The Lighthouse
Lucian Warder.
Isabel examines the record. The date beside Warder’s name is today’s, the twenty-first of Isra’s Moon. He must have gone to the library this morning, after word of the murder in the Shell District spread. Nothing unusual about that. Anyone would be curious—Isabel was, after all.
Still, it’s strange that she’s run into him twice in such a short time, and stranger still that he sought her out after everything that had happened last night. What did he say his device did? Banish restless spirits, rather like she does? What she does isn’t banishment, but that’s only the first of many problems she has with the concept of Warder’s device.
Isabel doesn’t have much else in the way of leads, so she tells the librarian, “I’m very interested in Mr. Warder’s research. Can you tell me what other texts he has been looking into recently?”
The librarian shuffles through his ledgers. “Ah, here we are,” he says, his voice and his hands both wavering. “He has been researching Sentinels, funnily enough. He signed out for the 714 edition of the Account of the Black Delve, just last week.”
Isabel knows that title, and she knows it well, though the edition she studied was only a few decades old. It’s a record written by a Sentinel at the time of the Inquisition, some six centuries ago, and his effort to sanctify the lair of one of the many necromancers who plagued the Imperium in those days. Every generation of Sentinels since then has read it, and the church of Ondir keeps it updated and its margins full of commentary.
“I believe Mr. Warder mentioned he would be occupied with preparing for a field expedition this afternoon,” the librarian continues, “but you could speak to Eugenio Smith, in the school of engineering.”
Isabel nods. If nothing else, she’ll rule out Warder’s involvement in the murder. “Is Mr. Smith a colleague of his?”
“Yes. A mentor, in fact. Young Mr. Warder is quite the promising student.”
The Mr. Warder Isabel met outside the library had been at least forty. He is rather like a ghost, this man; unattached to the present time. She gives the librarian a thin smile. “I’ll be going to the engineering school, then. Thank you for your help.”
The school of engineering is on the other side of the district, close to the high dome of the observatory. A directory of engraved names and office numbers points her toward a windowed room on the second floor, where a bespectacled man with thinning gray hair and long, gnarled fingers like a bare tree sits behind a heavy oaken desk. Despite the afternoon light coming in from behind him, and the door being open, a mirrored lamp burns at his elbow. One hand darts over an abacus, while the other makes notes on a diagram of several interlocking gears.
The man looks up. “Yes?” He takes in Isabel’s black coat and the gateway pin on the collar. “Sentinel. How can I help you?”
“Professor Smith?” Isabel asks. “I ran into your associate, Lucian Warder, earlier today. I was wondering if you had a moment to spare to talk about the nature of your work together.”
Magnified eyes glance between Isabel and the diagram as Smith gives an exasperated sigh. “Well, come in, I suppose,” he says. “I’m sure he’s prattled on about that wretched little device of his. There’s not much more I can tell you.”
“It isn’t your…it isn’t a collaborative project?” Isabel enters the office and sits down in the spindly chair across from Smith.
“Well, it was,” he says, disdain dripping from every word. “It’s been some years now that he’s been chasing his inane fancies of the nature of magical energy and so on.”
Isabel’s brows go up in an unspoken question. With the confidence Warder had when speaking of his device, she was not expecting this level of barely-masked disapproval from a colleague.
“Well. I shouldn’t be speaking ill of another member of the university,” Smith continues, “especially one who was once my student. Anyway, yes, we did work on the device together, though he has since taken the fairly simple principles upon which it was designed, and the simple purpose for which it was made, and tried to make some grand invention that will save the world from all manner of hauntings forever.”
“I see. And what was the original purpose of the device?” Isabel asks.
Smith holds out his hands toward her. “Why, to frighten off a ghost and keep it at bay until a Sentinel arrives.”
It’s quite a difference from how Warder described it. Isabel had the distinct impression, earlier, that he intended to replace her. “From how Warder put it, he seems to believe that it can banish ghosts permanently,” she says.
“Yes. He claims that he can gather and condense the ghostly energies present in the form of the poltergeist, apply a negative magnetic charge to the magical field, and disperse its energies to the far corners of the universe. That is what he believes.”
“That’s impossible,” Isabel says. A soul cannot be divided into parts and scattered. She hadn’t believed that it could even be damaged, until last night.
“Frankly, I thought it a waste of time and a waste of his talents,” says Smith with a shrug. “It hasn’t really paid off for him, not for the last decade, no matter how much funding the university throws at him. To be honest, he’s running out his welcome here, but he does have his wealthy uncle to fund his flights of fantasy in the future.”
He waves his hand, as though brushing thoughts of Warder out of the air. “For myself, I’ve moved on. I’m developing a faster and more efficient printing press. That will have a far greater benefit to the human condition in this age, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I certainly don’t disagree,” Isabel says. “I’m curious as to how Warder has tested this device up until now.”
Smith’s gaze drifts to the side as he remembers. “In the early days, we were something of a trio of vagabonds, the Warders and I. We would chase the ghosts away and wait for the Sentinels to finish the job, and get commission on that to fund our further research.”
“And is the elder Mr. Warder still working on this project?”
“Oh, no, Lucas is retired now,” Smith says. “He took his generous pension and retreated to his modest estate in the countryside.”
“There were Sentinels that you worked with during this time,” says Isabel, redirecting him back toward the topic at hand. That could be a better lead, if there were members of her own order who had seen the device at work, at least in its early stages.
“Oh, there were a few. We made their job a little easier, at least. I did the machining work, you see, and it was Lucas Warder who originated the theories behind the magical principles.”
“Would you happen to have any of his writings on the subject?” Isabel asks.
“No,” Smith snaps. “The patent was in his name, and he guards it rather jealously. You’d have to ask him.”
There must have been a falling-out. That means that there isn’t much more she can get from Smith, who hasn’t been involved with the Warders’ projects for decades. “Thank you so much for your time,” she says. “If I have further questions, would you mind if I called on you again?”
“I suppose not. But I should get back to my work, now; invention must happen on the schedule of the university’s patrons, after all.”
Isabel thanks him again and leaves the engineering school, finding a shady bench on which to work. The late afternoon sun streams through the gold and emerald leaves of the tree overhead while she takes pen and paper from her satchel and writes two letters. The first is to the church of Ondir in Vernay, where the Sentinels in this country are headquartered, to ask if there is anyone who remembers Smith and Warder and their peculiar device. The second is a letter of introduction to Lucas Warder, the wealthy uncle, to ask permission to come calling and discuss his theoretical work.
She’s unwilling to believe that Warder’s device works the way he claims it does. It would go against everything known and recorded about the nature of the soul and its journey into death.
But so is the idea that the soul can be damaged, she reminds herself. If the device was used on a ghost, would it end up like Mikhail, rather than disintegrated and scattered to the winds?
The wrongness of the idea gives her a chill despite the late-summer sun. The soul must remain whole. How could one tear apart what made Isabel herself, or Mikhail, or Warder? And even if one could, why would one attempt such a thing?
She starts off at a brisk walk, leaving the university and placing her letters in the post-box by the district gate. She briefly considers confronting Lucian Warder, but she decides against it. There is little evidence to suggest that he was involved in the murder, unless it can be proven that his device was the thing that mangled Mikhail’s soul. Besides, the librarian said Warder would be away on a field expedition. Isabel will just have to wait.
She is on her way back to the Temple District to collect her horse when she hears the cry go up. It’s darker, the marble pillars of the churches stained a soft pink in the twilight.
There is a commotion of voices and the flat note of an iron bell being rung. Isabel turns. It’s coming from the river district. She can see people running up to the lighthouse perched on the bluff outside the harbor. A few are rushing back downhill to the docks. The lighthouse is lit, its beam turned uselessly back toward the city.
Through the brightness, Isabel can just make out the shape of a human figure, hanging in the aperture.
She runs, leaving the temple grounds and racing through the emptying market. A crowd has formed in the River District, filling the streets and piers—she puts a hand under the flap of her collar, showing her silver brooch, and elbows her way through.
At the base of the hill is a stout man in a policeman’s uniform. The patch on his jacket identifies him as a member of the River District constabulary, and the yellow ribbon beneath it marks him as the Chief Inspector.
“Miss, we can’t let you through,” he says through his bristly mustache. He takes another look at her uniform and a step back. “Sentinel. I suppose we might have use for you. Right now we’re just trying to get the damned body down.”
He gestures to the lighthouse with a sharp movement of his head. The light has been doused. In the darkness, Isabel can just make out the shape of limbs, the unnatural angle of the neck, and a huge, black gash across the midsection.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says. She gathers her skirts and sets off up the hill.
The door at the lighthouse’s base is open. The first room looks like the keeper’s living quarters. Isabel can see an overturned table and the bed shoved out of place, but that will be a concern for later.
After three flights of stairs, sweat trickles down her back and her breathing is ragged, but she has arrived at the light room. A young constable stands at the window, and he reaches gingerly with a handkerchief out toward the body, tugging at whatever has lashed it to the rafters above.
Isabel takes one look at it and shouts for the man to stop. He turns with a start.
The body has been disemboweled. It rotates, slowly, side to side. Around its neck has been wrapped some fifteen feet of bloody, shiny intestine.
“It will break,” Isabel says. Entrails were not meant to support weight, and she doesn’t want to see their contents splatter the room and the body lost to the shallows below. “You’ll have to bring him in by his shoulders.”
The constable, already pale and greenish, turns back to the window with a pained expression.
Isabel removes her coat and rolls her sleeves to the elbow. She’s seen a plenty more bodies than this fresh-faced policeman has, and she isn’t afraid of the task of washing blood from her traveling clothes. Together, she and the officer lift the body up and pull it in through the aperture.
She unwinds the intestine from the man’s neck—she can see he’s a man now, solidly built with a scruffy beard, bloodlessly pale, and naked from head to foot. When it’s loose from the rafters, she places it beside the body, cleans off her hands as best she can, and picks up the constable’s lantern for a closer look.
The man is in poor shape. His skin has been cut into with a sharp knife in lines and patterns up and down his torso. The back of his head is bloody, and his belly is an empty cavity.
On his forehead, precisely carved with a fine instrument, is a miniature of the circle drawn in the Luminous Codex and painted on the walls and streets of the Shell District: the summoning ritual of Essash-poleth, the demon of pestilence.
Thanks for reading! Come back next week for more ghosts and murder.
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