Fragmentary Record · Records Sealed by the Inquisition
Assembled from what the city of San Cristóbal believes it saw, which is a wolf. The Inquisition's own account of these nights exists, and is under seal, and the people who sealed it are not available for comment.
The city's version is simple. On a summer night there was a commotion in a building the neighbours had always been told was nothing in particular. Part of a roof came down. And then a wolf — a wolf the size of which grows with each telling — went through the streets of San Cristóbal with half the watch behind it, and was gone before morning, and the watch has been strange on the subject ever since.
[ — the sealed record begins here, and is sealed — ]
What can be pieced together from the edges: an Inquisitor out of Eisen — a hunter of monsters by trade, whose name the surviving papers burn around — had prepared that building for two particular guests. A chair of worked silver. A circle of salt. A rite intended not to kill its subjects but to unmake them, which its author would have called mercy. The two guests were the Eisen lord and the Eisen countess, and neither was there willingly, and the rite was well advanced when the company arrived through the wrong wall.
In the wreckage of the interruption, the roof was breached. Moonlight, the fragmentary record notes, is not stopped by good intentions. What stood up out of the silver chair did not stay to be questioned.
[ — several pages here are simply gone — ]
Three things escaped that room. A mist went out through the window grate, thanking, it is said, the hussar who broke the circle of salt — a life owed, formally pledged. A wolf went through the roof and into the city, and was followed, street by street, by a barefoot man speaking to it in Ussuran — and by a small foreign woman nobody in the company had met before that night, who had walked into the middle of the rite as if she had been sent to it, and who has been with them since. The wolf was brought back. The record does not say how, and the barefoot man, asked directly, only smiles.
The aftermath is better documented, because the Inquisition did it in public. The lord's household was scattered. His physician was taken, and questioned at length by the same Eisen hunter, who — the one surviving witness attests — asked little, and knew much. And fifteen guards were sent to collect one old soldier of the household. Seven came back. They did not bring him.
[ — here the fragments end — ]
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