Chapter 2

Raleigh stopped at the bottom of the driveway and looked up at the mist-shrouded parapets of Knox Bishop’s house. Ghosts and memories haunted the place. It sent a shiver through her heart.

Not one light burned in that house anymore. Raleigh never bothered to light the lamps in any of the rooms. She went to bed at sundown. Usually, she slept in the servant’s quarters when she bothered to sleep at all. She occupied the old maid’s room, while Mrs. Mitchell and Dax stayed in their own rooms.

Mrs. Mitchell kept on her usual schedule of meals, laundry, and housekeeping. She behaved exactly as if Bishop was still home, except she never delivered his meals to his rooms upstairs. She served Dax and Raleigh in the kitchen, after which the three of them went about their business without a word to each other. Raleigh never even bothered to tell Dax she was leaving in the first place. She just disappeared.

Raleigh continued her daily training schedule. She saw Dax training on his own at a different time of day, but their paths never crossed. They never spoke or even looked at each other. The memories hurt too much.

Raleigh hitched her gun belts around her hips and settled her crossbow across her shoulder. She had to re-enter that house, and she did it the way she entered any battle to the death. Re-entering that house, facing the job she left behind, demanded all her reserves. It might even kill her.

Her boots crunched through the gravel on the way up the driveway. She strode around behind the house to the kitchen door, where she met Mrs. Mitchell emptying the dirty dishwater from lunch. Mrs. Mitchell gave her a sharp look, but said nothing. She didn’t approve of anybody skipping meals without the most critical reason.

Raleigh smiled at her. Now that she faced the inevitable, the decision gave her a sort of grim energy. She could face this. She could stuff her own feelings down where no one would see them. She would deal with the twen. Then she would quit the way she planned. Bishop’s old clients could hire someone else to do their jobs.

Raleigh went into the house and hung her crossbow on the nail by the door along with her curved throwing blade. She kept her guns on, though. She never took them off.

She warmed her hands by the fire for a second when she heard footsteps outside. She peeked through the door and spotted Dax crossing toward the barn. She ducked outside and followed him.

Dax went into a tool shed adjacent to the barn. The door banged shut, and Raleigh passed through to find the young man standing in front of a high work bench crowded with boxes, tools, and papers.

Raleigh came to his side. Dax gazed down at a small glass box sitting on the bench. A tiny creature no larger than a pea squirmed around in a bubble of water. It cocked its head to look up at Dax and Raleigh.

Raleigh’s voice cracked from lack of use when she tried to speak. “How’s it going?”

Dax acted as though they hadn’t spent seven weeks not speaking to each other. He nodded. “It’s going okay. It’s eating the mussels.”

“Show me,” she told him. “Show me what you’ve been doing to take care of it.”

He tugged a wooden box toward him and pried off the lid. “The supply is getting low. We’ll need some more soon.”

He pulled out a gelatinous blue blob of gooey jelly and slapped it onto the bench. He picked up a sharp skinning knife and carved off a slice. He chopped it into tiny pieces and put the rest of the blue mussel back in the crate.

He took hold of the glass cube. The twen raced around its tiny world in a frenzy, but Dax paid no attention to the creature. He slotted a screwdriver into a groove in the lid and unscrewed a round plug. He steadied the square to prevent any water from spilling out.

He set the cube back down on the bench with the hole wide open. He dropped the scraps of mussel meat into the water. The twen zipped around its little home and gobbled up the scraps as fast as he put them in. In seconds, it ate all the food Dax gave it. “There you go. Nothing simpler.”

Raleigh watched him close the lid and clean up the mess. When he finished, Dax went back to staring at the twen.

Raleigh braced herself. She was in charge here since Bishop died. She had to make the first move to break down the icy reserve holding her and Dax apart. “We’ll need money to buy more mussels.”

Dax nodded and didn’t answer.

Raleigh tried again. “I see you’ve been keeping up your training. That’s good.”

He didn’t look up. “I don’t want to lose my skills. I want to be ready in case of another fight.”

“You’ve done very well, and I’m sorry I let you down these last few weeks. Get your weapons ready, because we’re going back.”

His head shot up. “Going back?”

Raleigh had to smile at him. “First we’ll go to the market and get some more mussels, but we won’t need very many. We’re going to track down Bishop’s client and hand over the twen.”

Dax blinked at her. “How are we going to do that?”

Raleigh chuckled. “I have no idea, but we better do it soon. Word will spread through the market someone’s buying blue mussels. It’s only a matter of time before they find out we’ve got the twen and they come after it.”

She started to turn away, but Dax laid a hand on her arm to stop her. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going up to Bishop’s office. There must be a clue there on who hired him. I only wish we had his notebook. That would tell us.” Her eyes flew open, and she gasped out loud. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“What?” Dax asked. “What’s wrong?”

She spun away. “The notebook! What an idiot I am! I’ve been so wrapped up in feeling sorry for myself I didn’t think about the notebook.”

He hurried after her. “What about the notebook?”

Raleigh raced out of the shed on her way back to the kitchen. “Don’t you see? Whoever broke in here to steal the notebook must have been looking for information only Bishop had. Bishop told me his father had information in his notebook about the Ten Guilds forming an Alliance to create the Elixir of Life. If we find out who stole the notebook, we might be able to get it back. Then we could locate Bishop’s client.”

She burst into the kitchen and blew past Mrs. Mitchell to the stairs. Raleigh hadn’t ascended those stairs since the fateful night she and Dax came home alone from Hinterland to find the house ransacked and Mr. Bishop, Sr.’s notebook stolen from Bishop’s wall safe.

She bolted up the stairs with Dax on her tail. After the break-in, Mrs. Mitchell made it her personal mission to restore the house to its former condition. She went to great lengths and expense to clean everything up, replace every item of furniture, every thread of ruined carpet and curtain, and redo the wallpaper. She made the whole house as pristine as it was before the break-in. No one would ever know the state they found things when they came home.

Raleigh blocked all that out of her mind. She couldn’t let the past distract her. She couldn’t remember Bishop standing over there under the window or him sitting in his wing-backed chair in front of the fire.

She charged down the passage to Bishop’s office work room. Mrs. Mitchell outdid herself on this place, although she couldn’t restore it to what it was. She couldn’t make head or tail of all his papers, and she didn’t even try to replace his potions or his helmet microscope. She cleaned out the broken glass and debris. She stacked the papers on his desk and left them alone.

Raleigh paused in the door. Dax panted behind her, and they both gazed in on this mausoleum to their fallen hero. Raleigh’s eye skipped over every inch of the place. She had no idea where to start. She would have to go through every detail of Bishop’s life, even the part from before she met him. Did she really want to do that? Did she really want to dig into Bishop’s life, going back who knew how far?

She really had no choice. She might get lucky and find the information on Bishop’s client lying around on the top of those stacks of papers, but she held out little hope of that. Either way, she couldn’t back down on this, no matter how much it hurt. She would find out more about Bishop than she ever wanted to know, more than he ever wanted her to know.

She crossed the room to the desk and picked up the first piece of paper. It was an invoice from the local wheelwright for repairs to the carriage out in the barn. A bold hand-scrawled across the bottom: Paid. She checked the date. The invoice was more than three years old. Raleigh chuckled.

Dax whispered over her shoulder. “What? What did you find?”

She turned a happy smile on him. “It’s nothing. He was a pack rat. He kept every piece of paper that ever crossed his palm. Run downstairs and bring back that basket from the kitchen hearth. Unless I’m mistaken, we can throw out most of this and make our lives a lot easier.”

While he did as she asked, she set the invoice on Bishop’s chair and picked up the next piece of paper. It was a letter from the Perdue United Cab Service, dated more than twenty years ago.

Dear Sir

Thank you for your inquiry into the accident dated August 17, 1753. Unfortunately, our service no longer employs the driver involved in that particular accident. The nature of the accident rendered him unable to work, and he retired to his brother’s farm near Henleyville. He informed our service he never intended to drive for a living after his unattended coach caused the death of an unsuspecting bystander. Thank you once again, and please inform us if we can assist your inquiry further.

Kind wishes, Ronald Forsythe

Perdue United Cab Service

Perdue, Maryland

Raleigh frowned down at the paper in her hand. Why would Bishop keep this letter for so long? Only one explanation made sense. The accident in question occurred when Bishop was a young man. It involved a coach killing an unsuspecting bystander.

The story Bishop told her of his father’s death came back to her. Bishop’s father, Mr. Bishop, Sr., worked as a slayer before his death. He died crossing the street when a coach raced out of control and trampled him in the street.

So Bishop wrote to the Cab Service to locate the driver of the coach. Did he find him? The letter gave no indication. His father’s death haunted Bishop for the rest of his career. He never found out for sure if his father’s death was an accident or murder.

Raleigh turned around to set the paper on the chair along with the invoice, but she hesitated at the last moment. Her hand hung in mid-air. Should she get rid of this relic, too? Bishop thought it was important enough to keep, so maybe she should, too.

She set it in a different location on another corner of the desk. She picked up the next sheet. It was a lift of ingredients for one of Bishop’s potions. Raleigh read down the list of ingredients.

Idunt hair oil

Bueh recnibetl

Ruoib brain, well mashed, 7 parts per quart

Eodhea toewrerq

Raleigh laughed to herself. She didn’t recognize half the words on that list, but maybe this recipe would come in handy someday. She put that on top of the letter from the Cab Service.

Dax came back and set the basket next to Raleigh’s feet. She dropped the invoice into it, along with a bill for delivery of seven cartloads of coal from five years before. The next ten papers, she discarded along with the bill.

She smiled up at Dax. “Feel free to help out.”

He stared down at the desk with wide eyes and shook his head. “I wouldn’t dare.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “Most of this you can’t go wrong with, and if you think there’s the slightest chance anybody would want to keep it, put it over here.”

Dax approached the next stack of paper. He picked up the first sheet and read it over. Then he laughed and slid it into the basket. “You’re right.”

She picked up the next leaf. She scanned it. It was another list of items invoiced from a shop, dated eighteen months prior. She almost threw that out, too, when her eye fell on some of the items. Splatter grenades, cube lasers, cloak of invisibility.

Her eye skipped to the top of the sheet. She read a single word: Pringle. She put the bill on the keep pile. She would love to talk to Pringle right about now. He must know a lot more about what Bishop was working on than just about anybody else in Hinterland.

She went through another ten sheets of useless rubbish before she found another letter.

My dear Knox

Your correspondence always gives me so much pleasure I don’t know how I ever survived from one letter to the next. You know I would love to see you again, and it pains me that you chose to remain aloof from me. I would give anything to explain why I made the decision to break off our engagement, but I now believe I am doing the best thing for both of us by keeping that information to myself. I am now and shall always be your fervent supporter and ally. We worked together for many years on countless jobs, and I’m sure we shall continue to do so into the future. We can be partners and allies without getting married, and I shall always love you as much as I ever did.

I hope to see you again very soon. I am and always shall be,

Sincerely yours,

Angela Cross

Raleigh put the letter on the keep pile, but her fingers burned from touching it. She shouldn’t have read it. She shouldn’t have peeked in on Bishop and Angela’s private affairs. So they weren’t just involved with each other, but actually engaged to be married when she broke it off. Why?

Raleigh would never find out the truth, and she didn’t want to. On the other hand, Angela worked with Bishop for years. Angela was a highly placed Guildsman of the Martial Arts and a slayer in her own right. She worked for Soto doing God knows what. Maybe she knew something Raleigh could use to find Bishop’s client. She might even know something about his father’s death.

Dax and Raleigh worked the rest of the day to sort through Bishop’s papers. They discarded half the papers on his desk, but they found nothing directly stating who he was working for.

Raleigh sighed. “Oh, well. I wasn’t really expecting to find anything.”

Dax nodded toward the wall safe. It still stood open the way they found it. “What about that?”

“What about it?”

“Aren’t you going to go through it? Maybe there’s something in it.”

Raleigh put out her hand and plucked the contents out of the safe. She waved it in the air. “There’s nothing here. There’s the folder of customers from the blue mussel farm, and there’s the deed to this house and some other properties in Bishop’s family. They won’t help us.”

“What about the blue mussels?” Dax asked. “We need some more anyways. We could get them from the farm instead of the market.”

Raleigh shook her head and slid the papers back into the safe. She didn’t close the door. She couldn’t unlock it again if she did. She didn’t have the combination.

“The market is closer, and since we won’t have the twen much longer, there’s no sense buying more than we need. We can get a small amount from the market and that will be the end of it.” She turned away. “We better get downstairs. It’s suppertime, and Mrs. Mitchell will go on the warpath if we’re late.”