braymitch thornathy. (grever) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-03-23 12:16:00 |
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Bram Thornton was working. This was nothing unusual: while others took their allotted holidays and parted ways with the investigation to celebrate the new year, the detective inspector refused to clock out. Come Friday morning, he was still out at the Aerodrome, staring at the sleek lines of the Reveler as it creaked in its moorings. Without its captain and crew, the airship looked dead: inanimate, quiet, inert. The corpse at the Aerodrome had been reported early Wednesday morning, by one rattled ship worker coming home late when she found him. His chest had been caved in, his limbs burned—but the face was still recognisable, and his identity was soon established as Kamon Leradine, airship captain. Which, after a couple days of inquiries and sifting through records, had led them here. They’d been combing the Reveler all morning, trying to pull up some indication of who might have killed the man and why. The Knights of the Peace milled over the ship like ants crawling over a corpse, covering it from top to bottom, searching for clues. The actual corpse waited back at the morgue, magicite placed at each corner of the examination table, frost spells keeping the body chilled for further inspection and identification. Bram ground out his cigarette under the heel of his boot, and then climbed the groaning gangway, his hand steady on the railing. One of his men (looking tired, hungover) looked up, flipping his clipboard around. The ship’s papers. “Anything yet?” Bram asked. “No, sir. The cargo hold’s been scoured. It’s empty—the ship doesn’t seem to have been carrying any goods or supplies into or out of Emillion. The ship’s manifest doesn’t show him as having been on assignment.” No hints. The lack of evidence made the detective inspector’s teeth grind, as always. He kept walking, strolling the deck and peering around. It seemed normal enough, but the use of magic spoke to it being not just another mugging gone awry; there were easier ways to do that, ways that wouldn’t leave behind a fire-blackened corpse on the docks. “Sir! Think we found something!” Perking up and following the shout, Bram clattered down the steps to the captain’s cabin. The room had been meticulously turned over by the investigators, and nothing seemed out of order until he spotted it: a hidden compartment, floorboards pried open from the space beside Kamon Leradine’s bed, one triumphant officer standing above it. “Excellent work,” he said, accepting the find: a letter and a memstone. They were finally getting somewhere. Clicking the stone on, they could see a memgraph of some small pile of objects—glinting metal, the curves of a scroll, indecipherable symbols. That’d be something for Peony Min, he thought automatically. Handing the memstone back to his colleague, Bram then turned his attention to the letter. With gloved hands, he unfolded the pages. And his eyes widened once he saw the name on the inscription. To: Magnolia Paget. “Fuck,” the councilman said, and his nearby officers all jerked in surprise, staring at him. |