Chronicle of the solution: The Testimony of the Citadel
Poisoning Tier I
The poison has found the hand that poured it, and the Chancellery sets down here, for the archive, the whole course of the investigation.
The deed, as it was recorded
Someone slipped poison where it did not belong, and now the whole court eyes its goblets warily. The dose was measured with care — enough not to look like chance, too little to go unpunished. Before you, one by one, will stand Sword-Bearer Dragos, Margica the Innkeeper and Elisei the Stargazer. Rumor walks the deed through every corner: the merchant's house, the salt market and the north wall. Take up the quill, follow the thread of the clues, and set your seal upon the verdict.
The Chancellery had to weigh Sword-Bearer Dragos, Margica the Innkeeper and Elisei the Stargazer. All of them had opportunity, and for that very reason opportunity was worth nothing.
The suspects
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Sword-Bearer Dragos
He bears the king's ceremonial sword. At the tourney he has never lost; at dice, always.
1.86 m tall · brown eyes · chestnut hair · right-handed
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Margica the Innkeeper
At the Golden Boar inn, wine and secrets are spilled in equal measure. She never forgets a debt - or a word let slip.
1.61 m tall · dark eyes · chestnut hair · right-handed
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Elisei the Stargazer
He reads the future in the stars and the past in men's debts. The second method fails less often.
1.67 m tall · blue eyes · greying hair · right-handed
Locations
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The merchant's house
Carpets brought from overseas and a desk with more secret drawers than drawers.
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The salt market
Here anything is bargained for, from salt to silences. The price of silence keeps rising.
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The north wall
The stretch of wall the patrol skirts when the wind blows. Everyone knows that.
The pages of the file
This much was worked with, no more and no less. Minimality is not a figure of speech: each row was taken out in turn, at trial, and without it the solution ceased to be unique.
- Every scout reports the same about the culprit: the culprit was at the north wall.
- An honest-faced witness saw it plainly: the shortest suspect was in the place where anything is bargained for.
- The hounds caught no scent at all: the tallest suspect never set foot in the north wall.
Read the unravelling, step by step — open only if you have already tried the dossier
The unravelling of the thread
No suspicion weighed here. Only the grid weighed: every certain match sweeps a whole row and a whole column, and at the end one arrangement alone remains possible.
The Chancellery asked for one more check, and received it: “Every scout reports the same about the culprit: the culprit was at the north wall”. A fact fastened to the culprit, with no name attached: enough for all those the fact does not cover to fall.
The clerk read the next line aloud: “An honest-faced witness saw it plainly: the shortest suspect was in the place where anything is bargained for”. The match was nailed down, and the rest of the row was left clean, like a page wiped with a sponge.
A detail overlooked at the start came back into the file: “The hounds caught no scent at all: the tallest suspect never set foot in the north wall”. A well-proved “no” is worth, in an investigation, ten suspicions.
The close of the investigation
After every cut, one possible suspect was left in the file: Elisei the Stargazer. The grid shows plainly how matters stood: Elisei the Stargazer was at the north wall. All of this follows from the findings above, without a single unproved hypothesis.
The remaining suspects
The innocent were not left without a story; each had a place of their own: Sword-Bearer Dragos was at the merchant's house; Margica the Innkeeper was at the salt market. Not one of the rows above is spare — remove it and the grid opens again.
The Chancellery asked nobody to take its word. It showed the road step by step, so that anyone might walk it again.
Play this dossier All mysteries
Nothing in this chronicle is invented: the text rises out of the dossier's logic, and the dossier passed through the solver before publication, so that its solution is provably unique. behind the scenes at the Chancellery.