Free Retribution (Drakenfeld 2) by Mark Charan Newton Page B

medicine. White paper lanterns glowed under the large arched ceiling. Sulma Tan moved one of the lanterns over beside a ledger before I had the chance to glimpse what was on it. As she did so, I told her about my discussion with Priest Damsak and of the bishop leaving the city.
    ‘Was that true?’ I asked. ‘Or do you need to confirm it with the Astran officials?’
    ‘It was true,’ she said. ‘The queen had already asked me to look into the process of adding a new bishop to that district. She is a great admirer of those gods, given they are not representative of the barbaric cults of our past. She is keen to see their forward-looking ways are continued in the city.’
    ‘And do you believe in such progressive ways?’
    ‘My beliefs are not important.’ She then steered us to a central table positioned directly beneath a skylight made of clear glass. Around this thick wooden table were three curved rows of stone benches, much like a theatre, only on a far smaller scale.
    Sulma Tan had brought with her two middle-aged male officials, who were clothed in red silk trousers, black silk jackets with high collars, and long white socks. They lingered by the ledger at the back, ready with a reed pen to make notes as she spoke. Myself, Leana and Sulma Tan gathered around the covered remains of the bishop.
    ‘There’s not much hope for a recovery with this fellow,’ I said, pulling back the cloth.
    One of the men gasped and muttered something incomprehensible as I uncovered the head carefully, before discarding the sack to one side.
    ‘By Astran,’ the other breathed. If these men had come here to study, they were clearly not that familiar with corpses.
    ‘Ah, it is so.’ Sulma Tan clasped the edge of the table. She asked one of the other men behind to run out to retrieve the other limb. In the meantime, we continued stripping back the fragments of cloth, exposing the body piece by bloodied piece.
    ‘You have the stomach for this?’ Sulma Tan asked us, and she was being sincere.
    Leana gave a short laugh and said fiercely, ‘Lady, we have seen worse. I first met Lucan wandering around a field of corpses.’
    That was putting things lightly. Our paths met during the aftermath of a most bloody battle. Her friends and family – and her husband – had been wiped out in the war. In the intensely hot location of a massacre, she had asked me if I needed a worker. I was an excuse for her to leave those horrors behind, to try to forget what could not easily be forgotten.
    Sulma Tan continued to cut away at the final fragments of the bishop’s thick woollen clothing, until his flesh was fully exposed. Leana helped pull away the strips of material and discarded them in a metal bucket underneath the table. Sulma Tan retrieved a small metal tray, containing water and a cloth, and began to ever-so-gently wash away the detritus from the torso. The water soon took on the colour of the blood and dirt.
    Now and then the queen’s second secretary would lean away to avoid the stench, and eventually she ordered one of the note-taking officials to open the room’s windows, allowing in a refreshing salt-tang breeze and the absent-minded chatter from a nearby courtyard.
    The skylight above created harsh shadows, so Sulma Tan asked for three lanterns to be moved in order to see the gruesome details from all angles.
    ‘Most disturbing,’ I muttered, as it became apparent what had happened to the bishop.
    ‘A sick mind was at work here,’ Sulma Tan added.
    The bishop’s body had not
just
been severed at his shoulders and neck, though that would have been a terrible enough way for him to have been killed. In addition to this, and though it was difficult to make out fully, there were well over a hundred cuts across the various surfaces of his skin, which had long since started to transform in colour to that of a green-tinted bruise.
    There were a couple of skin blisters, too, but it was unlikely that these were related to the method of