“If you can get into the house, I can show it to you,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “What do you think, Gray?”
“I’m curious,” she told me.
“How do we go about it?” I asked. “Any open windows? Unlocked doors?”
“You couldn’t fit in through my opening. It’s just a little hole, up in the attic. The back door is usually unlocked, but it takes a human to open it.”
“Maybe not,” Graymalk said.
“We will have to wait till the constable and his men are gone,” I said.
“Of course.”
We waited, hearing the puzzlement over the unnatural remains of the three repeated many times. A doctor came and looked and shook his head and took notes and departed, after deciding that there was only one human body, Owen’s, and promising to file a report in the morning. Mrs. Enderby and her companion stopped by and chatted with the constable for a time, glancing at Graymalk and me almost as much as at the remains. She left before too long, and the remains were sacked and labeled and hauled away in a cart, along with what remained of the baskets, which were also labeled.
As the cart creaked away, Graymalk, Cheeter, and I glanced at each other. Then Cheeter flowed up the bole of a tree, drifted from its top to that of another, then over to the roof of the house.
“It would be nice to be able to do that,” Graymalk remarked.
“It would,” I agreed, and we headed for the back door.
I rose as before, clasped the knob tightly and twisted. Almost. I tried again, a little harder, and it yielded. We entered. I shouldered the door nearly closed, withholding the final pressure that would have clicked it shut.
We found ourselves in the kitchen, and from overhead I could hear the hurrying of someone small with claws.
Cheeter arrived shortly, glancing at the door.
“His workshop is downstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you the way.”
We followed him through a door off of the kitchen, and down a creaking stairway. Below, we immediately came into a large room that smelled of the out-of-doors. Cut branches, baskets of leaves and roots, cartons of mistletoe were stacked haphazardly along the walls, on shelves, and on benches. Animal skins occupied several tabletops and were strewn over the room’s three chairs. Diagrams were chalked in blue and green on both ceiling and floor, with one prominent red one covering much of the far wall. A collection of ephemeridae and of books in Gaelic and Latin filled a small bookcase beside the door.
“The sickle,” I said.
Cheeter sprang atop a small table, landing amid herbs. Turning, he leaned forward, hooked his claws beneath the front edge of a small drawer. He jiggled it and drew upon it. It began to move forward to this prompting.
“Unlocked,” he observed. “Let’s see now.”
He drew it farther open, so that, rising onto my hind legs, I could see into it. It was lined with blue velvet which bore a sickle-shaped impression at its center.
“As you can see,” he stated, “it’s gone.”
“Anyplace else it might be?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “If it isn’t here, it was with him. Those are the alternatives.”
“I didn’t see it anywhere out back,” Graymalk said, “on the ground, or in that, mess.”
“Then I’d say that someone took it,” Cheeter said.
“Odd,” I said then. “It was a thing of power, but not really one of the Game tools, like the wands, the icon, the pentacle, and, usually, the ring.”
“Then someone just wanted it for the power, I guess,” Cheeter said. “Mostly, I think, they wanted Owen out of the Game.”
“Probably. I’m trying to link his death to Rastov’s now. It would be strange to consider the killer as one player, though, with Owen an opener and Rastov a closer.”
“Hm,” Cheeter said, jumping down. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Rastov and Owen had some long talks very recently. I got the impression from listening that Owen was trying to talk Rastov into switching, all his liberal sympathies and his Russian sentiments could have been pushing him in a revolutionary direction.”