The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 2.1

Krizner, with a handkerchief pressed against his sweating, pallid face, made a count of the bodies. A long twenty minutes later, he declared to Thijis that approximately seventy-four souls appeared to have met their end in Keynish Helg's wine cellar. Or had at least been stored there. Thijis himself put the number at something closer to eighty-three.

"An exact count won't be possible till we—" Krizner broke off, retching into his handkerchief. He'd held it in for quite a while. Thijis had to give him that.

"Until you get them out of here and do a proper inventory, yes," said Thijis. The matter was complicated by the fact that the rear chamber, in addition to several more impressive stacks of whole cadavers, also housed a scattered collection of body parts ranging in condition from well-preserved to slightly better than mush. Given the lumpy pools of ichor that graced the depressions in the uneven stone floor, it was more than likely that an exact count of Helg's victims would never be possible.

Whatever solution Helg had doused them in had done a remarkable job preserving most of the bodies and avoiding the stench of decomposition. Too remarkable, in fact: it didn't seem to fit with Thijis' understanding of physics. Even embalmed, nothing could prevent the long term decay of dead flesh, and killing a hundred people in such an organized manner wasn't something one did in a matter of days. Man might be able to fight off Nature at times, but Nature always won in the end. He made a mental note to discuss the matter with the coroner. For the moment, he supposed he'd have to file it under hand-wavy University wizardry and leave it at that. Krizner would be proud. Not that he'd give him the satisfaction of saying so.

The fumes coming off the bodies were almost as bad, however, and Thijis regretted not bringing his chemical mask, a rebreather of his own design currently sitting quite uselessly on one of his worktables at home.

"Would you say, Inspector Krizner," asked Thijis when the older man seemed to have finished gagging, "that this constitutes reasonable cause for the arrest of Doktor Helg? Unless you think the maid did it."

Krizner glared at him.

"Good. Don't move him yet, just post two of your constables directly outside of the laboratory. I still want to read whatever Gebbing has on him before we disturb the scene further."

Krizner, clearly happy to have something to do that would take him out of the cellar, left to round up two of his men.

Alone with the scene, Thijis took a deep breath and, after immediately regretting doing so, tried to concentrate on what his other senses were telling him.

He approached what appeared to be the fresher end of the pile of remains, nearest the iron gate leading into the wine cellar proper, and selected a subject at random. He settled on the body of a young man. He looked to be around twenty years of age. He had the tanned skin and sandy brown hair of an islander. Why do we call them that? Thijis wondered, not for the first time. Oridos itself was, technically, an island, though all that separated them from the northern shore of the continent of Westalen and the massive heights of the Pillars of the Gods was a narrow, canyon-like inlet known as the Deep.

Oridosi history was one of Thijis' hobbies, of which he had many. Dalia would call them obsessions, but then, if Irik and Dalia could agree on anything they'd still be living in the same house. Not as if that's her fault, though, is it?

Contrary to what he understood to be the norm, Thijis found that true focus involved an act of surrender rather than an act of control. When he was young he had realized that allowing his mind to drive itself forward led to the most productive lines of thought. Trying to constrain it to a single subject only gummed up the works. He didn't think linearly, was the problem. Some people did. That didn't make them unintelligent, necessarily, just different. One track. The upside to this was that they made good leaders: their thinking was elegant, minimalist. They could make decisions quickly and confidently. The downside was that they were, at least in Thijis' experience, more likely to be wrong. Accuracy, truth, correctness—call it what you would—came from testing and review. From the analysis of data, coupled with intelligent intuition. Logic alone was insufficient.

He allowed himself to think on Oridosi history as he examined this islander boy's body. One part of his mind considered the formation of the Deep, an event lost in time and with no apparent record that Thijis had ever been able to find, despite the fact that Oridos had been inhabited for thousands of years. This led him to consider the general dearth of records in Oridos dating back much beyond the last few centuries, a fact explained away universally as a result of frequent political upheaval and the unavoidable corruption of time. All of the interesting questions of Oridosi history came back to this, whether you were a University professor or a hobbyist. Why had their ancestors left such poor accounts of their lives?

Another part of his mind observed the pallor of the boy's face, touched the spongy tissue, now soft, the hardening of recent death long past, and peeled back an eyelid. The eyes were cloudy and dim, but otherwise unremarkable. His body was relatively clean, aside from marks on the heels: definitely transported then, the corpse dragged, with difficulty, by a man holding it under the arms.

There were two general camps of Oridosi historians. The realists, or so they called themselves, who argued that the explanation for the lack of written records in a city as developed and ancient as their own was manifold and undramatic. Political change, the influence of various religious sects, war with the northern tribes before the Khorye Pass collapsed, and a warm, humid climate made for a poor environment in which to archive data. Several libraries had burned, over the centuries, and most of the city's most important public buildings had been sacked and damaged at one time or another. It stood to reason, therefore, that all of these facts added up to the disappointing but pragmatic conclusion that there weren't many old books preserved in Oridos because nobody had been interested or able enough to do so.

Aside from a sickle-shaped scar on his lower abdomen, which Thijis suspected was the result of a cheap appendectomy, the islander boy's body seemed normal. Aside from the fact that it was stacked, dead, in Keynish Helg's morgue of a basement, of course. He moved on to the next one, a young woman with dark hair.

Thijis subscribed to another theory, however, one put forward by a small number of rebellious academics that viewed the "realists" as pawns of the establishment. This theory, though admittedly somewhat impervious to experimental testing, held that there were no written records beyond a certain point in the city's past because the city's founders recorded events in another manner entirely. It was known that Oridos was once home to a civilization more advanced than their own; there were still ruins in the city that contained machines and other implements beyond the understanding of even the University itself. What if the abilities of these men, these true Oridosi, had surpassed the need for such crudities as paper books?

Her breasts were ample and well formed, a fact Thijis noted in passing with little interest other than the professional. Aside from the fact that she was days dead, the smell in this place was enough to dampen even the most deviant of sexual appetites. There was a time when Irik Thijis might have questioned whether a normal human being could ever become aroused in the presence of a dead body, however beautiful it might have been in life, but that time was long past. He'd attended enough autopsies with nervous young inspectors to realize that the male body reacted to tits first and death second. Not to mention what the medical students at the University were rumored to do with the recently deceased...

In the end, this theory seemed far more logical to Thijis, who thought the realists' explanation too convenient. Something would have survived, something more than they had. Not a single public ledger or record of parliamentary proceedings or deed of real property survived from before the time of the city's rehabitation, three hundred and more years ago.

It was when the branch of thought surveying the broader questions of Oridosi history came to its close that Thijis finally noticed something that had thus far eluded him. As always happened, letting his mind play in the chaotic field of its own diversions had helped.

The corpses stacked before him were all young. Not just the two he'd inspected, all of them. His mind suddenly in overdrive, he walked briskly through the first chamber and into the second, avoiding the bloody, chemical scum on the floor when he could. Every one of them. Certainly all the ones he could see clearly—and though he wasn't about to go digging, he'd be willing to bet the bodies on the bottom of the pile were just as youthful.

Finally, a pattern. He liked patterns. And the next part was the most fun of all:figuring out just what kind of sick, twisted pattern it was.

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