THE FIRST THING that struck me was the cleanliness of the place. Not just the absence of dirt—though there was no dirt, not a smudge nor smear in sight—but there was a sterility to everything before me, no matter how elegant: the dining couches were too smooth and unblemished, and the woven silk mats laid in squares on the floor were too unspoiled, perhaps having never known the tramp of a foot. The whole house felt as cozy and comfortable as a surgeon’s knife.
Which wasn’t to say it was not opulent. Miniature mai-trees had been altered to grow down from the ceiling, acting as chandeliers—something I’d never seen before—their fruits full to bursting with the glowing little mai-worms, which cast a flickering blue light about us. I wondered if even the air was expensive in here, then saw it was: a massive kirpis mushroom had been built into the corner of every main room—a tall, black fungus built to suck in air, clean it, and exhale it out at a cooler temperature.
The shrieking went on and on from somewhere in the mansion. I shivered a little, and knew it had nothing to do with the temperature of the air.
“We’ve kept all the staff and witnesses here at the house, as the investigator directed,” Otirios said. “I expect you’ll want to interview them, sir.”
“Thank you, Princeps. How many are there?”
“Seven total. Four servant girls, the cook, the groundskeeper, and the housekeeper.”
“Who owns this estate? I take it not Commander Blas?”
“No, sir. This house is owned by the Haza clan. Did you not see the insignia?” He gestured to a little marking hanging over the entry door: a single feather standing tall between two trees.
That gave me pause. The Hazas were one of the wealthiest families in the Empire and owned a huge amount of land in the inner rings. The staggering luxury of this place began to make a lot of sense, but everything else grew only more confusing.
“What are the Hazas doing owning a house in Daretana?” I asked, genuinely bewildered.
He shrugged. “Dunno, sir. Maybe they ran out of houses to buy everywhere else.”
“Is a member of the Haza clan here currently?”
“If they are, sir, they’re damned good hiders. The housekeeper should know more.”
We continued down a long hallway, which ended in a black stonewood door.
A faint odor filled the air as we grew close to the door: something musty and sweet, and yet tinged with a rancid aroma.
My stomach trembled. I reminded myself to hold my head high, to keep my expression scowling and stoic, like a real assistant investigator might. Then I had to remind myself that I was a real assistant investigator, damn it all.
“Have you worked many death cases before, sir?” asked Otirios.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just curious, given the nature of this one.”
“I haven’t. Mostly the investigator and I have handled pay fraud among the officers here in Daretana.”
“You didn’t handle that murder last year? The sotted guard who attacked the fellow at the checkpoint?”
I felt something tighten in my cheek. “The Iudex Investigator position was created here only four months ago.”
“Oh, I see, sir. But you didn’t work any death inquiries with your investigator at your previous station?”
The muscle in my cheek tightened further. “When the investigator arrived here,” I said, “I was selected from the other local Sublimes to serve as her assistant. So. No.”
There was the slightest of pauses in Otirios’s stride. “So…you have only worked for an Iudex Investigator for four months, sir?”
“What’s the point of this, Princeps?” I asked, irritated.
I could see the smirk playing at the edges of Otirios’s mouth again. “Well, sir,” he said. “Of all the death cases to be your first, I wouldn’t much like it being this one.”
He opened the door.
* * *
—
THE CHAMBER WITHIN was a bedroom, as grand as the rest of the house, with a wide, soft mossbed in one corner and a fernpaper wall and door separating off what I guessed was the bathing closet—for though I’d never seen a bathing closet inside a house, I knew such things existed. A mai-lantern hung in the corner; in the corner diagonal from it, another kirpis shroom. Beside it were two trunks and a leather satchel. Commander Blas’s possessions, I guessed.
But the most remarkable feature of the room was the clutch of leafy trees growing in the center—for it was growing from within a person.
Or rather, through a person.
The corpse hung suspended in the center of the bedchamber, speared by the many slender trees, but as Otirios had said it was initially difficult to identify it as a body at all. A bit of torso was visible in the thicket, and some of the left leg. What I could see of them suggested a middle-aged man wearing the purple colors of the Imperial Engineering Iyalet. The right arm was totally lost, and the right leg had been devoured by the swarm of roots pouring out from the trunks of the little trees and eating into the stonewood floor of the chamber.
I stared into the roots. I thought I could identify the pinkish nub of a femur amid all those curling coils.
I looked down. An enormous pool of blood had spread across the floor, as smooth and reflective as a black glass mirror.
A flicker in my stomach, like it held an eel trying to leap out.
I told myself to focus, to breathe. To stay controlled and contained. This was what I did for a living now.
“It’s safe to approach, sir,” Otirios said, a little too cheerily. “We’ve inspected the whole of the room. Worry not.”
I stepped closer to look at the greenery. They weren’t really trees, but some kind of long, flexible grass—a bit like shootstraw, the hollow, woody grass they used to make piping and scaffolding. The thicket of shoots appeared to have emerged from between Blas’s shoulder and neck—I spied a hint of vertebrae trapped within them and suppressed another pang of nausea.
Most remarkable was Blas’s face. It seemed the shoots had grown multiple branches as they’d emerged from his torso, and one had shot sideways through Blas’s skull, bending his head at an awful angle; yet the branch had somehow enveloped his skull above the upper jawline, swallowing his face and his nose and ears. All that was left of Blas’s skull was his lower jaw, hanging open in a silent scream; and there, above it in the wood, a half ring of teeth and the roof of a mouth, submerging into the rippling bark.
I stared at his chin. A whisper of steely stubble; a faint scar on the edge from some accident or conflict. I moved on, looked at the rest of him. Left arm furred with light brown hair, fingers calloused and crackling from years of labor. The leggings on the left leg were stained dark with blood, so much so that it had pooled in his boot, filling it like a pot of sotwine.
I felt a drop on my scalp and looked up. The shoots had punched through the roof of the house, and the morning mist was drifting inside in dribs and drabs.
“Sticks out about ten span past the top of the house, if you’re curious, sir,” said Otirios. “Shot through four span of roofing like it was fish fat. So—a pretty big growth. Never seen anything like it.”
“How long did this take?” I asked hoarsely.
“Less than five minutes, sir. According to the servants’ testimony, that is. They thought it was a quake, the house shook so.”
“Is there anything the Apoths have that can do this?”
“No, sir. The Apothetikal Iyalet has all kinds of grafts and suffusions to control the growth of plants—succus wheat that ripens within a quarter of a season, for example, or fruits that grow to three or four times their conventional size. But we’ve never made anything that can grow trees within minutes…or one that can grow from within a person, of course.”
“Have we got any reason to believe it was intended for him?”
“Inconclusive, sir,” said Otirios. “He’s Engineering, moves around a good bit. Could be he accidentally ingested something during his travels or contaminated himself. There’s no way to tell yet.”
“Did he visit anyone else in town? Or meet any other infected official, or imperial personnel?”
“Doesn’t seem so, sir,” said Otirios. “It appears he departed from the next canton over and came straight here without meeting anyone.”
“Has there ever been a record of any contagion like this?”