A Serious Incident (Part 2/3) (Patreon)

Mr Tailor waited patiently inside the clothiers, placidly watching the man in the neat suit and shoes that were somehow still shiny despite the street's inch thick layer of manure. It was unfortunate, but such excrement-encrusted conditions were always a danger in any city that relied on equine locomotion.

Meanwhile, Mr Butcher, the owner of Butcher's Bespoke Robes and Vestments, talked to the man.

"I already told you government lot everything I know. Guy came in, ordered two dozen robes, then left. Came in a week later to collect. I reported it. The end."

"And those things happened in that exact chronological order?" queried Mr Black.

"Yes?" hesitantly answered the tailor, 'chronological' containing one or two syllables more than he was comfortable with in his words.

"Might I ask why you produced the robes, and waited until after the collection to report it?"

"Hey, just because they're cultists doesn't mean I don't want their coin."

Mr Black sighed. The average resident of Glimmerhome would sell their own mother if they thought they'd get good money for her, so merely delaying a report to the guard was on the tamer side of things. Nevertheless, it was annoying.

"And to whom did you make this report?"

"How should I know? It's not as if guards wear name tags, plus they always keep the guard stations gloomy and never take their helmets off. It was whoever was on the front desk at their Jaunty Street office."

Not helpful; the guard house would have a duty roster, of course, and it might even, broadly speaking, be accurate. It was the finer strokes that were the issue; the smoke breaks every ten minutes, or leaving to take a piss, and they were only a couple of the natural reasons for the scheduled receptionist to leave their post. If the inside man had been prepared, it would have been easy enough to slip something into the duty officer's beer to give themself an excuse to take over.

He got times and descriptions anyway, both of the guard and the purchaser, then proceeded away from the premises to make further inquiries.

Meanwhile, Mr Butcher turned to the next person in line. "Sorry for the wait. How can I help?"

"I was hoping my new robe was ready for collection," answered Mr Tailor the butcher.

"Ah, yes. A robe made from rubber. I imagine that would be very helpful to keep yourself clean while working; the blood will wipe right off it."

"Huh?" asked Mr Tailor, displaying a brief bout of confusion before brightening up. "Ah, yes. I suppose it'll be good for that, too."

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"With those ingredients? Won't do anything. Wouldn't even explode," said Cyanide, fully fledged member of the Abode of Abhorrent Alchemy, and three times runner-up in the Glimmerhome aptronym championship[1].

Mr Black glanced at his notepad. "And if you added sulphur?" he tried.

"Ah, then it would explode."

"Big explosion? Danger to the city? Any sort of noxious fumes that would poison the continent?"

"Not really. Whoever was mixing it would probably need a new pair of eyebrows, and anyone who breathed the smoke would be seeing purple elephants for a few hours, but that's about it."

"Then what's the point?" frowned Mr Black.

"Sorry? You want the city to explode?"

"No, of course not. But I must assume that the people who stole these ingredients do."

"Dunno what else to tell you, mate. I mean, you could add this stuff to a few tonnes of nitroglycerine and it would do some decent damage, but that would be equally true if you didn't add the mushrooms."

Mr Black tapped at his notepad. Even if the alchemical ingredients didn't do much, there was still the divine commode to worry about. Perhaps mixing stuff up in there would boost the effect, somehow? He'd need to go see a priest.

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"It's all a bit of an embarrassment, really," explained a green cotton sock puppet. The priestess acting as host to the sacred puppet was fairly high ranked in the clergy of Jelehelehen, god of mimes, ventriloquists and the rear halves of pantomime horses, and was able to hold her mouth perfectly still while the sock spoke.

"Too damn right it was," agreed the yellow puppet on her other hand. "Just imagine it. A god blows his nose, accidentally drops the tissue, and suddenly there's a million people proclaiming it a holy relic."

"Don't they have any idea how many holy relics we have already?" moaned the first puppet. "Just flush the damn thing down the toilet!"

"That's very interesting," interrupted Mr Black, "but I want to know about this specific relic."

The priestess turned around, made a few seconds of rustling noises, then turned back, one hand now wearing a brown sock with a monocle drawn on.

"That would be one of the seven hundred and eighty known sacred chamberpots of Graxilox, god of bodybuilders, gym bunnies and anyone who has muscles where their brains should be," droned the sock, in a thick scholarly accent. "After a tryst with a courtesan in the Marketplace of Affection, he needed to relieve himself and was too lazy to return to his divine realm, or indeed to leave the room, so he employed her chamberpot instead. A priest of Graxilox seized the item the following morning, enshrining it in the local temple."

"And what happened to the contents?"

"Drunk by Graxilox's high priest."

"They weren't after that, then. And what if the chamberpot was used as the container for an alchemical reaction?"

"As per the treaty of heaven, heaven, heaven, paradise, paradise, nirvana, hell, hell, hel, the abyss, Hades and Gehenna[2], the contents would become the irrevocable property of Graxilox."

"Ah," said Mr Black, a suspicion forming. "And if those contents had the effect of inducing a few hours of hallucinations?"

"A muscle-bound idiot like Graxilox? Hah. Wouldn't want to be on the planet that caused that," laughed the yellow puppet.

"You are on that planet," pointed out the priestess, speaking for the first time in the interview.

The yellow puppet stopped laughing.

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"Monday, three weeks back? That would have been Ned," answered the guard, flipping through some cheap yellow paper covered in barely readable chicken scratches. That wasn't anything to do with illiteracy on the part of the guards; in fact, the average guard was quite well educated. It was just the way they never wanted to remove their gauntlets to do paperwork. Extracting an on-duty guard from their armour was every bit as hard as extracting a crab from its shell, and for pretty much the same reason. "Hey, Ned! One of those Serious Incident guys wants you!"

A clatter sounded from the break room, followed by a rude word. Nevertheless, within a few seconds, a suit of armour walked into reception. Mr Black could only assume that it contained Ned, somewhere deep inside.

"How can I help?" asked a voice from within the armour.

"Three weeks back, Monday, you were on reception duty. What do you remember about any reports filed that day?"

A gauntlet awkwardly rubbed at the back of a helmet. "Sorry, sir, but I had the runs that day something awful. Couldn't get off the toilet all shift."

Sometimes, Mr Black hated being right, but he nevertheless ploughed on. "Who covered for you, then?"

"Uhh..." stammered Ned, then looked at the current receptionist.

"Don't look at me," she replied to the silent plea. "I was off that day for my daughter's birthday."

"Could have been anyone," said Ned. "If the desk is empty and someone shouts, it falls to whoever happens to be near enough to hear and sufficiently bored to want to deal with it."

Mr Black pondered, unwilling to believe the guards were a dead end. He could interview all of them, but as well as being time consuming, it would have little chance of success. The person who dealt with it could easily be off shift today, and would assuredly lie even if he wasn't. The questioning would give away that Mr Black was on to them, and all he'd get for his trouble was a lot of people denying ever having seen Mr Butcher. With a sigh, he stepped back outside, moving on to his next line of enquiry. A pair of impassive helmets watched him leave.

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Professor Venenum cracked his knuckles, glaring at the victim in front of him. A dozen thick leather belts secured the man into an uncomfortable metal chair, a contraption of iron screwed into his skull, wires running between it and a big metal box engraved with mystical sigils, crackling with electricity.

"Just to warn you, this is going to hurt," said the professor.

"Mmmpf!" moaned Second Brother, doing his best to scream into his gag. He wasn't overly bothered about whatever the professor was warning him about, being focused on the pre-existing pains of his broken knees, toes, fingers and the magical headgear that had been screwed into his brain.

The professor flipped a switch.

"Mmmpf!" exclaimed Second Brother, suddenly discovering that broken knees were actually quite a mild problem, all things considered.

An image appeared on one side of the box, displaying Professor Venenum and Mr Black, standing next to a box, on one side of which was an image of Professor Venenum and Mr Black.

The machine stuttered and sparked, and the muffled screaming grew more urgent.

"One moment, please. It doesn't deal with recursion well. I should have been more careful with the angle," explained the professor, rotating the cube to bring the image out of sight of Second Brother. The stifled screaming dropped back down to the levels that might be expected for someone having his brain slurped up through a wire.

"I must admit, this is an impressive piece of kit," said Mr Black. "I don't suppose we could order one for our Office?"

The professor shrugged. "You can have this one once I'm done with it. The damn thief that took my sandwich from the break room is going to get his comeuppance, I swear. Too petty for the thieves' guild to deal with, my arse."

Mr Black blinked. "You built a tool capable of ripping memories out from someone's head to solve a stolen sandwich?"

"It was bacon!" exclaimed the professor, as if that explained everything.

"Never mind," back-pedalled Mr Black, remembering who he was talking to. Expecting common sense from any employee of the Institute of Inadvisable Incantations was as bad as expecting blood to come from a stone. "Let's just see what he remembers."

The professor nodded and rotated a bunch of dials on the box. In response, the image paused, then reversed, replaying the previous few minutes backwards.

Muffled screaming turned out to be perfectly recognisable even when played in reverse and at high speed.

"So, when are we looking for?"

Mr Black checked his notepad for the date of thefts, but they weren't really all that interesting, except to confirm he was being truthful when he admitted them. What he really wanted was to listen in on a cult meeting.

"Can we just rewind and look for lots of people in red robes?"

"Sure," answered the professor, dialling the playback speed up a few notches.

Mr Black implacably watched fingers healing as hammers bounced off them, while the professor cackled to himself, amused by the guild's punishment of the unlicensed thief. It showed his arrival at the thieves' guild, the drop-off of the professor's stolen catalyst, which unfortunately had been a dead-drop that lacked the involvement of any other people, and then the sight of him changing out of very familiar armour.

"He was the inside man?" muttered Mr Black. "Can you show me three weeks ago, Monday?"

The screen blacked momentarily, before displaying a very plush room containing a very large bed. The noises suggested that Second Brother had been having a good time. Of course, his standards had been lowered somewhat since then, and he was at the point where he would consider having only one broken knee to be a good time, but a few seconds more of video was sufficient to confirm his Monday had been very good.

"Eww," commented the professor.

"Indeed. Let's just play the entire day on fast forward."

The professor did, and at no point did the apparent guard don his uniform or go to work.

"Dammit. Were there two inside men? Let's keep going."

Further viewing confirmed that yes, he was responsible for the thefts. It also confirmed that the lifespan of someone with magical wires sucking their brain dry generally failed to exceed an hour.

"Useful, but not as much as I'd hoped," commented Mr Black, pondering the scenes of enrobed cultists he'd witnessed. Less than two dozen each time; either they weren't all there at every meeting, or else they'd ordered spare robes. They'd also failed to helpfully divulge their plans, assuming everyone already knew and only giving progress updates that weren't overly meaningful to an outsider. The uncooperative prisoner had passed on before they'd got far enough back to get the actual plot.

And, of course, being cultists, they all called each other Brother or Sister. Not a single damn name in the video!

"Thanks for the testing help," nodded the professor. "Now it's time to try it out for real. I will see justice done for the brazen theft of my sandwich!"

Mr Black left him to it.

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Back in his office, Mr Black steepled his fingers, pondering. Firstly, he had no motive. Yes, watching the cultists for two seconds had been sufficient to unveil some deep-seated resentment and anger issues, but had offered no clue as to why. Obviously it was something important enough to risk the ire of the thieves' guild, but no-one had been thoughtful enough to articulate it. Secondly, he didn't know when. Yes, the so-called Second Brother had slipped up and revealed it would be at some point in the next week, but that was more of a time limit than a time. Second Brother hadn't been able to articulate an exact time—even if he'd wanted to and didn't have his mouth full—having been occupied having his bones broken during the meeting it was being decided.

Mr Black knew how it would happen, but that didn't help him much. A crossbow bolt to the face was unlikely to work on a god, and while there were options that would, the collateral damage would be... unprofessional. Mr Black was a neat person, and collateral damage was not neat.

Thankfully, he also knew where. Or at least, strongly suspected. Every meeting of the cult had occurred in the same section of sewer, so he just needed to wait there and stop the ritual before it started. Tucking his foldable crossbow into his jacket, he followed the route he'd seen in the memories of Second Brother, and settled in to wait.

What were the chances of them breaking habit on their very final meeting?

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[1] The winner the previous year had been Mr Butcher the tailor, not so much because of his tailoring business, but because of what he'd threatened to do to the judges if he lost. The description had been quite graphic and had displayed extensive knowledge of human anatomy, awing the assembled audience and proving his butchery skills beyond any doubt.

[2] Unfortunately, despite extensive negotiations during the drafting of the treaty, the various religions were unable to come to any agreement on the selection of unique names for their respective afterlives.