Chapter 27
Arya, standing slightly to the right of Nirma's position, immediately followed her lead, his hands—rough from years of wielding weapons—rising in the same solemn gesture, his eyes closing briefly, his lips moving to utter the same words even though in his heart he had never truly believed in what he recited.
This was not about faith; this was about disguise, about becoming part of the world they had entered, about convincing anyone who might be watching from the shadows that they were merely two devout Christians coincidentally assigned to investigate this heinous murder, not time investigators from the twenty-first century who had no rightful place here.
After the brief prayer ended, Nirma lowered her hands slowly, her single eye opening and immediately focusing on the floor before her, on the chaos scattered around the victim.
With steps so slow they resembled a dance performed in a dream, she began to move forward.
Every step was calculated with meticulous care; each time the sole of her shoe was about to touch the ground, she paused for a moment, ensuring that no shard of glass would be disturbed, no overturned chair would shift, no cloak or sword or amphora would be accidentally nudged aside.
Arya mirrored her pattern exactly behind her, restraining his heavy strides with extraordinary control, moving his large frame with the suppleness of a cat walking along a narrow fence.
Together they advanced, leaving almost invisible traces upon the dusty stone floor, passing overturned tables and scattered chairs, passing pools of red wine beginning to dry in places, passing shadows that flickered along the walls under the glow of oil lamps still burning.
It took nearly two minutes for them to cover a distance that should have required only ten steps, but when they finally stood directly before the victim, when Étienne d'Arques's pale face was no more than half a meter from Nirma's eye, they both knew the effort had not been in vain.
Every object surrounding the victim remained precisely where it had been, every trace left behind by the patrons who had fled in panic preserved as it was when they had first abandoned this place hours earlier.
Nirma stood still for a moment, her single eye moving slowly over every detail of the victim's grotesque position.
She observed how Étienne d'Arques's legs were neatly folded atop the seat of the chair, how his slightly protruding belly—earned from nightly indulgence in wine—rested squarely at the center of the seat, how his arms hung limply at his sides with his palms facing upward in a gesture of surrender.
She watched how the victim's head, with reddish-brown hair already thinning at thirty-four, still shifted from side to side at the same steady rhythm, every five seconds striking the iron support of the chair behind him and producing a metallic clang that now felt disturbingly familiar to her ears.
Clang. Silence. Clang. Silence. Clang.
Like a clock of death that continued to tick, like a reminder that although the victim's heart had ceased beating, although his breath no longer flowed through his throat, although his soul might have drifted who knows where, his body was still being forced to move, to strike, to create a sound that would draw the attention of anyone who entered this Kapeleion.
Nirma recorded everything within her photographic memory, preserving each detail to later compare with the documents she had read in the carriage, to search for patterns, to uncover meaning.
After several minutes of observation from the front, Nirma moved.
She did not inform Arya of her intention; there was no need, for between them communication had long transcended words.
Slowly, with the same deliberate steps as before, Nirma shifted her position, circling the chair from which the victim hung with careful precision, ensuring she touched nothing, altered nothing, left behind no new trace other than the nearly imperceptible marks of her shoes.
She passed along the victim's left side, past a small table still standing upright with two untouched glasses of wine, past an overturned wooden chair with one broken leg, past a pile of cloaks strewn across the floor as though their owners had discarded them in haste.
And when she finally reached the exact spot behind the victim's back, standing only centimeters from Étienne d'Arques's body still moving in its rhythm of death, Nirma halted and began to observe once more.
Behind the victim's back, in a silence broken only by the rhythmic clang every five seconds, Nirma stood motionless like a statue carved from ice.
Her single eye narrowed, focusing on every minute detail that might escape an ordinary observer, while her fingers twitched faintly at her side, restraining the urge to touch, to feel, to confirm with her sense of touch what her eye had just perceived.
Within her mind, murmurs began to turn—not questions seeking answers, but conclusions gradually assembling themselves into a coherent whole.
"No physical assault," she whispered inwardly, a voice only she could hear.
"No stab wounds, no slash marks, no signs of blunt-force trauma to the head, chest, or any other vital area.
This victim did not die from ordinary physical violence, did not perish in a fight, did not fall to the conventional murders that so often occur in taverns of this medieval age."
From her position directly behind Étienne d'Arques, Nirma noticed something that strengthened her suspicion.
At the right side of the victim's waist, just beneath the last rib, the skin appeared different.
There was no open wound, no flowing blood, no visible mark of physical aggression, yet there, visible only from this angle, the skin shimmered strangely beneath the oil-lamp light.
A shimmer unnatural in quality, as though emanating from within, a glimmer that made the hairs at the back of Nirma's neck rise despite the countless strange phenomena she had witnessed across the corridors of time.
And as she continued to observe, still striving to comprehend the meaning of that shimmer, a faint hissing sound suddenly emerged from the same spot.
A hiss like water dropped upon heated stone, a hiss like meat beginning to sear upon burning coals, a hiss that should not emanate from the body of a man already dead.
Nirma held her breath, refusing to step back even as instinct screamed at her to retreat.
She watched as the skin at the victim's right waist continued to hiss, continued producing the same sound, yet did not melt, did not form a wound, did not darken as though burned. Only that hissing persisted, rhythmic, steady, like a second ticking clock accompanying the clang of the victim's head every five seconds.
"This victim was struck with something," Nirma murmured inwardly, her gaze fixed with near-burning intensity.
"A powder, or perhaps granules of a foreign substance, hurled directly at the right side of his waist.
And when that substance touched his skin, when it began to react with his body, the pain it caused must have been unimaginable."
To be continued…