she’d spent all night on duty and should have been home herself. She glared at him. “You’re arurim dhaskoi Demakos Nomasdina, in charge of the investigation of four murdered yaskedasi, are you not? This is the Elya Street arurimat, and not my house, where I should be fixing breakfast for my children right now.”
“Sorry,” Dema replied, feeling guilty, even though he hadn’t been the one to assign the arurim to find him.
The sergeant emerged from the station with a flask in each hand, one for the arurim and one for Dema. They held smoking hot guardroom tea, guaranteed to take the finish off wood and to wake the dead. “You’re a lifesaver,” the woman told the sergeant. “I may live to go home after all.”
“They owe you the time you’ve spent after your shift getting our greenie, here,” replied the sergeant with a nod to Dema. “Make sure they give it to you.”
“I will,” the arurim replied.
“And try not to dent the dhaskoi,” added the sergeant. “He’s a good enough sort, for all he belongs to the First Class.”
Dema wasn’t sure which would bother him more if he were awake, the slight to his class or the fact that even after eight months of service they still thought he couldn’t take care of himself. It was too much to think about now. He thanked the sergeant for the tea instead and followed his arurim guide down the street.
Drinking hot tea at a trot was a thankless effort, but Dema made it anyway, catching the spilled drops on an end of the blue stole that marked him as a mage. As he drank and dodged people in the streets, he reflected on how badly he’d been cheated. He had chosen the arurim as his area of advancement because it seemed far less regulated than the army or navy, and infinitely less boring than the treasury or law courts. Few people would be able to order him about among the arurimi, while every person with one more stripe or dot or sword on his sleeve would make military life into something very much like work. Even when his arurim superiors gave him night duty, Dema was pleased. The Elya Street station was just four blocks from Khapik. If things were dull at the station, a short walk led him to the best food, drink and entertainment in Tharios, all neatly tucked inside the walls of the pleasure district.
The nettle in the garden of his service, the first dead yaskedasu, sprouted five months after he’d finished his training and settled in at Elya Street. He hadn’t realized that the easy service of an arurim dhaskoi was due to the fact that, more than nine times out of ten, the victim knew the criminal. It was a family member, or a friend, or a neighbourhood roughneck. These were all offenders that regular arurim found easily by talking to the family, friends and neighbours of the victim, then tracking down everyone who looked suspicious, questioning them until they confessed. The arurim dhaskoi were called in only when the criminal was a mage, or when no one with a motive or chance to get at the victim could be traced. When the investigation of yaskedasu Nioki’s murder produced no possible killers, the case had come to Dema.
Now, three dead women later, Dema felt like those animals who chewed off a limb to escape a trap must feel. His service to the arurim was no longer fun. He wanted to destroy the one who destroyed the beauty and harmony of Khapik, and he couldn’t even get his fellow arurim to care about it as much as he did. One cheap yaskedasu or three yaskedasi, the others told him, okozou still meant no one was supposed to work up a sweat over this.
So Dema did his best, and knew it wasn’t good enough. He was too ignorant. Most of his spells for uncovering events could be used only when he had a suspect or when the crime had taken place elsewhere or had not led to death. Trying to find the killer was like sifting through a tonne of barley in search of a pin. No one knew anything. No one saw anything. The priests who had ritually and magically cleansed the murder sites noticed nothing irregular, and Dema found no traces of magic. He was at his wits’ end, even dreaming about the case. What was he doing wrong?
“I see word’s got out,” grumbled his arurim guide.