"Inspector, do you mean that the body is still there, just as it was found?" Lillet asked.
"That's right. Everything's just as the first watchman on site found it."
She looked down at Amoretta.
"You don't have to see this if you don't want to, little love."
"Actually, I'd like her opinion on this. Whatever messages the killer is leaving, they're personal to Miss Virgine. If they mean anything to anyone, they would to her."
"Inspector, you're not going to make Amoretta look over all the gruesome details of a torture killing." What on earth is he thinking? She's not a professional police officer, used to mucking about in blood and violence.
"Lillet." The homunculus's cool fingers covered the hand that still rested on her shoulder.
"Amoretta?"
"It's all right. I know you just want to protect me, but this is something I want to do."
"You're sure?"
Amoretta nodded.
"Yes. This person has to be stopped. Some unpleasantness is a small price for that."
Lillet sighed. She didn't like watching Amoretta suffer, even in the smallest way, but it wasn't Lillet's choice to make.
"All right. Inspector?"
Ballatore took them down the alley to a spot directly opposite the stage door. This time the killer had apparently taken no chances that the body's discovery might be delayed. The watchmen they passed had drawn, pale faces that the flickering light made seem like exaggerated fetish-masks of anger or of shock.
Janice Riesling was waiting already, her dress and long cloak making her seem almost a threatening harbinger, a birdlike figure of ill omen. Lillet barely gave her a glance, though, as the obscene spectacle demanded her complete attention as soon as she saw it.
There was only a single corpse, but it was horrific enough. It was suspended by the wrists by what looked like horseshoes that had been driven into the brickwork of the wall by tremendous force. Her mouth was an open rictus and the lower portion of her face smeared over with blood. By contrast, the gaping rip clawed in her throat had not bled so freely. She had blond hair and wore a cheap lavender dress, not that of a prostitute but perhaps a shopgirl.
"Her tongue was ripped out," Ballatore said grimly. "She was forced to drown on the blood--there's bruises on her face from where her mouth was covered and head tipped back--and her throat torn out later, after she'd been dead a while. I'm guessing she wasn't killed here because of that; someone would have stumbled across the crime during the time it took her blood to settle."
A shudder passed through Lillet and she clutched at Amoretta's hand as much for her own support as for her love's. She'd faced death before, but had never been face-to-face with this kind of deliberate cruelty and violation done for its own sake.
Ballatore took a lantern from one of his men and turned it on the wall, first on one side of the body then the other. As he'd described about the previous night's crime, there were messages written in blood. To the left of the body was written, "For if the golden throat be stilled," and to its right, "Let all tongues fall to darkness and silence" as if they were parallel lines in a couplet.
"Do you recognize the lyrics, Miss Virgine?" Ballatore asked.
"No, I don't," Amoretta said in a small voice.
"You're sure? It isn't from some song you performed before coming to the City Theater? Or a tune or poem you like personally, even if you've never sung it in public?"
She shook her head.
"No, I'm sure that I've never seen or heard these words before."
"That's probably the literal truth," Riesling said. "Alchemy familiars don't have memories like humans do, but an exact record of what they observe."
Familiar! Lillet's temper flared up. How could anyone talk about Amoretta that way? Ballatore didn't give her the chance to make an issue out of it, though.
"Damn it. I had Mr. Saint and Maestro Terne take a look at it, since they were conveniently here, but they said it had nothing to do with tonight's performance or any other opera they know. I'd hoped it was something personal to you, Miss Virgine, but since it's not..." He scowled, pursing his lips as if he wanted to spit. "Devil take it, this breaks pattern! Just when I thought these killings made some twisted kind of sense...and I refuse to believe that there are two mutilation murderers using sorcery at work in the theater district at the same time!"
"I don't understand it either. Amoretta didn't even perform--" Lillet broke off suddenly, the words sticking in her throat. She forced herself to look at the scene again, at the girl's wounds and the couplet. "'For if the golden throat be stilled'...Oh, my God."
She looked at the Inspector and saw understanding in his eyes.
"She didn't perform," he said.
"That's why it isn't from an opera," Lillet continued. "Those were Amoretta's performances, adapted into diabolic sacrifices. This adapts what happens if she doesn't perform."
"The tongue and larynx removed so the victim can't speak, the couplet about silence..." Ballatore said, nodding. "It all fits." He glanced at Amoretta for a second. "I think our killer wants her to get back on stage. That's why the body was put here, open and obvious, so there'd be no mistake in finding the message."
"Then this is because I didn't sing tonight?" Amoretta put it into words.
"I...think it is," Lillet said.
"Why didn't you go on tonight?" Ballatore asked. "Neither Mr. Saint nor the Maestro could understand it. They said you just sent them a note saying you wouldn't sing tonight, without any explanation."
"This is why," Amoretta said, nodding at the corpse. "The killer was taking inspiration from my performances, so I thought I needed to stop giving him that inspiration."
"And instead this happens. Looks like he's not willing to surrender his muse so easily."
"I guessed wrong. I never thought that he'd react like this."
"We guessed wrong," Lillet said, shouldering some of the blame. "I went along with it, even agreed with you."
"You can never tell what the insane will do," Ballatore said. "They have their own logic, but understanding it before the fact is no easy task."
"Particularly if a devil's influence is making things worse," Lillet pointed out.
"If I go back on the stage, I'll be giving the killer what he wants. It should stop more demonstrations like this, but what if it turns out to be worse?"
Somewhere along the way, they'd all seemed to reach a tacit agreement that the killer was "he," rather than "her" or "they." Lillet wondered if any of them could even articulate why.
"If we don't catch him, he'll get everything he wants sooner or later. The real question is, now that he's broken pattern, will he go back to killing only on closing nights, or will he do something else right away?"
"You're the expert, Mage Consul," Ballatore said. "You tell me."
"I don't know. Amoretta and I spent the afternoon researching what the ultimate end of this might be, but we don't have any hard answers. Of all the forms of traditional, pre-Rune magic, sorcery is the least understood. Alchemy is scientific and precise by its nature and the kind of glamour practiced by hedge-wizards and village wisewomen was passed on by organized tradition, but ritual sorcery was the province of people who were evil, insane, or both. There isn't really an organized scholarship, more of a collection of journals and manuscripts--rarely even proper grimoires--by the practitioners and books by Church authorities on how to identify and fight it, which half the time got the details wrong or confused sorcery with other types of magic."
"So in all, you've learned nothing," Riesling said, seeming almost smug about it. Maybe she's just defensive, Lillet thought. Her job is to give magical assistance to the Watch, so it can't be easy to have me march in and do what she can't. Even so, though, in the face of the kind of horror that was before them, it seemed absurdly petty to pursue a personal squabble.
"Yes," she admitted, "only vague hints and suggestions of what might be happening, but nothing that would provide useful evidence. I did learn one thing, though."
"Which is?"
"I was bothered because the crimes obviously relate to Amoretta, to her roles in the performances."
"That's clear enough," agreed Ballatore.
"Well, that sounds like a human being, an obsessed madman. No devil thinks like that. One might take pleasure in pain and suffering, even torture, but not in this particular way, do you see? If a devil was obsessed with Amoretta, it would act more directly--at the very least it wouldn't have taken three crimes and your official attention to bring the news of the murders to her. It would have made sure she knew."
"That seems clear enough. We knew that all along."
"No, but there's more. These murders, or at least the one last night, weren't just committed using sorcery; they are sorcery. When those poor girls were killed according to the end of The Crimson Key, it was a human sacrifice according to ritual sorcery."
This was apparently too much for Riesling to accept.
"Are you delusional? How on earth could killing women according to...to an opera scene somehow have magical power? With or without Runes, any kind of magic involves very specific acts which manipulate supernatural energies in precise ways. You cannot tell me that this"--she waved a hand at the corpse mounted to the wall--"is magically significant!"
"That's my point, Ms. Riesling," Lillet said. Even if the older woman couldn't bring herself to be polite, Lillet could be, if only to show some respect for the dead and for Amoretta's plight. "That shouldn't be possible unless a new ritual is being created which incorporates the insane symbolism of these murders into the effect."
"But that's just not possible! Even when new magic is 'created,' it's not really being made. We just discover new ways to use the laws by which magic works and think up new combinations in which to use them. The laws themselves don't change any more than they did when...when humans discovered fire or the wheel or the mathematical concept of zero!"
Lillet nodded.
"I know. That's why I was so confused! But then I realized what could explain it. The objects we've been talking about are related to human magic, but they wouldn't apply in one circumstance."
Riesling stared at her as if she'd grown a second head.
"They wouldn't apply? What are you talking about?"
"The limits of human magic wouldn't control someone who wasn't human."
It was Ballatore who followed her point, despite his lack of magical talent. Perhaps it was his deductive experience.
"You mean a devil," he said. "Is that why you said what you did about how devils don't think this way, Mage Consul?"
Lillet beamed.
"Exactly, Inspector. It's a devil's power, but a human will." Her smile vanished and she smiled heavily. "I only wish that I could understand the point of it all, but in one way or another there are two people involved: a human sorcerer and a devil. What's more..."
"Lillet, what is it?" She hadn't even told Amoretta this part yet. In point of fact, she hadn't really articulated it in her own mind.
"Yes, don't keep us in suspense," Riesling said dryly.
"Well, it's only this. If a devil is responsible, then it has to be one which is capable of major acts of power. It's not some demon or succubus or grimalkin like which might be summoned through ordinary sorcery. This is at least a greater devil, capable of making these killings into a pact of blood sacrifice between itself and the sorcerer. What Amoretta's felt here tonight only confirms that. So not only does the sorcerer have enough power to summon up something that strong--"
"Could you do it?" Riesling suddenly challenged.
"With the right Rune, certainly. The problem is that even with that kind of Rune, summoning a spirit of that power is one thing, but binding it as a familiar is another matter. The Archmage Calvaros summoned Grimlet, but could only master it with the aid of the Philosopher's Stone, and even then his soul was still forfeit once their transaction was complete and the Archmage no longer had the Stone."
Lillet sighed again.
"Anyway, that's assuming I had a functional rune, which at that level of power would have to be unique to the devil in question. The problem is that without Runes, ritual sorcerers weren't very reliable in the binding side of their magic. Even a magician of sufficient power might not be able to bind a summoned devil because they didn't have the right magic to do it with. Instead, magicians would make pacts with those devils to bargain for their service."
She couldn't entirely repress a shudder at that, because she was all too familiar with the concept. When she'd been at the Silver Star Tower she had done it herself, freely signed the contract in blood and felt the icy grip of another's hold on her soul...twice. Lillet had been deceiving the devils, had escaped one contract when time unwound, negating the contract while leaving her with the benefit of the bargain, and escaping the second by tricking Grimlet into breaking the contract himself. They were risks she'd had to take to save Amoretta, her friends, and her teachers from Grimlet and the Archmage's spirit, but regardless of how successfully she'd planned it and carried it off, she knew the true cost of such an act in a way others could not.
"Wait a minute," Ballatore interjected. "If I'm following what you're saying, there's a devil out there who's at best bound to do the bidding of a madman and more likely is virtually free to commit whatever horrors it likes?"
Lillet nodded.
"I don't know the reasons, but what's happening here is that these murders and the sorcerer's obsession with Amoretta are being used by that devil, merged as ritual elements of sorcery. That means we're not just fighting to save future victims, but to keep that ritual from finishing."
"So what happens then?"
"I can't know that--but if this is the kind of thing that makes up the journey," she added with a wave towards the corpse, "do you really want to see the destination?" Lillet glanced at Amoretta, and felt a stab of fear as she contemplated what that ending might be.
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