Free Fable: Blood of Heroes by Jim C. Hines Page A

managed to splatter himself from such a height?”
    The Mayor’s forehead wrinkled. He scowled at the closest home. Glory could almost see his thoughts crawling along, like insects with half their legs plucked off. Then his eyes lit up. “He must have brought a chair onto the roof and jumped from that!”
    “Excellent thinking, my good man!” Sterling slipped an arm casually around the Mayor’s shoulders. “If that’s the case, the chair couldn’t have gone far. Why don’t you search the area while we see what we can figure out here? Together, we’ll soon uncover the truth of this terrible tragedy.”
    Once the Mayor scurried off, Shroud crouched on his heels to examine his sketch, comparing it to the street. “I’ve measured the width of the blood splatter and the indentation in the cobblestones. Assuming this fellow was of average height and weight, if he did jump from a chair, it would have to have been a chair seventy-five feet high. Even jumping from the town wall shouldn’t have made a mess this size.”
    From outside Grayrock, the town wall stood roughly twelve feet tall. Inside the town was another matter. The early settlers had dug deeper and deeper, until most of the town was roughly twenty feet lower than the land outside.
    “How do you know that?” asked Winter.
    “Research.” Shroud tucked his notebook away in his cloak. “Death is an art. It takes a lifetime to truly understand and master its many forms.” He pointed to the top of the roof. “You throw bodies down from various heights and study the results. I worked out a formula for the height of the fall based on the diameter of the splattered blood. I’m not one to boast, but I can lay out a tarp, toss a man from the top of a tower, and leave not a single drop of blood to stain the road. In this case, the more likely possibility is that the victim didn’t jump at all but was thrown down by someone or something incredibly strong.”
    “Interesting schooling you had,” Sterling commented.
    Shroud pulled his black cloak more tightly around his shoulders. “This was more of an independent study.”
    “Right.” Glory stepped away from them both. “Four deaths. Hardly the kind of thing that threatens the very survival of Brightlodge.”
    “All four deaths were men,” Shroud pointed out. “All quarry workers, too.”
    “Ninety percent of the men in this town are quarry workers,” Glory said. “And most of the women.”
    “It’s a place to start.” Sterling stepped between them and brushed another layer of dust from his shirt. “Unless you’d prefer to stick around here and help the Mayor look for a seventy-five-foot chair?”
    By the time they reached the quarry that occupied the eastern quarter of the town, dust coated the inside of Glory’s mouth and nostrils. She could literally taste the grey.
    A broad pit spread out at the base of a curved cliff. Wooden scaffolding clung to the rock face. From a distance, it looked like an enormous arena with oversized stone steps descending to the bottom, where tiny men waged a never-ending battle against the mountainside.
    Given what Glory had seen of the townspeople thus far, her money was on the mountainside.
    “It’s the Ghost of Grayrock all right,” said an older worker when they asked about the deaths. Like most of the others, he wore tight, layered clothing, with a head wrap to cover his mouth and nose. He was currently setting a series of small fires atop a broad block of stone. “To look upon her is to pay a terrible price. Longing fills your every waking moment, and your dreams are haunted by her beauty. Desperation turns to despair, until you welcome death.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Winter, “but what are you doing?”
    “I’m a fire-setter,” he said, as if that explained everything. He gathered another pile of sticks and lit it with a brand from the previous fire. When nobody spoke, he pointed to the line of fires and said, “The heat cracks the