That answer felt honest. Not because Varik sounded defeated. Because he sounded irritated by the memory of failing. He hadn’t ignored it. He just hadn’t been able to crack it.
Varik leaned back slightly and fixed Ludger with a direct stare.
“Regardless,” he said, “what you are doing is even more troublesome than antagonizing the Regent from Lionfang.”
Ludger didn’t blink. Varik’s tone hardened.
“You’re digging up problems from the past,” he said, “here. In the capital. In the regent’s backyard.”
There was no humor in it. No dry acceptance. Just a statement of fact.
Ludger had crossed from being a distant, inconvenient border talent into something more dangerous, a boy with sharp instincts and no respect for the invisible lines powerful people preferred others not to cross.
Ludger, of course, looked completely unbothered.
“It became my problem when it repeated,” he said.
Varik’s eyes narrowed. “Repeated where?”
Ludger did not answer directly.
He just tapped the papers once and said, “Patterns don’t care where they start. Only where they lead.”
That made Varik go quiet again. Because that, more than anything else, was the real issue. Not just that Ludger had found old dirt. But that he had found it in a way that suggested it might not be old at all. Ludger leaned back just enough to study Varik’s face for a moment, his expression unreadable.
“So,” he said, voice calm and flat, “are you planning to help with this investigation?”
There was no heat in the question, but none was needed. The meaning was obvious enough. One way or another, Ludger would keep digging until he got the answers he wanted. The only real question was whether Varik intended to stand near the path… or get dragged into it anyway.
Varik exhaled through his nose and rubbed a hand over his face before answering.
“Not directly,” he said. “I can’t. Not without creating problems that would spread farther than either of us wants right now. At the same time, if anyone asks about you and your actions if you are found out, I want to be able to say that I don’t know anything.” His eyes shifted toward the papers on the desk. “But I can give you the information I found.”
Ludger gave a small nod. “That will be enough.”
For a second, Varik just looked at him, as if measuring whether those words were reassuring or deeply concerning. Then he crouched beside the desk and reached under one of the drawers. His fingers pressed against something hidden beneath the wood, and after a moment he pulled free a worn notebook bound in dark leather.
Ludger’s gaze dropped to it, then back to Varik.
“You were prepared.”
Varik snorted quietly and set the notebook on the table between them.
“I work under the Senate,” he said dryly. “Being unprepared is a good way to end up buried under someone else’s version of the truth.” He tapped the cover once. “Some of these notes aren’t directly related to what you asked for. But they connect to people, rumors, transactions, small inconsistencies. Things that didn’t amount to proof on their own.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “They should still be useful.”
Ludger reached for the notebook without hesitation. The moment his fingers touched the cover, he could already feel the weight of what it represented, not certainty, not yet, but direction. Sometimes that was more valuable.
“I accept,” he said.
Then, after a brief pause, he added, “Thank you.”
Varik gave him a long look at that, like he still wasn’t fully convinced the thanks was a good sign. In Ludger’s case, gratitude usually meant he had just been handed another tool to dismantle someone’s life with.
“You’re welcome,” Varik said anyway. “Just try not to turn the capital upside down before sunset.”
Ludger opened the notebook, his eyes already moving over the first page.
“We will see.”
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Ludger flipped through the notebook quickly, his eyes skimming line after line as he committed the general structure to memory. Names. Dates. Fragments of incidents. Small links Varik had bothered to record even when they had led nowhere. Useful, but not something he could afford to sit there and study in detail.
After a few moments, he closed the notebook again.
He had already stayed in Varik’s office longer than was wise. The longer he remained, the greater the chance someone would notice something strange, an odd sound, a missing guard pattern, a ward reacting in a way it shouldn’t. He had no interest in turning a quiet intrusion into a public incident.
Varik rose from his chair and muttered something about needing to use the bathroom before Ludger disappeared and made him question his sanity later. Once the man stepped out of the office, Ludger moved immediately.
He crouched and placed a hand on the floor.
Mana sank into the stone beneath him, silent and smooth. The ground softened under his control, opening not with noise or dramatic force, but with a precise, practiced shift, as if the earth itself had simply decided to make room for him. Ludger slipped down into the darkness below, notebook secured, and then drew the stone shut over his head.
The floor sealed perfectly. No crack. No raised edge. No loose dust disturbed in the wrong pattern.
Mastering the Geomancer class had pushed his control far beyond simple walls, spears, and crude reshaping. At this point, manipulating the earth with subtlety had become almost second nature. He could move stone and packed soil so finely that he barely left any trace behind at all. To an ordinary eye, and to many trained ones as well, the office floor would look untouched.
By the time Varik returned, Ludger would be gone as if he had never been there.
Ludger moved through the underground routes with steady speed, letting the familiar pressure of enclosed earth settle around him. Only once he had put enough distance between himself and the Senate district did he allow his pace to ease. His next destination was obvious.
The Torvares manor in the capital.
Getting inside was far easier than entering the Senate building had been. He already knew the estate’s structure, its blind angles, the places servants rarely checked, the routes that let him slip in without disturbing anyone. Before long, he reached one of the unused guest rooms and let himself in as quietly as a shadow.
He should have been in a hurry to read through Varik’s notes. Every instinct tied to the investigation pushed him toward opening the notebook that very second and tearing through every page until he had wrung it dry. But that would have been stupid.
This kind of information was exactly the sort that punished impatience.
A missed date. A repeated family name. A merchant house mentioned once in passing. A servant death that looked irrelevant until placed next to three others. If he read it tired, distracted, or with his thoughts racing ahead of the pages, he could easily miss the one detail that mattered.
So Ludger set the notebook aside for the moment and lay back to rest. He would read it later, with a fresh mind and steady focus.
If Varik had hidden those notes under his own desk, then whatever was written there had survived not because it was obvious, but because it was subtle. And subtle things were the easiest to overlook when exhaustion turned the mind dull.
When Ludger finally opened the notebook for real, he did it with the kind of focus he usually reserved for dismantling traps or studying an enemy in motion.
He sat by the window of the empty guest room, the curtains drawn just enough to keep the light low and controlled. The capital beyond the glass remained distant and muffled, reduced to a faint hum that didn’t matter. On the small table in front of him rested the notebook, a loose sheet for his own notes, and a thin stick of charcoal. Nothing else.
Then he began to read.
The first thing that became clear was that Varik had not approached the deaths like a careless bureaucrat trying to satisfy a report. He had actually worked the problem. Properly.
Ludger’s eyes moved steadily over page after page, and the deeper he went, the more obvious it became that Varik had tried to build a profile of the victims. Age ranges. political standing. health before the sickness. known rivals. business disputes. inheritance structures. family tensions. debts. lovers. travel history. known healers consulted before death. servants dismissed shortly before symptoms worsened. even the temperament of the heirs.
It was thorough.
Varik had not just looked for murder. He had looked for motive, for pattern, for the kind of human ugliness that usually sat behind suspicious deaths. A son too eager to inherit. A rival branch of the family. A political enemy. A trade dispute. A past insult that had festered into long-term revenge. Something.
Ludger frowned faintly as he turned another page.
Apparently, he had found nothing.
One note after another pushed in the same direction. No meaningful overlap in faction. No shared business circles large enough to matter. No private feuds that stood out. No old scandal linking the victims. No secret society, no common patron, no obvious hostile contact shortly before the decline began. Some had reputations for being stern. Others had been regarded as competent, or distant, or difficult, or generally unremarkable by noble standards. But none of it formed a pattern.
Varik really was smart. He had tried the simple angle first. Then the less simple one. Then the ugly one. Then the paranoid one. And still nothing. Ludger kept reading.
Varik had gone farther back too, digging into the victims’ earlier lives over the span of years. Childhood alliances. military service. marriages. old inheritances. properties acquired decades ago. court appointments from before the current Emperor’s reign. Even older labyrinth expeditions in some cases, if records existed. He had clearly entertained the possibility that whatever had killed them had roots far older than the visible symptoms.
Yet every time the notes narrowed toward something promising, the trail seemed to collapse into dust. No suspicious common mentor. No shared battlefield event. No old expedition where all of them had crossed paths. No long-buried dispute over land or relics. No strange transfer of assets before the illnesses. Nothing odd enough to justify the pattern of deaths.
Ludger’s brows drew together more deeply the further he went. That was the sort of result he hated most. Not because it meant there was no answer, but because it meant the real answer was sitting somewhere outside the obvious lines. Hidden behind something most investigators would have dismissed too quickly, or never thought to compare at all.
He turned to the notes on the victims outside the capital. Those sections were thinner.