6. The Inquisitor
Written by Troy Whitlock, VP of Design, Jam City.[1]
A small figure worked his way through the crowd that had gathered at the edge of the Market Bazaar. He wore cuffed trousers and a fur lined jacket, both in a style that had fallen out of fashion some fifty seasons prior. In his left hand was a segmented chain adorned with seven colorful stones, each representing one of the Houses of Massina. Their glassy surface was nearly opaque from wear. The chain spun and twirled with a practiced precision, as it wrapped itself around and between each of his fingers. In his right hand, the last remains of a bidi smoldered.
To most in the crowd, he appeared to be a boy of no more than ten. But to a keen observer, certain details stood out; his weary stride, the way he squinted when making eye contact, the familiar angle of his hand when he puffed on the bidi. These were not the movements of a child, but of a jaded old man.
He reached the front of the crowd where a uniformed Il’gra stood guard at the open door of a small shack.
The guard stopped him with a massive gnarled hand. “Hey kid, you can’t go in there. It’s dangerous.” He smirked at the boy menacingly, but the boy held his gaze calmly.
The Il’gra’s second head swiveled and scowled at the first. “You dumb shit.” Then it looked back at the boy. “An Inquisitor, pardon me. We didn’t recognize you.” It smiled, but the boy noted a certain sarcasm.
The Il’gra moved aside and the tiny figure made its way forward again. He deftly dropped the burning bidi into the guard’s tunic as he squeezed past them and through the door.
He heard the Il’gra talking to itself. “Ew. What a creepy little thing.”
“Yah, they always sorta weird me out too.”
“You smell somethin’ burning?”
On the floor of the shack, a dirty sheet outlined the contours of a body. A sergeant from the City Watch was standing over the body and writing in her notebook. She was startled by the appearance of the Inquisitor and stepped back to make room in the cramped shack. She looked at him with a combination of awe and pity. How could the Emperor send a child to solve a murder? Maybe it was easier to think of him as an adult trapped in a child’s body, she thought to herself, rather than a child trapped in an adult world, although both were true.
The sergeant stammered a bit as she told the Inquisitor what she knew. “The victim was an Aos, House of Life, 35 seasons old.”
The Inquisitor bent down and lifted the corner of the sheet revealing the victim’s face and torso. Beneath the cover were the mortal remains of a once mighty Champion. In the dingy haze of the room, the face of an Aos was barely recognizable. Only another Champion could have done this — and killing a Champion outside of the Colosseum Eternal was a serious crime. A crime worthy of an Inquisitor.
The corpse had already been drained of its Essence but the boy knew ways to determine to which of the Houses the Aos was pledged. As the Inquisitor pulled the sheet back, the chain whipped around his left hand until the yellow stone was perched between his fingers.
The initial shock of his appearance had faded, and the sergeant puzzled over why he was double-checking her assessment. She ventured meekly: “Sir?”
“Yes,” he said, without looking at her.
“Don’t trust me?”
“Not just you,” the Inquisitor replied.
The Inquisitor raised the stone to his eye and peered at the body through its prism. She waited on the result.
“House of Life,“ he agreed, as he lowered the stone.
Correctly identifying the victim’s House was important, maybe the most important fact the Inquisitor had to establish. But it wasn’t the only fact he needed. If someone was trying to send the House of Life a message, the Emperor would want to know who.
The Inquistor’s job was simple, really — determine the Family and House of the murderer and report it to the Ministry of Inquisition. The task of actually capturing the suspect lay solely on the sergeant and her team. So she was eager to glean anything she could from her preternaturally gifted colleague. She watched intently as the Inquisitor examined the body further.
“The fang marks here and here,” he said, pointing to the Aos left shoulder and forearm. “These prove the killer wasn’t Dragonkind.”
Reaching down, the Inquisitor touched the back of his hand against the victim’s skin. “She’s been dead three hours, maybe four. So that eliminates the night operators: the Undead, the Demons and the Fenrir.”
Looking around the confines of the shack, he continued. “Nothing is broken or out of place. This space is too small and this body too badly beaten for the crime to have occurred here. The body was killed elsewhere and then dumped here. And by the looks of these footprints, the murderer was really big. A Kark, maybe?”
The sergeant, her mind rushing to assimilate all the detail, offered up a lead. “A witness claimed to have heard wingbeats.”
He nodded. “Wings. Ok, then. It wasn’t an Il’gra or Grondal. You’re looking for a Karkadon, with wings.” Then he smiled at her: a strange tired child’s smile. “And a sharp set of chompers.”
“Right.” The sergeant said. “And the House?”
***
Earlier that day, the Inquisitor had been in his Supervisor’s office, lounging on a miniature leather lectus, laughing and enjoying a smoke.
The Supervisor leaned forward in his chair and asked in as non-threatening a way as he was capable: “Do you know how many spirit strips you’ve used this month?”
“Aw, come on Boss, stop busting my balls,” the Inquisitor scoffed. “You know the last batch was defective. Everybody’s using more than normal.”
The Supervisor shook his head. “Not as many as you, though. Are you losing your edge, maybe? Might be it’s time for a rejuvenation treatment? ”
The Inquisitor frowned. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
The Supervisor squinted at him. “Is that a little hint of mustache I see?”
The Inquisitor sat up and put out his smoke. “The problem is with the strips! I’m not going back to that quack… The Alchemist screwed up, not me.”
“Okay, okay. Settle down,” the Supervisor interrupted him. “If you’re doing so great, why don’t you tell me what you can remember about your mother?”
The Inquisitor sighed. “Why do we have to keep doing this?”
“Because otherwise, you little bastards go insane,” the Supervisor said, in a low flat voice. “Now. Let’s talk about your mother.”
The Inquisitor threw himself back down on the lectus. “You know I can hardly remember her. When she had me, the Emperor was so desperate to find Videre, they were testing every kid in the city. If you were too lucky at Darulk Dice you might find yourself locked up until you could be cleared by an Alchemist. And me? I came out of the womb speaking in tongues. You can guess what chance I had of leading a normal life.”
“That’s a bullshit answer,” the Supervisor shook his head. “Let’s do another treatment. Everything will be clearer then, including the memories of your mother.”
The Inquisitor sat up again, becoming visibly agitated. “Treatment? Treatment! You know what’s bullshit around here? Your treatments!”
“Lower your voice.”
“I’m not being treated, I’m being tortured!”
Surprised by the strong reaction he had elicited, the Supervisor sat for a moment in stunned silence. After a short time he leaned forward, and in a hushed tone said: “Don’t do this. Do you want to throw away your career?”
The Inquisitor shrugged and threw himself back down on the lectus. “Maybe I don’t want to work for the Ministry any more.”
The Supervisor lowered his voice even further, almost whispering. “Nobody ever leaves the Ministry.”
The Inquisitor looked puzzled. “Sure they do. Inquisitors retire all the time.”
The Supervisor nodded in agreement and added: “Yes, but they never stop working for the Ministry.”
The Inquisitor took a deep breath, collected himself for a moment. “Why’d you ask me about the spirit strips?”
The Supervisor blanched and then scowled. “What difference does it make?”
“How do they work?”
The Supervisor was unmoved. He shrugged with diffidence. “You know how. You expose them to the corpse and they give you a clue to the suspect’s House or Family.”
“I didn’t ask how to use them, I asked how they worked,” the Inquisitor turned to face his Supervisor, like a suspect. “Why are they so damn expensive? I want to know!”
The Supervisor was done entertaining this line of questioning. “The Alchemist goes to great lengths to keep his secrets.”
The boy rose from the bench and lit another bidi. “I’ll find out. That’s what I do.” The smoke swirled around his head.
The Supervisor stood up too, towering over him. “I’ll tell you what isn’t a secret — we can’t afford your continued use of strips at this rate. And by we, I mean you. So, starting today, you get one per case — that’s all you get. And if you fuck up an assignment, straight back to rejuvie you go. Do I make myself clear?”
In that moment the Inquisitor determined to figure it out for himself. After all, solving mysteries was his job.
***
Identifying the murderer’s House was a trickier problem but one for which the Inquisitor’s talents were especially well suited.
Examining the body again, he winnowed down the list of possibilities. He leaned in close and gently inhaled, as the refined palette of his innate clairalience rendered the corpse in odoriferous ribbons. The Mystic Houses were the easiest to detect in this fashion; Life, Death and Arcane essences all stank to high heaven. While absent were the sulfurous hues of the House of Death and the bookish pallor of the Library of the Arcane, the pungent amber redolence of the corpse’s lingering Life essence practically knocked him down.
He looked closely at the wounds for the tell-tale scorch marks made by a Champion forged in the Cauldron of Fire, but found none.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt a sharp shift in the air, like a door opening and a small breeze rushing in. For a split second, he was elsewhere, far away, in an immense hall carved from solid rock, the Hall of the Mountains. It was empty. Then there was a feeling of vertigo as though he were looking down at himself inside the shack as he stood over the body of the dead Aos. He was wobbly for a moment but regained his composure before the sergeant could tell anything was wrong. He would not be able to do that again for several hours.
“It was definitely an Elemental House,” he said, somewhat out of breath. “And it wasn’t Fire or Earth. So that just leaves…”
“Air or Water,” the sergeant interjected, as the Inquisitor reached into his leg pouch and produced a small vial.
She peered at his prize. “Spirit strips?”
He nodded. “Either way, we’ll have our answer soon– but, do you care to wager on which it is?”
“Are you kidding?” The sergeant laughed. “I know better than to gamble with a Videre.”
“Ok, then,” he shrugged. He held the vial over the corpse, removed the stopper only for an instant, and then replaced it. He shook the vial vigorously and placed it in the warmth of his armpit.
The sergeant watched for a long moment and then gave him a quizzical look. “Are you supposed to do that?”
The Inquisitor shrugged again, and removed the vial. “Well, it’s not exactly Ministry procedure, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He held it up to examine the tiny strip of paper inside. Inscribed in three tiny letters, the strip revealed the Essence: A I R
As if on cue, attendants from the Ministry of Bone arrived to take possession of the body. They clamored into the tiny shack and began their work.
The Inquisitor handed the vial to the sergeant, and she inspected it. “Do you know how the spirit strips work?” she asked him earnestly.
“Funny you should ask,” he smirked. “I imagine that a small amount of essence on the paper reacts in the presence of elemental residue. I can only detect Air essence with a vial prepared specifically for that purpose.”
“And for Family identification?” she asked incredulously, “A Darulk, for instance?”
The Inquisitor raised an eyebrow. “Maybe little bits of Darulk?” he ventured sheepishly.
The attendants from the Ministry of Bone snickered amongst themselves.
He suddenly felt six seasons old.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she crossed her arms, puzzled.
The Inquisitor conceded. “No, you’re right. It doesn’t.”
***
As he walked away from the Market, the Inquisitor was smiling broadly. He was pleased with himself. He was relatively certain that his solution to the case wouldn’t raise any eyebrows at the Ministry because he had identified the correct suspect. The Aos was the fifth Champion to be murdered that week and the previous four were all victims of the Acolytes of Air.
But his real victory, the real reason for his smile, would be known only to him. Instead of using a new spirit strip to confirm the case with certainty, he had palmed off an old, used test to the sergeant and kept the fresh one for himself. If the Supervisor questioned him again, having an alibi in the sergeant could be helpful.
He spent the rest of the afternoon in his office, waiting for the awareness to come back to him. It was worth using his powers to quickly narrow down the list of suspects earlier in the day, but now he was impatient to get to some answers.
When enough time had passed, he forced himself to wait just a bit longer. He didn’t want to screw this up. Had anyone ever done what he was about to try? He removed the unused vial from his pouch and brought it to his nose. He removed the stopper and inhaled slowly. At the same time, he opened a door in his mind and stepped through.
But this wasn’t like any door he had opened before. As he stepped in, the floor gave way. He began to feel himself fall, tumbling, lurching as he attempted to control his descent. His nose filled with scents from his past; a leather bracer that broke his nose, a bitter lager that made him sick, a musty blanket that was once his pillow. All of these were smells he associated with people: Videre, other Inquisitors. Inquisitors whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. Retired Inquisitors. Dead Inquisitors.
He felt their cold hands reaching up to him through the dark, snaking into his decrepit body, and squeezing his aging exhausted heart.
***
The Supervisor stepped through the crowd that had gathered around the Inquisitor’s office. Inside the office, there was a small body on the floor beside the desk. A sergeant from the City Watch was standing over the Inquisitor’s body and writing in her notebook. The appearance of the Supervisor startled her and she stepped back to make room in the cramped office.
The sergeant told the Supervisor what she knew. “The victim was a Videre, Ministry of Inquisition, 64 seasons old.”
The Supervisor knelt to lift the corner of the sheet, revealing the face of the Inquisitor. His angelic face was unblemished, but his eyes had turned completely white and there was a bit of foam at the corner of his mouth. The Supervisor lowered the sheet and rose to face the sergeant.
“This is a Ministry matter, sergeant,” he said firmly. “Please give me your notebook.”
She did what the Supervisor asked. “He helped me with a case,” she said, tentatively. “I think.”
He took the notebook, tore out the top page and handed it back to her. “It never happened. You were never here.”
As she left, he turned to the attendants from the Bone Ministry waiting anxiously in the hall and waved one over.
“Do not bother the Butcher with this. He doesn’t want one so small,” he said sternly. “You are to take this body to the Alchemist for immediate processing,”
As they carried the body out of the office, the Supervisor locked the door and muttered to himself. “Godsdamnit! I’m going to need a new Inquisitor.”