Adamant Blood

“I don’t understand,” Mark said, in a rather harsh way. He was stressed as fuck right now and he let some of that anger show. “You’re really telling me that there’s nothing to be done. That those killers are going to get away with it.”

Taking the car had proven to be a good choice, because the trip was nice and Mark didn’t have to be around anyone else, which he realized he wanted, and was glad for, about halfway through the drive. Being on a tram was not a place he wanted to be right now. Especially if people recognized him.

And now he was here, at Collective Temple, which was a giant cathedral with its own hoverport and offices for every single denomination of paladin, priest, or other sort of person in the Chosen System, which was a lot of people. Every god was here, except for Thrashtalon, of course. And every person here was dressed nicely. It was kinda wonderful to walk through the main hall and look up at all the sculptures of the New Pantheon, and down at the people in the halls, wearing the silver breastplates common to paladins, or the other people, who wore more normal clothes. Chainmail seemed to be a popular choice, for some reason. Mark had seen Willow wearing chainmail, too.

Mark had gone to the front desk, sitting under a radiance of multicolored glass windows, and then made his way through some bureaucracy to meet the agent working his case. Inquisitor Layfair was a 30-something native of Memphi who sat at a desk in a big office of desks. Layfair seemed permanently exhausted.

Mark had started off polite and strong, reiterating the sequence of events, the possible Powers that he saw on display, but now he was here, facing Layfair with an exhaustion all his own.

Layfair said, “Look, Careed. The incident was outside of the city, and we have no records of that sort of team composition, so that check failed to turn up anything, and so, at this point, we’re 99% sure the people who tried to rob you are exiles. You survived. They probably won’t. A lot of exiles don’t make it past 3 years.”

“What the— So what if they’re exiles! They’re obviously survivors! They survive by killing people!” Mark said, trying not to raise his voice. He failed. “I turned over that silver sword! It had to be expensive! Surely it had a paper trail! Surely the AIs you have here are better… better than this!”

Other people looked their way.

Some people tried not to look their way.

Layfair had started off polite, too, but now he solidly said, “I solve violent assault inside the city, between hunters, when demons are involved or when Thrashtalon is involved. Not open-ended monster hunter drama outside of the city, unless demons or cultists are directly implicated, and that’s not the case here. What you have given me is an impossible task. A strictly no-go situation for me, and even for the cops here in Memphi, and I’ll tell you why:

“The people you described could be from anywhere in the world, and they are likely already gone.

“Even their armbands could have been fake. The City AI turned up no one with those sorts of Powers you mentioned, in the age groups you mentioned, in the same sort of configuration you mentioned. Individually, those people exist, but not together. I expanded the search to include pairs of people. Still nothing.

“Now the AIs don’t tell us everything. All it takes is an investigator meeting one accomplished technopath in their career to make them discard almost all AI information as fake. Besides that, no one wants to live in a complete surveillance state, so AIs aren’t allowed to distribute what they see to third parties. And different AIs can determine things in different ways, especially when Powers get involved.

“Murders are flagged hard, but for everything else below a murder… There are reasons that Inquisitors exist. We solve violent crimes between the hunting community, and especially murder, which does happen a lot, but when it happens outside of the city, between people we don’t know and can’t piece together, we don’t do shit.

“Those people have already moved on. They shot their shot, and they failed. They’re going to move on. That’s how exiles function.”

Mark was flabbergasted.

He had handed over the backpack full of collected remains and badges to Willow yesterday, and she handed it off… to these people, right? And the sword?

Mark asked, “You got the sword, right? That’s an expensive sword. It can’t be tracked? What about the pile of IDs and the diary I recovered from the dead? I know the IDs aren’t connected to the sword at all, and the sword came from the maybe-brawny… bandit…” Weird word, there. Mark didn’t like it. “But they happened in the same area… kinda.”

Layfair frowned. “The items we received from Inquisitor Willow are in Evidence for a few more days, and then they’ll be turned over to Memphi Hunter Remains, for distribution to family and next-of-kins.”

… Layfair wasn’t telling Mark something. Something big—

Oh.

He wanted Mark gone.

Out of his hair, out of his problems.

There had to be a reason he was being so dismissive, right?

Maybe he was just busy.

Mark found himself asking, “What other cases are you working on?”

Layfair frowned, and then he said, “Serial rapist, kill-stealer issues that ballooned into a murder four nights ago, and there’s the Headtaker case. That’s a serial killer that is active every few months, taking someone’s head and then dropping the body at Southgate. I don’t expect to get anywhere with Headtaker, but it’s my turn to fail to solve the body drop this month. I’m closing in on the rapist, for sure. I got 2 interviews today, and I expect to get what I need to get from one of the women. The kill-stealer-to-murderer is going to be an active hunt, as soon as we can clear the suspect for a Memphi-approved take down, or the guy turns himself in, which could happen. He’ll face jail if he accepts a takedown, or maybe he’ll take an exile offer. Hard to know.”

That was a bunch of information that Mark did not need to know, exactly, but Mark had asked, and Layfair had delivered. Mark was overwhelmed. Logically, he knew that people did bad things to other people all the time. Assaults, murder… the other bad things. Mark didn’t understand it at all, but he knew that people did bad things to other people. Layfair was on triage, or something like that. In a monster war, warriors who were too far gone, or only facing scratches, got ignored, while people who could be helped and who needed help got help.

Mark said, “Those seem like bigger cases than mine.”

“They are,” Layfair said, solidly. “We aren’t even the cops for Memphi, kid. I just got handed your case because of who you are. Maybe you should take this case down to the local level, because I certainly can’t downgrade this case to the cops. Freyala knows I tried! But my boss’s bosses want you taken care of at the highest level, so here you are, being an obstruction to casework that is actually important.”

Oh.

It was like that, huh?

Layfair continued, “I got handed this case yesterday evening, did all the preliminary work, and now I’m giving you my professional opinion that this is a dead-end of a case. Let it go.”

Mark had an angry think.

Inquisitors were not cops. They were high-powered individuals that were responsible for big events. They mostly dealt with Thrashtalon and demonic influences and high-powered killers. The local cops would have been the ones to figure out an attempted murder. The city of Memphi was the one with the jail, where people could be held and rehabilitated.

Inquisitors just killed people.

Mark made a swift decision, based on too many weird things that he had yet to piece together in his mind, and in his life.

All the world wanted him to be a villain, eh? Maybe it was time to start acting like one. Bombastic. Primarily, he imagined what Gaston Lussier, Shadowlock, would do, aside from laugh maniacally. The laughing came after the big speech, though, after winning. That’s how villains normally operated, right? To start with, though, the villains always made promises.

In a discarded sort of way, Mark realized his sense of propriety had been shattered by Addashield, and Addavein especially.

“Okay!” Mark said, a bit too loudly, as he looked at Layfair.

Layfair got concerned. And then Mark stood up. He squared his shoulders and Layfair got even more worried.

Mark projected his voice to the entire room, “There is absolutely no way that a functioning city would ever ignore potential serial murderers outside their doors! You are obviously overworked, and you need help! What do I need to do to haul these people in myself!?”

Layfair looked more embarrassed than Mark had ever seen a man be embarrassed.

Good!

Mark was fucking mortified, too!

Layfair quietly hissed, “Sit down, kid.”

Mark asked, “Why should I, if you’re not pursuing this case? If you’re handing it off to the local cops! I should go to them! Furthermore, I demand all of the evidence that I have turned over to you, so that I can better follow it all myself!”

A few people were watching.

Most were ignoring Mark and Layfair.

Layfair stood up, declaring, “Vigilantism was always an option for you, Brother of the Dragon, Blackvein, but I needed you to tell me that you were pulling a vigilante before I could clear you for it. All high Powered people in good standing with Memphi can do the same when it comes to matters outside the walls.”

“… Oh!”

A few people chuckled somewhere.

Mark sat down. “So where were we?”

Layfair grabbed a folder out of his desk and slapped it in front of Mark as he sat back down, too. “I said to myself, when I got this job and I saw that it wasn’t an easy solve, I said, ‘Layfair, you unlucky bastard,’ and then I made up this little plan of attack for you to take, use, and then go see how futile it is to capture killers in the wilds, and hopefully not get killed yourself.” He pushed the folder toward Mark. “That’s yours. The majority of Inquisitor-selects die in their first year on the job, and that’s years after getting their Powers at least partially mastered. You, a similarly-disastrously-unlucky-bastard, are being fast-tracked by the powers-that-be.”

Mark took the folder. It weighed almost nothing.

… The folder rapidly felt a lot heavier, emotionally.

“… Alright,” Mark said to himself, holding the folder.

Layfair said, “Come back in a week if you get nowhere. In that amount of time, I might have solved one case myself. This shit takes a lot of time, so don’t go thinking you’ll solve anything fast. And you’re not getting the evidence back at all. You have pictures, and a code to the scanner database, with all the evidence scanned for you to look at at your leisure. Figure it out. Goodbye!”

Well okay then!

Mark could have walked out of there embarrassed.

Instead, he held his head high, shoulders straight, and strode out of there without another word to Layfair. He walked out of Collective Temple with his task set before him, and a set of new, old realizations on his mind.

Heroes were needed in order to make the world a good place.

And Mark was developing a problem with authority.