There are long periods of time in which no one is killed and no one needs saving, and the Great Detective does indeed savor those moments, but only ever in retrospect. Life is more vibrant, more real, somehow, when the Rule is broken. He can almost feel, like the turning of the seasons, all the various parts of his long and colorful history shivering briefly into synthesis with this more contemplative life. He is never so devoted to the order as when he is flouting its strictures, never so passionately in love with monastic life as when he is breaking curfew to ride through the woods with a lean and lissome deputy sheriff in hopes of saving some poor doomed idiot or other.

But he does cherish the quiet times; the long months of growth and harvest, the placid nights of plainsong, the unmemorable merriment of a feast day, the hushed chill of an icy winter. Even in the midst of civil war, he has found, clung to, a peace everlasting.

His Archnemesis, never one to be outdone, has anticipated him, wormed his way into the abbey before the Great Detective’s calling had even come upon him. But he, too, is made mild by the unchanging hours of the liturgical day, rendered no more venomous than any other toadying subprior trotting along behind a marmoreal and unregarding bore. They snipe at each other in chapter, but what of it? Their swords are sheathed, always sheathed, in the presence of the divine.

The Great Detective is many things to many people, but she is absolutely not a cop.

Violence is deplorable, sure, murder vile, she scorns these as any member of a society might do, but really she’s in it for the solve; hooked on crosswords at a young age, she graduated to the harder stuff when the pleasure ebbed. A nice theft, some swindling, a kidnapping or two, arson here and there, the occasional bit of barratry, all merely opportunities to excercise a soul quaked with idleness, a chance to pit herself against the invisible mind of another.

But she has no calling for conviction. Once the solve has been achieved, the pleasure is over, the world dims again, some of the sparkle goes out of her eye, some of the spring out of her step. The game is over with the reveal. More, as an amateur, she has a world of latitude in how she acts. She has discretion.

Her Archnemesis, in this moment, is smaller than ever before, less clever; if they have thwarted all the yeomanly efforts of the nation’s constabulary that is beginner’s luck more than anything. There was no premeditation to their latest murder, if quite some malice; pushed to the brink they merely snapped.

“I do not think,” says the Great Detective, slowly, “that the police will ever find you out. Go; I will not stop you.”

And like that Her Archnemesis is gone. This is justice, of a sort: the Great Detective knows that some people need killing, and the state has no monopoly on violence.

The bees are long dead, John and Mary more recently, and his fame, such as it was, is a long-banked fire he warms himself on on short winter days. Time has stolen his height and his appetite, and most days he sits quietly by the southern window watching the sun move across the valley. He boasted once to John that he neither knew nor cared if the sun revolved around the earth or the earth around the sun, as neither case could affect the solution of a crime; now, however, he cannot watch a sunrise without thinking of it.

They must have been young, then, but it was all so long ago he cannot conceive of what youth must have been like. He remembers the anxiety and the desperation of his idle times, but not the pith of the experience—remembers it as a story to be told. How it felt to be so despairingly understimulated that he would rather throw himself from the top of the falls than not eludes him. He is as precise with dates and times and distances as ever, but without the vital interest in humanity that once drove him, those points of data are as sterile and drily pleasing as a railway schedule.

He had not expected to live so long, to so far outlast not only the dead but even himself. He does not begrudge the passing time, but he cannot bring himself to care about it, either.

“Trees,” said Encyclopedia, “grow from the top up; what is carved low on a young tree will remain low on an ancient one.”

Bugs nodded to himself. Yes, he thought, that was my mistake. Ah, well, so it goes; they have circled around each other for so long, it is hard to conceive of a world where things could be different. Both the criminal and the detective produce crime, the criminal by the performance of marvelous things, and the detective by the delineation of crime. Who have I hurt by this lie? he asked himself. No one. And who has Encyclopedia hurt by revealing my lie? Also no one.

He was not bored; how could he be? Before this—in the long untime of their personal prehistory—he was merely violent, a beast in the shape of a boy, with no thought beyond the satisfaction of the desires of a moment and no craft beyond an extra six inches of height and another forty pounds of muscle. Can I have been said to exist? Can a creature that lives solely by reflex be said to live? Was I not then some biological robot, a Talos of mere flesh?

And what were you, my nemesis, my soul, without me? He conjured the kitchen table, the police chief fat and foolish asking his ten year old child for advice, the unbreakable boredom of a sane mind in a secure body, a motive will with no fears, no worries, no great work to wreak craft upon. They are complete in themselves, now, form given soul, soul given presence, and all for the soft labor of an afternoon of tree carving.

“We are our own victims,” Bugs muttered into his collar, but Encyclopedia, if he heard, gave no sign.

The Client
Someone close, but not too close. Someone the Great Detective knows well — an old friend, a forgotten lover, a favorite tradesperson, a former coworker — needs help. Not an innocent; they stepped outside the bounds of society out of greed or need or love and now they’re caught with their foot in the trap. Of course he’ll take the case.

The Mystery
Violence and the threat of violence hang in the air. The Great Detective is discomfited; this hits closer to home. Heavy footfalls echo off the walls of the alleyways he turns down; a sleek black car hops the curb and brushes against the hem of his coat. His Archnemesis is playing for keeps this time; the game has grown suddenly serious. The client is killed or kidnapped or beaten into a coma; something horrific that takes them out of the story and raises the stakes.

The Solution
Too late for the client, but the Great Detective has put the pieces together, pulled back the lid on the city’s seamy underbelly, revealing an elaborate network of crime operating with the implied blessing of the police, the courts, the wealthy; so long as they limit their depredations to the poorer sort, it’s not worth interfering. The Great Detective calls in his Lestrade to bring down the crime ring.

The Escalation
The leaders of the crime ring all die in their cells. Suicide is a plague in the prisons, say the cops, and cough mockingly into their sleeves. A check arrives by mail; for services rendered says the memo.

The Resolution
The Great Detective keeps pushing; Lestrade takes a leave of absence. He holds His Archnemesis at gunpoint, I know it was you. His Archnemesis laughs; you think I could do this all on my own? Give me a name, says the Great Detective. A shot rings out; the window shatters; the smell of gas in the apartment.

When he wakes, there are flowers by his hospital bed, signed by the richest man in town. Best wishes, they say, for services rendered.