Between The Lines

A cloaked head poked out from around the stone wall, glancing down both ends of the hall. The energy signatures were at their most condensed in this area of the fortress, which told the man impersonating the initiate that if any information was to be found, it would be here.

He held in his hand the strange leather-bound tome which he had procured and the longer he held it the more he came to realize he needed to know more about this strange cult that had taken over Diar’s Perch. A nagging feeling had begun to grow in him since taking possession of the seemingly ancient artifact, one of familiarity. Somehow, he had seen the book before or, in the least, something about it piqued a memory he couldn’t place. As all the other spells in his oeuvre that he could lay no claim to outside of prodigal happenstance, he had cast a likeness on the tome, creating a path in his mind that showed him–or rather helped him feel–his way to others of its kind. Other books, that is. Judging by the agglomeration of sense that had accumulated in his mind, he knew he was close to some kind of repository of them.

He stepped out into the derelict hall and wandered aimlessly down it, inspecting the signatures and spaces that lay around him. To his right, about three rooms over, was a great rectangular room, perhaps a hall of some sort. Several bodies congregated there though they didn’t appear to be conversing. The others that he felt were randomly dispersed in smaller chambers or making their way from one wing to another. It didn’t surprise him that these Keepers moved about without purpose; purpose only belonged to those with a vision, and nothing about these zealots that he had seen so far had convinced him that they were anything other than just that. An aimless cult; a group of children masquerading as adults, playing games with forces they knew nothing about. Forces far greater than them.

Still, they intrigued him.

He passed by a door and he tried the handle. Locked. He continued on, coming by several other doors identical to the last but all were locked. At the fourth such door, he grunted as the lock resisted. Beyond the series of doors a large room awaited, and in it a plethora of books. A plethora of knowledge that he desperately needed. At this particular door, a strange thought came to him suddenly: he could open this door without a key. How he knew this was the case, he didn’t know, but he knew, just like all the other tricks he had managed previously. In fact, he knew it was actually an easy thing to do. This all seemed ridiculous to him–that opening a door with one’s mind should be easy but he had, after all, immolated an entire encampment of bandits and turned a man to ash with a word. No, this was magick and, somehow, he was good at it. It was one of the many questions he had that he hoped he would find an answer to under the roof of the age-old fortress of millennia past.

A word came to his mind: Ydra. Air. Was it…Old Ladryan? Yes, it had to be. They all were, weren’t they?

He called upon a small but subtle yrda flow, pure and simple. He directed it into the lock and held it there with his mind. As the air settled into place in the mechanism, he began to feel all of its crevices and cracks, the tumblers that made up the mechanism forming like fingers wrapping around his brain, applying pressure. And so that was exactly what he did: he applied pressure. He increased the velocity of the air by drawing in heat from its surroundings, forcing the molecules out and out as they pressed up hard against the cool metal, the cold of which he also felt. More air seeped in to fill the space and he repeated the same procedure until the pressure in the lock was considerable. He felt the tumblers engage from the force and, with a small turning gesture of his wrist, he twisted the air around in a clockwise fashion and the lock disengaged with an audible click.

He stared at the door in a subtle stupor for a moment, catching himself seconds into it as he realized that an initiate standing blankly in a hall staring vacantly at a door may raise some eyebrows. He reached for the knob and it turned and he let himself into the room.

Immediately, he knew he had been there before. It was an abandoned library, a large open and rectangular room hemmed in by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves cheek-to-jowl on every wall with a broad, oblong table as the centerpiece spanning nearly the entire length of the room. The table was bare and sheared in pieces in several places, the edges seared black and charcoal by the distinct teeth of fire. The book shelves too were marred and scored by blackened gashes, many of the books reduced to carbon corpses of their former selves. It was if a bomb had partially gone off in the place and the fire contained before it could wreak its full havoc.

The infiltrator stepped into the room, his boot clicking against the cool jade tiles of the floor, reverberating up and away into the vast silence of the derelict room. There was a flutter of wings from above and the man looked up to see the shifting form of birds–pigeons from the look of it–darting away into the shadows of the infinite recesses above. A great spiral staircase across the way led up to the higher levels, each with its own balcony which ran around the circumference and bearing its own countless number of shelves upon shelves. He could not make out the entire height of the room as it gave way to darkness where the wooden rafters began, crossing between the levels like seams holding a patchwork model, but there were at least eight that he could count. He stepped around a pile of fresh bird droppings splattered on the tiles, confirming the presence of the filthy feathered shit-mongrels.

Suddenly, a blinding light flashed in his vision and sounds overtook him from all around. He stumbled backwards against the wall, holding his head as his thoughts raced. His eyes widened at the sight that played out before him.

The room was no longer damaged nor bare. Robed initiates and scholars of all stripes filled the room, working steadfastly at countless tasks. The center table was once again whole and rows of heads were buried there in lengthy tomes, surrounded by piles and piles of books and various glassware and alchemical tools that hearkened from an era long-past. The shelves were brimming full of colorful, leather-bound volumes, more books than any one man could read in a thousand lifetimes. The man let himself away from the wall and stepped cautiously into the room, attempting to stop himself from gaping in awe at what he was seeing. Around the edges of his vision there was a strange white haze, as one would expect in the trope of a dream. But this was no dream: the feeling was too heightened, too vivid. This was a vision.

The man walked past the table, the people there paying him no heed. It was if he did not exist to them. He turned away and approached a woman hunkered over an alchemical booth, staring intently down at several vials and flasks filled with glowing, multi-coloured liquids, an open manual before her with black-and-white pictograms depicting some kind of ritual, surrounded by the scrawl of a language he did not recognize.

“No, that isn’t right at all. Hegrim’s wort then Menira’s tears, five pinches then three. That’s what it says. Bloody Skandigan metrics! Why can’t they just convert everything to standard like the rest of us?”

The woman looked down at a small device with a wavering needle on it, a single aperture at its tip collecting light from the vials. She held up a handheld recorder to her mouth.

“Illuminometer reads sixteen dash three two for sample A, indicating an overly-acidic reaction, too caustic for use.”

She grumbled something under her breath and held her head down in thought.

The man waved his hand in front of her face but it didn’t seem to disturb her in the slightest. He reached out to touch her shoulder but his hand stopped mid-air as he caught a figure glancing at him from across the room, standing near the staircase. The two locked eyes and the interloper knew that this one could see him, unlike the rest. He couldn’t make out the figure as they were swathed in a thick hooded cloak but, somehow, he knew this person. The figure turned and began climbing the staircase. The interloper made his was across the room and began to climb the staircase after them. When he got to the next level, the balcony was full of initiates coming and going, others working quietly in the multitude of recesses and nooks around the perimeter. He glanced up to see that the other was already several levels above, which didn’t make any sense because he hadn’t been moving at any kind of clip. He continued upwards, taking the stairs two-by-two to catch up. At the next level, he looked up to see the figure still the same distance ahead of him, several floors up. The physics didn’t make any sense. The figure stopped and looked down at him and they shared a momentary glance before the interloper started up the stairs again, racing after the other. He watched through the spaces of the winding stairs above as the other ran upwards away from him, seemingly at an identical pace. A minute later the temperature in the air dropped and he noticed that the balconies spanning the room had ended, giving way for a series of wooden beams which criss-crossed the room, connecting the upper structure in a lattice-like network. He knew then that he must be nearing the top. Sure enough, thirty seconds later the staircase terminated on the uppermost level, revealing a wide hallway spanning perhaps ten blades across, large sealed doors lining its walls with a vaulted ceiling slanting inwards to a point, elaborate stained glass windows inset at intervals along their surface. Light poured down through their colorful facets, multi-hued beams shining at random points in the hall forming something of a modern art piece. At the far end of the hall the cloaked figure ran full tilt toward a large set of conical wooden doors, no different than the others before and after it. As the interloper came upon the figure, the other stopped at the door and watched the interloper approaching, as if considering something. The interloper slowed to a walk and held up his hand.

“Wait, there is much we need to discuss! Who…”

Before he could finish, the other turned and vanished through the doors, as if they were not there. The interloper stopped, stupefied by what he was seeing. But then again, it could all be a fiction, couldn’t it? He shook off the strangeness of it all and proceeded after the other, opening the doors with a simple yrda gust from the other side of the room. Inside, a small nondescript chamber awaited him, comprised of nothing more than a single bed with a simple wooden chest at its foot, a small dresser beside it and a stout wooden bookcase facing it against the adjacent wall. The figure was squatted down before the bookcase, their fingertip resting on the top of a large blue volume as if to pluck it up for a read. The interloper stood in the doorway taking in the scene.

“You there! What is your business here?”

The figure’s head turned and the interloper gasped as he saw his own face staring back at him behind the shadowy veil of the cowl.

“You tell me.” It said, and then the figure vanished, followed by another flash of light.

The interloper shielded his eyes and after several moments of blinking away bright spots in his vision, his sight returned to him. The room was no longer as it had been, now dark, dirty and damp, the bed and chest charred to a husk and barely recognizable beyond his memory of them. The bookshelf too had been badly burnt and all the books reduced to something barely more than ash. All except one. A large, blue book which had, somehow, survived the ordeal unscathed. The interloper walked over to the bookshelf and bent over, just as his spectral likeness had done. What did it all mean? What was this place and why had the apparition brought him here? Ever so carefully, he reached out and touched the book. Nothing happened. He wrapped his fingers around it and pulled on it but it wouldn’t budge, as if it were fastened to the shelf. Conjuring up a flow to augment his strength and exert a tremendous force on it, he let the spell dissipate away as the book tilted slightly toward him, followed by the distinct sound of wood sliding against wood. He watched as a small panel opened on the wall beside the bookcase, revealing a recess no larger than a man’s head. Curious, he leaned over and looked inside, seeing something in the back of the hole. He reached in and pulled out a dusty, ages-old book. He wiped his hand across the surface, revealing a strange monogram on its cover that he could not decipher, though his guesswork led him to believe it was old elvish. Oddly enough, his strange powers of immediate language acquisition did not help this time and he had no idea what it said. He unlatched the snap fastening the book closed and opened it. It was written in Standard, though the language used suggested an ancient dialect.

“A diary?”

He thumbed through several pages and, as he continued to peruse the entries, a strange feeling began to settle on him as the words flowed through his mind.

“Wait. This here.”

He pointed at a sentence midway down the page.

“….though this was, to no degree, a consolation on my part. By my merit alone–or lack thereof–I have brought this unholy hellfire down on myself and kin and doomed them all in the process. There is no deeper pit in Endabarron for the lover and the loved. It is why it exists, to punish us, for those transgressions which we call human yet lead us to the paths of the greatest pain. I am so, so sorry…I cannot fathom a greater suffering to incur than that which I now live. I only hope I am wrong and that there still remains a penance I can pay to absolve you of my sins. Wherever you now rest, know that I will never cease to search for you, even if a sea of eternal torment separates us. I would drown a thousandfold if it meant even a glimpse of your faces or the feeling of your breath on my cheek… For only in your graces can I be reborn.

The interloper lowered the book, his heart pounding, as he realized what he was reading.

“This is…my writing. How…”

A searing pain coursed through his skull and he dropped to his knees, grabbing at his head. A stream of images poured through his mind. Ships. Millions and millions of ships. Black as night, covering a sea of lightning. And then…A beautiful face. A nymph. A goddess. And then… A child. The most gorgeous, lovely creature he had ever seen. She is surrounded by light. A light they had crafted out of their pure love and years of cultivation. So much light. But then… this is later, there is blood. Darkness. He sees… the woman–the goddess–she…so much pain, so much blood. And then…no! Not the child! Anything but her! No no no! He sees himself struggling as he watches, held by his arms as he can do nothing. Nothing but scream and sob. It is horrible. More than horrible. It is the bottom of the pit of an abyss so dark, so lonely, that there is no return. No light reaches there. And then he is sobbing, smashing his fists against the earthen stones until they too are bleeding. There is so, so much pain. Never a greater pain than this. Faces, thousands of them, laughing at him. And then more pain, but nothing like the other. Nothing compares to the other. There is nothing to compare to the other because it is all there is. And then, a sword, gleaming red like a ruby in the night… There is a face. It is him. Then darkness. Darkness. Darkness.

The man screamed as the visions pounded themselves into his mind. And then, like a whirlwind come and gone, they stopped. Panting furiously, he stared wildly at the flagstone floor of what was once his room, trying to make sense of the story that was forming in his mind like wildfire spreading through a forest. But just as in fire, there was life, and his life–his past life–finally made sense to him. It all made sense to him. He had a name, a history…

A purpose.

He stood up, wiping a tear from his eye. He had not known that one person could contain such pain. Such loss. He felt as if his body could hardly contain his spirit, which itself was rapidly diminishing. He took a deep breath and called upon the flows to calm himself, recounting a now-familiar chant that he had used long ago to steady his mind. He recited the passage in his mind and felt his body beginning to relax, his muscles slowly letting themselves go. And, like a violent river dammed, his tormenting thoughts ceased to be. He stared at the ruins of his room with a dead look in his eye. But it was not a dispassionate death. His was one filled with a vigour and a newfound meaning. In the myriad fragments that had assaulted him, in the deluge of emotional bullets that assaulted his psyche, one overarching theme could be grasped at. It was a ledge–an olive branch–that he could use to keep his head above the surface in the mire. The face.

Mokul.

He had been both right and wrong about the wizard. His power was incredible and to be admired. But he was not to be revered. No, reverence was not on the table any longer. His was a story of revenge.

The thought of Mokul’s face, freshly formed in his mind, incited a rage like no other that he had ever felt. His hands lit on fire as the flows worked through him, unabridged and unbridled, pouring out of him in a cascade of furious flame as he screamed unholy betrayal into the night, into his chamber, as he cleansed the last living memory of who he had once been.

And from the flames he would be born anew.

***

There was a rustle from the other side of the door, the sliding of the lock and Tobay stepped into the cramped cellar that was his office. Brian looked up from the piles of paper scattered before him on the table, a vexed expression on his face. Tobay looked as tired as he felt.

“Any news?” Brian asked.

Tobay sighed and handed Brian a rolled up piece of paper.

“Nothing good.”

Brian gave the gnome a questioning look and took the roll, unfurling it to reveal a poster advertising the impending sentence of one  Kade Allor, tried on charges of attempted regicide, trespassing and break-and-entering. He was to be executed at the Dregs on the 3rd of Nom, Sarelo, at first light. Brian glanced down at his watch.

“Crusp, that’s tomorrow!”

Brian pointed at the paper. “We can’t just sit around and let this happen! We need to go get him, now!”

Brian made a move towards the door but Tobay held up a hand, staying him.

“Brian, think! I know you are passionate about saving your friend and, frankly, as you saved my life, I am as invested in your cause as you are. But Kade will no longer be under minimum security after his latest stunt. Regicide is about as serious of an offense as you get in Zale. Hell, in any gnome kingdom!”

Brian crossed his arms. “Kade would never do anything like that. I don’t know him all that well but I can tell when a kid is normal or not. He’s no killer, if that’s what you are implying.”

“I’m not implying anything. This writ–signed by the king himself–is explicitly stating he did. That’s what matters. He will be tried at the Last Lookout, of that you can be certain. And all pending executions are held in a secure cell guarded by nearly half the king’s military contingent. You wouldn’t get two steps into the block before you had a dozen lances in your gut. Human or otherwise.”

Brian sighed and turned back to the table with the years of casework littered over it.

“Then we’ll have to find out both who your killer as and who set up my friend. And yesterday.”

Tobay nodded. “Agreed. So what have you got so far?”

“Well…I’m not going to lie, this is a lot. You can’t expect much in a half day when looking at a decade of work, let alone the fact I don’t speak your gnome language, which is about half of this stuff at least. But…”

“What is it?” Tobay leaned over Brian’s arm, glancing down as Brian sifted through a pile he had set aside.

“No, not that one…where is it now…nope, nope…oh! Here. This.”

Brian held up a black-and-white photo, blurred around the edges from being zoomed in. The words TIME WILL TELL were legible enough, despite being written in a gnome’s blood on pavement. It was a cropped portion from the photo Tobay had shown Brian previously.

“I couldn’t help but think that there was a clue in this. Something we might have missed. How far did your guys run with this?”

Tobay frowned at the photo. “It is perplexing, I admit. The language could suggest anything really, the most obvious being a threat; time would ‘tell us’ whether or not he was to be taken seriously or not. But that was no leg to stand on. Every murderer wants to put on a show, so that was a given. We switched gears and, at first, pursued the reasoning that the killer would reveal something in time, through more killings. But the killings didn’t seem to add up to any kind of grander MO or tell, so we ruled that out. The next line of thinking was that perhaps the past would tell us something. And there…”

Tobay pushed aside several stacks of paper until he found a folder he was looking and unwound the string holding it together. He opened it and revealed a large assortment of documents ranging from news clippings, scans, photographs and other written samples.

“…we assembled a portfolio based on both similar cases and lore.”

Brian frowned. “Lore? Like…fairy tales, you mean?”

“Not exactly. More like gnomish legends, specifically. You see this here, this is an entry from one of our several thousand cantos, stories written in song that tell of past kingdoms and their heroes and villains from times immemorial. Times before there were ways of recording time itself. Even the Old Gods weren’t a thing when some of these fables were written, they go back so far. But I digress, in some of these past murder cases–which haven’t been necessarily proven to be linked yet–we have seen some notable…similarities to these well-known yarns. In fact, some of the killer’s—or killers plural–MO’s are damn-near ripped right out of the books.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take this one for example: an excerpt from Imperitumizhum des Klyzxuvenmallenadenium, translating to the ‘Imperative of King Mallenadenium.’ It’s a well-known tale dating back, perhaps, several thousand years before the First Era. It follows a young king who has been enthroned after his father’s untimely demise, and well before he is capable of handling such responsibility. It was said that millions suffered unduly under his reign and that his petulance and entitlement set an unheard-of precedent of both poverty and despair in a nation. It is also known as “the Life of King Brat” colloquially, though some scholars would scoff at that I am sure.”

Tobay cleared his throat as he held up the scan, strange runes that Brian had never seen the likes of.

“…and so it was that the boy-king declared his will to be so, and the master mason was to be boiled alive in hot oil for his transgressions. ‘For every angle must be perfect, lest a stray beam of light fall aloft where it mustn’t and the king’s royal count’nance be cast into shadows where none but the rats may avail it.”

Tobay shook his head as he put the book down. “This passage refers to the king sentencing one of his master builders to…well, you heard what it says. All for allegedly building a window in the wrong place such that the light didn’t shine onto his throne just so, so that his worshippers could see him on full display.”

Brian raised an eyebrow. “So are you saying this kid–this ‘king’–had a dude boiled alive because he didn’t get his daily dose of vitamin D?”

Tobay put the scan down and sighed. “This barely touches the surface of the atrocities committed in that age. Such megalomania. It is sad that so many had to die for nothing. There are days when I am ashamed to come from such traditions.”

Brian looked at that scan and his eyes wandered over the other papers lying on the pile. “Well, you’re pretty far removed from that kind of stuff, if it actually happened at all. At least, I would hope so. So, where does that put this killer then? Did he boil someone in oil?”

“Not exactly but the MO is too close for comfort. This, here…” Tobay handed Brian a clipping with a black-and-white picture from a news stub dating back five years prior. “…was a case from another gnome county, not far from here. The death was ruled an accident but witnesses on the scene who knew the man said he would never make such a mistake. He was a thirty-something gnome, master glazier, working on a multi-year project to restore the stained-glass windows on a local cathedral. One day he “slipped” and fell into a vat of molten tar that a local crew was using to rework the foundation. He wasn’t a builder and it wasn’t a vat of oil, but…”

“If the boot fits.” Brian interjected.

“Exactly.”

“So, does this all add up to something then? Do all of his killings fit folk tales?”

Tobay sighed and slumped down on the chair. “That’s just it, half of this crap makes no sense. Some of it fits hand-in-glove like I just showed you but others, like this, pure nonsense killings.”

Tobay slid a picture towards Brian, depicting a gnome nailed to a stake in the middle of a cornfield. The corpse had been clearly dressed after the fact, poised to look like a scarecrow. Ironically enough, a crow was perched on the shoulder pecking at the neck. Brian guessed that had never been the intention.

“They might not even be the same killer, but the timeline was right and we couldn’t be picky with our Intel so we took whatever filtered in.” Tobay added.

Brian was about to put the picture down when he noticed a strange symbol carved into the right hand of the gnome’s corpse. It looked distinctly like the letter ‘G’.

“What’s this here? A ‘G’?”

Tobay leaned in. Oh, yes, that. How silly of me to forget. We found several of those ‘monograms’ over the years. Originally, we were quite excited by the find, thinking the killer had left us a calling card, finally. Turns out, it was just a decoy to put us off his real MO. They call those ‘fish food’ in the paper pit. Just false leads to put us off his trail.”

“Wait…there are more of these with these…letters on them? Can I see them?” Brian asked.

Tobay grunted. “Really, it’s a huge waste of time, trust me. We spent months working that angle. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”

Brian shrugged. “Do we have anything else go to off of?”

“Suit yourself. Hopefully, I still have that file kicking around.”

Tobay sifted through the heaps of papers and folders on the table but didn’t turn up anything. He made his was over to a desk in the corner of the room and began rifling through the deep drawers. As Tobay searched, Brian glanced back down at the photo of the scarecrow killing, running his hand over the glossy surface of the photo. His finger settled on the hand and he tapped the small, bloody ‘G’ as he thought.

“Ah, here it is! Looks like it was buried in with the other junk.”

Tobay slapped an aging yellow folder down in front of Brian.

“That’s all you’re going to find in there too, so don’t get too excited.”

Brian opened the folder and began sifting through the documents that stuck out to him. He began to pick out evidence photos and news clippings that illustrated past victims, as well as artists’ illustrations and depictions of crime scenes. After several minutes of sorting he had a sizable pile. He fanned out the photos like a macabre storyboard and leaned his weight on the table as he scanned over them. Tobay walked over to his side and a sad look came over his face.

“It’s…beyond words, isn’t it? All these people. Parents, children, all with families. They all had lives. Lives that ended too soon. Perhaps, lives that could have been saved if someone had been looking out for them better.”

Brian looked over at the gnome. Tobay couldn’t be certain but he thought he saw a flash of deep pain in Brian’s eyes before it was gone, covered by a layer of resolve. The boy nodded.

“We can’t change what has happened but we can do something about this now. If this killer did all this, and he’s in the city now, with Kade, then we’ll catch him this time. We have to. I’m not letting him send my friend to his death while he keeps getting away with this. I’ll punch through every gnome until I find him, if I have to.”

Tobay chuckled. “I’m not sure whether to be afraid for the killer or my family but I take your point. So what do you think? Did we miss anything?”

Brian looked back down at the photos. He pointed between several of the photos. “Well, there’s a ‘C’ etched into the chest of this one, and then an ‘A’ in the bark of the tree there, if you look closely. Here, on her inner thigh, another ‘C’. And here there’s a ‘D’, an ‘E’, another ‘C’… Does it spell something? Do you have a pen?”

Tobay frowned. “A pen?”

Brian raised an eyebrow. “You know, like, to write with?”

The gnome reached over and handed Brian a small black stick, sliding a blank piece of paper between them.

“What is this?”

“Charcoal. It’s how you write things.”

“Uh…in the First Era, maybe.”

Tobay frowned. “Are you done making fun of us or can we get back to work?”

Brian grinned despite himself. “Charcoal it is.”

He scrawled down the letters as they appeared in each picture and came out with an indiscernible sequence on the page. He frowned at it.

“What does this mean? I see a couple words you can form. Here, ‘CAGED’. Or ‘FADE’. ‘Fade away in a cage’, maybe?”

Tobay cast Brian a deprecatory look. “Now you’re reaching. I told you this was a waste…”

“Wait a second.” Brian interjected.

“These letters, I recognize them.”

“Sure, they are from your Standard ideograph.”

“Yes, but not the whole thing. Look, they only use 7 different letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G.”

“The first seven, sure, but what significance does that serve…”

“This is the musical alphabet, Tobay.”

“Muscial what?” 

“The notes of the musical alphabet in cren music. It’s how we learn how to read and write music. Don’t gnomes have music?”

“Of course, but our systems are clearly entirely different. There are, in the least, three scales for every species of mushroom, let alone the higher forms of atonal dissonance sound-bits assigned to the microbial systems…”

Brian waved his hand. “Sure, sure, that’s all fine and dandy but the point is, I think this is trying to tell us something. Musically.”

Tobay looked at the pictures with a skeptical glint in his eye. “Surely, the hundreds of eyes that poured over these would have picked up such a simple pattern. How could we miss something that obvious?”

“As obvious as a musical system no gnome has ever heard of?”

Tobay paused as he considered Brian’s reasoning. “Let’s say you’re on to something here. We still don’t know what any of this means. There’s thousands—millions–of different ways to arrange that many letters. And that’s not even considering how many cases we may be missing here.”

Brian looked down at the pictures as he thought about it. “That could be true, but something tells me we have enough here to figure this out.”

Tobay raised an eyebrow. “A hunch?”

“A hunch.”

“Well, what do you want to know?”

Brian scanned the pictures, shuffling them around to form different arrangements. He looked at them in silence for several moments then tapped the one of the scarecrow likeness.

“Best to start from the beginning, I think. Tell me about this one.”

Tobay shrugged. “What’s to say? A solitary, rural farmer, no real connections to the outside world. One of the small agrarian settlements in Syrdia, if memory serves. Certainly, no way he could have been making any enemies out there. We couldn’t tie him to any priors or connections to the killer. A real head-scratcher, that one.”

Brian rubbed his chin in thought. “Any other important details they might have glossed over?”

Tobay thought about it. “Nothing comes to mind. I mean, it was just another Winter Harvest. Hence, the scarecrow getup. At least, that was the assumption on the killer’s behalf.”

Brian frowned and pointed at another photo, this one of two gnomes hog-tied together, waterlogged and laid out on a shore. “How about this one? What’s their story?”

Tobay sighed. “Ah, yes, the Rullezhyndall sisters. A true tragedy in every stroke of the pen, that one. Barely out of their twenty-first year, they were ambushed on their way home from a Celebre Celeste at a neighboring community hall. Just goes to show why gnomes don’t wander between settlements regularly.”

Brian grunted as he panned over the remaining photos, running his hand through his hair.

“This doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. What about that one. That’s gotta have a story behind it.”

Brian picked up the photo, an impressively fat gnome wearing women’s undergarments, his face painted as a clown, pinned to a wooden wall by uncountable daggers and other sharp implements.

Tobay chuckled. “You would think so, wouldn’t you? The reality is far more mundane, I’m afraid. This poor bloke was found like that by the staff in the morning. He was a chef at a wayward tavern, somewhere between here and Yillimzhdyn, the next major settlement. No one heard anything. Not a peep. The strangest thing, considering how he must have died. You’d think with the kind of occupancy the Jandrem of Bandell brings, someone should have seen something. Alas, no faces in the mugs that evening, by some strange coincidence…”

“Wait…you said this happened during Jandrem? Which day?”

Tobay grabbed the folder and flipped through some of the documentation, coming to a list scrawled in Gnomese. He slid his finger down until he found an entry, reading it as his mouth moved silently.

“Says here it was the seventh. Why?”

Brian thought about it for a moment and then his eyes widened as a grin spread across his face.

“Bam! There it is. Don’t you see it?” The excitement was plain in his tone.

Tobay frowned at the photos. “I’m not following…”

“The seventh of Jandrem, Bandell. What day is that?”

“Well, I’m a gnome don’t forget, so our holidays are different than yours. But generally speaking, that would be the Fading Light Festival, fairly universally. Marks the end of summer. I still don’t see…”

Brian held up a hand, counting his fingers off as he listed cases. “You got the Winter Harvest. Scarecrow guy. One. Two, Spring Celebre for the equinox. Three…”

“The Fading Light Festival.” Tobay chimed in with Brian, his expression changing to one of disbelief.

“I don’t bloody-well believe it. They all happened on the day of a major event. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Brian crossed his arms, motioning to the table. “Well, why don’t you ask them if the theory holds?”

Tobay looked back over at the pile of photos and he immediately began rifling through them, comparing the pictures to their entries in the ledger.

“Subject 3-491. Dated, let’s see here…Okay, that would be…Wow. Luminaria. Case 267990. Uh…the fifth of Addra, Trimas. Let me think. We don’t have anything that day. Oh! The Nymphs, that’s their Day of the Wind. I don’t bloody believe this…”

Tobay continued through the list, naming off events and holidays as they began stockpiling in front of their faces. Finally, he folded the ledger and lay it on his lap, slumping back down in the wooden swivel chair, running a hand over his face.

“I just…don’t get it. What about the rest of these cases? Were they unrelated then?”

Brian shrugged. “We’ll never know. It’s possible they were all your false leads. Like…filler. You know, to throw you off.”

Tobay’s expression sunk. “That doesn’t make me feel any better about the last ten years of my life, thank you very much.”

“Hey, you got this far. But don’t thank me yet. We still don’t know how this connects to these letters.”

Tobay leaned forward. “What if…these events happened in sequence. What if we rearrange them according to time of year. ‘Time will tell’, after all. Remember?”

Brian began shuffling the pictures around until they lined up chronologically with their occurrence in the year but no visible pattern was immediately discernible.

Tobay grabbed a charcoal stick and a notepad and began scrawling down the order of the letters as they appeared. As he did so, Brian squinted in thought as he began ruminating on the possibilities. He stopped as it finally hit him.

“Oh my god.”

Brian reached out and began rearranging the pictures, seemingly at random. Tobay stopped writing and shouted at him.

“Hey! I was taking that down. What are you…”

Brian stopped and the photos had been completely rearranged to seeming nonsense. Tobay stood up and leaned over the pictures, examining them.

“I don’t see it.”

Brian just stood there, his arms crossed with a knowing smile on his face. “Your killer wasn’t threatening you Tobay. He was giving you a clue. ‘Time Will Tell’–tell you who he is. And he just did, here.”

Tobay looked over the sequence but, try as hard as he could, he couldn’t see the reference. “I’m sorry Brian, I just don’t see it.”

Brian nodded. “That’s what he was hoping for. You don’t see it because you don’t know it. This here, these follow the verses to a very well-known cren folk tune. Each one of these deaths, happening on a very specific day, they all occur just like that in the song. The killer banked on you not knowing a cren folk tune. That was how he got away with it and he taunted you with it, right under your nose this whole time.”

Tobay took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. I can live with that. No gnome could have possibly guessed such a thing. Though…my guilt weighs no less knowing this, I must add.”

Brian put a hand on Tobay’s shoulder. “No one would expect you to feel any better. And no one holds you accountable for this, Tobay. You did what you could with what you had. It just took a different pair of eyes to see the pattern.”

Tobay nodded. “That is fair. So we are looking for a musician then? I’m assuming these ‘notes’ spell out part of the tune?”

Brian chuckled, mirthfully. “Oh yes. But we aren’t looking for just any musician my friend. Tell me…”

Brian smiled at Tobay.

“Does your dad employ…a piper?”