Confessions of a Madman

Chapter Five: Crooked Blades

Then they came. A wondrous couple – a young, handsome man in a dark blue service uniform, a gilded blade by his side and the biggest of smiles on his carefree face. The woman beside him was a beauty, her cheeks framing an illustrious smile, her black hair partially in a braided bun, attached to an uplifted veil, and partially flowing past her back to her hips. The gown she wore shone in the sunlight, and the cheers from the crowd made the couple blush.

The scene reminded me of something I had forgotten. I had forgotten that things like this still live on. Love, happiness, youth. Gruesome irrationality and twisted passion had become my world, whether in the halls beneath the ivory towers, where men steeped in treachery and bathed in jealousy to dole out naught but revenge while seeking power; or in the offices of police headquarters, where order was a standard none could even begin to dream about, and it was easier to take a bribe and look away than stare at an unfixable mess; or out on the streets, where men with strange knives killed strange people, for strange purposes and stranger benefits. Then there was Harlington’s talk of treason, and the results I had gotten from the Order.

My world hadn’t changed much since Khooma. This was simply another chapter in my life, and blood still replaced ink. The quill, a curved knife rather than the blade on a musket, was cutting through the paper, and the world behind my leather bounds was unseen. Until now.

Young love, naive and fresh, hopeful and blessed. How I longed for simpler times. Yet times never were simple. I simply saw what little others decided not to – what I decided not to.

We rolled past the scene and were still on the path to the headquarters as I receded once more behind the red curtains of the black carriage. I recall still the details mailed to me this morning.  Of the commissioned scholars who had taken an interest in my request, two had mailed back with dissimilar results – one, the earlier, said the crops I had sent were not contaminated.  There was no strain. The other sent results stating it was a strange sort of genetic infectant, highly contagious among crops and quick to decay them. I mailed back to both, yet the contradiction makes me wonder. Which was the right answer? Should I wait for further opinions?

I stowed the thought back for a moment to prepare for the briefing at the headquarters. While they were the official headquarters, barely any of the three thousand men that investigated and acted upon crime were here. The headquarters were used mostly for notary purposes, and the people working here were usually secretaries of the law, put in place and commissioned for, simply for the purposes of filing records, checking evidence and reviewing cold cases – as if there was any time for that. The filing room designated to unsolved crimes was the largest and fullest of any room in the entire headquarters, and new crimes kept flooding in. A few desk-bound investigators and politically-assigned supervisors littered the busy and humidly hot filing room this morning as I strode in towards the back of the headquarters of the cooler briefing room. Joining me were two constables of the separate districts where the two crimes I had been informed of this morning happened.

“Two bodies.” started one of the two, as I took a seat at the longtable of the room, while the other constable locked the doors.

Laid out on the longtable was a map of the island. The map was a top-down view of the entire island, structured in rings. The innermost circle, at the center of which was the Emperor’s Estate, marked the highly advanced Residential District. Surrounding the area, protecting the uppermost cap of the island from the rest of the population to the edge was the authoritative district, Cronwell’s seat of political power, home of the the ivory towers, and the frequent shopping district of the elite. Below that, the largest ring was the Common District, where the bulk of Cronwells continuously poorer, larger, sicker and hungrier population lived.