Quoted By:
Time passes as you work on the counterfeit graven ball. While you had intended to fully focus on the engraving of the counterfeit, you have found that the work is very, very mindless, and you find your attention wandering back to the enigma of this thing. Even though you have read the whole thing a dozen times over now, and are well into the copying, you do not feel as if you are any closer to understanding how this object worked, or what it did.
But while there are no clues for coming from the Glyph itself, you do recall something significant that might give a hint as to what the Glyph actually does when active. Now, Aldoin’s mortal coil had been absolutely mangled by the Coroners, clearly in a desperate attempt to stave off the Strangeness, to the point that one of his legs had fallen off. At the time, you never really looked that closely at the body – you were much more concerned about the suspicious purse of salt that had been nailed to the foot of the coffin, which is where the graven ball had been stowed – but when none of Aldoin’s surviving male relations showed up to his funeral armed, it clued you in to something big. No one at that funeral thought he had been murdered, or even thought that his death was the least bit suspicious.
Now, if you were to come across a body that had a musket ball size hole in it, with the musket ball still inside, you would be pretty comfortable with saying that this man was shot. There is no reasonable way explain why people would overlook a gunshot wound, which means that the only possible explanation is that there never was a gunshot wound. Accepting this, that means that the Glyph has to work in one of two ways. It is either some sort of Shadow Phasing spell that allows a musket ball to kill without leaving physical evidence behind, excluding the ball itself, or the Glyph is some kill-on-contact spell, and the graven ball is not a musket ball after all, and was never actually shot at Aldoin, instead, it was just given to him somehow, or it was put somewhere where he would pick it up.
Which would probably be the way to use a weapon like that. Imagine it. If someone saw an engraved steel ball just lying somewhere, you would suspect that a lot of people would pick it to look at it. And now that you consider it, the only reason that you assumed that the graven ball was a musket ball in the first place was because you found it in a coffin. Sure, it is the right size for pistol, but how many people would make that connection … or that it was magical?
Of course, as far as weapons go, it does leave a bit to be desired. What if the intended target doesn’t pick it up? What if the target doesn’t even see it? What if someone else picks it up before the target? And more importantly, why was it still in his possession when Aldoin was brought to the Morgue? Even if no one recognized it as magical weapon, surely someone would want to investigate it further.
