Chapter 744
Varik had noted the limitation himself in the margins with dry irritation. He had not personally gone to the territories where those nobles had lived, and local reports had been inconsistent. Some came from secondhand letters, some from guild contacts, some from Senate messengers, some from hearsay carried through official channels after the deaths were already old news. There were names, rough timelines, family positions, and symptom summaries, but far less texture than in the capital cases.
Ludger read them anyway, carefully.
A house lord in the west. A matriarch from a minor but old line in the south. Another head of family near an old trade route. One more whose territory bordered lands that had once been more strategically important than they were now.
Information about them was frustratingly incomplete. Varik had done what he could, but without stepping onto their lands himself, he had only managed to gather outlines.
Still, outlines could matter. Ludger compared ages. Ranks. Causes of death as officially declared. Time between first weakness and final collapse. Names of heirs. Names of attending healers. Patterns of political succession.
At first, it looked like the same wall again. Limited data, uncertain rumors, and a lot of empty space where facts should have been. Then his eyes stopped on a short note written in smaller, sharper handwriting than the rest. He went back and read it again. And then he turned the page to the next victim.
There it was again. Not in the main report. In the side notes. Rumors. Ludger’s expression hardened slightly as he read through them in sequence.
Several of those people, both in the capital and outside it, had apparently been on the verge of something before they fell sick. Not the same thing, which made it easier to ignore at first glance.
One had supposedly been close to finalizing some political realignment inside his region. Another had been negotiating a marriage alliance that would have dramatically raised her house’s standing.
One had nearly secured rights tied to an old mining route. Another had reportedly become obsessed with old records and was believed to have found something promising in his family archives.
One rumor even suggested that a victim had been preparing to announce a “great discovery,” though nobody seemed to know whether that meant a financial opportunity, a secret agreement, or something else entirely.
None of it was solid proof.
Most of it had been dismissed by Varik himself as unreliable noble gossip, the kind that always appeared after a powerful person died unexpectedly. People loved pretending the dead had been standing at the edge of greatness. It made random death feel less random. More meaningful. More dramatic.
Normally, Ludger would have agreed. But not here. Because it kept repeating. His eyes narrowed as he leaned back slightly, notebook open in one hand while the other rested still on the table.
Breakthroughs.
That was the word forming in his mind, even if Varik had not written it so directly.
These people had not merely been rich, old, and politically useful to kill. At least according to the rumors, they had been approaching something. An advantage. A discovery. A shift. A gain. Something that might have changed their position.
And then they got sick. Ludger looked back over the pages again, this time with that idea in mind, scanning not for social connection, but for momentum. Were they all moving toward something?
He read faster now, but not sloppily. The pieces were still incomplete, but the shape was beginning to annoy him in a very specific way. It reminded him of someone cutting branches before they could bear fruit.
Not random deaths. Not even necessarily inheritance killings. It could be suppression. The quiet removal of people right before they crossed some line they were not supposed to cross.
Ludger’s fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the notebook.
That was still only a possibility. Rumors were garbage more often than not. But the fact that Varik had preserved them at all meant he had considered the same thing and hadn’t been able to disprove it.
Which meant it mattered. Ludger lowered the notebook to the table and stared at the open page for a few silent seconds. If those rumors were true, then the question was no longer just who benefited from the deaths.
It was what the victims had been about to learn, gain, uncover, or accomplish. And that, he suspected, was a far more dangerous trail than simple murder.
Ludger went back to the sections on the victims in the capital and read them again, slower this time. Now that the idea had lodged itself in his mind, the absence started to bother him more than the information itself.
Varik had written solid profiles. Age. family position. symptoms. succession. rumors surrounding the deaths. political consequences after they were gone. Even private impressions gathered through quiet inquiry. But there was very little about what those people had actually been doing before they died.
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Not in the way that mattered.
There were mentions of status, of course. House head. landholder. old blood. influence in this district or that circle. But that wasn’t the same thing. Ludger wasn’t looking for titles. He was looking for motion.
What had they accomplished recently? What projects had they been pushing? What kind of business had filled their coffers? What had they been investing in, buying, closing off, or trying to secure?
That part was thin. Too thin. Ludger frowned and tapped a finger once against the edge of the page.
Varik had investigated the deaths as suspicious events. That made sense. He had looked for murder, for motive, for political advantage, for hidden enemies and family disputes. But he hadn’t built the profiles around achievement, discovery, or commercial activity. Not deeply. Not in enough detail to confirm whether the rumors about “breakthroughs” meant anything real.
Which meant Ludger was missing a crucial angle. If the victims had all been nearing something important, then their actual work mattered more than their public reputations.
He leaned back slightly, one hand rising to his chin as he stared down at the notebook in silence. His thoughts moved quickly, turning over possibilities, discarding the weaker ones, keeping only the threads with weight.
Then, after a while, his eyes lifted toward the window. The room had grown dim without him noticing.
Beyond the glass, the capital was already dark. Not fully asleep, this city never really slept, but dark enough that the rooftops had become hard-edged shadows and the streets below had turned into lines of lanternlight and muted movement. Time had slipped past while he read.
Ludger narrowed his eyes faintly.
That decided it, then.
The notebook had given him a direction, but not enough answers. And there was one person nearby who might know more than Varik’s records did, not as an investigator, but as someone with quiet access to a noble household and the kind of sideways information that official reports never captured.
Hroth.
If anyone might know what kind of work those families had been involved in, what sort of people they had entertained, what rumors had circulated before the deaths instead of after them, it would be someone like him. Especially if the family he guarded moved in the same circles.
Ludger closed the notebook carefully and stood. He should look for Hroth again. And this time, he had better questions to ask. Ludger had to wait longer than he liked.
He remained on the warehouse roof where they had met before, still as stone, his presence tucked into shadow while the capital breathed below him. The night air carried the distant noise of carriage wheels, muffled voices, and the occasional metallic clink from patrol routes further off. None of it mattered. He waited with the kind of patience that looked effortless from the outside, even if his mind was still moving through the details in Varik’s notebook.
Eventually, a presence approached across the rooftops. Light. Controlled. Fast enough to clear distance without drawing attention.
A moment later, Hroth landed on the same roof, boots touching the tiles with barely more sound than a cat. He straightened and glanced at Ludger before looking out over the city as if this had somehow become a normal arrangement for them.
“You know,” Hroth said, voice dry, “when people meet in a place like this, under these kinds of circumstances, it usually means they’re up to no good.” He placed a hand over his chest with mock offense. “That makes an upstanding person like me feel bad.”
Ludger didn’t bother with a reply.
He just looked at him and asked, “Did you learn anything new today?”
Hroth’s mouth twitched, the joke dying without ceremony.
“No,” he said. “I work during the night and sleep during the day. So unless the city decided to whisper secrets directly into my ear while I was unconscious, then no, I learned nothing new.”
Ludger gave a small nod at that. Fair enough. Then he decided to share what he had learned instead.
He told Hroth about Varik’s notes. About the victims in the capital and beyond it. About the lack of obvious connections, the absence of shared enemies or business ties, and the way the investigations had kept turning up nothing solid. Then he moved to the part that actually mattered, the rumors. The repeated whispers that several of the dead had been close to something before they fell sick. A political gain. A family rise. A discovery. Access to something valuable. Some kind of breakthrough.
As Ludger spoke, Hroth’s expression slowly lost the casual edge it had carried when he arrived. By the time Ludger finished, silence settled over the roof. Not the comfortable kind. The heavier sort. The kind that came when information stopped feeling like rumor and started pressing against old instincts.
Hroth didn’t answer immediately. He stood there with his gaze fixed on the city below, jaw slightly tense, as if some part of his mind had gone backward through things he had heard, dismissed, or never bothered to connect before.
For a while, he said nothing at all. Hroth let out a slow breath through his nose, still staring out over the lantern-lit streets below.
“You learned a lot in a single day,” he said at last.
There was no mockery in it now. Only a rough kind of acknowledgment, the sort one professional gave another when a trail that should have remained muddy started taking shape far too quickly.
Ludger said nothing, waiting.
Hroth shifted his weight slightly and folded his arms.
“The family I work for likes to put money into certain kinds of business,” he said. “Not shipping. Not weapons. Not flashy trade ventures meant to impress idiots at banquets. They prefer things that stay useful no matter who is sitting on the throne.” He glanced sideways at Ludger. “Mainly alchemy and herbology.”
That got Ludger’s full attention. Hroth noticed it and continued.
“They fund growers, medicine suppliers, apothecary workshops, people who deal in processed ingredients, healing compounds, rare plant stocks, and all the little trades around those things.” His tone remained even, but he was clearly digging through memory rather than reciting something prepared. “It makes sense. Everyone gets sick. Nobles get paranoid. Armies need salves. Healers need ingredients. Even when politics shift, that kind of business keeps moving.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“And?”
Hroth looked back toward the city again.
“From what I overheard, the previous head of the family was about to invest a large sum into a certain apothecary family before he fell sick.”
That made Ludger’s expression sharpen.