Chapter 2

Kameichan watched the guards grumble with one another as they removed the two bodies from the house. Husband and wife dead in the same night, and already the locals were contesting the rights to their property. It was a fine house. Two stories, stone structure, and solid wooden framing within, set in a good location near the southwest market square.

The man, evidently drunken with too much ale, had beaten his wife to death and stuffed her into a barrel. Then he had simply sat down to down a few more and had died mysteriously in his sleep. Guards argued whether it was poison or simply heart failure from the excitement of his murdered wife. Kameichan knew better. His Kaleichstone told him there was more to the story. There was a third person involved. He didn't know who, but he sensed a lot of fear, sorrow, and hatred around the scene. But should he tell the guards? Would it even make a difference?

"I don't care whether he was poisoned, stabbed, or beaten over the head with a chamber pot. The man is dead! Let's just get him into a box and be done with it."

The wife was a pretty woman. Young, tired-looking, but pretty. Kameichan leaned forward, focusing, and he saw her, in his minds eye, being strangled at the bottom of the stairs, shaken and smashed until her neck broke, by a monster of a man whose motives were unclear.

The husaband died in a chair, drinking ale and passing out while some unseen figure watched from the shadows. Who? He couldn't see. The Kaleichstone showed him the point of view of the people he focused on, and that was all. No one was focused on this mysterious stranger at the time of the incident, so he couldn't see the person.

The guards had even less insight though, and didn't seem to care. Kameichan watched the two thrown onto the back of a wagon, already piled high with folks who had died in the night. They would be forgotten, dropped in unmarked graves and left to rot, like so many others. Sad.

"That's eleven today, sir," an underling of the townguard said, brushing the dust from his hands.

"These two have been dead a few days, by the looks of it. Who found them?"

"Me, sir!" a man said from the onlooking crowd. "I knew 'em. I's a friend o' the man. I came to call on him, Daleinich-ma, and found him dead in his chair, like's you found him. I touched nothing."

"Any idea who killed them?" the senior guardsman asked.

"No, sir. They were good folk. They had a wee daughter also. Only she must have gone with the rest of the children to the refuge."

"Good folk, you say? I doubt there's such a thing left in this city. The whole country's gone mad. This here pile is all the testament you need to that."

The guard flicked a dangling arm up into the pile with the tip of his sword as he spoke. It fell to hanging off the cart again, as though rebellious even in death.

"Stab wounds, beatings, one man thrown from a window. And this is just one night. The city hums with malevolence and we've no power to stop it. Hang one and there's six more in the shadows with a blade drawn against someone's throat. It's madness. And growing worse."

"If we had but a few more men," the younger guard said.

"Pah! A few more men! They'd be but a few more spoonfuls of water thrown upon the inferno of chaos this city's become. Come. Let's move on. There'll be more around the next corner to tend to, and bloodier than this, I'll wager."

"Indeed, sir."

"You folks with your eyes on this dead man's home, see the local magistrate and negotiate with him for the deed to their property. I've no interest in real estate. Let he who knows ought of what happened to these poor souls come forth. Otherwise depart."

Kameichan knew a little what happened, but he still wasn't convinced he should say so. He had affairs to attend to. There was coin to be made.