The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) by Christopher Nuttall Page A

she concentrated on looking around and studying the interior of the building. It was surprisingly bare; she could see places on the walls where portraits had hung, before they had been taken down and stored elsewhere. There were definitely signs that someone had been trying to keep the place tidy, but it was clear that they were losing the fight. Dust was everywhere, particularly in places few men would notice. Maybe, Gwen told herself, Lady Mary’s lessons on how to run a household hadn’t been wasted after all. It was clear that Sir Travis hadn’t been a married man.
    The stairs seemed reassuringly solid, even though half of the carpeting had been removed and the rest had ugly marks from where dozens of policemen had tramped up and down. At the top, two doors had been forced open by the policemen, revealing rooms so dusty that it was clear that no one had been inside them for months, if not years. The pieces of furniture in the opened rooms were covered with cloths, providing some protection against the ravages of time. Somehow, Gwen doubted that they would still be in good condition anyway.
    “Sir Travis saw no need to use the rooms,” Lord Mycroft explained. “They were closed off, one by one.”
    He stopped outside a larger room and peered inside. “Lestrade,” he said, by way of greeting. “I trust that the crime scene remains undisturbed?”
    “Yes, Your Lordship,” Lestrade said. He looked understandably nervous; the last time aristocrats had started to die, he hadn’t managed to catch the killer either. But then, he wouldn’t have wanted to catch a Master Magician without some heavy magical support. “Sir Travis is lying right where he fell.”
    Gwen braced herself as she stepped into the room. Few people in London would have been comfortable allowing a woman to look at dead bodies; she still remembered the incredulous looks the policemen had thrown at her and Master Thomas when they’d thought they couldn’t be seen. Now, part of her was used to seeing corpses... London had been littered with bodies by the time the Swing was over. And it was part of her job.
    Sir Travis looked to have been decent, she decided. He was surprisingly pale for a man who had been in India and Turkey, but that might not have been surprising. A Sensitive would prefer to avoid the sun where possible. He was clearly healthy, wearing a thin nightshirt and trousers that would have allowed him to host meetings without bothering to get properly dressed. There were some people – Lady Mary, for example – who would have complained about such informality, but a Sensitive could be counted upon to know his friends.
    “That’s the cause of death,” Lestrade said, pointing to the back of Sir Travis’s head. Blood matted his hair, revealing a nasty crack in his skull. Even a Healer couldn’t have saved someone whose skull had been caved in. Death, Gwen suspected, would have been effectively instant. “Can you sense anything from the wound?”
    Gwen gritted her teeth and knelt down beside the body. Carefully, she opened her senses, bracing herself for a rush of memories and impressions burned onto the world by the trauma of Sir Travis’s death. Instead, there was nothing...
    ... apart from an alarmingly familiar scent.
    “Wolfbane,” she said. “Someone wanted to block a werewolf’s nose.”
    “Yes,” Lestrade said. “Anything else?”
    Gwen hesitated. “No,” she said, finally. There should have been something , unless Sir Travis had been taken completely by surprise. But if that were the case, how could someone have sneaked up on a Sensitive? “I take it that he couldn’t have committed suicide.”
    Lestrade gave her an odd look. “Suicides normally shoot themselves, or stab themselves, or take poison, or jump off bridges,” he said. “I don’t see how he could have killed himself in such a manner.”
    Gwen stood upright and looked around. There were no signs of a struggle, apart from a broken object – a vase,