The body of Dr. Cornelius Grubb lay in the heather at the edge of the excavation site, arranged with a care that seemed almost tender. His arms had been folded across his chest. His legs had been straightened. His vasculum, that battered tin case he had carried everywhere, had been placed on his stomach like a funerary offering. Only the face betrayed the violence of his end: the eyes bulged, the lips were drawn back from the teeth in a rictus of astonishment, and the mouth gaped open to reveal the black ruin where his tongue had been.
Thaddeus Mire stood over the body with his hat in his hands, the cold seeping up through the soles of his boots. Beside him, Honoria Silt knelt in the frost-rimed grass, her face pale but composed. She had brought a lantern from the farmhouse, and its yellow light threw long, wavering shadows across the scene.
“The chain is still around his neck,” she observed quietly. “A surveyor's chain. Parkin's, I would wager.”
Ambrose Parkin, who had retreated several paces and was now leaning against a thorn tree with his head bowed, made a sound that was half sob and half protest. “It is mine. I left it in the equipment tent last night. Anyone could have taken it. Anyone.”
“When did you last see Dr. Grubb alive?” Thaddeus asked.
“At supper. He was in high spirits. He said he had found something in the soil samples, something important. He was going to examine it after the meal and present his findings in the morning.” Parkin's voice cracked. “I thought nothing of it. The man was always finding things in his soil samples. I went to my room at the inn and slept until I heard the shouting.”
The shouting had come from Jonas Groat, who had risen before dawn to check the trenches and had stumbled upon the body in the grey half-light. He and his brother now stood a short distance away, their faces grim and their hands thrust deep into the pockets of their rough wool coats. They looked, Thaddeus thought, like men who had seen such things before and had hoped never to see them again.
“Where is Creach?” Thaddeus asked suddenly.
The question hung in the cold air. No one had seen Septimus Creach since the previous evening. His room at the inn was empty. His horse was still in the stable, a detail that troubled Thaddeus more than he cared to admit. A man who had left on foot in the middle of the night, on a moor where the fog could swallow a traveler without a trace, was either a fool or a fugitive.
“We must send for the constable,” Honoria said, rising to her feet and brushing the frost from her skirts. “This is murder, and we are all suspect.”
The constable of Drearhaven was a man named Thistlewick, a stout, slow-moving individual with a red face and a permanent expression of mild bewilderment. He arrived at the farmhouse shortly after noon, accompanied by a scribe who took notes in a small, greasy notebook and a coroner's assistant who examined the body with the brisk efficiency of a man who had seen too many corpses to be impressed by any of them.
“Strangled,” the coroner's assistant announced, straightening up. “The hyoid is fractured, same as those old bones in the trench. The tongue was removed post-mortem with a sharp blade. A curious detail, that. The tongue.”
“It is a sign,” said a voice from the doorway.
Everyone turned. Septimus Creach stood on the threshold, his black coat dripping with moisture and his face white with cold. He looked as though he had spent the night wandering the moor, which, as it transpired, he had.
“I went to consult a source,” Creach said, stepping into the room and shaking the water from his sleeves. “A hermit who lives in a bothy on the far side of the Murgatroyd Mire. He possesses certain manuscripts that are not available in any library. I lost my way in the fog and was obliged to wait out the night in a shepherd's hut. I have only just returned.”
Thaddeus studied him. The explanation was plausible, but something in Creach's manner—a tightness around the eyes, a certain careful deliberation in his speech—suggested there was more to the story than he was telling.
“You said the tongue was a sign,” Honoria prompted. “A sign of what?”
Creach crossed to the fire and held his hands out to the flames. “Among the Romans, the removal of the tongue was a punishment reserved for those who bore false witness, who spoke against the state, or who revealed secrets that had been entrusted to them. It was also, in certain frontier rituals, the mark of a sacrifice to Tacita, the goddess of silence. The dead are made mute so that they cannot accuse their killers.”
“Dr. Grubb was not a Roman,” Thaddeus said flatly. “He was a botanist from Millstone City who spent his days collecting moss.”
“He found something,” Parkin said, his voice quavering. “He told me at supper. He said the soil samples contained something unexpected, something that would change our understanding of the site. He was going to examine it more closely. I told the constable this already.”
Constable Thistlewick cleared his throat. “I have examined the deceased's belongings. His notebook is missing. His vials, the ones he used for collecting specimens, have been smashed. Whatever Dr. Grubb discovered, someone did not wish it to be known.”
A silence fell over the room. Thaddeus looked at the faces around him: Parkin, pale and trembling; the Groat brothers, stoic and watchful; Honoria, her grey eyes sharp with calculation; Creach, inscrutable behind his mask of cold detachment; the constable, bewildered but dogged. One of them, perhaps, was a murderer. Or perhaps the murderer was someone else entirely, someone who moved unseen through the fog and the heather, someone who knew the ancient rituals and was determined to reenact them.
The thought was not a comfortable one.
The inquest was held three days later in the village hall at Candlewick, a drafty timbered building that smelled of damp wool and old candle wax. The coroner, a fussy little man named Chalk, presided over a jury of twelve local farmers and tradesmen who looked as though they would rather be anywhere else. The proceedings were brief and unsatisfactory.
Parkin testified that he had loaned his surveyor's chain to no one and could not account for its use as a murder weapon. The Groat brothers testified that they had spent the evening at the inn's taproom and had retired to their shared room at ten o'clock, where they had remained until dawn. Honoria testified that she had worked late in her room, cataloguing bones, and had heard nothing unusual. Thaddeus testified that he had been alone in the farmhouse, studying the bronze eagle and the curse tablet.
Creach, when called, testified that he had walked to the hermit's bothy and had become lost in the fog. The coroner asked for the hermit's name. Creach replied that the man was known only as the Anchorite of Murgatroyd and had taken a vow of silence. The jury exchanged glances of frank disbelief.
In the end, the coroner recorded a verdict of “murder by person or persons unknown,” and the matter was referred to the county assizes for further investigation. The jurors filed out of the hall with the relieved expressions of men who had discharged an unpleasant duty. The constable closed his notebook and went home to his supper. Justice, it seemed, would have to wait.
That evening, as the excavation crew gathered in the private parlor of the Drearhaven inn, a grim determination had settled over the group. They had lost a colleague, and the authorities had proven themselves incapable of finding his killer. If justice were to be done, it would have to be done by those who remained.
“The key,” Honoria said, “is the missing notebook. Dr. Grubb told Parkin that he had found something in the soil samples. Whatever it was, it got him killed. We must find out what it was.”
“How?” Parkin asked. “His samples were destroyed.”
“We take new samples. We go back to the site and we look for whatever he found. It must be something visible, something in the soil itself. A deposit of some kind. A mineral. A substance that does not belong there.”
Thaddeus nodded slowly. “And we keep watch. The killer may return. If we are vigilant, we may catch him.”
“Or her,” Creach said quietly. His eyes flicked toward Honoria for the briefest of moments before returning to the fire.
The implication hung in the air, unacknowledged but unmistakable. Honoria's face betrayed nothing.
The following morning, Thaddeus announced that he would travel to Millstone City. The decision surprised the others, but he explained it with a logic that was difficult to dispute.
“The curse tablet and the eagle belong to the Ninth Legion,” he said. “If the Ninth was disbanded or destroyed under unusual circumstances, there may be records. Military tribunals were documented. Punishments were recorded. The Central Pension Archive in Millstone City holds the regimental ledgers from the earliest days of the Crown's standing army, but it also holds copies of older documents, Roman records that were preserved by the monastic houses and later incorporated into the Crown's archives. I have a right of access, even if the pension board would prefer I did not exercise it.”
He did not mention the other reason for his journey: the cipher. The word had been nagging at him since the night of the murder, a half-remembered detail from his own struggles with the pension board. The rejection letter he had received, the one that had reduced his annuity by two-thirds, had been marked with a code in the upper corner: “non combatant in situ.” He had seen the same phrase somewhere else, somewhere unexpected. If he could find the regimental ledgers, he might be able to trace the origin of that phrase and discover why it had been applied to him.
The coach to Millstone City departed at dawn, a rattling, mud-spattered conveyance that stopped at every village along the turnpike and collected passengers with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a dog gathering fleas. Thaddeus took a seat in the corner and watched the moor recede through the rain-streaked window. The heather gave way to pasture, the pasture to plowed fields, and by midday the soot-stained spires of the city were visible on the horizon.
The Central Pension Archive occupied a grim, fortress-like building on the edge of the legal quarter, a structure that seemed to have been designed to discourage inquiry. Its windows were narrow, its doors were heavy, and its corridors were lined with shelves that groaned under the weight of ten thousand ledgers. The air smelled of old paper and dust, a smell that Thaddeus had come to associate with the slow suffocation of hope.
He presented his credentials at the front desk, a process that involved a great deal of suspicious scrutiny and the consultation of at least three different record books. Eventually he was granted a reader's ticket and directed to the military records division on the third floor.
The chief archivist was a wizened creature named Scrimshaw, whose back was permanently curved from decades of bending over manuscripts. He listened to Thaddeus's request with the weary patience of a man who had heard every conceivable inquiry and found most of them wanting.
“Roman records,” Scrimshaw repeated, as though the words tasted of something unpleasant. “We have a few. Mostly copies of copies, made by the monks of St. Alban's Priory before the Dissolution. They are stored in the basement. I will have them brought up.”
The wait was interminable. Thaddeus sat at a long oak table, watching the dust motes dance in the shafts of grey light, and tried to order his thoughts. The Ninth Legion. The curse tablet. The mass grave. The murder of Dr. Grubb. The pieces were all there, but they refused to cohere into a picture he could understand.
When the ledgers arrived, they were not what he had expected. They were enormous, bound in cracked leather, their pages yellowed and brittle. The script was a mixture of Latin and Old Albionic, the handwriting of a dozen different scribes over as many centuries. Thaddeus opened the first volume and began to read.
For hours he searched, scanning columns of names and dates and dispositions. The Ninth Legion had been stationed in Albion for nearly two centuries. Its history was a patchwork of campaigns and garrisons, of triumphs and losses. And then, around the year 120, the entries stopped. The last record was a single line, written in a hand that was markedly different from the others, smaller and more cramped:
“Legio IX Hispana deleta est ob Maculam Muneris.”
The Ninth Legion was destroyed because of the Stain of Service.
Thaddeus stared at the words. The Stain of Service. It was not a phrase he had encountered before, but its meaning was unmistakable. The legion had been purged because its members had violated the boundaries of their duty. They had been soldiers who had done civilian work, or civilians who had borne arms, and for that ambiguity they had been annihilated.
He turned the page, and his blood ran cold.
Tucked between the leaves of the ledger was a piece of parchment, folded small. He unfolded it with trembling fingers. It was a list of names, written in a modern hand, and at the top of the list was a heading:
“Men of Drearhaven Eligible for the Conscription, 1783.”
Beneath it, dozens of names, each one annotated with a cipher. Some were marked “combatant.” Others were marked “non combatant in situ.” The same cipher that appeared on his own pension rejection. The same phrase.
And there, halfway down the list, was a name that made his heart stop: Thaddeus Mire. Not himself, surely. The date was wrong. The Thaddeus Mire on the list would have been his grandfather, or perhaps his great-uncle. But the name was there, marked with the same damning cipher.
He turned the parchment over. On the back, written in a different ink, were the words:
“The tribunal sat. The sentence was carried out. The ledger was corrected.”
Thaddeus understood, with a clarity that was almost physical in its force, that the mass grave on his land was not the only one. The murders of 1783, whatever they had been, were connected to the Roman purge. And the pension board's denial of his claim was not a bureaucratic error. It was a continuation of the same ancient logic, the same merciless principle: the man who serves two masters must be erased.
He looked up from the ledger, his heart pounding. The archivist, Scrimshaw, was watching him from the far end of the room, his eyes bright and curious in his wizened face.
“Have you found what you were looking for, Mr. Mire?” Scrimshaw asked.
Thaddeus folded the parchment and slipped it into his coat pocket. “Not yet,” he said. “But I believe I am getting closer.”
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