That night nobody got nixed, nobody died on a hopscotch board, and nobody found Ezery Shaze. The next morning I woke up without anyone jamming a glass of green sludge in my face or making rude comments about my physique. I got up, went to Bright Street Station, and checked the files from the night before. Nothing. I spent a few hours catching up on my paperwork — I suspected Lt. DeWitt made up new forms for me to fill out just out of vindictiveness — and was just convincing myself that talking to those two little girls who saw Hanks get murdered wouldn’t really be about the hopscotch case since we found nix in his room when a constable ran in, shouting my name.
“I’m here.” I stood. He had a Sepulchres Watch identification on his tin badge.
“Hopscotch murder,” he said, sounding only a little out of breath.
“Where?” I asked, grabbing my coat.
“In an alley behind the Old Graveyard.”
I strode outside, whistling up a balesteed.
A crowd had gathered outside the cemetery walls, and I had to shove my way through on foot with oaths and a few well-placed kicks before I got to the cordon. The Sepulchres Watch captain ushered me through.
“Briefing the other day said you’re point for any murders involving a hopscotch board, so…” She shrugged, and I thanked the demons of bureaucracy that Carel hadn’t thought to update the Watch about taking me off the case. “What’s this about, anyway?”
“Hell if I know,” I muttered, staring at the body sprawled in a tiny space between two tenements and the tall stone wall that circled the Old Graveyard. “But that man’s name is Wry Dick, and I heard he might be working for slavers.”
The bully-for-hire that Arlin had fingered was face-up, his body sliced up and his guts hanging out. That’d be interesting enough even without the hopscotch board drawn in the dirt beneath him.
I cautiously touched the Line and flinched. It was frayed and thin, wounded, a ghastly, oily glow seeping across the worn spots like leaking plasma. I’d never seen anything like it before. I stopped discerning, but everything around me remained washed out, overlaid with an unwholesomely pale sheen.
Nope, I’d never seen the phenomenon before, but I’d sure enough read about it. I wet my lips with my tongue.
“Captain,” I said, “I think we have a problem with the Line.”
She froze. “A breach?”
“A pall. Call Nobilis Aronson,” I said, remembering the nobleman’s promise to help. “He lives on the Hill. And see if you can find a guy named Axton, lives in Dockside. Sergeant Connas from my division will know where. And send someone to notify General Tegeus Droit.”
“General Droit?” the captain paused, startled. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. He’s probably at home, reading. Parkside. Tell him I might have something entertaining for him.” I looked at her. “This is Vigilance business, Captain. Put a lockdown on all calls in this vicinity. If Aronson arrives on a balesteed, stop him at least two blocks away if you can. Tell him to come in clean and blind.”
She turned and began giving orders, sending looky-loos running right and left, fetching the Guard, notifying the Vigilance, and clearing the alley. The slower members of the crowd were urged on with cuffs and curses.
I crouched against the tenement wall and stayed watchful.
Something had done lasting damage to the Line, and that ain’t easy. The border between Here and There is so thin that bale can be called through with relative ease; so thin that transients can cross on their own if they’re given enough incentive. But at the same time, it’s so strong that it holds two fundamentally incompatible realities apart from each other.
Usually it does, anyway. But when the Line gets badly frayed, little bits of the other side, the bale, sometimes start leaking through.
Uncalled, unmastered raw bale is like the taste and texture in your mouth just after you’ve vomited, like the bone-colored scum that collects on the top of the pot when you’re boiling down cheap meat for stew. It manifests like an oily, glowing residue that sentinels call the pall. And seeing the pall is a very bad sign.
My discerning eye saw raw bale pooling around Dick’s corpse with his blood and running through the narrow runnels in the dirt that shaped the hopscotch board. Shadows flickered across the Line’s sickly glow: skinny, angular shapes with the fast, jerky movement of birds. Transients, attracted by the echo of pain and the scent of blood. They were pushing against the Line’s weak spots, trying to get through. I was there to deal with them if they succeeded.
I don’t know how much time passed while I kept an eye on them; I must have been there a while, though, because the next thing I knew Nobilis Aronson was standing next to me.
“Captain. Has anything come through?” he asked.
“Not since I been here.”
“Good. I understand you put a lockdown on adjuration in the area. That’s wise. I concur.”
“Can you tell what happened?”
He settled back, studying the Line. I tried to study it with him, wondering what his increased sensitivity to bale would tell him.
“A gap was opened,” he said at last. “There’s been a crossing here — a major manifestation. And a controlled one, or else this would be a full-fledged breach.”
I nodded. “We’ve been hearing reports about something crossing and committing murder. A sentinel, probably.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem.”
I glanced at the body and found that Axton had arrived and was carrying out his usual unsavory inspection. Droit was there, too, with a Watch sword that he’d scrounged up from someone. Bullied out of a constable, most likely. He was watching Axton with interest.
“I’ve never seen a fray this bad before,” Aronson mused. “You get a pall during battle, usually, after both sides have used adjuration against each other for too long. In this case – do you think whatever crossed might have been holding the Line open for a length of time? I’d think that would require a group of sentinels working in tandem….”
“Carel would have told the board if any operation that big was being carried out down here,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose so.” Aronson looked disturbed.
Droit walked over to us.
“Your taste in companions is getting worse, Lorencz,” he said, glancing at Aronson. “I thought we were done with each other.”
“That’s one of the kiddy-nappers Arlin fingered. Wry Dick. Kinda curious that he got gutted by the hopscotch killer, don’t you think?”
“And yet there is nothing here for me to kill.”
“Hey, pal, I was just tryin’ to be civil. As far as I’m concerned, you can go back to your books and dead roses if that’s what you want.”
“I’d prefer a dead rose over a dead Dick,” he mused.
“You got a crappy sense of humor.”
“You aren’t the first person to tell me that.”
“No, I probably was,” Aronson said, standing. “Hello, Tegeus.”
“Hello, Michael. How nice to have you speaking to me for a change,” Droit purred. I cocked an eyebrow and wondered if this was going to turn into some kind of lover’s spat. But Droit immediately turned back to me. “How bad is the damage to the Line?”
“Worse than it should be,” I said. “The Nobilis says it’s battlefield-level damage.”
“Could it be coming from the other side?” he asked, his green gaze flickering toward the nobleman. “Maybe the transients are having a war.”
“Transients aren’t that intelligent,” Aronson said, his voice flat. “This has to be the result of human tampering. There’s a sentinel somewhere who’s not only damaging the Line, but damaging it to the point where its reconstitution has been slowed or halted.”
“Halted,” I repeated, trying on the word for size. I didn’t like its fit. “Halted wouldn’t be good.”
“No,” Aronson agreed. “It wouldn’t. That’s the kind of damage that created the Donweyr Waste.”
“I bivouacked in the Waste once,” Droit reminisced. “We lost fourteen soldiers that night. I moved us out at dawn. Everything they say about it is true.”
“So that’s what’ll happen to Cislunar’s if the Line don’t fix itself?” I asked. We looked at each other.
“The damage to this victim is somewhat different from that inflicted upon the other two hopscotch corpses, Captain,” Axton reported, breaking our moment of silence. “I see a number of apparently randomly placed lacerations on the arms in addition to the central cut to the abdomen that we saw on the other corpses. The smaller cuts look like defensive wounds — a human knife attack, or perhaps the work of a skinslicer or a razorbite. The victim was killed sometime last night. His internal organs are cold, but in this weather, that could have occurred within in a few hours of death, which leaves us with a wide window of opportunity.”
“A transient attack would explain the damage to the Line,” Aronson said.
“But why here?” I asked, looking around the small alley. “This is a crazy place for anyone to be in the middle of the night.”
“Meetings in graveyards aren’t entirely unheard-of,” Droit pointed out. “Cemeteries usually empty and quiet after darkfall, and the walls and tombs are tall enough to block light from a lantern.”
“There’s a gate in the cemetery wall, about three blocks away. He could have been heading toward it when he was ambushed,” Aronson suggested, getting into the spirit of the investigation. “Perhaps he was cutting through the alley to avoid being seen.”
I shook my head. “Anything else?”
“The previous two bodies were found on stone surfaces atop chalked hopscotch boards,” Axton said, obligingly. “This board has simply been drawn in the dirt. The squares aren’t quite as large as the others, and the top has been formed differently.” He gestured to the tombstone-shaped half-circle at the top of the board. “In the others, this was marked with numbers running from one to nine. I see no numbers here, although they may have been rubbed out.”
“The other two hopscotch boards — did they look like they were drawn by the same person that did this one?”
“I didn’t pay enough attention, Captain.” He sounded regretful. “I was concentrating on the cause of death, not the context.”
“Okay. So maybe they were drawn by different people …” I hesitated. “Different children.”
“Why children?” Aronson asked at once.
“Links to other cases,” I replied, evasively. “And we know Wry Dick’s implicated in buying children in Dockside … we’re just not sure why.”
“I’d like to read the case files,” Aronson said. I nodded, thinking that would be up to Carel.
“Axton, what do you think?” I asked. “Same killer or not?”
He brightened, looking gratified.
“I think the murders could be the work of the same man, Captain. But the fact that this board is significantly different in style and placement from the others suggests that he might be working with, or for, different people.”
“Shit,” I growled. Of course. Far was being called by different children.
“But why a board at all?” Aronson demanded. “It doesn’t make any sense!”
“The board could have some personal meaning to the killer, my liege,” Axton ventured, “or it could be a message to an enemy, akin to the codified postmortem mutilations some street gangs carry out. If there isn’t a second killer, then this change to the board’s design could be indicative of its deeper meanings.”
I took a moment to sort through the big words, then looked at the men around me.
“Okaaaay,” I said. “So, what do we know about hopscotch? I may have played it a couple times in my life, but I don’t remember much about it. You?”
All three men shook their heads.
“Fine,” I said, resigned. “Then I’m going to the Hall of Records as soon as we’re done here to find out what we know about hopscotch.”