Free Murder in Cormyr by Chet Williamson Page A

and what I would learn from this experience, I could make it my career when I received my freedom a few days hence.
    But my first duty in Ghars was the mundane one of returning Benelaius’s book to the library. I glanced at the name on the binding and saw that it was another deadly dull treatise on natural science—The Internal Structure of the Brachiopod by Professor Linnaeus Gozzling of the University of Suzail. Dreadful stuff, but Benelaius gobbled it up by the
    double handfuls.
    It was just after four by the time I lumbered into Ghars, plenty of time to return the book before the library closed. The library was just a large room that had been tacked on to the town hall years back. It held a gloomy assortment of material, mostly books over fifty years old, and none of the recent thrillers about Camber Fosrick, else I should have lived there.
    No, the place leaned more toward history, which was the particular passion of the librarian, Phelos Marmwitz, whose personal collection made up half the library’s holdings. There was also a decent section of natural history, philosophy, and other dry subjects, a smattering of imaginative literature, and drawers filled with dry and crumbling antique maps of Cormyr and environs, many of which were drawn in great detail but were very much out of date.
    As I entered the dark, dingy room, the smell of mildew struck me, and as always I feared for those books against the damp outer wall. “Good afternoon, Mr. Marmwitz,” I said, but the thin, wizened old man waved his hands in the air and made a hissing noise through his teeth intended to shush me.
    “Please, quiet,” Marmwitz said in a stage whisper with a voice as dry and papery as his books. “We have a patron.” And he pointed with a bony hand to a corner near one of the small windows.
    A patron was a rarity, and I was surprised to see that it was none other than Grodoveth, king’s envoy and ladies’ man, though not too hot at the latter. He looked up at me for a moment, apparently saw nothing worth further consideration, and plunged back into his reading.
    I set the brachiopod book down on the counter. Marmwitz opened it suspiciously, glanced at the due date as though he
    had expected it back years before, then with a nod acknowledged grudgingly that it was on time. I couldn’t resist. “Get anything new in lately?” I asked him.
    He gave a proud little smile. “A town history of Juniril,” he said. “A splendid volume, published forty years ago. Been looking for it for ages.”
    “Forty years ago,” I mused. “Not too new. Still no Camber Fosrick mysteries, eh?”
    His face shut up like a clam sucking lemons. “We circulate only serious literature here, young man.”
    “Ah, right. I forgot.” I turned to go out, when I remembered that Benelaius had asked me to query Grodoveth about seeing any highwaymen. I wouldn’t have done it in the library, but I didn’t know if I would see the man again, and there was another reason, too.
    “Mr. Marmwitz,” I said quietly, “I want you to know that I do what I do now at the behest of my master Benelaius and with the authority of Mayor Tobald.” Then I turned to Grodoveth, who still had his nose buried in his book. “Sir,” I said in a normal tone of voice, which boomed loudly in the quiet room, “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”
    I thought Marmwitz was going to become apoplectic. I turned back to him. ‘This will only take a minute, Mr. Marmwitz.” Ignoring Marmwitz’s stammering protests, I went to Grodoveth’s table and sat across from him.
    He slammed shut the book he was reading, covered its spine, and glared at me, making me wonder if he had somehow found an erotica section and was annoyed at being discovered. ‘What is it?” he asked brusquely.
    “I was wondering, sir, if you may have heard of the death of one of our residents.”
    “Who?”
    “Dovo. The smith’s assistant.”
    “Why would I have heard about it?”
    I shrugged. “I