The demon from the basement leaned toward me slightly. “The future can resist all it wants. In the end, it will surrender. I have no intentions of losing this war.”
He was right. We hadn’t lost the war. Both the Sun Margrave and Matheo were still breathing. We still had a chance.
“You don’t know the Butcher’s name,” Reynald said. “But you do know something about him.”
True. Even if I couldn’t account for all of the consequences, even if we did change things, I still had the core knowledge from the books. I knew things about the major players. Facts, quirks, habits, secrets. More, I knew how they thought.
If the future did resist change, it would make things more predictable, not less. The Butcher would stick to his once-a-week pattern. He would target the same victims.
Reynald’s eyes said,It will be fine. We have this. It’s under control.
He’d pulled me out of the sea onto his rock. All I had to do was stay on it.
I took a deep breath and let the angst go. Whatever happened, had happened. Now we had to deal with it.
“Could it be that man from the Garden?” Reynald asked.
“No. The Butcher is older, and dark haired. The man from the Garden has blond eyebrows.”
The serial killer was a subplot. He was mostly mentioned in passing, except for three scenes: one where a character was targeted by the Dog Market Butcher, brought to his lair, tortured, and murdered; the Sun Margrave’s death; and Hreban’s discovery of the Butcher; they were presented in gory second-by-second detail.
“The killer is a man.” I began writing a list under the Butcher’s name. “Dark brown hair, neither too tall, nor too short. Strong, muscular. Between thirty-five and sixty years old.”
The description in the book mentioned shoulders that showed the strength of a mature man. Latour specifically stated through one of the characters that the onset of maturity happened after thirty-five and before the old age of sixty.
“That describes half of the men in Lower Berem,” Shana murmured.
Lower Berem was Hreban’s domain.
“Anything specific?” Reynald asked. “A friend, a spouse, where he’s from, if he’s a soldier or a mercenary?”
I shook my head.
“He duels his victims until they can no longer fight, then transports them to his place, where he tortures them. Ritual is very important to him. Dissecting and displaying the body is as vital as the killing. Usually, repeat killers like him have a type. Their victims look similar. He doesn’t. He doesn’t care what his targets look like or what their age or gender is, as long as they are famous knights.”
That’s why his reign of terror was so scary. He was killing people who not only knew how to defend themselves but excelled at it. If he could kill them, an ordinary person wouldn’t stand a chance.
“He’s very good with his sword,” I said.
“How good?” Gort asked.
“Good enough to be a problem,” Reynald said. “I recognized the man he hung in the Dog Market. It was Shuhoven.”
I had no idea who Shuhoven was. The series spent very little time on the victims aside from stating that they were all famous knights. Half of the time, the books just said things like “another body was found in the morning. The Butcher had struck again” and moved on to the intrigue and Great Families’ machinations.
Gort whistled. “Are you sure?”
Reynald nodded. “I saw the scar.”
There’d been a scar? All I could remember was the mangled organs, the blood, and flies breeding on his insides.
“Shuhoven the Spear?” Will asked.
“Yes,” Reynald answered.
“I heard he retired,” Will said.
“And he has a bad arm,” Lute said. “Had. Had a bad arm.”
