“Sometimes the best way to find the culprit is to have them do the work for you.” - Haerkul of Clan Poisonrot, investigator constable from Elmaiya.

The next evening, Aideen and Celia returned to Deyosia to bring back the Striped Carrion-Eater they rented to its owner, paying the man extra fees as they had taken a day longer than they had originally planned. Aideen carried the sack that held the woman’s remains prominently over her shoulder, and many people looked questioningly at it, some wondering aloud in public.

Which was something she did on purpose. She wanted people to notice that they had returned from several days in the forest with a sac that they carried rather than stuff in their storage artifact, though to be fair, an average storage artifact might not even fit the sack inside.

After they returned the rented animal, they left Deyosia through the western gate, and set a slow pace before they rested for the night. The following day, they continued their way west, again setting a slow pace – for them, as their slow pace still allowed them to travel what most travelers on foot would manage within a day normally – before they set up camp for the night once more.

It was during that second night that Aideen’s suspicion – and the reason they made a bit of a show of leaving while carrying the sack with them – proved itself to be true.

Just as they were cooking their dinner, a group of riders – likely men-at-arms or knights under the Baron, from the way they dressed, since the city guards didn’t have armor of that quality – caught up to them, dismounted, and without a word, drew their blades as they fell upon Aideen and Celia with obvious intention to kill.

Needless to say, neither unliving women had any plan to meekly “accept” their fate.

The fighting was brutal and violent, but swift. The assailants might have better armor, but they learned very quickly that it was a false sense of security when Aideen struck the first of them on the side of the neck with her staff hard enough to break the man’s neck even through the chain coif he wore. The armor did little to halt the force of the blow or save the man’s life.

Celia did much the same towards the first of the assailants that went for her, the oversized sword-staff she wielded blowing straight through the man’s guard and into his shoulder deep enough to bend the metal pauldron he wore as well as crush the flesh and bones underneath. From how the man was coughing up frothy, pinkish blood Celia could tell that she had likely injured his lung and that the man would perish slowly even if she left him alone.

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While there were a dozen of the assailants, the two women were unliving, and naturally had the advantage in that they literally did not have to worry about dying from mere injuries caused by weapons. Aideen exhibited skills she had honed over centuries of practice and whipped her heavy staff around even as she weaved around the attacks aimed her way, often dodging them by the barest margins while retaliating with blows that crushed flesh and broke bones.

In contrast, Celia often allowed her opponents to land their blows at her, at which point she would exploit their momentary lapse of attention to land a debilitating counterattack of her own. Though she too had trained for decades, her skills were still nowhere near that of Aideen’s, and it was simply more efficient for her to bait her opponents that way instead.

Before too long, all the assailants were down for the count. The last few attempted to escape, but Aideen was having none of that and took them down with a couple of expertly thrown weapons. The two of them had slaughtered the assailants to a man, with the only one still breathing being the man Celia had disabled early in the fighting.

Aideen healed the man’s injuries just enough to allow him to speak so they could interrogate him, and in that desperate strait, the man all too easily spilled what they wanted to know. He along with the rest were retainers to the Baron, and they did not know the reason why, they had just been ordered to catch up to the two female travelers that left town towards the west while carrying a sack the day before and kill them.

The fact that none of the retainers had asked any questions or showed any misgivings pretty much told Aideen that it likely wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened, and it further fueled her suspicion towards the Baron. Even if the man wasn’t the culprit himself, he was most definitely related in some manner to the disappearance in Deyosia.

In fact that was why Aideen left the city so visibly. She was trying to bait out a reaction from the man, where a lack of reaction would have probably meant that the noble in question was perhaps unrelated to the incidents. That he sent out his retainers to kill on the other hand, was as good as an admission of guilt, all considered.

Still, the man was a landed noble and Aideen didn’t feel like pulling status would work well on the locals. Instead, she chose to continue westwards, towards the territory of the Veros family, both to visit her distant relatives and to get some support behind her.

That was not the only reason, as Aideen could feel that the mana that lingered on the remnant body parts they found had been growing stronger by the day. She had helped other unliving people regenerate their bodies from catastrophic damage before, and the feeling was similar to what she felt from the remains, albeit weaker, perhaps because the owner of those limbs was still in the process of rising into unlife at the moment.

Either way, once they finished the process, Aideen would be able to quickly regenerate the rest of the woman’s body, and they would be able to find more information straight from the woman’s mouth. It was a coincidence that whoever dismembered and buried the woman could not have taken into account, but sometimes life could be stranger than fiction indeed.

And dead people do sometimes tell tales.