The governor, however… well, perhaps that hidden file on her desk—full of hints, guesses, and clues—would finally be relevant.

“Winsting,” she asked Aradel. “Is he…?”

“Dead?” Aradel asked. “Yes, Constable Colms. From the invitations we found, he initiated this meeting, under the guise of an auction. We located his corpse in a saferoom in the basement.”

This drew Waxillium’s attention. He stood up, looking directly at them, then muttered something to himself and paced off another body. What was he searching for?

Wayne wandered over to Marasi and Aradel. He took a swig from a silver flask engraved with someone else’s initials. Marasi pointedly did not ask him which of the dead he’d taken it from. “So,” he said, “our little house leader was friendly with criminals, was he?”

“We’ve long suspected he was crooked,” Aradel said. “The people love his family though, and his brother went to great lengths to keep Winsting’s previous lapses out of the limelight.”

“You’re right, Aradel,” Waxillium said from across the room. “This will be bad.”

“I dunno,” Wayne said. “Maybe he didn’t know these folks were all trouble.”

“Doubtful,” Marasi said. “And even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter. Once the broadsheets get ahold of this… The governor’s sibling, dead in a house full of known criminals under very suspicious circumstances?”

“What I’m hearing,” Wayne said, taking another swig, “is that I was wrong. The fun isn’t over.”

“Many of these people shot one another,” Waxillium said.

They all turned to him. He knelt beside another body, inspecting the way it had fallen, then looked up toward some bullet holes in the wall.

Being a lawman, particularly out in the Roughs, had required Waxillium to teach himself a wide variety of skills. He was part detective, part enforcer, part leader, part scientist. Marasi had read a dozen different profiles of him by various scholars, all investigating the mindset of a man who was becoming a living legend.

“What do you mean, Lord Ladrian?” Aradel asked.

“The fight here involved multiple parties,” Waxillium said, pointing. “If this was an unexpected hit by someone external—and Lady Colms is right, that would have made the most sense—one would expect the victims to have died from a barrage fired by the enemy who burst in. The corpses don’t tell that story. This was a melee. Chaos. Random people firing one at another. I think it began when someone started shooting from the middle of the group outward.”

“So it was one of the attendees who began it,” Aradel said.

“Maybe,” Waxillium said. “One can only tell so much from the fall of the bodies, the sprays of blood. But something is odd here, very odd… Were they all shot?”

“No, strangely. A few of the attendees were killed by a knife in the back.”

“Have you identified everyone in the room?” Waxillium asked.

“Most of them,” Aradel said. “We wanted to avoid moving them too much.”

“Let me see Lord Winsting,” Waxillium said, standing, his mistcoat rustling.