76 – Carriage ‘Cleaning’

Lenora’s party arrived in a fancy carriage. Said carriage had bloodstains on the coachman’s seat. I hadn’t gotten around to investigating that last night, after they first got here, but I didn’t want to delay it any longer. Not like the blood would get any fresher.

Most people were still asleep, but the manor guards had been worked up a bit after the night’s events. As a result, it took a while to sneak my way over. What I was going to do wasn’t, at its base, secret or sensitive. So it wouldn’t matter too much if one of my staff members knew where I was going. That didn’t stop me from waiting for more privacy anyway, just in case.

Inspecting my guests’ carriage without their knowledge and permission would probably be seen as rude, but there were more than enough extenuating circumstances to use as an excuse. Also, being rude back to my guests didn’t sound so bad right now.

Gathering evidence – if there was any – of what had happened to the group during their travel was important. Determining if repairs were in order should technically be the job of Lenora or her people, but doing it as the host wasn’t unreasonable. And cleaning up was definitely not expected of me specifically, but in general the host providing something of the sort was good form.

Just that usually everyone would leave that to their staff to handle. In this particular case though, I was rather hoping no one else had robbed me of the chance to ‘clean’ the blood.

I hadn’t actually asked anyone who might know whether it was already done. Mia was the acting steward and thus responsible for organizing the staff, but I didn’t think to bring the topic up.

No way to know but to go see for myself. Even if no blood remained, I was still interested in the carriage itself. Assuming whatever effect totally cut off sound from the inside was a part of the vehicle and not something Lenora had taken with her when she exited, studying it might be insightful.

Learning to enchant things was pretty high on my list of priorities, so my disappointment if I didn’t find the dried blood would be limited as long as I could glean even a tiny bit of knowledge from the soundproofing.

Finding the blood too would be better, of course. Besides wanting to drink it, I could hopefully learn something from it, too. Maximilian had claimed the original coachman had died in the ambush and he’d had to take over. Confirming the blood belonged to a normal person would lend credence to that idea.

Far from conclusive proof, of course. There were uncountable ways blood could have gotten there in a fight. But it would be better than pure guesswork.

The carriage was parked – is that the right word? – in a part of the stables next to the servant quarters that must have been designed for exactly that purpose. There was room for one or maybe two more, with some careful maneuvering.

Kalin himself hadn’t owned a carriage, so Lenora’s ride stood alone. It was an impressive sight even without the horses.

Light wood with silver embellishments and stag motifs. What else could I have imagined from the Steelheart family? This fit my mental image perfectly. The coachman’s seat I was so interested in was padded with a gray leather that fit the rest of the aesthetic while offering at least a minimum amount of comfort.

And there, just as I remembered, were dried bloodstains, partly on the wood and partly on the leather. They were faint, as if someone had tried to remove them but not succeeded completely. But that had been the case when the guests arrived as well, if I recalled correctly.

Interestingly, the scent was very thin, though I did still smell it. A combination of small quantity and the blood’s dried nature, if I had to guess.

Looking at the pattern… there wasn’t really one I could identify. Some clear splatters, mainly on the higher parts of the wood, but the leather had little definition to its stains. They were spread much wider on the seat itself.

To be expected, I guess, that the liquid would pool down there. Not that leather is particularly absorbent. Though more so than lacquered wood, I would guess.

Properly treated, the cushion material should be fairly water-resistant. At least that would only make sense. The coachman’s seat wasn’t covered in any meaningful way, so unless the carriage was never out and about in bad weather, it would get wet. Which made me feel a bit bad for whoever had to drive this thing. Whatever noble had this thing made evidently didn’t care too much about that.

If the blood had enough time to soak a bit into the leather and treated wood, then it clearly wasn’t cleaned up immediately. Not that I expected removing bloodstains to be the first priority during or even after an ambush. Maximilian was wounded, so he needed first aid. Then there were possible considerations like cleaning up the battlefield, clearing the road to continue moving and so on.

To test the leather’s properties, I let a drop of blood land on it and observed. Wiping it away after about a minute, there might have been a barely visible blot left over. I made sure to reclaim it as well. The fresh blood responded well to my control. Unsurprising, considering this was my blood in the first place.

Back to my inspection. The stains were clustered on the right side of the seat, from the carriage’s perspective. Was that where the coachman sat?

I was forming an image of a potential scene. The coachman is either in the middle or right side. He gets attacked from the left somehow, likely an arrow to the neck or something similar. Falls over to his right and lays there for a time, his blood pooling on the seat.

It made sense in terms of what I was seeing. Probably. I wasn’t a forensic expert by any means. But it matched well enough to the way the blood was spread out.

Time to gather some more evidence. I placed a finger over one of the isolated spots on the wood.

Controlling blood that wasn’t mine was difficult enough when it was actually still liquid. I had figured out how to draw it towards me already, but it was much less responsive than my own.

This dried hint of blood was different from liquid blood, much more stubborn. It refused to obey my will.

Good thing I have a secret weapon when it comes to dried blood.

I wet my finger with some saliva and rubbed that into the stains. As I thought, the traces liquefied much more than would normally be expected. Not all of it, the bits soaked deeper into the wood not as accessible to the saliva. But enough to color the liquid on my finger pink with diluted blood.

Good enough for a taste.

On licking the mixture, one thing became clear immediately. This is not Maximilian’s blood. As I expected.

Flavor-wise, it was about on the level of a normal human. It wasn’t easy to judge, because the age and dilution reduced the quality a good bit. Either way, it clearly wasn’t a knight or monster’s blood. What I couldn’t tell was whether this was one or multiple people’s blood.

That wasn’t really something I could determine from normal blood, either. Unless I had tasted all the components separately, maybe? It was hard to guess my proficiency with something I hadn’t really tried before.

Different humans tasted different, that much was true. If I drank someone’s blood, I should be able to recognize them by their smell, and vice-versa. The many interviews I’d conducted were proof of that. But that only really applied to fresh blood. This re-hydrated stuff was distorted enough that I would have trouble identifying the person it originally belonged to, even if they were right in front of me.

I repeated my trick on a few different stains. The leather was easier to clean, the blood not seeped in as deeply compared to the wood. That any blood had stuck to the carriage body at all was weird enough, let alone even deeper than to the leather, but maybe the treatment applied to it wasn’t the best? Unexpected of a noble carriage, if so.

All three spots I decided to sample tasted about the same, so I concluded it was probably from one person.

With that conclusion set, it was time to seriously reclaim all the blood. My saliva was useful, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t enough to get all the deeper bits of blood out. My blood control was also not strong enough.

What solution was there to this problem? Easy. I just repeated what I first did when I learned to manipulate foreign blood. Namely, adding some of my own to improve my control.

Basically, I smeared more blood over the existing stains, mixed with a bit more saliva. My lack of ability in controlling blood away from myself was annoying here, but directly applying it with a finger worked well enough.

Good thing no one else is here, this would look absolutely unhinged. I smiled a bit at the absurdity.

Letting the ‘cleaning mixture’ steep a bit, I fell deeper into thought.

I’d noted a bit earlier that Kalin didn’t own a carriage himself. That wasn’t much of a surprise, he never went anywhere. But looking around at the stable, there were only the two horses that had pulled Lenora’s ride, plus the one that had been bound to the back. I assumed the latter was originally Maximilian’s mount, before he had to take over steering.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

No horses, no other means of transportation… how did Kalin even get here back then?

My memory of nine years ago was a bit unclear. It was possible that there had been horses or carriages involved and they were simply sold off afterwards, but that didn’t seem right. Maybe a loan from the family that returned after dropping Lars and Kalin off here?

It wasn’t the most important question ever, but thinking about it made me realize that I needed a carriage of my own if I ever wanted to travel. Even if my idea of wrapping myself entirely in light-blocking clothes and carrying a parasol actually worked to keep me safe from the sun, riding on horseback all day would likely not go well. Besides the sheer discomfort.

No, I needed a sheltered, enclosed space that would keep me out of the sunlight. For travel, that was a carriage. And a proper, fully enclosed one like the example in the room with me, not some wagon with a tarp erected over it like what the merchants often used.

How can I get one of my own? That question wasn’t so simple. The town might have someone specialized in making wagons and the like, but I didn’t know of it, if so. Even without a specialist, skilled carpenters could probably figure something out if sufficiently motivated. Would the result be good? No idea.