All Sharp Edges

'He's dead,' Scotta announced, wiping his hand on his white outer coat, making it less white in the process. 'Pretty much as you predicted.'

'His head was removed,' noted his companion, a woman of perhaps twenty, in a dry voice. 'Me being wrong would have been a surprise.'

'Hey! I've known people to survive losing their heads.' Scotta looked hurt as he said it. 'There was the Rochley case'-

'The Rochley case was an aberration. Possession by ten-thousand year old Daemons is not standard. We hardly get more than a case like that a year.'

Scotta frowned, sulking.

'Okay,' he said; 'you win. But this isn't going to be a normal case you know.'

'Why not?' the woman asked, raising a single eyebrow with careful precision.

'Because,' Scotta said, a look of triumph winding its way across his grimy face; 'this was the guardian of the gem of Yrisa!'

Two hours later they called out the Royal Guard.

'You see,' Scotta explained, 'we didn't worry so much when we found the guardian dead, but when we found the rest of the facility in tiny pieces we decided it was too big a job for us. We only get paid to clean up.'

The captain of the patrol who had responded, a short man with a magnificent sense of his own importance, turned towards Scotta's companion.

'And what do you make of it, Lady Trailor?' he asked.

'A massacre,' she replied, flicking the eyebrow up as she said it, then stared at him as he wondered what next to say.

'But do you have any idea why?' he asked.

The second eyebrow joined the first.

'Presumably to steal the gem they were guarding. Which apparently allows the transfer of supernatural beings of great power from one reality to the other.'

'Ah,' said the Captain, and some of his men- the ones who were out of his immediate line of sight- smirked.

'But that doesn't really matter,' Scotta said; 'what matters is that there are far too many deaths for me to investigate and I will not do it. I'm not going to clean up either, unless I get the extra holiday bonus I've been begging for since the business of that bloody dragon. The one with the red scales and horrendous attitude, not the charmingly naive one which we spitted with a sharpened broomstick.'

'Which you spitted,' Lady Trailor said with mild disapproval.

'Which I spitted, thus saving the world from'-

'A charmingly naive dragon.'

'Which said it was going to lay waste to the north!'

'And you believed it,' she said with a sniff, then turned to the obviously discomfited Captain, who had opened his mouth at some point to say something, and had subsequently forgotten all about it.

'I'll continue the investigation, with your aid. And we'll get to the bottom of it, don't you worry.'

And all the Captain could do was nod.