Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 134898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 540(@250wpm)___ 450(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 540(@250wpm)___ 450(@300wpm)
Aspeth’s workstation is easy to find amidst the clutter of books, shelving carts, and boxes of artifacts. Hers is the desk covered with all the cats. The archives keep cats around as mousers, but Aspeth is a softhearted sort and started feeding them bits of her lunches, she told me. Now they all hang about her desk, waiting for handouts or petting. Today she’s seated at her desk, which is piled high with books and has a lamp on the corner. Two cats are curled around each other to her right, and another peeks down from a stack of books on her left. A gray beast with a huge fluffy tail saunters past me as I stand and wait for Aspeth to notice I’m here.
She doesn’t, of course. Aspeth is lost in her research. Her face is bent over something, a magnifying glass held in one hand. I clear my throat and she startles, thunking her head with the glass. One of the cats scrambles away with a yowl, sending papers flying in his wake. I get a chance to see what she’s studying so intently. It’s a long, pointy pin the size of a finger, made of gold and with a jewel at the end. There is a strange glyph on the prominent head of the pin.
“New find?” I ask.
She huffs, adjusting her oversized spectacles and pushing them back up her nose as she straightens. “I wasn’t expecting you today. You startled me.”
“I see that.” There’s a chair parked across from her desk, but when I pull it out, another cat leaps up and runs away. “Is this a bad time?”
“Of course not. I’m just studying an item before it gets shipped out to Lord Emijar.” Her eyes gleam with excitement. “It’s quite fascinating.”
“It looks like a diaper pin.”
She leans back. “Well…yes. But it’s the glyphs on it that are the interesting part. Even something as small as this has magic attached to it. Do you know what it says?”
I shake my head. I can’t read a lick of Old Prellian.
“This symbol is the one for ‘sickness,’ and the one on the other side of the pin is the symbol for ‘dohren,’ which was the soul. And to the Prellians, the soul was housed in the gut. The interesting thing is that the sickness symbol is inverted, which means that it’s the opposite of sickness—health. And the fact that they’re wishing soul health on a diaper pin means—”
“—that someone’s baby left some truly heinous messes?”
She giggles. “Possibly! Or it could just be a general blessing. I’m looking for duplicates of this particular duo of symbols to cross-reference and see if there are any other symbol pairings like this. But to think—a spell for good digestion on your baby’s diaper. Isn’t that fascinating?”
Frankly, the most fascinating thing to me is that the Prellians enchanted everything. Even a diaper pin. It means anything found in the network of caverns and tunnels below Vastwarren is likely to be magical in some way, and thus it makes the guild money. “Very interesting. I don’t suppose you have a moment to chat, do you?”
“For a friend? Always.” She beams at me and rubs her nose, leaving a dusty smear there. Her glossy brown hair is pulled into a tight bun at the top of her head, but several strands have slipped free and she looks a frowsy, scattered mess. It makes me happy, though, because Aspeth is doing what she loves. She’s thriving in the cutthroat guild environment. Married to a Taurian guild master, apprenticing to the head archivist, and surrounded by cats as she studies ancient artifacts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her happier.
Which is why I hate that I keep showing up with bad news.
She blinks owlishly at me. “Is something wrong?”
I nod, a lump in my throat.
Quickly, she sets aside her magnifying glass and the artifact she was studying. A cat wanders over the desk, tail in the air, and she picks it up and moves it to the floor. “What is it?”
I bite my lip, then sit in the chair across from her and lean forward so I can whisper my terrible news. “I found another body today.”
Aspeth—Sparrow—gasps, her ink-stained hand flying to her mouth. “What?”
Hissing, I wave a hand at her. “Quiet! No one else can know!”
She nods and leans in closer. “What do you mean,” she asks, her voice pitched low, “another body?”
“Remember how I told you I felt one the other day? That I was tingly all over? And it only stopped when they moved the dead man out of the alley?” When she nods, I continue, rubbing my arms as if I can still feel the thousands of pinpricks. “Well, I felt another. Worse than before this time. I think I even know how he died. Someone cut his throat in the alley behind the guild hospital.”