Chapter 18: The Order of Veil [1]
Sergeant Feen ran as fast as his legs could carry him, his face pale and slick with sweat.
Each pounding step up the narrow staircase of the Silver Rabbit Inn made his potbelly strain against the brass buttons of his Watchers uniform.
Behind him was his subordinate... a young guard who kept his pace with considerably less wheezing.
"A Tier 3 Knight... of the noble Marquess house dead." Feen panted. "Why... in all the realms couldn’t it have been a tavern body, Jory?"
"Because then you’d actually have to fit through the tavern door."
Jory muttered under his breath in a barely audible voice.
Feen stopped mid-stair as he twisted around.
"What did you say?"
Jory blinked up at him innocently.
"Nothing, sir. You must be hearing things. The stairs have a nasty echo." He offered a faint smile. "Could it be your pulse is pounding in your ears from all that running?"
Feen glared at him.
"I’ll deal with you when we get back."
The innkeeper, a gaunt middle-aged man with a thinning comb-over, was already waiting for them.
His face had settled into a queasy mixture of genuine fear and the hollow, gut-sick dread of a man watching his livelihood crumble, already calculating all the losses he was going to get from this scandal.
"This way, sirs. The young lord Morwell is still here."
Feen’s stomach tightened.
He’d served in the Thornhaven City Watch for eighteen years now.
He’d broken up drunken brawls, chased pickpockets through the market square, and handled many more cases than he could count.
But the matters involving nobility had always made his palms sweat.
As they turned the corner into the east wing hallway, the thick smell of decay and rot clung to the back of their throat and burrowed into their sinuses.
Feen gagged as his hand flew to his mouth.
Beside him, Jory stumbled back a step, his face turning extremely pale.
"Merciful, Goddess." Jory choked out, pressing his sleeve over his nose. "What is this awful smell?"
The innkeeper had wisely hung near the stairs and pointed his shaky finger down the corridor.
"That’s where they are, sirs. The young lord and the... the remains."
Feen forced himself to look.
The hallway was dim as the afternoon light slanted through the window, barely pushing back the shadows.
And there, standing alone amid the gloom, was a young man with strikingly handsome features and short black hair that fell in a careless disarray.
He stood motionless just outside a doorway, staring into the room beyond with unnerving stillness.
His expression was utterly neutral, as though the stench and the horror before him were nothing more than a minor inconvenience in his day.
His ghostly grey eyes in the dim light looked almost spectral, haunting yet impossible to look away from.
The innkeeper swallowed audibly.
"That’s him, sirs. Young Lord Mikael Morwell."
Feen straightened his uniform as best he could and approached Mikael.
Each step he took brought the source of the smell into sharper focus.
By the time he drew close enough and was just about to address the young lord, his eyes suddenly fell inside the room.
On the floor of the doorway, just inside the open door, lay what had once been a man---
The Knight’s body was a collapsed ruin of glistening, greyish-red muscle and exposed bone, with skin that had sloughed away, pooling around the remains like a discarded wax mask.
The face was entirely gone, and the nose cartilage had collapsed inward, leaving the eye sockets empty, and a thick, yellowish fluid seeped from the fissures between the muscles, spreading in a slow, glistening puddle across the warped floorboards.
The stench was almost unbearable.
Feen felt his stomach lurch.
He had seen death before--knife wounds, broken skulls, nasty injuries, burn marks-- but this.... this was something else entirely.
He wrenched his gaze away and fixed it on the young lord, who was watching him with those unsettling ghostly grey eyes.
"Young Lord Morwell. We... we received the report. I am Sergeant Fenn from City Watch. This is my subordinate, Guardsman Jory."
He glanced at the remains again and said.
"Goddess protects us... Can you tell us what befell him?"
"He was Mr. Walter Dyre, a Tier 3 Knight in service to my house. He arrived at my door moments ago, before a single word could be exchanged, he succumbed to this... affliction, directly in front of me."
Jory’s face went pale in the span of a heartbeat as he muttered in a low voice.
"It’s like the others... the body they pulled from the canal last night, and the one by the bell tower... completely rotted."
Feen stiffened.
The rotted bodies from the canal, the bell tower, the slum alley... of course, he had heard the whispers.
Ten bodies in a single week alone...
It was the case that even unsettled the Order of Veil, and they had been sniffing around ever since, asking their quiet, unsettling questions.
But those bodies, even though rotted, were still intact.
This, however... this was something else entirely.
Something worse.
Mikael’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in the depths of those ghostly eyes.
"That means this incident is far beyond the jurisdiction of common City Watchers." he said.
Feen still held up.
The young lord was right. Whatever dark things happened, it fell squarely under the purview of The Order.
Still, the procedure was procedure.... Marquess, son or not, the boy had been present at the moment of death.
Feen gathered the courage and spoke...
"Sir, with all due respect. We need to know the exact details about the situation. Where you and your Knight have been over the past few days, and whether he has eaten anything unusual or any details that might help us understand.... for the report, you understa--"
"You will not get any report from me."
Mikael cut him midsentence and took a single step forward, and despite himself, Feen found himself taking a corresponding step back.
The young man wasn’t overly tall or bulky... but there was a coiled authority in the way he carried himself--a quiet, undeniable gravity that seemed to demand acknowledgment.
"I will not provide any statement to an ordinary guard."
"But, my Lord—"
"I will say this once."
Mikael’s ghostly grey eyes locked onto Feen, making him flinch.
"Send word to the Order of the Veil. Tell them a Tier 3 Knight of House Morwell has perished from the same phenomenon they are currently investigating. I will provide my statement to a high-ranking member of the Order, and I will do so only once my family’s legal representative has arrived."
The Watchers exchanged a nervous look.
"And until they arrive." Mikael added. "I suggest you quarantine this Inn. Unless, of course, you’d like to find out if this rot is contagious by standing there staring at it."
Feen and Jory nodded.
"Yes—yes, Young Lord Morwell, right away. We’ll send the word to the Order. And quarantine the hallway, immediately. Come on, Jory."
They retreated down the hallway with considerably more haste than they’d arrived, as their footsteps clattered against the wooden floor.
"Seal the Inn. No one in or out until the Order arrives. Gather all the guests in the Inn on the ground floor. And send a runner to the Order’s office. Tell them Sergeant Fenn requests immediate intervention."
As they hurried away, Mikael watched them go.
Only then did he let his shoulders drop as he pressed his two fingers on his temple.
The headache from the essence overload was getting worse, and now this...
He’d bought himself some time by insisting he would speak only to a high-ranking member of the Order, and only once his family’s legal representative arrived.
He hoped Jeanne would be here by then.
He had no intention of explaining where he’d been last night to a couple of low-level Watchers.
Some things didn’t need to be paraded in front of the local authorities.
Still, he’d never imagined he’d stumble into the Church and the Order of Veil this early.
A cold, bitter amusement flickered through him.
’Well, it can’t be helped now.’
He’d already heard about the rumors while buying ritual ingredients in the city yesterday--the carriage drivers muttering about the Order of Veil investigating strange deaths, bodies rotting from the inside out with no external injuries.
The details didn’t exactly match Mr. Dyre’s situation, but it felt similar...
The threat had either evolved or something similar had joined the hunt.
Or was it something different altogether?
His gaze drifted back to what remained of Mr. Dyre. He stared for a long moment.
"Liren, what do you make of it?"
He asked Liren in his mind; he had just discovered that they could also talk like this.
It was quite convenient and far less conspicuous than muttering to himself like a madman.
{I’m not exactly sure... it could be anything, really. But one thing is clear — the attacker wasn’t present here at the Inn. The Knight Dyre was already dead by the time he arrived, and his body only started decaying while he was here, because I never felt any essence that could have triggered it.}
"...I see."
He stood there for a long moment, lost in his own thoughts.
{Shouldn’t you hide those blue-tinted fingers?}
He glanced down at his fingers, which were still stained vivid blue from the essence overload.
"Oh, right. I almost forgot about this. Thanks."
He stepped into the room, the cloying stench settling around him.
His eyes swept the interior until they landed on the black gloves lying atop the writing desk.
He crossed to them, plucked them up.
He was halfway through pulling one on when his knuckles brushed against something solid tucked beneath a stack of loose papers.
It was a small black leather book.
This was the same book that he found the invitation letter to the Astralspire Magic Academy entrance exam.
He’d wanted to check it properly back then, but the shock and panic of realizing he had become Mikael Morwell had driven it completely from his mind.
He opened the book as his gaze swept across the lines...
And his eyes widened.
******
