Darius spent the next two days on a rather fruitless investigation. He went through the entire post-mortem report on Caima Rocha once more, this time in the presence of the surgeon Oxern. A detailed comparison of the version that had reached Atlantis and the one presented by the shehed revealed no discrepancies, apart from the dates. A review of the evidence gathered also yielded nothing new; apart from personal belongings, the identity documents of all three friends, and a handful of metal fragments of unknown origin, nothing else had been found.
Consulting the city archives proved more helpful. Among other things, he managed to begin translating the prayer book found in the inn. Instead of a title or a prayer to a specific deity, the first page contained the quote Fides in Deum ducit ad veritatem, Faith in God leads to truth. The next few lines resembled an introduction to monastic doctrine more than the beginning of a prayer.
More importantly, however, he managed to find out a little more about the plague that had struck the unfortunate village a quarter of a century earlier. The description in the archive pointed to smallpox, though the clerk who made the entry had deigned to add a small note in the margin, in which he expressed his doubts, pointing to the very low mortality rate and the disease’s negligible contagiousness. Given the small scale of the outbreak and the lack of cases outside that one village, no one had bothered to investigate the matter further. Everyone had agreed on the smallpox version and closed the case file, attaching a list of victims.
Meanwhile, Darius felt like swearing up a storm. He had learnt something important, and once again he had to place a big question mark over the information. Moreover, it didn’t help at all that he had no one to talk to about such a distant past. All the officials who might have remembered anything fell into two groups: those who had passed away and those who had left shortly after Murphey took up the post of governor. Whatever the reason,
