“That is most troubling, most troubling indeed,” said Madame Ludec. “Such a master poisoner operating under your very noses, I can see why you would turn to another, falsely accused though she be.”

“Can it with the false modesty,” Warden Z’bari said. “It might work on this witless conjurer, but it won’t work on me, not while I’ve lost six men to you on my watch.”

“Your dedication to your work does you credit, Warden,” Ludec said sweetly. “As does your determination to reward your men with a noble death. Dysentery, food posioning, and sepsis are all such ignoble ends for the Landgrave’s guards; if a mad poisoner looming over them gives their deaths any meaning, and their families any closure, it is a stigma I am happy to bear.”

“No ideas, then, how it could have been accomplished?” Conjurer Baueaz said, sounding disappointed.

Ludec cocked her head. “Tell me, did they vomit blood? Was there blood in their stool?”

“Why yes, both,” Baueaz said, excitedly.

“Shortness of breath a day, perhaps two, after showing flu-like symptoms?”

“Exactly, exactly,” the conjurer said. “You know what it is?”

“It is an inelegant cudgel where a subtle scalpel is called for,” Madame Ludec said. “Anthrax, likely put through a process of aerosolization so it is inhaled rather than merely settling upon the skin.”

Baueaz was scribbling notes on a scrap of paper. “Yes, yes, it all makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Madame Ludec.

“And why, pray, is that?” said the warden.

“Why, because anthrax should have been detected by any member of the Magician’s Guild,” said Ludec. “Especially with such symptoms. So either your friends looked for it and could not find it, or it was somehow undetectable. And surely your friends are not so dimwitted as to not know the symptoms of anthrax.”

“Certainly not,” Baueaz said with a nervous chuckle.

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