Even the servants thought themselves worldlier than I, it seemed. But then, they were probably right.
I asked her more, but she gave me less with every question, withdrawing into herself further and further. I made a note of it and moved on.
I asked the next girls about Blas’s advances. While they corroborated the story, all of them claimed they’d never had a relationship with Blas beyond these unpleasant moments, and none of them had much else to say.
“I didn’t hear or see anything before he died,” said the final girl flatly. She was bolder, louder, angrier than the others. Less willing to quietly suffer servitude, maybe. “Not for the whole night. I know that.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“I am,” she said. “Because I didn’t sleep much before the guest came.”
“Why was that?”
“Because I was hot. Very hot.”
I thought about it. “Do you sleep near the kitchens?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because the kirpis shroom is dying there. Could that be why you were hot?”
She seemed surprised. “Another one’s died?”
“They’ve died before?”
“They’re very sensitive to water. Too much and they shrivel up and die.”
“What kind of moisture?” I asked.
“Any kind. Rain. Humidity. Leave a window or door open nearby—especially now, when the wet season starts—and they’ll get sick right away. They’re temperamental as hell.”
I leaned back and focused. A fluttering at the backs of my eyes, and I summoned up my memories of searching the house, each image of each room flashing perfectly in my mind like a fly suspended in a drop of honey. No doors or windows had been open that I saw. So how might the kirpis have died?
“Did you or anyone else in the house happen to close an open door or window before Blas died?” I asked.
She stared at me. “After seeing what we saw, sir,” she said, “we could barely stand, let alone do our work.”
I took that as a no, they had not shut any doors or windows, and continued on.
* * *
—
EVENTUALLY I RAN out of servant girls, so I went hard at the cook, asking her about the blood in the kitchen. She was most unimpressed.
“Why do you think there might be blood in the kitchen?” she demanded.
“Did you cut yourself?” I asked.
“No. Of course not. I am too old, and too good. If you found blood, I am sure it’s from the larfish I cooked for Blas’s breakfast—not that he ever got to eat it.”
“Larfish?” I asked. I pulled a face. “For breakfast?”
“It’s what he likes,” she said. “It’s hard to get, out close to the walls, where he works.” She leaned closer. “If you ask me, he picked up something out there, at the sea walls. Some parasite or another. I mean—think of what the sea walls keep out. Sanctum knows what kind of strange things they bring in with them!”
“They don’t get in, ma’am,” I said. “That’s the point of the sea walls.”
“But they had a breach years ago,” she said, delighted to discuss such grotesqueries. “One got in and wrecked a city south of here, before the Legion brought it down. The trees there bloom now, though they never bloomed before. They weren’t trees that could grow blooms before.”
“If we could get back to the circumstances of last night, ma’am…”
“Circumstances!” she scoffed. “The man caught contagion. It’s as simple as that.”
I pressed her harder, but she gave me nothing more of interest, and I let her go.
* * *
—
THE GROUNDSKEEPER NEXT. Fellow’s name was Uxos, and he was apparently more than just a groundskeeper, performing odd jobs about the house, fixing up walls or fernpaper doors. A most timid man, perhaps too old to still be groundskeeper. He seemed terrified at the idea of trying to fix the damage the trees had done to the house.
“I don’t even know what kind of tree it is,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
“It had a bloom, you know,” I said. “A little white one.” I described it to him—the inner petals purple and yellow, the sweet and sickly aroma. He just shook his head.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s not a flower I know. Not a tree I know. I don’t know.”
I asked him about the kirpis shroom, and he said the same thing as the servant girl: too much water kills them. But how this one had died, he didn’t know.
“Someone probably overwatered it,” he said. “Dumped a drink in it. It’s expensive, but it happens. They’re very hard to care for. It’s a complex process, cooling the air. They make black fruit in their roots you have to clean out…”
Finally I asked him about his oven, and the ashes of the fire out there in the hut.
“I use the fire to clean my tools,” Uxos said. “Some plants are very delicate. Can’t get fungus from one to the other. So I put them in the fire to clean them.”
“Don’t they have washes for that?” I said. “Soaps and such for your tools?”
“They’re expensive. Fire is cheaper.”
“The Hazas don’t seem like people who care much about price.”
“They care,” he said, “if people get expensive. Then the people go. I try very hard not to be expensive. I don’t want to go.”
A worm of worry in his eye. Too old to be groundskeeper by half, I guessed, and he knew it. I pressed him for more, but he had nothing more to give, and I let him go.
* * *
—
LAST WAS THE housekeeper—a Madam Gennadios, apparently the boss of the whole place when the Hazas themselves weren’t around. An older woman with a lined, heavily painted face. She wore bright green robes of a very expensive make, soft and shimmering—Sazi silk, from the inner rings of the Empire. She paused when she walked in, looked me over with a cold, shrewd eye, then sat down, her posture immaculate—knees together at an angle, hands in her lap, shoulders high and tight—and stared resolutely into the corner.
“Something wrong, ma’am?” I asked.
“A boy,” she said. Her words were as dry and taut as a bowstring. “They’ve sent a boy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She studied me again out of the corner of her eye. “This is who’s trapped us in our house, the house of my masters, and won’t let us remove that damned corpse—a great, overgrown boy.”
A long, icy moment slipped by.
“Someone’s died in your house, ma’am,” I said. “Potentially of contagion. Something that might have killed you all, too. Don’t you want us to investigate?”
“Then where’s the investigator?”
“The investigator isn’t able to attend,” I said. “I’m here to review the scene and report back to her.”
Her gaze lingered on me. I was reminded of an eel contemplating a fish flitting before its cave. “Ask me your questions,” she said. “I’ve work to do, a damned ceiling to patch up. Go.”
I inhaled at my vial and then asked her about the nature of Blas’s stay. She gave what might have been the smallest, least sincere shrug I’d ever seen. “He is a friend of the Haza family.”
“One of your servant girls said the same thing,” I said.
“Because it’s true.”
“The exact same thing.”
“Because it’s true.”
“And your masters often let their friends stay at their houses?”
“My masters have many houses, and many friends. Sometimes their friends come to stay with us.”
“And no one from the Haza clan intended to join him?”
“My masters,” she said, “prefer more civilized environs than this canton.”
I moved on, asking her about the locations of the staff’s reagents keys.
“All the reagents keys are locked up at night,” she said. “Only I and Uxos are in constant possession of any during the evening, for emergencies.”
I asked about replacing keys, how to duplicate them, and so on, but she was dismissive. The idea was impossible to her.
“What about alterations?” I said. “Have your staff had any imperial grafts applied?”
“Of course,” she said. “For immunities, and parasites. We are on the rim of the Empire, after all.”
“Nothing more advanced than that?”