Donnie Frisk watched Sam work. He was still suspicious of her since she lied to his face twice but the gold was real so he took the job. He was curious why she hired him in particular so he accepted her as a student and taught her as best he knew.

  He also wanted to know who was spreading his name around. He knew she didn't get it from magic because he could tell when she was lying and she already admitted to lying to him once. The curiosity itched at him enough to get him to bundle up against the cold weather and go outside in a hurry.

  The case itself was interesting enough to keep his attention. Two missing diviners. Donnie suspected foul play. He could tell by the coat hanging in the coat closet. And the hat. The coat was worn and it had wrinkles at the elbows. It was right for the weather so it wasn't something unseasonal left from last year. No, this was a heavy winter jacket.

  David Wilson entered his office and expected to be leaving.

  Donnie was able to piece together a pretty healthy profile of Mr. Wilson. He could tell from the furnishings and the overall decoration that Mr. Wilson's family came from wealth and expected to stay that way. Diviners usually came from wealth since it was so expensive to find a proper teacher.

  The personal effects in the room indicated a pretty boring person, conservative, with nothing out of place that any potential client would find objectionable. The man wanted to retire early. Most diviners usually did. They wouldn't do anything to rock the boat. There would be no indications of personality in any of the decor.

  The diviner's office was perfectly tidy and sparse. All the books on the bookshelves were history, law, economics. No works of fiction, no esoteric subject matter. All the bindings on the books were fresh. Most looked like they had never been opened at all.

  The large desk at the end of the room over by the windows had wear marks on top, through the finish, right where a man's elbows would sit. That man spent long hours working. He wasn't stepping out on his wife. He actually was here all the time.

  Donnie saw no indication of whether or not he actually liked the woman but judging from her personality, he would have no reason not to. She was a nice lady, and pretty. He was just obsessed with work.

  He was pleased Sam had discovered the letter in the waste bin. That meant there was a connection between the two diviners. Coincidences like that were too rare. The simplest explanation was almost always the correct one.

  At some point he'd let the city soldiers know there was a missing persons case on their hands. There'd be plenty of powerful people interested in a pair of missing diviners, but not before he figured out the case.

  He watched his student work. She was competent and smart and let him explain things she already understood, which made him like her a little bit. He didn't know why she was lying to him but people had strong reasons to lie.

  Sam was an interesting one. She moved like she weighed nothing sometimes, like her body was unfamiliar to her. She had had some kind of training, he supposed, or was unusually strong for a woman of her size.

  She wasn't rich, despite the explanation she'd given him for being able to afford a gold. Rich folk negotiate and rich folk object to spending their money. Sam wasn't rich or she was so impossibly rich that one gold coin meant nothing to her. If that was the case, why was she traipsing about, playing at being a private investigator? Why not just enjoy her wealth?

  No, she was poor and had been poor for all her life. Her crumpled clothes smelled of stale sweat. She slept in them. Her shoes were worn, meaning they were her only pair. The soles were flat and smooth.

  And she told him she had learned a bit of sorcery recently and even mentioned her teacher. That meant somehow she had money to pay the teacher. Learning sorcery was notoriously expensive.

  Maybe she was rich and this was all a sort of game to her. Or something had happened to her that made her feel she needed the protection of magic and the ability to investigate. That would mean someone close to her was hurt or killed.

  He wondered about her missing eye. From what he'd heard, military interrogators were given an artifact in that eye that could tell whether or not a person was lying. It was meant to be a secret but rumors got around. When interrogators were discharged, they had their memories wiped so that they couldn't be a liability for the Army and the Empire would be able to maintain their tight grip on the flow of information.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  But Sam never reached up and lifted the patch to rub at an itching eye socket. Donnie had noticed people with missing limbs would unconsciously rub them or scratch at them or in some way pay attention to them without thinking about it, but Sam never did. He wondered why.

  Sam let him see her office. How could she think he'd believe she was rich if she worked in a shithole like that? It was a terrible neighborhood. One of the rats sat on the windowsill and stared at him. If Donnie didn't know better he'd have sworn the little critter was sizing him up.

  When Sam opened the door to the ritual room, Donnie spotted the small scuff mark immediately. The unfinished sigil at the center had a scuff mark going from the inside to the outside, as if someone had carelessly slid a foot through the chalk and hadn't noticed.

  Donnie made a note to remind Sam of the proper way to enter a room. She had already forgotten in the excitement of finding the letter. No matter what the contents of the room, it needed to be investigated thoroughly using the same process as the previous room. He'd point it out after they'd left the office, though. Too much talking while breaking and entering wasn't a great idea.

  He began his own methodical examination of the paneled room. It was mostly empty, save for the sigil and the podium. The panel walls were wainscoted, made of dark wood, the same as the bookshelves in the previous room.

  Donnie didn't know what type of wood it was because he didn't make it outside enough to learn the names of all the trees and what their wood looked like after it'd been turned into furniture.

  The emptiness of the room was what struck him. This room would have been filled with the personal effects the clients wouldn't see: the tools a diviner used to mark their sigils, make their offerings. Donnie knew from his own career as a city soldier investigating crimes that magic involved tools. Some bindings required bowls of silver; some required the blood of a bat or other such exotic ingredients. They would have been kept in this room but there was nothing. He waited for Sam to notice.

  The scuff mark gave Donnie pause. He wasn't the type to jump to conclusions before more evidence presented itself but from what he could tell of David Wilson, he wouldn't be careless enough to mess up his own work. Sam had noticed the missing grimoire at the podium but she hadn't yet noticed the scuff mark or the lack of ritual paraphernalia. He'd point it out later.

  Donnie was reminded of a case he'd encountered over a decade ago in which a business rival started murdering his competition so that he would be the only game in town. He was some sort of financial advisor or consultant that specialized in something Donnie couldn't remember because he didn't care. One by one other consultants in his field began disappearing. Eventually it became clear who was responsible when there was only one man left in the city who could do what he did. From there it was a simple task of building up evidence to establish a case against the one remaining man with motive. Donnie hoped he wasn't going to have to wait for a pile of dead diviners to figure out which one was responsible.

  But that was his suspicion: it was a rival out there offing his peers to get more business. The only problem with that theory was that diviners were in short supply already. Unless he was looking to drive up prices, any competent diviner would have more business than he could handle. But there were better ways for a diviner to become more expensive.

  The puzzle of it appealed to him, just like the puzzle of who had given Sam his name appealed to him. It was interesting. Far more interesting than sitting at home on his couch reading books about other people's adventures.

  Donnie knew retirement wasn't going to suit him but he hadn't anticipated that the problem would be boredom and loneliness. The truth was Sam came in like a breath of fresh air, offering him an interesting mystery and something to do with his days.

  Donnie returned his mind to the case at hand. He started profiling the scene as if it were an abduction, but then someone would have seen him leaving the building. What caused the scuff mark? Was it David Wilson or whoever took him? Was he taken or killed? Donnie knew that sorcerers had their ways of disposing of bodies. They could simply offer the remaining flesh and blood as a sacrifice for some new effect and then it would disappear into the black smoke that indicated magic was about to take place.

  And then whoever had taken him had also taken objects from the room. How would they have managed that? They could have sacrificed the body, transformed it into smoke, but Donnie saw no indication of magic outside of that which was interrupted. It might be useful to identify the sigil that was on the ground.

  Donnie wondered what would happen if magic went wrong. Would it destroy a body and anyone connected? Would it similarly take Philip Hoffman, the other missing diviner? They'd need to investigate the other missing man's home in order to have more answers.

  A new scenario started to emerge that connected the two diviners. Maybe they were involved in working magic together that went wrong and killed them instead of producing their desired effect. They could consult with Samantha's teacher and find out if that was possible, while simultaneously determining the nature of the sigil David Wilson was working on.

  Donnie put his attention back on Sam. She was looking around the room and he could tell she had started to notice the same things he had. She was a quick study.

  "Hey Donnie," she said. "I think somebody might have kidnapped this guy."