On shelves to the right and left were displayed bottles of lamp-oil. On the bottom-most shelf were common pottery jugs that contained equally common rendered animal oil; in the middle were large casks of distilled ground-oil, which the customer would use to fill his own container; on the top, delicate glass flagons of clear, scented oils distilled with rare gums and berries. A solid wooden counter stretched across the middle of the room; on shelves behind it were barrels of tallow-dips bundled in dozens and wrapped in paper, cakes of raw waxes, and candles. There were hundreds of candles, from simple tapers to elaborately colored, carved, and molded sculptural pieces. The warm air was gently scented with barberry, presumably from the candles burning in glass-and-brass lanterns in the four corners of the room.
Behind the counter stood a woman neither old nor young—a woman with such a cheerful, vital countenance that Tal could not for the life of him put an age to her. Cheeks of a flushed pink, no sign of wrinkles around the smiling lips or blue eyes—her hair was hidden beneath a sensible scarf, so he couldn't see if there was any gray in it. She could not possibly be as youthful as he thought, yet he had never before seen a middle-aged woman who was so entirely happy. Her dress was modest, blue-and-white linen, impeccably clean but nothing like luxurious; she was clearly not a wealthy person, yet he had the impression that she was completely content with her life in every way.
"Can I help you, sir?" she asked, beaming at him, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight.
"I don't know," he said, hesitantly. "I really—I'm looking for a man named Torney?" Her very cheer and confidence rattled him; he would almost have preferred some surly old man to this charming woman, and he dreaded seeing her face fall when he mentioned the name of his quarry.
But if anything, she glowed at the mention of the name, as if one of her own candles had suddenly come alight within her. "That would be my husband," she said immediately, her face softening at the final word.
If I had a wife like this one—is she why he left the Church?
"But the sign says Bertram—"
"Is my father," she replied promptly. "Dasel is my husband. I never had a knack for the chandlery and he does, oh, most certainly does! My father could never have made lovely things such as this," she gestured at one of the carved candles, "and he'll be the first to tell you that. He's mostly retired, but he comes in now and again to help me or Dasel." Now she tilted her head to one side; her eyes grew keener, though no less friendly, and a look of recognition came over her, though she lost none of the glow. "You're with the Church, I take it?"
He didn't start, but he was surprised. "How did you know?"
"The cloak. I saw a few of those before Dasel's troubles were over." She did not lose a flicker of her cheer or her composure, but her next words startled him all over again. "You've come about the girls, haven't you? The poor things that were stabbed. I don't know that Dasel can help you, but he'll tell you anything he knows."
He didn't say anything, but his face must have given him away, for she raised her eyebrows and continued. "How do I know what you've come about? Oh, the wife of aformer Priest-Mage is going to know what it means that there are women dead and a three-sided blade has done the deed. We knew, we both did, and we've been expecting someone like you to come. The High Bishop ordered everything taken out of Dasel's record when he was allowed to leave—which only makes it look the more suspicious when something out of the common happens, I know."
Now she picked up a section of the counter and let it fall, then opened a door in the partition beneath it. "Please come into the shop, sir—your name, or shall I call you Master Church Constable?"
Her cheerful smile was irresistible, and he didn't try to evade her charm. "Tal Rufen, dear lady. Would you care to be more specific about why you were expecting someone like me to call on you?"
"Because," she dimpled as he entered the area behind the counter and waited for her to open the door into the shop, "we knew that the recordsyou would be allowed to see wouldn't disclose the reason why Dasel resigned, as I said. The High Bishop is the only one who has those, and she would keep them under her own lock and key. With those girls done to death by ecclesiastical dagger, the first suspecthas to be a Priest or a Priest-Mage, and you would be trying to find every Priest that had left the Church that you could.You'd rather it was someone that wasn't in the Brotherhood anymore, and the Church would, too, so that's the first place you'd look. We've already talked about it, Dasel and I. Dasel—" she called through the open door "—Tal Rufen from the Justiciars for you." She turned back to him, still smiling. "I have to mind the shop, so go on through."
He did so, and she shut the door behind him. He had never been in a chandlery before, and looked about him with interest, as a muffled voice said from the rear of the room, "Just a moment, I'm in the middle of a muddle. I'll be with you as soon as I get myself out of it. Don't fret, there's no back entrance to this place, it butts up against the rear wall of the building on the next street over."
The workroom was considerably wider than the shop; Tal guessed that it extended behind the shops on either side of this one. To his left was an ingenious clockwork contraption that dipped rows of cheap tallow candles in a vat, one after the other, so that as soon as a layer had hardened enough that it could be dipped again, it had reached the vat for another go. There was another such contraption doing the same with more expensive colored beeswax, and another with a scented wax. There were rows of metal molds to his right filled with hardening candles, an entire section full of things that he simply couldn't identify, and a workbench in the middle of it all with several candles being carved that were in various stages of completion. At the rear of the workshop was another door, leading to a storeroom, by the boxes he saw through the open door.
Again the air was scented with barberry, and Tal surmised that this room was the source of the scent, which was probably coming from the warm wax in the dipping area. As he concluded that, the man he had heard speaking from the rear emerged from the storeroom with a box in his hands. He was considerably older than the woman in the front of the shop; gray haired, with a thick, gray mustache and a face just beginning to wrinkle. He was, however, a vigorous and healthy man, and one who appeared to be just as content with his life as his wife was.
"Well, there is one thing that a bit of magic is good for, and that is as an aid to someone too scatter-brained to remember to label his boxes," said Dasel Torney as he set the box down. "Fortunately for one such as myself, there is the Law of Identity, which allows me to take a chip of Kaerlyvale beeswax and locate and remove a box of identical wax. Unfortunately, if that box happens to be in the middle of a stack, I can find myself with an incipient avalanche on my hands!"
Dasel Torney would not look to the ordinary lay-person like a man who could kill dozens of women in cold blood—but looks could be deceiving. Such men, as Tal knew, could be very charming if they chose.
But they were seldomhappy, not as completely, innocently happy as Dasel was. Once again, except for the gray hair, Tal could not have put an accurate age on Torney if he had not already known what it was from the records. His sheer joy in living made him look twenty years less than his actual age, which was sixty-two.
"Well!" Torney said, dusting his hands off. "Welcome, Tal Rufen! You'll find a stool over there, somewhere, please take it and sit down."
Looking around near the workbench, Tal did find a tall stool, and took a seat while Dasel Torney did the same on his side of the bench. "Your wife is a very remarkable woman, sir," he ventured.
For the first time since he entered the shop, Tal saw an expression that was not completely cheerful. There was a faint shadow there, followed by a softer emotion that Tal could not identify. "My wife is the reason I was dismissed from the Church, Sirra Rufen," Torney told him candidly. "Or rather—I was permitted to resign. The permission did not come without a struggle."
Tal felt very awkward, but the questions still had to be asked. "I know that you may find this painful, but your wife did say you'd discussed the fact that someone like me would be coming to talk to you—"
Torney shrugged. "And I know it will be my job to convince you that I had nothing to do with the murders—which, by the way,I think were done with the help of magic, speaking as a mage. Mages—Priest-Mages, at least—are expected to study the darker uses of magic so that they will recognize such things and know how to counteract them. I doubt I have to tell you that, though; I can't imagine that as learned and intelligent as High Bishop Ardis is, she hasn't already come to that conclusion."