Gort grunted at them. “He had two bad arms, and I still wouldn’t have fought him unless I was buying time for you and your mother to get away.”
“Who is Shuhoven?” Kaiden asked.
“A renowned knight,” Reynald said. “He was famous for driving his spear through multiple fighters in one thrust.”
“It’s hard to do,” Will explained. “It takes a lot of strength.”
“Then you have to pull the spear out,” Lute said. “And the bodies don’t want to let it go.”
“Now you’re stuck with your weapon inside another person,” Will said.
“Any asshole can come up and stab you,” Lute said.
They sounded exactly the same. It was like listening to one person whose voice bounced from one speaker to another. Will and Lute, spear experts, coming through in stereo.
“Shuhoven would do it in a single pull,” Gort said. “Unbelievable upper body strength.”
Reynald grimaced. “He was a show-off. He used to do this thing before battles—once the troops lined up, he would stand on his horse. He claimed he needed the height to survey the field.”
“Why did he really do it?” Kaiden asked.
“So the enemy would see him standing there on a horse with his spear,” Reynald said. “I once told him that he made an excellent tar—”
Gort coughed.
“A story for another time,” Reynald said. “The angle of the wounds suggests Shuhoven was upright and moving when they were made, so Maggie is right. The Dog Market Butcher duels with his victims, then he cuts them open and displays the bodies for everyone to see. It’s a message.”
“This is what I did and how I did it,” Will said. “It’s pride.”
“It’s hubris,” Reynald corrected and turned to me. “What about the other victims?”
“I know of two, besides the Sun Margrave: Eliarde of the Silver Eagles and Jeor Baes. But both of them die later. Eliarde is number three and Jeor is number five.”
“He kills Eliarde?” Gort frowned.
Dame Eliarde was Arvel’s second cousin. She hadn’t inherited the Enduring Flame of the main family, but she got the lesser version of the talent called the Amber Coal, which made her both stronger and more durable than an ordinary knight. She was deadly.
“Did he ambush her?” Lute asked.
“No. He fought her,” I told him. “She lost.”
The table went silent. Even if the Magnars all banded together, Eliarde would go through them like Shana’s cleaver through a fish.
“How does Hreban find him?” Reynald asked into the silence.
“The killer has a lair on the coast. That’s where he tortures and slices up his targets. When he takes Eliarde there, she can hear the surf. Hreban was buying a warehouse, didn’t like the condition of it, and wanted to see what else was available. Supposedly he ended up walking into the wrong building with his guards as the killer was cleaning up the gore.”
Except that if he and the Butcher were in on it together, he would know exactly where to find his pet serial killer.
“Do we know what area of the coast?” Gort asked.
I shook my head. “Somewhere remote where nobody could hear the screams.”
Kair Toren was founded because of its safe harbor and access to the West Ocean. It had literally miles of docks and warehouses. We could search for months and not find anything.
“How does he transport his victims?” Will asked. “He can’t just walk around dragging people and bodies back and forth.”
“In a cart,” Clover told him. “That’s how I would do it. I’d load them into a delivery cart, stack some goods on top, and wear some cheap clothes and beat-up shoes. I could make circles through Kair Toren all day, and nobody would pay me any mind.”
