The body smelled. Not badly yet, but the direction it was going was clear.
Doc had Bram Vesser laid out on the common table. The lamps were were pulled in close so Doc could see better. His hands moved from wound to limb to face and back and all over the body. This was not the first time Doc worked on a dead body.
The rest of the squad had found other places to be. Soldiers did not like dead bodies. It was a reminder of the cost of failure or sometimes, just plain bad luck. For some reason, Fen decided to stay. He observed Doc from the end of the table.
Cael stood where he could see the body's full length.
"Tell me," he said.
Doc did not look up. "No defensive wounds. Hands, forearms, nothing. He did not fight back."
"He didn't know."
Doc moved the lantern to the neck. "The cut is left to right. Smooth entry, smooth exit. One motion." He demonstrated the angle with his hand, palm up, drawing left to right across his own throat without looking up from the body. "The man behind him was right-handed. Standing close. This is not a long swing. This is a blade held tight and drawn across."
"Practiced."
"Or very calm. The result is the same." Doc straightened. "He has been dead approximately two nights. The stiffness is past its peak. He will begin to loosen by this evening and by tomorrow morning we will need him in the ground." He looked at Cael. "Whatever you need from this body, you need it today."
Cael looked at Vesser. Broad chest, road clothes, worn at the knees and elbows from a life of loading and unloading wagons. Two rings on his hands. The satchel had been searched and catalogued: manifest, route papers, a day's worth of travel food still wrapped in cloth. Coin pouch gone. Rings still there. Bloody odd.
A man who took the coin pouch and left the rings was either very rushed or very focused on something.
"Anything on him we would not have found quickly?"
"I checked the seems of his shirt and the other usual places," Doc shrugged and started feeling the seems of the man's clothes again for a double check.
At the end of the table, Fen picked up the belt from where it had been set aside. Turned it over. Ran his thumb along the inner seam.
He said nothing. He took the knife from his belt and cut the seam.
The leather separated in a clean line. Inside, folded flat and thin, was a single piece of paper.
Cael took it.
Two columns of figures.
The left column was headed GRAINHOLLOW DEPARTURE. The right column was headed MILLHAVEN TRANSIT. Same dates down both margins and loads identified by carrier.
Every row showed a loss.
Not random losses. Consistent losses.
Someone with access to both sets of records made this comparison. That was not Bram Vesser. Bram Vesser was running the Grainhollow-to-Highwatch route for the Army and picking up his fee from the supply office. He had no business with Millhaven transit records.
Below the figures, in a different hand. Shorter strokes, more urgency in the pen. A note.
*Pellin Dorn is crooked. But you already know that. Do not go to him.*
Cael read it twice. He folded it and placed it in his breast pocket. Pellin Dorn was the House Maren tax collector in Millhaven, the next town South of Grainhollow.
He looked at Fen. Fen was cleaning his knife.
"Good eye," Cael said.
"The stitching was wrong," Fen said.
Cael waited. Nothing more came.
He looked at the body. Someone gave this message to Bram to carry to someone. Who? That same someone told him to stay away from the one official in Millhaven he would normally report to.
"Bram, you poor bastard. Why are you mixed up with this?" Cael said as he started down.
Patch came through the door with a leather pouch. "House Maren." "Their man didn't want to come inside."
Cael could not blame him for that.
He took the pouch and opened it in front of the squad.
He turned it over once and shook it. Nothing came out.
He looked at it for a moment.
"The Rann family leaves the market short every fourth day," Cael said. "Every farmer on the northern road pays more than the charter allows at the Maren weighing post. Thom Cass overpays his docking fees every time a barge comes through the river landing." He set the empty pouch on the table next to the body of Bram Vesser. "Bram Vesser paid his fees, paid his transit costs, paid with his life."
He looked at the pouch.
"House Maren still needed the coin."
Heads went down around the room. One by one.
"Doc," he said. "Get him in the ground this afternoon. With a marker."
Doc nodded.
They put Vesser in the ground that afternoon. The squad moved north on the Watch Road the following morning.
Cobb went first, crossbow up, eyes on the verge. Thirty paces ahead of the column.
Behind her, the squad followed in file: Sarc the heavy, Olis, Fish, then Cael, with Doc and Fen close behind him. Patch the heavy at rear.
"This road is safe," Fish said. He said it to nobody in particular, which was how Fish raised grievances. "We've walked this road three times this rotation."
"Foot moves in formation," Olis said. He did not look at Fish when he said it. "Always. That is just how it is done."
"Even on a road we know."
"Especially on a road we know." Olis adjusted his kit. "The day you stop moving in formation on a road you know is the day you wish you moved on the road in formation."
The Watch Road ran north from Grainhollow along the river to Highwatch. Drenn patrol ground. The squad had walked every section of it across multiple rotations. Cael had walked it more times than he could count across three tours.
At the second league marker, Cobb's fist came up.
The column stopped. Nobody spoke. Cobb held her position, crossbow across her chest, and used two fingers to point left off the road without turning her head.
Cael moved up.
The ruts were not faint. A loaded wagon had left the road here. Deep cuts into the verge, the kind a heavy haul leaves when the ground is soft and the driver is not being careful about it. The grass on either side was pressed flat and hadn't come back. Two nights of weather had softened the edges but not the depth. No driver takes a loaded wagon off a road intentionally. You take a loaded wagon off a road because you have to, or because you don't care about getting it back out.
He looked at Cobb. She was already watching the scrub line.
He followed the ruts in. Fen followed immediately. The rest of the squad spread out behind Cael as they walked in a loose V formation.
The apricot thicket was well off the road. Dense and thorned and old, the kind of growth that did not arrive quickly and would not leave easily. The wagon was behind it, pulled in at an angle that set it outside the road's sightline. From the road you would have to be looking for a wagon to see it.
Cael stopped at the edge of the thicket.
"Nobody walks through anything until I have looked at it," he said. "That is not a suggestion."
Cael looked before he walked in.
Empty wagon. The grain gone. One wheel had come off the track and settled in soft ground, which meant whoever drove it in had come fast and not worried about getting it out again. In the dirt in front of the wagon, two dark fans spread out from central points, each one an arc of blood.
Two rooster tails of blood. A pace apart.
"He was standing here," Cael said. He did not crouch to examine them. He looked at the distance between the two stains, the direction they spread, the central points where Vesser had been when the blade found him. "He did not fight. He did not run."
Most of the ground was torn up from the patrol horses.
"Spread out," he said. "Let's see what else we can see."
The scrub thinned as they walked. The vegetation changed from thorned thicket to low brush and then to open ground that had been pressed flat by weight. The smell reached them before the sight did. Grain left in the open, cut from its sacks, beginning to work in the heat.
It was all there. The full load, or near enough. Dumped in organized stacks, not scattered. The sacks had been cut open at the top and tipped, not torn or dragged. Someone had taken their time. Cael walked the perimeter of the dump site, looking at what the ground said about how long the work had taken and how many sets of hands had done it.
He stopped.
He looked back the way they had come. Two thousand steps, near enough. The wagon was not visible from here. Nothing was visible from here except scrub and the dump site and the sky.
Sarc came up beside him and looked at the grain. He ran his own calculation, then looked at the ground around the site and found what Cael had already found.
"Second wagon," Sarc said.
"At least," Cael said. "Probably two."
The tracks came in from the south and left the same way. Whoever had done this had not used Vesser's wagon. They had come prepared with their own, driven in from the south, loaded the grain from Vesser's wagon at the thicket, driven south to this clearing, offloaded it a second time. That was a full night's work with enough hands to move at pace and enough planning to know where Vesser would be and when.
Fish was standing at the edge of the dump site looking at the grain going bad in the sun. He did not say anything. Cael gave him credit for that.
"This was not bandits," Cael said. "Bandits take the grain. They do not haul it two thousand steps into the scrub and leave it to rot. Someone moved this to explain its absence. The absence was meant to explain the murder." He looked at the dump site once more. "Bram Vesser was killed for what was in his belt. Not for what was on his wagon."
He turned back toward the road.
Fen had not moved from the edge of the dump site. He was fingering the cut marks on the sacks. Cael filed that and kept walking.
That evening he added to the investigation log. The wagon. The blood. The grain two thousand steps east, dumped not stolen. The second wagon's tracks coming in from the south. He wrote it plainly, in the order the evidence assembled itself.
At the bottom of the entry he wrote three questions.
Who made the comparison document?
Who gave it to Vesser?
Who knew he had it?
Who was Vesser's contact in Highwatch?
Poor Bram. Whoever gave him that note signed his death sentence. Now he was two feet in the ground south of the southern gate with a timber marker and a coin pouch that House Maren had emptied before they sent it back.
He closed the log.
The numbers were still there when he closed his eyes. Clearer now. The direction was south. But, first he needed to go to Highwatch and figure out why he was put on this case.