Because of the lack of any other structures, the only place for a camera to be stably situated in the gardens was against the side of the bioenclosure itself. The camera was about eight meters up the side of the wall, against part of the bronze frame that held the glass together. It faced the abbey at an angle, tilted towards the ground to maximize visibility of the surrounding area. As a result, it would be impossible to miss someone coming from the sides of the building, though because of the curve of the bioenclosure dome on which it rested couldn't quite capture the ground immediately beneath it. As a result, it occurred to me that someone could have stood at the far side, directly next to the ocean (or I guess the absence of one, at this stage in the night) and faced the window without being visible in the footage, though this would have been out of range of the Power, meaning they couldn't be the murderer-- At least not directly.
But this realization was quickly cut off by another, more pressing one: It was impossible to see the third floor of the building.
The footage we'd seen had been taken at night, with the entire sanctuary shrouded in darkness. That meant the color of the grass had been difficult to discern. In other words, maybe the footage wasn't from the guest bioenclosure at all. Maybe it was a setting trick, and what we'd really been seeing was the hidden bioenclosure the whole time!
I hesitated. No, wait. That doesn't make sense. We saw the barrier go up and down in the footage, and the time was included. Even if the culprit had an accomplice, there's no way they could have perfectly matched the intervals when Linos messed with his barriers. Could they?
I blinked. A realization struck me, and I descended back to the ground.
Kam was leaning out the window, looking upwards (though hopefully not up my skirt) as I descended. "Any thoughts?"
"When I showed you my notes earlier, you asked about what happened with the clocks in the guest bioenclosure, but we didn't follow up on it."
"Mm-hmm."
"Do you know anything about that?" I asked. "Is that a regular occurrence in the loops?"
She smiled, and right away I suspected this was the line of inquiry she'd been hoping I pursue. "That's another thing that's a little difficult to discern. Details like, completely peripheral to the murders, don't show up in the books at all. And in many of the loops for which I have heard first-hand accounts, it doesn't come up, either because nothing meaningful ever happens in the abbey, or they simply don't check. But..." She inclined her head forward, leaning her arms against the windowsill. "I can certainly tell you at least one where it did occur."
"Which one?"
"My own," she confessed. "We noticed when we returned at the latter part of the night."
I frowned. "Why didn't you mention this earlier?"
She chuckled. "Because I anticipated this exact sequence of events, of course, and thought it would be more compelling to see if you'd arrive at this idea yourself."
"You're the one who suggested we go out here," I pointed out flatly. "You've been in control of pretty much the whole situation since it turned out Ophelia wasn't around, so it feels kind of dumb to frame this outcome as some grand act of foresight."
Kamrusepa ignored this, not just verbally but even in terms of her physical reaction. Attacking her confidence in her own intelligence was useless. I might as well have been trying to tear rubber apart with chopsticks. "In any event, why do you ask, Su?"
"Because the only proof that the footage we saw in the security center actually came from the same time as the murder is that the time it was recorded lines up with our perception of when it happened," I concluded. "None of the clocks in the building were working, and because the sanctuary was cut off from the outside world, we couldn't use our logic engines to check either." (Well, some people might have had in-built clocks, but either way no one was smart enough to check.) I squinted. "You used the Time-Inferring Arcana to verify it a few minutes earlier, but the specifics would be a complete stab in the dark."
She was nodding along. "So you're saying the culprit could have recreated the appearance of when the crime happened - the presence of the barrier - a few minutes after the fact? But how ever would they have done so when you were still all occupying the room?"
I hesitated, feeling almost annoyed at her baiting me to explain the whole theory when she clearly knew where I was going with it. "I'm not saying they'd be doing this in the abbey. They could have done it in the guest bioenclosure instead-- It looks almost identical." I turned away for a moment, rubbing my brow in thought. "Here's how it would go. The culprit, sitting outside the window here," I pointed at the grass I was standing in, "kills Bardiya through the window via some trick. Then, after that, they either rush over to the hidden bioenclosure or contact an accomplice who's already there - maybe through the glass or something with lights, I don't know - and recreate the crime as it happened a... few minutes later..." I trailed off.
Kam raised her brow. "Su?"
No, I realized. This doesn't make sense.
The time Kam verified for us when we were in the hall in the lead-up to the crime was 5:21 AM. And then we started watching the security center footage at 5:23 AM. And the barrier came into view only a little bit after that.
The window is so narrow. Is this realistic?
Fuck. Fuck! I thought I had it!
Kam obviously picked up on my fall in confidence, scratching her chin. "You're on the right track, if I do say so myself, questioning the footage from the arcane lens in terms of the location and the time associated with it," she said. "But I think you might have stumbled on a point."
I grunted. "What point. How have I stumbled."
"Well, for example, I could have fudged the Time-Inferring Arcana."
I turned back and stared at her. A moment passed.
"I." I paused. "Are you confessing to being an accomplice?"
She laughed. "I mean, I could have been, couldn't I? You can't prove I wasn't."
"That's-- No." I scoffed. "It's one of the most simple Chronomancer incantations. And it's close enough to Thanatomancy that even I'd have noticed if you tried to pull something." Probably. Like, 50/50.
Look, someone would have noticed.
"Then consider more remote possibilities," she suggested. "For example: Remember the defect with my Index. I'm fundamentally not suited for Divination. It could have corrupted the data."
I snorted. "Maybe one time in a thousand."
She pointed a finger at me, brushing her wrist against the bushes but not getting cut on account of actually having a barrier. "Were you not just telling me earlier how I was struck with peculiar bad luck in that respect at the end of your loop?"
"I... I mean, I guess," I said. "But even that was just producing bad data. Not conveniently wrong data."
"Well, then consider an entirely different angle," she offered. "What if Linos was an accomplice not just to the Order's schemes, but the actual murders themselves? If you assume he planned the distraction from Bardiya's room, he could have known how the entire thing would go in advance." She flipped the pointing hand outward. "Were that the case, the whole thing could have been done in reverse, or even at the exact same time. Or, speaking of that-- This whole presumption rests on the idea that Sacnicte, the one looking this data up for you, was an accomplice, yes? Since she would need to be deliberately showing you the wrong feed. But then why not take that idea to its logical conclusion? She may not have been able to fabricate the data in the security center, but there are many other ways she could have presented it misleadingly. For example, she could have shown you images from a different day altogether."
That... was true, I guess. The data we saw directly only included the time. But it would have been a risky move if anyone had pushed the issue, since unlike the hidden bioenclosure, it would have been a conclusion we could have easily reached ourselves on the spot.
Actually, this was a good chance to clear something up. "I've been wondering, actually. Is there any chance the security center itself could have been, well, compromised? That the data in there - not just about this, but about who was alive and in what bioenclosure, all of that - could have been falsified somehow."
She shook her head. "No, that never happens. Aside from the risks it would pose to the Order's plans, it also breaks the rules. That systems must work as described unless indicated otherwise."
I nodded. "That's what I thought, I guess."
"Another possibility," Kam added, "is that the culprit could have had contact with the security center, and thus live footage of the situation as it developed. Were that the case, they'd be able to obfuscate what happened with only a little bit of warning."
I nodded again, this time more to myself. That was true. I was fussing about the strict time-feasibility of the trick... but that wasn't actually an argument against it on a more fundamental level. There was an infinite difference between something being impossible and just being difficult.
"What are you trying to say, exactly?" I asked.
"I'm not trying to suggest a particular conclusion is correct," she answered. "I'm just pointing out that there are clearly multiple ways in which the footage, specifically, can ill be trusted." She drew back from the window, moving over to the kitchen counter. "Do you recall when I told you that in my loop, the security center was completely destroyed?"
"That was twenty minutes ago," I said as I floated back in through the window.
She gestured dismissively. "That's something which happens very often. Which makes sense. If you consider it rationally, the security center is a huge liability in terms of the ability of the culprits to operate, to the point that I can only imagine there are two reasons why they might not sabotage it."
"You mean... if they can't, or else if they think it might help them in some way." I furrowed my brow, glancing back at where the corpse would have been. "By obfuscating the truth instead of making it clearer."
Kam nodded. "Precisely so." She looked over my shoulder, back out the window. "If we conclude that the culprit, or at least one culprit, was someone outside of the window, that it stands to reason they were - in both of our scenarios - a mobile agent, freely moving about the sanctuary. They were also clearly proficient in combat." She let her mouth hang half-open for a moment after saying this, then closed it, putting a finger to her lips. "Well, I shouldn't make absolute statements; one of the easiest pitfalls in this whole business is binding oneself in assumptions about what must be true, instead of following the thread of what is likely and seeing where that leads."
"You think it's not out of the question that the killer could have been someone from within our group and killed him through the window?" I frowned. "How?"
"By using the window in the dining hall, of course," she answered. "It would have been extraordinarily risky, mind you, but it's not impossible they could have slipped out during the chaos of the gunshot going off, when everyone's attention was drawn hither." She shook her head. "But we're getting off-topic. The point is, it's reasonable to assume that, in all likelihood, the culprits are capable of overwhelming or somehow subverting the security center so long as it's only manned by its usual staff. And so a failure to do this could be indicative of its retention being advantageous to them - as, perhaps, something of a poison pill."
I considered her words. I wasn't sure if I quite agreed with that conclusion, but it was at least true that the camera was by the far the most suspect source of proof, given all the evidence. If there was a trick, it had to be this. I now felt extremely confident of that much.
But still, how would the murder have been done in specific?
Theodoros - unreliable witness as he was - had said, in the end, that he couldn't see anyone outside the window. It just looked like Bardiya was smashing himself forward. Because I'd bludgeoned him to death before there was time for an extensive dialogue, he hadn't clarified whether the part of his earlier fake story where the window was open was true or not.
If it was open, then absent the camera, the murder became absurdly simple. The killer would wait in the garden - somewhere nearby, but where we wouldn't be able to see them - and wait for Linos to drop his barrier for the first time, then run towards the narrow strip where the barrier extended outside the bounds of the building. They'd cast the Object-Manipulating Arcana to seal the door and the World-Deafening Arcana to hide the screams, open the window, grab Bardiya from down in the bushes so Theo wouldn't see them... and the rest would be history.
Well, not entirely history. There was still the fact that the thumping noises were still ongoing after we'd already returned from our investigation into Bardiya's room, meaning the culprit presumably would have needed to still be within the barrier even after it was lowered and raised for the second time. But that was easily explained too. After all, we'd been so paranoid after his death that we'd gone outside to take a good look outside the dining room and kitchen. So one could imagine a scenario where the killer's plans went slightly amiss, and they failed to kill Bardiya in time for their original planned escape, forcing them to hide beneath the bushes for almost an hour until Mehit's departure finally gave them another chance.
But... that felt a little too convenient. When I'd found the body, the window had been closed, and though you could say that the culprit had shut it behind them... there was no gore or visceral left on the plants, and the angle of the body had been slumped at a strange angle, as if only pulled towards the window partially.
That didn't feel like he was pulled all the way through an open window-- It felt like his face had been smashed, rather awkwardly, against the part of the barrier that was indoors.
I nodded to myself a few times, looking upwards again. "Alright. I think I've figured out what happened. Or at the very least, your theory."
"'My theory'?" She smirked, still leaning against the counter. "You're not convinced it's the truth?"
I shook my head. "No, I feel like this is probably the howdunnit, or at least close enough that whatever the truth might be would be just... some kind of variant. It still feels as though there's something missing."
She peered curiously. "What does 'howdunnit' mean?"
"I, you're fucking with me, that's-- No, it doesn't matter." I shook my head stiffly. "Here's what I think happened. The culprit hid just out of view near the window and waited for the gunshot their accomplice in our group set off - maybe the accomplice is different each time, maybe not, that doesn't matter right now - then rushed into the bushes. That's probably where the blood came from. They waited until the right moment, just as people were starting to leave but before everyone had, then drew the attention of whoever was closest by somehow. Maybe they showed themselves for a moment, or opened the window and prodded them, or..."
Or maybe they showed them something else. My thoughts went back to what Balthazar had suggested right before he'd shot me; that Bardiya had seen something through the window to incite him to suicide. That felt too fantastical to me - it was an appealingly spooky notion, but what could anyone see that would make themselves willing to smash their own face in seconds later? - but maybe a lesser version was true. Maybe there was something the culprit could use which would incite the quiet panic they exactly needed, where they wouldn't shout or scream...
I cleared my throat. "...or something like that." I gestured towards the bottom of the window. "Then, they slid open the window just a little and used, well, probably something like a thick noose on a narrow pole, an implement which would be hard to see in the dark but would still be strong enough to project force. Because the whole face and neck area was going to be destroyed anyway, they wouldn't need to worry too much about leaving signs on the body. Maybe they even stabbed them first, so they'd be less able to resist." I pointed upwards, towards the upper-right corner of the room. "Then it would just be a matter of thrusting him hard enough into the barrier."
Kam clicked her tongue. "Pushing them up with a pole at an angle... Noose or no noose, you'd need rather an abundance of physical strength to pull that off. It would be very awkward."
I frowned. "You have something better in mind?"
"Well, imagine instead that the culprit first arrived at the scene much earlier in the night, while most everyone else was still asleep or preoccupied elsewhere, and then set up a trap." She pointed at the upper portion of the window, where the top of the mobile component rested when it was fully closed. "Say they carved a little groove into this portion here, then strung a wire through it, with a noose resting just where the barrier would protrude through the wall beside the window. That way, instead of having to shove them awkwardly, the culprit could simply pull them with their full body weight once ensnared. Half of their face would be forced right against it."
"That seems like it would be kind of impractical," I said skeptically. "Like, that would go beyond them only needing an educated guess on the size of the barrier. They'd have to know almost exactly where it was going to intersect."
"Not necessarily," she countered. "They could have made multiple grooves, or... well, Linos is a rather predictable person." She chuckled to herself. "It's likely he has a standard size for his barrier much like a standard composition for it."
"Why are you saying that like you can only speculate? Can't you just ask him."
She shrugged. "I probably have at some point."
"Anyway, you're talking about putting a huge amount of pressure on a pretty normal-looking window," I continued. "The weight of a whole body at a single point. The wood would crack, the glass would break."
"Not immediately. We've done experiments."
I rubbed my brow. "Of course you have. Still keep forgetting how this place works." I sighed. "Since you're so confident in this, I assume it's a scenario recurrent in the books."
A nod. "Indeed. They always describe someone appearing to rise or ascend before suddenly striking their head towards the window. There's never a mention of them stumbling to the side, or the window sliding open, in the way that would be necessitated by your version of the theory."
A held a hand to my mouth. She wasn't wrong - my precise vision of events did feel awkward, or at the very least it cut down the possibilities of who could have committed the murder significantly. Hamilcar would have been that strong, but other than him there weren't really a lot of heavyweights left in the Sanctuary outside of our group. Balthazar could have done it, I supposed, but that felt wrong, and though Sacnicte was tall she wasn't especially sturdy. Maybe Zeno's older body, if those being hijacked was in question? Or who knows; maybe his female one had super strength or some horseshit too.
It felt off. But so did Kam's answer, a little. I couldn't completely buy the culprit doing something so fiddly, even if it was, in fact, feasible.
No, my gut told me something was missing. Some other final component to the trick I didn't quite understand.
Still, none of that changed one thing: That this scenario, yet again, pointed in the direction of the two stewards of the sanctuary. There was almost no interpretation of the camera trick that wouldn't require whoever was manning the terminal to be an accomplice, deliberately showing us the wrong thing. In our case, that had been Sacnicte. So... were she and Yantho working together?
She wasn't like him, though. She'd died normally.
"Nnn," I intoned.
"You're not satisfied?"
"I guess I should be," I replied with a frown. "Like, even this much does give me a tangible idea of what I should be following up on. An accomplice outside of our group - maybe the same one that shot Fang later in the night. And of Yantho and Sacnicte, though I was already planning on doing that." I frowned hesitantly. "But something about all this feels kinda inelegant. There's too many accomplices all working together too flawlessly for something that feels like it had to be somewhat off-the-cuff." I wandered over to the pantry, checking it one last time, feeling like there could have been some little detail I overlooked. "Even if whoever was the culprit here was also either Sacnicte or Yantho, that still means they'd need to have been working with whoever planted the gun from within our group. And at least in my loop, I didn't get the impression that was Theo; he acted like the whole thing had been set up for him, and that he'd intended to kill Bardiya, but something had taken him by surprise." I couldn't see anything, so I looked over my shoulder, scratching the side of my head. "In your loop, it could have all just been one person - the mastermind, and... me, I guess. But in mine, it would need a minimum of three people, probably four."
Kam was quiet for a surprisingly long time after I finished laying this all out, her eyes going towards the ceiling for a moment. It was unusual for her, and I found myself wondering what exactly she was thinking.
"Well," she eventually said, clasping her hands together. "I'm glad you're thinking about this, but there's no point in fussing too closely about the details while we're still catching you up, I think." She pushed herself up from the counter. "Why don't we head to meet some of the others? It's properly dawn now. People ought to be getting up for breakfast."
I blinked. "That's it? We're going to just drop this here?"
She raised her eyebrows. "Is that an issue?"
"No, it's just, well." I glanced around, feeling vaguely put-off. "I was hoping we'd be able to... knock this completely out, I suppose."
Kam gave me a look I found I couldn't help but find somewhat patronizing. "Su, I know I'm rather laboring the point with this, but however many insights you might end up bringing to the table, I'm not sure you can expect yourself to surpass tens of thousands of years of scholarship over the course of a morning."
I waved my hand, speaking tiredly. "Yeah, yeah. I don't understand anything, I'm an infant compared to everyone else here and will be for literally lifetimes, whatever."
"Oh, don't be such a priss." She beckoned me forward. "Come along. With luck, we might run into one of the others."
"What, so they can run away from me too?"
She smiled tightly. "This time we'll be a little more circumspect."
We left the dining hall and headed back through the abbey. Kamrusepa wasn't kidding - by now, the place was quickly waking up. Where one person had been sitting by the fire before, now three talked among themselves, giving us only a brief but friendly acknowledgement as we passed. I spotted another two outside, moving between the bioenclosures.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"The new bioenclosure in the center," she explained. "I think the official name used to be the Forum, but the label that seems to have stuck is detox bioenclosure, because the idea is that it's a place where we're not allowed to talk about the books or anything else related to all this. A wholly social space, in other words."
"Even though it's right next to the Manse."
"Well, it wasn't always this way," she explained. "This is before my time, so take it with a spoonful of salt, but supposedly - in the beginning - this Domain was not intended to be a place where people actually lived. Instead, it was just one of many facilities maintained by a much larger collective of people researching the truth of the Manse, of which the importance of the sanctuary was considered but one of many perspectives." She narrowed her eyes as we walked beneath the small grove of trees. "But eventually, the leadership of that group came to believe they had arrived at the full truth, and entered the Manse in an attempt to solve it. I assume you can guess what happened next."
I nodded slowly. "They failed, and the whole organization fell apart?"
"I alluded to this earlier, but when people fail at solving the Manse, they generally go through something of a transformation," she told me. "First, they feel deep sorrow and regret that they acted too soon, and their own ambitions will now never come to pass. Next, they become consumed by a great fear - that they are now powerless, victims of the visions of utopia held by others. And those two things together form the perfect bitter cocktail to turn them against their allies."
I stared ahead for a moment, wrinkling my lip. "I assume this is why you don't have outright millions of years worth of research built up here."
"Bingo," she said, pointing at me. "You're fresh from the 1600s, Su. You know all too well how sour grapes can destroy a civilization."
I wasn't sure which political demographic Kamrusepa was referring to with this remark, and I decided I didn't want to know. "So this whole place is just a remnant."
"Indeed. Initially there were plans to establish other Domains in the vein of what had once been, but the ranks were too thin, and that never came to pass. And as persecution towards those pursuing this cause heightened, what had once been intended as a mere utility became a home for many, and the Forum shifted from yet another place to collate theories, to a respite from them altogether where the other parts of life might be enjoyed." She looked at me, her face growing more serious. "That said, your phrasing does not capture the full truth. It is reductive to call this Domain a remnant. Rather, it is a remnant of a remnant of a remnant of a remnant. Far before even what I describe to you now, the history books tell of entire civilizations dedicated to solving the Manse - thousands of Primaries and Secondaries with vast legions of Tertiaries at their disposal. And even those themselves are surely shadows of even earlier ages, where perhaps those with this preoccupation even ruled as hegemons."
I frowned. "That does make sense, I suppose. I mean, if people only get one chance to solve it for all eternity... I wasn't thinking of it on quite that scale, I suppose." I blinked, a question coming to mind. "How many people here left still have the ability to attempt the Manse?"
"In truth? Counting you and I, perhaps one, maybe two dozen at most."
My eyebrows raised in surprise. "That's even less than I thought."
She nodded grimly, holding her hands behind her back.
"If that's true, why are so many more people here? Are they all Tertiaries?"
"Many are, but there are people who are exceptions to the phenomenon I described a moment ago," she explained. "People who do not turn to bitterness and fear upon failure, but instead hold fast to the cause despite their inability to personally realize it, either out of genuine enthusiasm or a belief that they can influence others who haven't yet made their attempt with their own visions for the future." She shook her head. "Beyond that, a smaller group are people who I would call dead cat denialists. Who have no memories of attempting the Manse and refuse to try to enter it, avoiding confirming their situation one way or the other until they have an answer."
"I mean, I can think of worse mentalities," I said. "It's better to have false hope and be productive than just give up on everything, even if you're technically facing reality."
"Debateable-- But admittedly, it's something of a moot point. After all, none of these people ever actually commit to answers anyway." She let out one of her long, melodramatic sighs, speaking with exasperation. "I must confess to you, Su, the situation is more dire than I've perhaps been giving the impression. I believe there's a real possibility - perhaps even a likelihood, at this stage - that everyone will fail, and this world will become a place of eternal stagnation. Even the Manse may one day pass out of memory in the wake of the unceasing years, dismissed as myth by our future selves."
For the same reason that humans cannot conceptualize death, we also cannot conceptualize eternity, though that didn't stop me from finding this notion pretty disturbing. Being in this world in a quintillion years, my complexes shoved into my face in an infinite loop until the concept of time lost all meaning. "That's bleak."
"It's not the worst outcome, but yes, the utility would be significantly less than I'd prefer."
"What about the message we heard at the end of the loops, though?" I suddenly remembered. "About their being two paths? A high path, only for us, who 'witnessed' it?"
Kam looked at me, blinking, then frowned. "Ah, that." She glanced downward. "I've never been able to understand what it meant, unfortunately. Though I have a few... thoughts." She inclined her head towards the bioenclosure door. "We'll have to save that for later, though. We're here."
We passed through the seal - which felt weirdly uncanny to see, like someone had doodled an extra feature into the background of an old painting - and through to the 'detox bioenclosure', which despite its small size proved to be be extremely lively, almost a little village in its own right. A circular path ran around the Manse, and along it were a number of quaint little houses of varying architectural styles that completely countered its imposing nature. Some were private spaces like cottages, while others had faces that made them come across more like stores or public buildings; one even had a cute little sign reading 'INN' hanging above the front door.
Curiously, some had strange proportions, looking like they'd originally been much larger buildings, but had been shrunk, with only the windows and doors not kept to scale. Either way, though, the atmosphere was extremely quaint, while having a little more eccentricity to it than somewhere like the Valley. At least in terms of atmosphere, 'coffee house' wasn't too awful a descriptor.
More importantly, it was reasonably bustling, a couple dozen people chatting to one another outside the buildings and preparing a large meal in a square off to our right. People were trickling in from the other bioenclosures too. This was more than just the Domain waking up, it felt like an Event.
"Well," Kam said, gesturing outwardly. "Here we are."
I furrowed my brow. "Everyone eats breakfast together?"
She smiled slyly. "You could say that." A hand went to her hip. "There's a little ritual people here like to do twice a day. I think it's silly, personally, but I suspect you'll rather like it."
My lip wrinkled in distaste. "Just tell me. I hate surprises even when they're good." And I'm not convinced this will be good.
Kam opened her mouth - I could tell she was about to rebuke me in some snarky way - but before she had the chance to speak, someone called out from the left. "Hey, Kam!"
We both turned. A medium-sized group of colorfully-dressed figures was approaching, at the forefront of which was a blue haired girl giving an enthusiastic wave. But my eye was drawn to the rear, towards a bearded man I was pretty certain was none other than Seth of Ikkuret.