Dale Ashveil

Dale Ashveil was an Aristonian nobleman, the husband of Maren Ashveil. He died some months ago in the study of the family estate in the Civic Quarter. The constabulary ruled it natural causes — a heart attack — but the scene, left untouched since his death, tells a darker story.

What the Study Revealed

• His dying message, scrawled in the margin of a document, reads "the fixe—": the letters grow weaker from left to right, and the word is unfinished. He seems to have been fighting a sedative as he wrote it.
• The arm of his chair had been coated with a contact sedative — an extract of moon petal, which numbs and immobilizes within seconds of touching the skin. He is thought to have absorbed too much of it before he realized what was happening, leaving him helpless at his desk.
• Caught in a splinter under the desk was a single strand of curly red hair, matching the description long attached to the Fixer.
• Among his papers lay a shipping manifest for a Canal District warehouse, stamped with the seal of House Betony and annotated in Dale's own hand: "G wants this moved before the 14th."

Moon petal on its own is not lethal, so some further, untraceable agent was likely used to finish the deed and make the death resemble a failing heart. Taken together, the evidence points to a killing carefully staged to look like natural causes — the work, it is now known, of the Fixer.