Word Count: 2.1k
Warnings: Mentions of infant death and murder, implied sexual relationships,
Rating: M
Description: An Arcana AU set in a Vesuvia that is half-noir and half-fantasy.
Liuyin’s left ear had been both yelled off and pinched beyond sensation by the time Doctor Devorak returned, and they were pretty sure it was as red as a sunset by now. Luckily, Auntie Liya had grown weary of tormenting them for their impulsiveness and left to brew herself some tea in a huff, and Liuyin had retreated back into their own room, changing out of the funeral robes and veil, and into a casual set of clothing once more.
That extra layer of blazer made them feel better, like a suit of armor, and Liuyin had healed themselves up as well, a bit vexed by the lingering sting where their hair had hung over their ear.
Thus, Doctor Devorak was greeted by the sight of aunt and apprentice in the courtyard veranda, two cups of tea between them when he emerged from the autopsy and packed the baby back into its original bundle.
Liuyin smiles at him and gestures him to one of the stone benches-- Aunt Liya scoffed, rolled her eyes, and then begrudgingly produces a matching third teacup that had been tucked up her sleeve before pouring out some tea as well, Liuyin seemingly unperturbed by the judgemental airs as they steepled their fingers and turned to the auburn-haired man.
"The baby died in water. But it wasn't drowned this morning, and I also doubt it was drowned in the harbor," Liuyin says plainly.
The doctor blinked, frowned, and then stared at Liuyin, rather taken aback. "How did you figure out?"
Liuyin smirked internally-- they were only half-sure of their prognosis, with the rest being guesswork. "There's a certain smell to bodies found at sea, from the salt, and when I'd been holding onto it this morning, the body was already stiff as a board."
“And the drowning?” the doctor asks, admittedly with a bit too much excitement.
Liuyin had opened their mouth, most likely intending to tell them, before being cut off with a resounding smack to the table coming from the older woman.
"Liuyin," Aunt Liya interjected with a withering look between the two of them, knowing and probably resenting the fact her ward was enjoying the banter. "We don't speculate on the manner in which the bodies our clients bring to us died!" She admonishes.
Liuyin replied, nearly reflexively, “Sorry Auntie,” while not sounding very remorseful at all.
By clockwork, as if this were a dance they’d perfected by now, Aunt Liya had said in the vernacular dialect of Langya, “Silly child, we’ve seen so many dead, why the interest in this particular body?”
“You’re not curious at all, auntie?” Liuyin asked blithely, with that same sort of calculated shrewdness they’d exhibited at the docks. Be just vexing enough to get others to dismiss you, but not enough to want to harm you or arouse suspicion. It involved a fair amount of playing at stupidity in moderation, something that must have come by either years of practice or as instinctively as breathing.
When Julian tried his hand at it, it came wrapped in a bundle of cavalier flirtatiousness. For Liuyin, it was a calculated mix of ignorance and innocence projected onto a face with eyes far too clever for such a con.
Yet Julian Devorak watched in amazement as the very woman who raised Liuyin from an infant huffs and busies herself with chugging down the chrysanthemum tea in dismissal at their ward’s pretense of innocence, having seemingly bought the lead.
Hook, line, sinker.
“Our lack of curiosity is what has kept us alive and fed,” Aunt Liya replied pointedly. “Our clients are wealthy, or powerful, or both. What’s to stop them from believing we’ve outlived our uses? Especially if secrets were shared with,” and here, she levels a sharp gaze at the doctor, who’d at least had the good grace to look down at the steaming cup. “Outsiders with no regards for what we do, our customs and rituals.”
Liuyin was openly frowning now, and had been opening their mouth-- perhaps to argue, perhaps to agree, perhaps, and this was a ludicrous belief, Julian had thought to himself, to defend his own honor.
He cuts them off by standing with a flourish of his overcoat, having gauged by now that he had, as with most places, overstayed his welcome. “Ah, well Madam Zheng, Apprentice Mei. It’s been an honor, to be certain, but I must be off.”
No use driving a wedge in between Liuyin and their aunt, especially given the way they’d indicated their regard and appreciation for them on the way to the coffin-house.
The witchling looked as though they wanted to interject further but hadn’t the opportunity-- Julian readjusted his gloves, nodded sharply at them, and then made his way down the cobblestone path of the courtyard to the front door. He doesn’t wait to clarify Liuyin’s abrupt call for him to wait, nor Madam Zheng’s hiss for her apprentice to stop being so foolish and reckless to chase after such a man.
With a hint of ruefulness, he thinks that the old witch is right.
“I suspect foul play,” Julian greets Asra with no other prelude as he sidles in from the back door to the shop, stooping before he hit his head on one of the lower ceiling beams.
“Mhm? That’s nice,” the white-haired magician replied absently, stooped over a table on which laid a prosthetic arm as well as a spread of cards.
Unbidden, that old longing returned to his chest like an instinct-- not really love, no, and even calling it a crush was pushing it, but that inclination to act like a foolish schoolboy and (metaphorically) tug at Asra’s curls or chatter his ear off till the other would just literally shut him up by crushing their mouths together, give his hands something better to do.
A flash and then the impulse was gone.
After a brief pause, Asra prompts, gesturing. “The arm and the missing fiancee? Or Liuyin’s baby?”
“Well,” Julian cleared his throat, deeming whatever Asra was doing safe enough to pull a seat up for, slinging his arms around the back of the chair. “I’ve only taken a look at one of those.”
“So the baby is a foul play case,” Asra murmurs as he reshuffles his deck of tarot cards and then flips one over, frowning at the horned figure on it.
“I think so. I think Liuyin would agree, but her aunt wants the case closed and baby buried,” he muses. Not in a suspicious manner, he had gauged-- Julian knew enough about that sort of thing, the wanting your secrets buried six feet deep where no one could hear even a whisper of it. It was almost… protective, in its own strange way, slightly overbearing or smothering, which reminded him of Pasha and the way she scolded him when she got too worried for his safety and recklessness. Idly, he wondered if Liuyin were the same.
Asra seemed to agree, flipping over another card-- a smiling youth who looked suspiciously like the person occupying a corner of the doctor’s thoughts, an orb with a star shining within it cupped in their hands. “The Old Witch doesn’t like asking questions. Says they’re bad for the business.”
“I can tell, dear,” Julian replied automatically, earning him a look of near-scorn from the magician. “But is it because she doesn’t like to or doesn’t want to?”
“What difference does it make, even?” Asra raised a brow. “A baby died. Case closed and over with.”
“Don’t tell me your cards aren’t saying there’s more to it than that,” Julian replied, reaching out a hand lightning-quick, laying it over Asra’s.
“I’ll take another avenue,” he responded firmly. “It’s not a matter I want to pry into. Liuyin’s business and mine remain separate for their sake.”
“So there is something more, you agree.”
Asra turns to him then, something like fire in his violet eyes as he carefully, using his free hand, encircled the wrist that Julian had caged his other hand with, extricating the offending appendage. “Ilya.”
He’d never heard him sound this dangerous before, truth be told. It was sending shivers down the hair on the back of his neck.
Asra continued. “Whatever happens, my affairs are my own, just as Liuyin has their own matters to attend to. I suggest you don’t try to reel them into this. Are we understood?”
What if they want answers, what if they want to be reeled in?
It was so silent that Julian could hear the soft rasp of his own breathing, the dull thud of blood in his ears. “Yeah,” he found himself nodding obediently.
“Blessings for the rich, blessings for the poor!” Liuyin chanted listlessly, waving the stack of talismans in their hand as they assailed yet another group of unsuspecting tourists in the Temple District.
“You! Good sir over there! You look like you could use a little… magic in your life,” Liuyin said with as much charm as they could muster after staying up the previous night, chasing after a baby-corpse-snatcher in the dark, and then getting yelled at by their aunt for consorting with the likes of cads like Doctor Devorak who stuck their noses too far into other peoples’ businesses. As a result, they were made to hand out talismans as punishment to the tourists, which, between the tourist-wrangling and the general lack of success this endeavour turned out to be, was far worse a task than having to clean the cadavers brought in.
The tourist, probably not expecting to be beset by a figure who dressed like a religious fanatic and spoke like a particularly ambitious but dead-inside street vendor, had shaken off their grip and stalked away.
Other attempts bore similar fruit, with only one or two accepting their talismans-- Liuyin had checked the sigils inserted subtly into the charms for protections that had a persuasive air-- one that manifested as a small voice in the user’s head that suggested they visit a particular coffin-house on the edge of the Center City and the Temple District for any blessings, curses, exorcisms, and funerals they needed to undertake.
Their punishment, as per usual, ended at sundown. Liuyin gazed over at the setting sun and groaned, wiping a clammy hand down their face and slumping against a nearby wall. Finally, finally, their workday was over.
With great enthusiasm, they’d torn the veil and forehead ribbon from their head and balled it up, shoving them along with the talismans into the pouch slung from their shoulder, getting started on the white robe they wore atop their actual clothing as well, undoing the sash.
“You didn’t look the type to be into public indecency, but I suppose appearances are deceiving,” a voice said right next to their ear, and Liuyin jumped forward several feet before realizing who it was.
“Gods and devils,” Liuyin had blurted out, “Please don’t sneak up on me again, Doctor Devorak.”
“Call me Julian,” he grinned down at them.
“Julian, please don’t sneak up on me again,” they corrected, letting their robe hang loose, opening onto a pair of loose trousers and neck-high blouse, so much for public indecency.
“Won’t happen again, darling. ‘Pon my honor,” he’d said, holding three fingers up and clasping the other hand to his chest in a gesture like taking a vow.
They looked half-amused at that, softening the words, making them less suspicious than they were earlier. “What do you want?” Liuyin asked, query mirroring what they’d demanded from the doctor just earlier today-- heavens, it was only today that this entire fiasco had taken place. Not even twenty-four hours later, and they’d been bantering with the taller man as if they were old friends.
“Ever to the point as usual,” he’d said with a grin. “Come, walk with me. I was looking for you, but your aunt said you were out-- while chasing me off with a sword.”
“Ah, right, the peachwood sword. I believe she thinks you’re a wicked spirit,” Liuyin muttered, earning a hearty chuckle from Julian. Their aunt used it to banish wicked spirits, as was common in their line of spiritualism. Liuyin had their own, usually left in their room along with the rest of the charms and trinkets, unless they were going to perform some ritual or blessing or another, in which case they had it strapped to their back.
“Then, my dear,” Julian says, swivelling around to face them with a hint of mischief glinting in his eyes. “Would you be adverse to an evening of wickedness?”
Liuyin raised a brow expectantly. “Where did you have in mind?”
His answering smirk promised a world of trouble. “The Red Market.”
Word Count: 2.1k
Warnings: Mentions of infant death and murder
Rating: M
Description: An Arcana AU set in a Vesuvia that is half-noir and half-fantasy.
“Doctor Devorak, if you do not cease and desist, we will have no choice but to take you into custody!” snapped one voice, the annoyance in it softened by the fact that the owner of said voice was obviously trying to suppress a yawn.
“Shouldn’t we get this body to a morgue, get an autopsy report in, identify the corpse, inform the family?” another voice cuts in rapidly-- “That’s standard protocol, why would you just leave a dead baby lying around--”
Asra had trooped on ahead when Liuyin hesitated at the fringes of the forming crowd, tugging his companion after him till they reached the source of the voice.
“Ilya,” the magician greets, and the name almost seemed like a spell-- the tall, gangly man going red-faced from his haranguing had shut up, almost literally, his jaw clicking as he slammed his mouth shut.
His eyes widened, almost to a frantic degree, and Liuyin suspected this new flush was from something other than aggravation as he offers the two of them a small smile that bordered on nervous. “Ah, good morning Asra--”
“Magician,” Asra corrects steadily, seeming to grow increasingly unfazed the more flustered Doctor Devorak seemed. He gestured to Liuyin. “And this is--”
“Liuyin Mei, administer of last rites and curses, blessings, the such,” Liuyin replied, breaking the tension between them by offering their hand to the doctor. “Pleasure to meet you, Ilya.”
“Oh, it’s Julian now,” the man replied, stooping down and pressing a kiss to the back of Liuyin’s hand. “It’s wonderful to see such a lovely face in the midst of such chaos.”
A business card is pressed into their hands, and Liuyin had glanced between it and the man, now straightened to his full height, before they’d tucked the card into their sleeve. “Ilya, that’s enough--” Asra says, a faint note of vexation in his voice. “Constable Marlin, take us to the corpse, please.”
The mustachioed, portly gentleman nods, gesturing them forwards, whilst they shouldered past a few more civilians and reporters starting to gather around a cordoned-off area of the docks, where two bundles lay on the ground, side-by-side.
“When the salvage team found the body and the arm, was there anything else present?” Liuyin turned to a detective on the scene.
The detective turns to Liuyin, frowns, then shakes their head. “No, sir,” they’d replied. “Nothing turned up of note.”
“No coffin?” Liuyin cuts in, and received a strange look in turn.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because around three this morning, in fact, my aunt and I were preparing burial rites for a baby,” Liuyin replies. It wasn’t an outright lie, per se, just a small one-- truly, they hadn’t even seen the contents of the box yet before it was stolen-- “and someone had broken in and snatched it from our property. I think that because the box was so small, they might have mistaken the contents for valuables, and possibly dumped the body of the infant once they realized it wasn’t.”
“Very curious. Why didn’t you file a report?”
“Finding the body ought to have spooked the thief enough,” Liuyin reassured them.
“So this is yours, then?” the detective asks.
“Should be, yes,” Liuyin nodded, watching as Asra paced a slow circle around the larger of the two bundles, a calculated look in his eyes.
“So you’re saying,” furious scribbling commences, “That the corpse recovered from the water was dead before entry?”
“Isn’t that the job of the detectives to determine, sir?” Liuyin replies in response, a calculatedly aggravating response.
It works. An eye-roll of disgust and a sigh later from the detective, they’re told to simply “collect their things” and “get the hell out.”
Liuyin is all too happy to obey, even if it meant carrying a corpse in their arms through the streets of Vesuvia-- the docks were starting to get a little too crowded, too loud, and they felt a headache coming on.
“Asra, let’s go.”
The white-haired magician had glanced between them and the bundle of soaking white silk in the arms apologetically. “I have more investigations to do here,” he says, jerking his chin in the direction of the larger bundle-- the one that Liuyin knew concealed a metal prosthetic arm beneath it.
“I’ll stay--” Liuyin began to offer, about to reach into their pockets for some tiger balm to temporarily alleviate the burgeoning migraine, but Asra shook his head instead.
“Go home, Liuyin. You should get some rest.”
Liuyin opened their mouth to protest, but decided better of it, nodding instead. “Fine. Take care of yourself too,” they’d offered as parting words.
Navigating the sea of people was even harder by themselves, especially considering their cargo-- Liuyin had covered up the baby’s face so no one would take a look and frighten the mass into a panic, and then resigned themselves to elbowing and shouldering their way between the people.
A black-gloved hand reached out to them then, and Liuyin followed it up into the smirking face of one Doctor Devorak. “Need a hand?”
“What do you want?” they inquire in return, less than hostile but shrewd nonetheless, even as they accept the assistance.
“No need to be so suspicious,” the doctor drawls in return, quite cheerfully, using his height as an advantage to navigate through and around the crowds. “It’s quite a reasonable request, though I’m sure we ought to discuss it away from the crowds.”
Liuyin waits till they’re free of the worst of the gathered, before deftly stepping in front of him, their hand still in his, pacing backwards with measured steps and careful not to crash into anyone. From a distance, they’d almost look like two sweethearts with a newborn on a stroll, though in reality, he was just their new acquaintance who obviously held a torch for their best friend, and the newborn was, of course, dead.
“Talk,” Liuyin says tersely.
Doctor Devorak slows his steps down till they were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the sidewalk, dipping down till his wild auburn curls were brushing over Liuyin’s cheek.
“I want to perform an autopsy,” he says, the way someone else might whisper a sweet nothing, breath brushing against their ear and causing a few flyaways of hair to flutter up. “Aren’t you curious why a baby had to die, and why someone kept it so secretive?”
Liuyin couldn’t help it, they found this scene far too comical-- here he was, almost flirting, and here they were, a literal corpse in their arms being toted about like a loaf of bread.
They snorted, and then laughed, ignoring the affronted expression on Doctor Devorak’s face, pushing the dead infant into the doctor’s hands as they continued down the street. “By all means,” they said, giggling as they watched him fumble with the package before regaining his handling.
He was, in fact, quite adorable when flustered, the thought came unbidden to Liuyin.
They pushed it out of their mind and nodded on. “Come back to my shop, then. I’ve got a decent workspace.”
“Administer of funeral rites, right, right,” the doctor nodded, muttering to himself as they passed through the streets with trickles of conversation being passed around as if it were a strong liquor-- sparingly, with each their turn.
Gradually, he’d discovered that they were adopted by an aunt, their parents were unknown, and that Liuyin was frightened of creatures that crawled. In return, Liuyin found out Julian was orphaned as well, raised by a woman who was “practically a grandmother”, and was an apprentice to one of Secretary Satrinava’s children when he was learning his practice before joining the Ministry of Public Health.
They’d both known Asra for some time, though the doctor clammed up about the nature of that relationship when pressed-- and Liuyin was too polite and well-trained to ask further.
Finally, they’d reached the door of the shop-- a small property on the edge of the central district, white-walled, with evergreens peeking over the tops of the shingles. The double doors were thoroughly pasted with yellow talismans, layer upon layer over the years, till hardly any of the original wood underneath could be seen, strips of sun-bleached paper fluttering in a limp breeze.
“What are these?” the doctor asks, trying to make out the sigils and reaching for one of the slips of paper.
“Don’t touch it!” Liuyin says in a near-shout of alarm, throwing themselves onto his arm.
He retracted his hand back rapidly, blinking down with a query in his eyes.
Slowly, bit by bit, Liuyin let go of his arm. “Sorry I yelled…” they replied, eyes trailing right over where the button of his jacket opened at the dip of his collarbone. “Those are protective charms designed to keep intruders of the supernatural sort out.”
“I see,” he’d said, face settling into a look of consideration. “In that case--”
“Yinyin?” A slender, petite woman with dark hair in a high-collared dress over which she’d draped a dressing robe emerged from the opposite door. “I thought I heard your voice-- oh!”
Auntie Liya was staring somewhat judgmentally, at the two of them-- and Liuyin suddenly became aware of their proximity to Julian, pressed nearly chest-to-chest, the bundle in his arm held awkwardly at his hip to prevent getting crushed.
Their face lit on fire and they stepped back right into the door of talismans, pushing it open blindly and stumbling back into the courtyard. “C-come in, Doctor Devorak, we’ll set up a table for you.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Aunt Liya asks expectantly, hands on her hips.
Liuyin squeezes their eyes shut, as if praying for the ground to swallow their mortification, and then nods obligingly, painting a smile across their features. “Auntie, this is Doctor Devorak, who helped me recover the body that was stolen from us earlier this morning. Doctor Devorak, this is my Aunt Liya, who I’m apprenticed under.”
“Charmed,” the tall man replied, reaching to shake the matron’s hand.
He mustn’t have expected her to grab his hand, remove his glove, turn it palm-up, scan it, and then let it drop back with a, “Humph!” and a “that one’s nothing but trouble, Yinyin,” to her ward within the span of the few seconds he was caught off-guard, tossing the glove back to him in the meanwhile.
Doctor Devorak, to his credit, only fumbled briefly with the glove that she threw back at him, Liuyin taking the chance to transfer the bundle of corpse baby to their own arms, deeming it unstable in his current state of hesitance.
“A-Yi, Auntie, we really must be carrying on with the investigation,” Liuyin replied as they gestured the doctor to them with hurried movements, as if urging them to escape before Aunt Liya got around even further in passing judgement upon the two of them-- who were strictly professional, sorry and thank you.
“Investigation?” their aunt asks incredulously, and that was pretty much all the incentive Liuyin needed to grab Doctor Devorak’s free wrist and tug him insistently up the steps and through the open sliding doors to the left, into the coffin-house where the dead were banished. “Yinyin, you stupid child, come back out here!”
Liuyin led him through the white-sheets hanging from the entrance, skirting around a not-quite-fully burnt trough of incense sticks that was arranged in front of an altar housing the statue of a stern-faced man.
Liuyin had paused in front of it for a brief moment and bowing, murmuring a few words of supplication under their breath before they’d continued on, holding open yet another set of white curtains as they led him into another room.
He’d taken stock of the surroundings and deemed it acceptable-- a waist-high table, good lighting, and the area was evidently kept clean. Despite the number of corpses that must have gone through this coffin-house, it smelled more strongly of incense than of necrotic flesh, and though he was far too accustomed to less glamorous working conditions, he’d appreciated the meticulous care that the witch and their aunt had. “You can set it down on the surface of the table,” he’d informed them.
They’d concurred with the request, gingerly laying the bundle down. “I assume you brought tools with you,” they said.
“Of course, darling,” the doctor offered a smirk and cast off his coat, leaving it hanging on one of the hooks on the wall, before bringing out what looked like a leather portfolio, but bulkier, from one of the folds.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Liuyin says skeptically, eyeing the variety of sharp blades and implements he’d unravelled from the bag.
“Don’t want to stay for the show?” He asks, raising a brow.
Liuyin narrowed their eyes at him. Fine, two could play at the banter. “No,” they replied. “I’m going to just purify everything so the infant spirit doesn’t latch onto you and eat your spouse’s children in the womb.”
“Yinyin?” A slender, petite woman with dark hair, wearing a high-collared dress over which she’d draped a dressing robe emerged from the opposite door. “I thought I heard your voice-- oh!”
Auntie Liya was staring somewhat judgmentally, at the two of them-- and Liuyin suddenly became aware of their proximity to Julian, pressed nearly chest-to-chest, the bundle in his arm held awkwardly at his hip to prevent getting crushed.
Their face lit on fire and they stepped back right into the door of talismans, pushing it open blindly. “C-come in, Doctor Devorak, we’ll set up a table for you.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Liya asks expectantly, hands on her hips.
Liuyin squeezes their eyes shut, as if praying for the ground to swallow their mortification, and then nods obligingly, painting a smile across their features. “Auntie, this is Doctor Devorak, who helped me recover the body that was stolen from us earlier this morning. Doctor Devorak, this is my Aunt Liya, who I’m apprenticed under.”
Word Count: 1.7k
Warnings: Mentions of infant death, murder, and infidelity
Rating: M
Description: An Arcana AU set in a Vesuvia that is half-noir and half-fantasy.
When Liuyin Mei nearly kicks down the door to the shop at dawn, Asra Alnazar immediately sensed, deep in the dregs of his instinct, that something foul was afoot.
For one, they were dressed, not in the high-collared and pale blue blouse that at this point was customary of them, but rather, in clean, simple linen, a pale figure outlined by the light of early morning. They were wearing white-- funereal colors, though on Liuyin, the veil and robes made them look like one of the immortals or angels or gods that lived atop the snowy mountains, aloof from worldly troubles.
For another count, it was dawn, when Liuyin was a habitually bad sleeper and a chronically late riser, and every moment before the sun was in the midst of the sky that they spent awake, they also spent cursing and looking like an alley cat rescued from the rains.
“Asra,” the white-garbed sorcerer had said, and in that space between sleeping and waking that he was surfacing from, the sound of his voice in their accent made his heart leap into his throat and stick there for a beat, two beats, before the rhythm reestablished itself in the wake of the tension held in those two syllables.
“You need to come down to the docks with me,” they’d said instead-- and turned to walk out the door entirely-- detained only by Asra, who’d reached out, clutching at the wide hem of their sleeve and feeling the fabric texture beneath his fingertips, magic rising to meet it-- magic seeped with death and decay, smelling faintly of that incense Liuyin sometimes burned.
“Have you eaten yet?” He’d asked, a question wholly unnecessary, a token of his concern nonetheless.
Liuyin shakes their head, and he’d nearly offered to take them to the bakery, before he recalled the urgency in their voice. “Let’s go.”
He’d tugged on a shawl and stumbled out into the streets in the early morning mists blanketing the town, distorting everything into a fanciful version of itself. Meanwhile, Liuyin forged on ahead, floating almost like a ghost in white.
For a moment, his heart was struck by a hidden foreboding, redoubling his pace and walking closer to his companion, letting the warmth radiating from their figure and the bitter-sweet scent of herbs reassure him.
As they paced down the street, only their breathing and the sounds of their shoes against cobblestone and the rustle of fabric to accompany them, Liuyin spoke up.
“My aunt received a client last night. Very wealthy, with stress on discretion being of utmost importance,” they’d reported.
“What services?” Asra couldn’t help but ask, but seeing Liuyin in their current garb, he had a good clue as to the nature of the house call.
For divinations, charms, and funeral rites, visit Liya Zheng and Associate’s today!
Namely, Aunt Liya and Liuyin ran a business that did some work on the side in blessing, cleansing, cursing, or otherwise invoking the spirits for their clients. Of course, this expanded into burial rites, especially for those matters that were more tinged in scandal-- a jealous lover shooting someone’s husband, a bastard daughter who’d been offed by the stepmother, the such. Said rituals were meant to prevent the deceased from coming back to haunt the wrongdoers.
(“That seems terribly corrupt,” Asra had declared, making a face.
Liuyin laughed. “No more than politics is. And it brings in better money, too.”)
Liuyin threw him a sidelong look that indicated the fact he ought to already have an idea. “Someone died. A child or baby, I believe, from the size of the coffin. Either that or there wasn’t enough of them left to bury-- we were tasked with banishing any traces of resentment or lingering malevolence it might have had on its person. I’m assuming a rather abrupt death, and the secrecy of it makes me suspect foul play in some form or another.”
“But you’ve no leads?” Asra asks, raising a brow. That was unlike Liuyin, who could suss things out with unerring accuracy akin to a bloodhound, as his own master, Old Fox, had once mentioned.
Liuyin shook their head. “I didn’t have the chance to-- someone stole the coffin before I could.” Their face took on a grim set, like one of the marble statues of the Scourgelander family.
“Then,” he drawled, the key points coalescing into a simplified timeline in his mind, “I suppose they recovered the body at the docks, then, if we’re headed in that direction?”
Liuyin let out an involuntary shudder, and Asra made to tug off his shawl and drape it around their shoulders instead-- before they’d given a tiny jerk of their head to reject this help. “They recovered more than that.”
The briny scent of the sea air was clearer now as they made their way down the empty streets of Goldgrave. “How many?”
“Not a body, just an arm,” Liuyin corrected. “A metal prosthetic.”
Involuntarily, Asra felt his eyes widen, thinking back on a visit to his offices three nights prior, the sharp scent of lavender lingering, the amused, wine-dark eyes and the silhouette of an elegant figure. “Do you think it might be…?”
Liuyin’s answering glance was grim. “Extremely possible. Who else around these parts has a metal prosthetic?”
Old Fox had gone travelling again, Asra noted with half a spark of annoyance after he’d returned from another house call-- someone wanted him to look into their husband, having gotten suspicious of his hours kept in the commerce district, and he’d taken one glance around the man’s study before he’d informed the lady of the house that Lord Sforza was having an affair.
It was really, nearly tragically obvious, and he didn’t even need to pull the tarot deck from his pocket to confirm this suspicion. The clashing notes of perfume were not a smoking gun, it was a crater on fire that someone had fired a cannon at.
Sometimes, he lamented the fact that his business had evolved from “Asra Alnazar, Magician and Diviner” to “Asra Alnazar, reader of tarots for bored nobles and finder of unfaithful spouses and eloped heirs”.
At least, as Liuyin had quipped, it brought in good money.
He’d slung his shawl over the coatstand by the door, and his satchel on top of it, then pauses when a figure rises from the chaise in the corner. “Asra Alnazar, I presume?” a silky voice accompanied the movement.
“Who’s asking?” Asra calls, a bit hesitantly, given the unanticipated nature of this visitor.
The woman inclines her head towards him as he snaps his fingers, illuminating the shop with a few dim lamps and allowing him to see the elegant planes of her face, furrowed with worry. “Nadia Satrinava.”
“Young Miss Satrinava,” Asra had bowed by reflex, in a gesture of courtesy.
The youngest daughter of city councilwoman, Secretary Nasrin Satrinava, their family was as wealthy and powerful as they came-- of her six sisters, all were exceptionals-- one was their mother’s aide, one was an ambassador, one was a silent film actress, one was a naval lieutenant, one a philanthropist, another a doctor, the list went on and on…
They were a veritable political dynasty that had their hands in every aspect of the public affairs in the city, how could one not know about them?
Speaking of which--
“Miss Satrinava, what brings you here today?” Asra asks as he rounds a counter and takes a seat in the chair opposite Nadia. “Is it not the day of your engagement party?”
And then there was Nadia, the youngest of seven, a journalist who, till recently, had been more or less out of the public eye, all of it thrown out the window when an engagement was announced in the Vesuvian Star, the premiere morning news of the city.
Nadia Satrinava, the youngest daughter of councilwoman Nasrin Satrinava, was to marry Count Lucio Morgasson.
As soon as the news broke, the rumor mill positively churned, from speculations of a passionate young love, to more outlandish rumors such as political alliances and scandalous accusations of premarital pregnancies. Asra was too polite to inquire into any of them, but the look on Nadia’s face spoke volumes.
“It is,” the woman confirmed hesitantly, almost diplomatically, before she scrunched her nose and curled her lip in something akin to distaste. “At least, till we couldn’t find my darling fiancee in time for his speech. You see, we’re pretending nothing is amiss-- my mother claims that if it were to come out the Count’s vanished, the ensuing panic cannot be a good thing. I left the party discretely to find you. My driver is parked in a secluded front a few stores down.”
Something in the intonation with which she’d said fiancee made him inclined to think it wasn’t an arrangement of love.
“Have you gone to check his residence? Or any of his usual haunts?” Asra asks. The Count’s reputation as a carousing hedonist was well-known throughout the city, another reason why the sudden engagement was so surprising to so many people.
“His servants said he’s left two days ago, and hasn’t returned since…” Nadia says, pauses, and then frowns deeply. “And all his companions with whom he usually revels with were all present at the party…”
“Is it possible he’s merely gotten cold feet over the betrothal with the engagement party drawing so near?” Asra prompted delicately. “A case of a runaway groom-to-be?”
“I’ve learned over the years to never ignore my intuition,” Nadia replies with a good deal of confidence. “And it’s telling me something is very wrong, Magician.”
Asra worries his lower lip in between his teeth absently as the woman stands, the folds of her velvet gown rippling out-- indeed, it looked as though she did come directly from her engagement party, or at least, there was no time to change before coming here.
“I’m willing to pay handsomely for your services and discretion, of course. Name the price and it will be yours. Think on it, Magician,” she’d said, draping a houndstooth jacket over her shoulders. “I leave the decision in your hands.”
With that, she departed into the night on a lavender breeze.
Liuyin Mei: 23 years old, the spirit medium with ability to communicate with the dead. Works with their aunt Liya, where they usually deal in arranging funerals, as well as pay visits to wealthier estates to cast any range of spells or provide a myriad of potions, no questions asked. Known as the Little Witch or the Witchling, after their aunt, who’s known as the Old Witch.
Asra Alnazar: 25 years old, known as the Little Fox, after his teacher, the reclusive magician known only as Old Fox, he is the lifelong friend of Liuyin ever since their adoption by Aunt Liya. He makes his living divining fortunes from his arcana deck and investigating into the matters of nobles for a hefty price on the promise of his silence.
Julian Devorak: 27 years old, a physician turned coroner with a life spent teetering on the edges of the law and getting free on technicalities or the leverage of his contacts. His field experience makes him widely-sought, but instead, he is dragged into the mystery after being falsely accused and arrested for the disappearance of a young nobleman.
Nadia Satrinava: 30 years old, an ambitious investigative journalist and youngest daughter of Secretary-General Nasrin Satrinava, she's determined to prove herself in a family of exceptionals. Engaged to Count Lucio Morgasson in a political match arranged by her family, but his mysterious disappearance has raised questions.
