"Drained of power," Alys repeated. "But what could do something like that?"
Preston Cross's face split in a mirthless smile.
"That is what I'm paying the two of you to find out."
Alys flushed with anger and would have made a hotheaded reply, but a cool flick of Galf's gaze in her direction made her damp things down at once. She could almost hear his voice saying, "So you don't like your client? So what? His meseta's still good, isn't it?"
What he actually said out loud, though, was, "And you're sure it's not just that it ran out of power the last time you used it?"
"Quite. I've experimented in the past. It can be used between twenty-five and thirty times each day, and...how shall I phrase it?...'recharges' itself after twenty-four hours, no doubt by drawing on the ambient power in the environment the way we do in order to use techniques. This time, it has failed to do so."
"Can't deny it's suspicious. You get the big bang and the next day your magic toy isn't working."
"That's how I saw it, at least," Cross tried his poor-little-trader act again. "You're the experts in this area, though. Just to clarify your objectives, most of all I want the thief. I go to a good deal of trouble to protect my collection. I will not have my privacy violated in such a fashion, and I want the entire underworld to know it!" He struck his fist on the table. "For an expert thief like this one to receive fifteen years at hard labor for burglary, theft, and destruction of property will send a message to the scum and riffraff of the inevitable consequences!"
He took a deep breath to help him restore his calm, then went on.
"The bonus for recovering stolen property listed in my commission was in fact, something of a misnomer. To earn that bonus, what I truly want you to do is to learn how the Fire Staff's power was lost. I don't want further incidents of this time affecting my valuable property! I need to know what happened--and more importantly, how to stop it from happening again. Lastly, if in some way you are able to return the Fire Staff to working order, I would gladly see my way clear to yet an additional bonus--say, another five thousand meseta. Are these terms understood?"
"And appreciated," Galf said. "Now, can we get a look at the scene of the crime, as it were?"
"Of course. I'll have you shown to my collection room."
A servant, thankfully not the obnoxious majordomo, quickly arrived in response to Cross's summons. As he led them to the collection room, Galf took the opportunity to question him about the night of the break-in, but found that his story tallied with Cross's version so far as he was aware of what had happened.
"Too bad he didn't know anything new," Alys said as they were left alone in the large room. "Still, it's nice to have some confirmation of Cross's story. You've told me a few tales of horror about clients who didn't give you the straight goods on a job for one reason or another."
"Everybody's got secrets," Galf agreed. "The trick's to keep them disentangled from each other, and the job. So, take a look around and tell me what you see."
The collection room was large beneath the domed ceiling common for ventilation in Motavian architecture. The floor was done up in fancy tiles of black and white polished stone, with gold-bordered purple carpets under the tables. There were wall-mounted display cases, shelves, and free-standing tables alike, each to best show off the variety of implements of violence and destruction featured within.
Alys didn't understand it, herself. She and Galf owned a variety of weapons, all of which they used, as appropriate, on the job. Cross didn't use anything in his collection for something practical, and they didn't even have any sentimental memories attached to him personally, whatever their history. If Cross had been a scholar, well, there was some value to studying history and making the past as clear as possible, but Alys just couldn't understand how anyone could romanticize battle, which was perhaps the most grimly pragmatic thing in the entire world.
You're losing focus, she told herself sharply. This is about the crime, not Preston Cross's weird habits. Worry about him when he becomes relevant. You're a hunter, not a tourist!
One of the room's four walls was not studded with displays; this one was pierced by three windows that let light into the hall. The latticed windows had diamond-shaped panes that echoed the design of the floor tiles. Alys glanced out and verified that all those faced the walled garden where Cross still sat sipping iced vanja.
The window that had been broken through was the one nearest the door; it had been covered from the outside with a large board to prevent further intrusion. Alys noted a circular piece cut out of one pane near the latch, the shape precise and the edges neat.
"This was done with a special tool," she concluded aloud. "That supports Cross's idea that the thief was a professional. An amateur would just have smashed the pane and risked alerting the house with the noise." She then found the cut alarm wire and the globule of resin that had been used to hold it. "This, too. He or she checked for an alarm trap and came prepared to disarm it."
"Also which window was chosen," Galf told her. "Could be random chance but I doubt it. Someone comes rushing in the door here, that window is almost exactly off to their right. The other two windows are in the field of vision, but that one wouldn't be seen at first glance. Care to guess why?"
Alys thought it over for a few seconds, then figured it out.
"It buys time. Until someone knows the thief's point of entry, they don't know which way to start chasing. Depending on how long the arriving people stare at where the theft happened, over on the left side midway down, they might give the thief an extra five seconds, ten, or even more."
Galf smiled broadly at his trainee.
"Good work! That's exactly right. Now go and take a look at the actual site of the theft."
Alys crossed the room to a shelf where the wood planking and the wall behind it were blasted and blackened in a circular pattern. The center point of the effect was a fancy case, two feet wide, one long, and about four inches deep, made of light-colored palm wood with brass fittings set with semi-precious stones. It had once been a work of art in and of itself, but now the wood had been blackened, chipped, and fractured. Opening the case, Alys saw a pair of daggers resting in a scorched velvet interior, their once-beautiful blades cracked and broken as if struck a titanic blow.
"I'm not surprised something weird happened with the Fire Staff," she said out loud. "It looks like someone hit this box with a Foi tech, maybe even Gifoi. These melted fittings imply a lot of heat, but the wood didn't catch flame, and fire techniques aren't good for ignition unless you deliberately want them to be." Just one of the vagaries of mystic power, she supposed. There were probably white-coats at Motavia Academy who studied the whys and wherefores; all Alys cared about was that the results were predictable.
"That sounds logical. Cross said that a gem was stolen. Any sign of it?"
Alys glanced over the case.
"Yeah, here, around back. There's a space where a stone was, but it's missing now. There's no sign that it was blasted to powder, and none of the other ones were. Hey, wait a second. Galf, could you come look at this?"
"Glad to."
The veteran hunter went over and Alys showed him the back of the case.
"So what am I looking at, here?"
"Well, do you see the setting where the gem is missing from? The metal has been twisted and melted, so it's a bit hard to see, but don't these look like scratches?"
"Dern, Alys, you're right. The damage from whatever hit the box has pretty well obliterated most of the traces, but here and there I can definitely see the marks where someone pried something loose here. Cross was right; the gem's not just missing, but stolen. It was deliberately removed before whatever happened to this box was set off."
Alys set the case back down.
"So what does this mean? A trained, professional thief sneaks into the house without alerting anyone. He passes up items of historical value, to say nothing of stuff he can easily break down for cash value like that ugly thing." She pointed to a jewel-encrusted sword with a gold handguard hanging on the wall. "Instead he goes to this case. All the stones on this thing together can't be worth much."
"Maybe five hundred meseta to buy them from a jeweler, and he'd be lucky to see half that from a fence. Whereas the amberine pommel-stone on that sword you pointed out would fetch a thousand for the thief by itself."
Alys nodded, carried away by her theme.
"That's right. Now, I suppose it's possible that it doesn't have to work this way, but I'd expect a thief that's so good at sneaking into a house to be able to recognize the valuable loot and grab it first!"
"Yep."
"So what's going on? Why this case in particular? And why set off that explosion?"
Galf stroked his beard.
"Seems to me that if the thief was an expert--and it's darned obvious he was--we oughta be giving him credit for it."
"I don't understand," Alys admitted. She'd learned early on in her apprenticeship that Galf respected it when she asked for help and advice (he was supposed to be teaching her, after all) but had no patience for it if she kept her mouth shut because she didn't want to admit she was clueless. In the hunter business, pride got people killed.
"Well, if he went after that gem, then it had to be that it was what he wanted most from here."
"Galf, even if there was one valuable stone on this case, no one would mount it on the back of the box where nobody would ever see it."
"Which tells me our thief wasn't looking for cash value."
Alys thought it through. Her mentor's logic held.
"That makes sense. Heck, he didn't even grab up a few trinkets on his way out. He didn't even take the case, just pried the one stone out of it. Which in retrospect was single-minded and probably dumb because it focuses attention on what he did take and leaves evidence of what happened."
"And when you combine the concepts of an expert thief and a single target of no known special monetary value, what do you get?" Her mentor's grin was wolfish, and after a moment, Alys's spread to match it.
"Hired henchman," she said.
"Got it in one, girl. Let's go ask our client a few questions about this case and where it came from."
Cross was writing a letter at the garden table when Galf and Alys returned to him, but he pushed aside the paper and ink-bottle at once.
"Have you learned anything?"
"Questions, mostly," Galf said.
"Oh?"
"The case with the daggers, the one that got hit by whatever made the noise. Where'd you get it?"
"A private sale," Cross said.
"From?"
"I don't see as how that's any of your concern," he replied coldly. Galf just gave a long-suffering groan.
"Look here, Preston. We work for you. We don't work for the town of Zema. I don't care what kind of shady deal you had going--or at least, I do care, but only to figure out what makes the things important. If you don't want to level with us, we can get going back to Aiedo and take a commission we actually have a chance of collecting the fee on. Your pick."
Cross and Galf looked at one another steadily. Then, as Alys had expected, the client gave in.
"Oh, all right. Besides, there's no evidence I did anything wrong. I just made a purchase. I had no way of knowing if there was anything amiss."
"That's one theory. So where'd you buy the daggers from?"
"It was a man named Argus. He runs an apothecary shop on the east side of town."
Antique daggers from an apothecary. Yeah, sure, Cross didn't know if there was anything "amiss." Still, as Galf had pointed out, no one was paying them to track down stolen daggers. It was like dealing with Bain--until Cross made it her problem, she was better off just keeping her mouth shut. Besides, they had a fence to roust.