“Will anyone who is not a Wolf see that log?”
“Not unless Helmat gives that permission. Hawks and Swords are always logged. Any query that comes through either branch is noted. Wolves have slightly different imperatives.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re Wolves. Some of the work the Wolves do is more secretive in nature. We’re not the Imperial Service, but we’re not Hawks either.”
“If I wanted to query some of the Hawks’ recent work, I have access to that information?”
Rosen exhaled. “Yes. Elluvian’s mirror has the relevant reports.” At Severn’s expression, she added, “You want to know about the remaining witness.”
He nodded.
“The information about that witness, and the three who didn’t survive to become part of your investigation, are waiting for you. Don’t look at me like that—Helmat’s been closeted in meetings for the past few days and hehatesmeetings. We know what some of those meetings are about.
“I’d love to know why you think the Tha’alani castelord is relevant, though.”
The witness, Dogan Sapson, was in jail. The cells served two purposes, the first being the expected one. They kept the criminals in. Given the nature of some of the criminals and some of their crimes, the cells had been constructed with protections against various forms of magic. Those protections were also useful when attempting to preserve the life of someone who had been targeted by the powerful.
Severn looked at the three morgue reports the Hawks had also filed. He knew what had killed the first two witnesses; the third had drowned. The drowning, however, had not occurred in any of the expected places—which is to say, near any body of water, large or small. If the first two deaths could be passed off as the natural outcomes of criminal activities gone wrong, the third could not.
Practical magic, Severn thought grimly. Of all of the lessons he’d been offered—or threatened with—that was the one he didn’t want to miss. He knew of magic, of course—any street child did. He’d never had the means to separate the stories of the street from reality. If a man could die from drowning without being near or in actual water, that was an application of magic he wanted to understand.
The Barrani Hawks had been sent to secure both of the two witnesses who had been alive when Severn’s sessions with Ybelline had begun in earnest. The first group had had the witness in custody; he had drowned in the middle of a city street, with no obvious visible intervention. The Hawks in question had failed to find the source of the attack before the man had ceased to breathe.
The other witness had been picked up by Teela and Tain. That witness had survived; there was no morgue report filed under his name. There was no report, he noted, of the event at all; Dogan Sapson was in the holding cells.
“Rosen—”
“The Hawks are famously bad at logging reports,” Rosen said, her voice raised to carry through Elluvian’s open door. “Their duty sergeanthatesreports. Even when the Hawks file them, half of them end up shredded.”
“Shredded?”
“He’s a Leontine.”
Leontine. Leontine. Severn grimaced and accepted his ignorance; he then attempted to alleviate it. An image of a golden-furred, long-fanged bipedal creature in what might have been a uniform filled the screen. Sergeant Marcus Kassan. “Do we have a lot of Leontines in the Halls of Law?”
“Nope. They have a problem with territoriality, or so we’ve been told. We have exactly one. I personally think they’d make excellent Wolves, but no one’s asked me. And no,” she added, “I’ve no records of the Tha’alani castelord in the Halls of Law, ever. Not the current castelord, at any rate. We don’t get a lot of Tha’alani here when we don’t log an official request.
“The Hawks have one at a permanent desk—Missing Persons. Other than that, we get visits. And castelords don’t do random visits at the convenience of the Wolves. The Hawks also have Aerians; the Hawklord is Aerian.
“Leontine, Barrani, Tha’alani, Aerians, humans. The only thing they’re missing is a Dragon.”
“The Swords?”
“There are Aerian swords, but the Swords tend to be human. Humans don’t tend to cause panic in the city streets, and quelling panic is the theoretical reason the Swords exist.”
That wouldn’t have worked in the fiefs. “Can we arrange to speak with the witness in protective custody?”
“If by ‘we,’ you mean you, the answer is no.”
“Elluvian?”
“The answer is probablyhell no, given the nature of the case and the reason for the custody.”
“If Elluvian was working for outside interests, and he wanted to destroy the Halls of Law, he could.”
Rosen did not disagree. “We know that. They won’t. The kind of magic used to kill witness number three wasn’t magic humans can normally use without effort and risk. There’s not a lot of crossover between the Wolves and the other two branches of the Halls. They’ll know Elluvian is Barrani; his length of tenure here won’t make a difference. They won’t know that all of our recruitment is done, initially, by Elluvian. If they knew, it would cement their refusal.”