Brandon Sanderson - Shadows of Self

“Ladrian,” he said, looking up from a corpse. “Good. You’re here.” He crossed the room and gave a glance to Marasi, who saluted. He didn’t dismiss her.

“Aw,” Wayne said, peeking in, “the fun is already over.”

Waxillium stepped into the room, taking Aradel’s proffered hand. “That’s Chip Erikell, isn’t it?” Waxillium asked, nodding to the nearest corpse. “Thought to run smuggling in the Third Octant?”

“Yes,” Aradel said.

“And Isabaline Frellia,” Marasi said. “Rusts! We have a file on her as tall as Wayne, but the prosecutors have never been able to charge her.”

“Seven of these bodies belong to people of equivalent notoriety,” Aradel said, pointing to several corpses among the fallen. “Most from crime syndicates, though a few were members of noble houses with … dubious reputations. The rest were high-ranking representatives from other important factions. We have near thirty notable stiffs, along with a handful of guards each.”

“That’s half of the city’s criminal elite,” Waxillium said softly, crouching down beside a body. “At least.”

“All people we’ve never been able to touch,” Aradel said. “Not for lack of trying, mind you.”

“So why is everyone so grim?” Wayne asked. “We should be throwing a bloomin’ party, shouldn’t we? Someone went and did our work for us! We can take the month off.”

Marasi shook her head. “A violent change in power in the underworld can be dangerous, Wayne. This was a hit of huge ambition, someone eliminating rivals wholesale.”

Aradel glanced at her, then nodded in agreement. She felt a surge of satisfaction. The constable-general was the one who had hired her, picking her application out of a dozen others. Every other person in the pile had had years of constable experience. Instead, he’d chosen a recently graduated law student. He saw something promising in her, obviously, and she intended to prove him right.

“I can’t fathom someone doing this,” Waxillium said. “Toppling so many of the city’s underworld powers at once won’t favor the perpetrators; that’s a myth from penny novels. Murders on this scale will just draw attention and unify opposition from every other surviving gang and faction as soon as word gets out.”

“Unless it was done by an outsider,” Marasi said. “An uncertain element from the start, someone who stands to gain if the entire system crumbles.”

Aradel grunted, and Waxillium nodded in agreement.

“But how,” Waxillium whispered. “How did someone achieve this? Surely their security must have rivaled any in the city.” He began moving about, pacing off distances, looking at certain bodies, then at others, whispering to himself as he periodically knelt down.

“Reddi said that the governor’s brother was involved, sir?” Marasi asked Aradel.

“Lord Winsting Innate.”

Lord Winsting, head of House Innate. He had a vote in the Elendel Senate, a position he gained once his brother was elevated to governor. He had been corrupt. Marasi and the rest of the constables knew it. In retrospect, she wasn’t surprised to find him in the middle of something like this. The thing was, Winsting had always seemed a small catch to Marasi.

The governor, however … well, perhaps that hidden file on her desk—full of hints, guesses, and clues—would finally be relevant.

“Winsting,” she asked Aradel. “Is he…?”

“Dead?” Aradel asked. “Yes, Constable Colms. From the invitations we found, he initiated this meeting, under the guise of an auction. We located his corpse in a saferoom in the basement.”

This drew Waxillium’s attention. He stood up, looking directly at them, then muttered something to himself and paced off another body. What was he searching for?

Wayne wandered over to Marasi and Aradel. He took a swig from a silver flask engraved with someone else’s initials. Marasi pointedly did not ask him which of the dead he’d taken it from. “So,” he said, “our little house leader was friendly with criminals, was he?”

“We’ve long suspected he was crooked,” Aradel said. “The people love his family though, and his brother went to great lengths to keep Winsting’s previous lapses out of the limelight.”

“You’re right, Aradel,” Waxillium said from across the room. “This will be bad.”

“I dunno,” Wayne said. “Maybe he didn’t know these folks were all trouble.”

“Doubtful,” Marasi said. “And even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter. Once the broadsheets get ahold of this … The governor’s sibling, dead in a house full of known criminals under very suspicious circumstances?”

“What I’m hearing,” Wayne said, taking another swig, “is that I was wrong. The fun isn’t over.”

“Many of these people shot one another,” Waxillium said.

They all turned to him. He knelt beside another body, inspecting the way it had fallen, then looked up toward some bullet holes in the wall.

Being a lawman, particularly out in the Roughs, had required Waxillium to teach himself a wide variety of skills. He was part detective, part enforcer, part leader, part scientist. Marasi had read a dozen different profiles of him by various scholars, all investigating the mindset of a man who was becoming a living legend.

“What do you mean, Lord Ladrian?” Aradel asked.

“The fight here involved multiple parties,” Waxillium said, pointing. “If this was an unexpected hit by someone external—and Lady Colms is right, that would have made the most sense—one would expect the victims to have died from a barrage fired by the enemy who burst in. The corpses don’t tell that story. This was a melee. Chaos. Random people firing one at another. I think it began when someone started shooting from the middle of the group outward.”

“So it was one of the attendees who began it,” Aradel said.

“Maybe,” Waxillium said. “One can only tell so much from the fall of the bodies, the sprays of blood. But something is odd here, very odd.… Were they all shot?”

“No, strangely. A few of the attendees were killed by a knife in the back.”

“Have you identified everyone in the room?” Waxillium asked.

“Most of them,” Aradel said. “We wanted to avoid moving them too much.”

“Let me see Lord Winsting,” Waxillium said, standing, his mistcoat rustling.

Aradel nodded to a young constable, and she led them out of the ballroom, through a doorway. Some kind of secret passage? The musty stairwell beyond was narrow enough to force them to walk single file, the constable at the front carrying a lamp.

“Miss Colms,” Waxillium said softly, “what do your statistics tell you about this kind of violence?”

Oh, so we’re using last names now, are we? “Very little. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times something like this has happened. The first place I’d look is for connections between the people killed. Were they all in smuggling, Captain Aradel?”

“No,” he said from behind. “Some smugglers, some extortionists, some gambling tycoons.”

“So it’s not a specific attempt to consolidate power in a certain type of criminal activity,” Marasi said, her voice echoing in the damp stone stairwell. “We need to find the connection, what made these specific people targets. The one most likely behind it is dead.”

“Lord Winsting,” Waxillium said. “You’re saying he lured them here, planned an execution, and it went wrong?”

“It’s one theory.”

“He ain’t that kind of slime,” Wayne said from near the end of the line.

“You know of Winsting?” Marasi asked, looking over her shoulder.

“Not specifically, no,” Wayne said. “But he was a politician. Politician slime is different from regular slime.”