Chapter 2: The Law of Contagion

Chapter 2: The Law of Contagion

The carriage ride to Harrington's manor was a silent, tense affair. Valerius seemed content to stew in his own austere thoughts, while Alex—Alistair—fought to reconcile the clatter of horseshoes on cobblestone with the phantom memory of engine hums and traffic sirens. He was clinging to the "amnesia" defense like a life raft, answering Valerius's pointed questions about the Harrington case with vague affirmations and deflections. The lie was flimsy, and he knew it.

Harrington's residence was a stoic, grey-stone building in a wealthier quarter of the city. A pair of uniformed constables stood sentry at the door, their expressions a mixture of reverence and fear as they snapped to attention for Master Valerius. They barely spared Lord Alistair a glance, their deference clearly reserved for the wielder of magic.

"Master Valerius. Lord Alistair," the senior constable said with a sharp nod. "The scene is as we found it. Untouched. The Ward is still active."

The study was on the ground floor. The air inside was heavy and still, thick with the scent of old paper, leather, and the faint, cloying sweetness of spilled brandy. Lord Harrington, a portly man with silvering hair, was slumped over his grand oak desk, a decorative letter opener protruding from his chest. His face was a mask of surprise, eyes wide and staring at nothing.

Valerius ignored the body entirely. His focus was on the very air itself. He raised a hand, his fingers tracing patterns that only he could see. "The Ward is intact," he murmured, his voice tight with concentration. "Class-Four, as I suspected. Woven with seals of privacy and inviolability. No ripple of passage, no thaumic residue of its undoing. It was not breached."

While the sorcerer communed with the invisible, Alex’s detective instincts took over. He let the foreign concept of "Wards" and "thaumic residue" fade into the background. This was a crime scene. You didn't look at the air; you looked at the details.

The constabulary had done a cursory job. They had secured the room, but they hadn't searched it. They were so fixated on the magical impossibility that they had overlooked the physical reality. Alex began a slow circuit of the room, his eyes scanning the floor, the furniture, the position of the body. The brandy decanter was overturned, a dark stain spreading across a sheaf of documents on the desk. A glass lay shattered on the floor.

"He was not alone," Alex stated, his voice cutting through Valerius’s focused silence.

Valerius lowered his hand, turning to Alex with an annoyed frown. "A remarkable deduction, my lord, given the dagger in his chest."

Alex ignored the sarcasm. "No, I mean right before it happened. The shattered glass is there," he pointed with his shoe, "but the base of the glass is here, near the desk's leg. He threw it, or knocked it away in a struggle. The position of his body is wrong, too. He's slumped forward, but the blood spatter on the desk blotter suggests the blow came from a slight angle, from his right."

The senior constable shuffled his feet. "With all respect, Lord Alistair, how could anyone have been in here? The door was sealed from the inside. We had to wait for a licensed dissolver from the guild to get it open."

"And the windows?" Alex asked, walking over to the heavy velvet curtains.

"Barred and shuttered from the inside, my lord. Same as the door."

Alex pulled back a curtain. Heavy iron bars were indeed bolted into the stone frame. This truly was a sealed room. Yet, his gut screamed that the solution wasn't some phantom assassin who could walk through magical walls.

His gaze swept the floor again, this time with more intensity. He saw dust motes dancing in the sliver of light from the hallway, the faint scuff marks from the constables' boots, the glint of shattered glass, and then… something else. Caught on the clawed foot of a heavy armchair, almost invisible against the deep crimson of the Aubusson carpet, was a single, tiny thread.

It was silk. A vibrant, luminous crimson that seemed to drink the gaslight. It was utterly out of place amidst the drab browns and greens of the dead man's study.

He knelt, carefully plucking the fiber with his fingertips. He held it up. "What's this?"

Valerius glanced over, his expression one of pure dismissal. "A thread, my lord. The late Lord Harrington was known for his… garish taste in waistcoats."

"This isn't from a waistcoat," Alex said, his certainty absolute. The quality was too fine, the color too rich. This was from a woman's gown. An expensive one. "It's silk. And it's not from any of the fabrics in this room."

"A fascinating observation," Valerius said, his tone dripping with condescension. "While you have been pursuing haberdashery, I have been analyzing the Ward. The killer did not use a counter-spell. They did not overwhelm it. It is as if they were never here. That is the mystery we must solve."

Alex felt a flash of frustration. Valerius was a hammer seeing only nails, a sorcerer seeing only spells. He had to bridge the gap. He had to translate his modern idea into this world’s arcane language. He closed his eyes, focusing on the faint, translucent interface that only he could see. He thought about the core principle of his old job: Every contact leaves a trace.

A flicker of blue text appeared, crisp and clear.

[System]: Cross-referencing concept: Locard's Exchange Principle. Closest Thaumaturgical Equivalent: The Law of Contagion. [Law of Contagion]: A Hermetic principle stating that objects once in physical contact maintain a metaphysical link. A part of a whole remains intrinsically connected to that whole.

Alex's eyes snapped open. "The Law of Contagion," he said aloud.

Valerius froze, his head tilting slightly. "What did you say?"

"The Law of Contagion," Alex repeated, trying to sound as if he were quoting from a textbook and not a hallucination. "A fundamental Hermetic law. 'What has been joined can be found again, for a part carries the echo of the whole.' Is that not correct, Master Valerius?"

The sorcerer’s eyes narrowed. The condescension in his gaze was replaced by a flicker of surprise, then sharp suspicion. "You are… familiar with the deeper principles of Sympathetic Thaumaturgy, my lord? Your 'fragmented' memory seems to be serving you well in esoteric matters."

"It comes and goes," Alex bluffed, his heart pounding. "If this thread was on the killer, and the killer was in this room, then a link exists. A sympathetic connection. Faint, perhaps, but there." He held out the tiny crimson fiber. "I challenge you. Use your arts. Not to look for a phantom, but to trace this. Trace the echo."

The constable looked between the two men, utterly lost. Alex’s proposal was a direct challenge to Valerius's methodology, a suggestion that the mundane held a power the magical had overlooked.

For a long moment, Valerius simply stared at the thread in Alex's palm. A war was being waged behind his stern features: professional pride against intellectual curiosity, rigid doctrine against a radical, yet logical, application of the laws he held sacred.

"The resonance would be infinitesimal," Valerius said slowly, more to himself than to Alex. "The contact was fleeting. The material is common. It would require a significant expenditure of energy for a result that is… highly improbable."

"But not impossible," Alex pressed.

With a deep, resigned sigh, Valerius finally extended his hand. "Give it to me."

Alex carefully placed the crimson thread onto the sorcerer's outstretched palm. Valerius produced a small, clear crystal from a pouch in his robes. He placed the thread upon it and closed his hand around the crystal.

He began to chant in a low, resonant language that made the air hum. The gas lamps flickered, and the temperature in the room dropped several degrees. The crystal in Valerius's hand began to glow, at first a soft white, then pulsing with a faint crimson light that matched the thread perfectly. The light grew stronger, brighter, a clear, resonant note in the silent room.

Valerius’s eyes were wide, all pretense of skepticism gone, replaced by pure, unadulterated shock. The crimson light projected from the crystal, forming a thin, shimmering line of energy that hovered in the air. It didn't point to a wall, or the door, or anywhere inside the manor.

It stretched out unerringly, piercing the magical ward as if it weren't there, and pointed southeast, towards the heart of the city's diplomatic quarter.

The light held for a few seconds before fading, leaving an afterimage burned into Alex’s vision. The thread on the crystal had turned to grey ash.

The senior constable stared, speechless, at the empty air where the line of light had been.

Valerius slowly opened his hand, his gaze fixed on Alex. The look was no longer one of mere suspicion or annoyance. It was sharp, analytical, and for the first time, held a sliver of grudging respect.

"The Polish-Lithuanian Embassy," Valerius whispered, his voice hoarse with disbelief. "The thread… it points directly to the Embassy."