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The last house to check on is Londuin.
It’s also the one both Tammy and Lindsey feel is least likely to resort to assassinations for power. Then again, if Nesanth has killed and replaced Anvar Londuin, what they know about him would be irrelevant. We’ve decided that the key to figuring this out is to determine which of the nobles is behaving in a manner that’s inconsistent with how they are portrayed in the novels.
Thus far, they’ve all been spot on.
We bumped into the others—as in, everyone—on our way across town and stopped to have a brief discussion right in the middle of the street. Demetria’s influence basically ensured our privacy from casual observation. Anything we say or do, alas, Nesanth will know as though she’s the author writing about us saying and doing things. In order to have true privacy from her, we would need to be in Demetria’s manor.
Anthony and Demetria explain how their meeting with Roldon went. I try not to panic too much when my son talks about assassins ambushing the man right inside his house. Hearing the killers materialized out of nothing confirms they are Nesanth’s doing, at least to me. Lindsey thinks it’s possible magic could give assassins the ability to teleport or go invisible. However, there is no precedent for that sort of thing in the prior books, so she dismisses it as unlikely.
From what the others tell me about Nald Mur and Roldon Barathor, it sounds like they’re probably not Nesanth. Anthony is firmly convinced Roldon can’t be the dark master. The kid’s got some crazy good intuition along with the pseudo-angel stuff, so I give his opinion a lot more weight than most moms would give their teenage son’s hunch.
Kingsley thinks the assassin went after Roldon’s daughter primarily as a distraction to expose his back. When trying to kill a guy who supposedly has supernatural abilities to know where his opponents are going to be before they move, it would take something like sudden emotional panic to throw him off.
Allison suggests the attack on the Barathor children had been performative: staged for Anthony and Demetria. Rather convenient the assassins showed up while they’d been visiting, as in, to cast doubt on Nesanth’s presence there (why threaten the children of a man she’s impersonating).
I brought my whole crew along for help to survive this trip into another reality… not to constantly keep coming up with reasonable theories that contradict each other. I’m thinking maybe Nesanth sent those assassins there when she did in hopes Roldon would somehow blame Anthony or Demetria for it. Yeah, I’m going to trust Anthony here: Roldon isn’t the dark master.
We’ve more or less used up an entire day running around and there’s one guy left. Since we’ve all gathered in a single group, we decide to get the last of our investigation over with right away. Demetria will go back to her manor house with Damon, mostly since he’s a ‘famous’ face around here and draws attention. Anthony decides to go with them as well to be nearby in case something attacks.
The rest of us—me, Tammy, Kingsley, Allison, and Lindsey—proceed to the estate of Anvar Londuin. Apparently, the whole ‘just barge right in and talk to them’ tactic works well enough. His estate is outside the walls of Tarramor, a half dozen miles northeast. Londuin owns a great deal of land, which his family primarily uses for a grape orchard. As it will be dark soon, I decide to cheat a little. Vast orchards are quite easy to spot from the air. I fly straight up, spot the orchard, and study it for a moment before gliding down to land by the others.
Teleporting a few miles away is probably the paranormal equivalent of driving to a convenience store at the end of the block you live on, but in my defense, it would take over two hours to walk and I can’t carry everyone while flying. Maybe I could as Talos… however, we’re in the middle of the city and someone would notice a dragon.
One nice thing about such a short distance hop: it’s fast, taking me only about six seconds to concentrate on the mental image of the spot and jump us there. We appear among rows of grapevines.
A sizable manor house stands off in the distance beyond the north end of the orchard. Six windows on the lower left part of the house glow from within, the other fifty or so are dark. Lamps? Fireplaces? Something like that… no electricity here. It’s going to be night soon, already dark enough to where it would be difficult to see inside a house without some form of artificial light. When I was a kid, this is about the time when I’d start feeling the need to go home before I got in trouble.
At the southwest corner of the orchard—much closer to us—is a small, ruined stone building. Judging by the amount of rubble around it, my guess is that it used to be two stories tall, probably a guard or observation tower. At present, it’s little more than a square enclosure of walls. The wall farthest from us is about twelve feet high while the walls on either side of the doorway have crumbled to the point they’re only a little bit taller than my waist.
Inside this ‘room’, a relatively young man dressed in a plain brown robe busies himself painting at an easel. His light brown hair is long and wild, not quite unkempt. The guy’s skinny with a longish nose and a prominent Adam’s apple. Dude kinda looks like he could’ve been a lead singer from a late Seventies rock band, seeming slightly strung out and not quite operating on the same wavelength as the rest of the world around him. Can’t call him handsome, though he’s not exactly hideous. He’s set up several small boxes of art supplies on a moldy, wooden workbench and several larger crates. Smears and smudges of long dried paint tell me this guy’s been using the collapsed tower as an art studio for quite a while.
“Weird,” whispers Tammy. “They’ve got an enormous house. Why would this guy come all the way out here?”
“What do you think, Allendria?” asks Kingsley, making a silly face at Allison.
She sighs. “Will you drop it already?”
He laughs, which tells me something’s been going back and forth between them for a bit.
“What did I miss?” I ask.
Allison hangs her head. “I introduced myself as Allendria before. You know, because ‘Allison’ doesn’t fit this world. It sounds out of place.”
“So she made herself a Lord of the Rings character.” Kingsley snickers.
Tammy giggles.
“Not you, too!” Allison flails her arms.
“Does anyone have any idea why this guy would be out here by himself hanging out in a collapsing tower?” I ask.
“Probably trying to avoid his family,” says Allison. “Maybe they don’t approve of his being an artist.”
Kingsley chuckles. “That or he’s in trouble with the wife.”
“Anvar Londuin isn’t married.” Lindsey shakes her head. “I know he had a private studio he used for painting because he needs absolute quiet in order to create. Odd it’s ruined though. I didn’t expect it to be destroyed.”
“Are you sure that’s him?” Allison scrunches her nose. “He looks like a monk or something, not a rich guy.”
