Justice Is Served: an Edward Red Mage short mystery

  * * *

  I returned to the smell of bacon grease and a minor disaster at the Snake and Egg. Sadie was back in the kitchen, bellowing at Dick, the youngest and clumsiest of the cooks.

  “What’d you have to go and drop that bottle there for?” she wailed. “You’ve probably got shards of glass all in my cookpot now—I’ll have to throw out half a dozen chickens, I will, and me with the pastry all ready for pies!”

  I was famished, but I knew better than to enter that kitchen.

  “Now Sadie,” her husband Nat was soothing,” the boy didn’t mean it. And the chickens are fine. Look—all the glass is down in the floor. Tell me, how is any of it going to have got way up there in your pot?”

  Sadie hrumphed something I couldn’t make out.

  “The chicken’s fine. Go ahead and make your pies.”

  “Well, all right,” Sadie said, “but it’ll be on you and Dick if I find myself serving broken glass to the good people of Belcamp . . . ."

  Some time later, I was holed up in my private corner of the beer cellar, quietly enveloping one of Sadie’s chicken pies. I tried, and failed, not to think about the possibility of glass in the filling. I wondered what broken glass in a dish would taste like, if it were too fine to be seen. Gritty, I supposed. Like sand.

  Like sand in dirty oysters.

  Sadie’s dog was thrilled to receive the leavings of my pie as I dropped it to dart up the stairs, out of the cellar, and into the street. Baron Hubert’s funeral was scheduled for sunset, and I had barely enough time before that to confirm my suspicions.

  Before going to Portsmouth, though, I went to the Great Rose Temple of Belcamp to beg the aid of the Order of Saint Morgana. The Morganites are responsible for the proper treatment of the dead, and I had learned in the past not to go poking too closely at a corpse without the Order’s consent.

  Mother Lillian, the elderly head of the order, was so shocked by what I had to tell her, she not only loaned me a carriage to take me back to Portsmouth but also her right-hand priestess, Sister Viola, to accompany me.