She shook her head. I felt a heat under the collar of my coat. I didn’t like how little she moved, sitting up so ramrod straight, shifting her head only to look at me out of the side of her eye like a damned bird.
“Can you at least tell me the nature of the commander’s relationship with the Hazas?” I asked.
A withering stare. “They were friends.”
“How long have they been friends?”
“I do not know the nature of all my masters’ friendships, nor is that for me to know.”
“Do they have many friends in Daretana?”
“Yes. In many of the Iyalets, at that.” Her eyes glittered at me. “And some of them are above you.”
I smiled politely at her, yet the threat seemed very real. I asked her more, but she gave me nothing. I let her go.
* * *
—
THEN IT WAS done: all witnesses questioned, all personnel accounted for, all times of departures and arrivals established. The only person who’d arrived in the past day had been Commander Taqtasa Blas, who’d come to the residence at just past eleven on the night of the twenty-ninth of the month of Skalasi. He immediately bathed and went to bed, awoke on the thirtieth, and then paused right before breakfast to die in the most horrifying fashion imaginable. Though I thought I’d made a pretty good job of it—except for my chat with the housekeeper, perhaps—I could make neither head nor tail of the scene: not whether Blas’s death was murder, or even suspicious.
Contagion did happen, after all. Especially to those who worked at the sea walls.
I stopped by the bedroom on my way out. To see the corpse one more time, yes, but also to replace Blas’s book in his belongings. It felt strange to slip his diary back in his bags, his frozen scream hanging over my shoulder. Despite all the mutilation, the pain of his expression remained striking, like he was still feeling all those shoots threading and coiling through his flesh.
I walked out and thanked Otirios, and he led me across the grounds back to the servants’ gate.
“Is it all right for us to remove the corpse for study, sir?” he asked.
“I think so, but please keep all the witnesses here,” I said. “I’ll report back to the investigator, and she’ll likely want to summon some of the witnesses to question herself.”
“It was well done, sir,” he said.
“What was?”
“Well done. If I might say so. All handled well.” He gave me a grin, beaming and big-brotherly. I’d only ever seen such smiles above a fourth pot of sotwine. “Though next time, sir—might want to be a bit friendlier. I’ve seen undertakers warmer than you.”
I paused and looked at him. Then I turned and kept walking, down through the picturesque garden paths and out the vinegate.
“But I’ve also got to wonder, sir…” Otirios asked as we passed through the vines.
“Yes, Princeps?” I said. “What advice do you have now?”
“Might this have been easier if the investigator herself had come?”
I stopped again and looked at him balefully.
“No,” I said. “I can say with absolute honesty, Princeps, that no, this would not have been easier if the investigator had come.” I returned to the path, muttering, “You’ll have to trust me on that.”
CHAPTER 2
| | |
THE DARETANA CANTON DIDN’T have a true city in any normal sense of the word, but rather a clutch of Imperial Iyalet buildings clinging to the main crossroads, along with countless lots and warehouses and storage barns for all the materials and livestock constantly being routed to the sea walls. That afternoon it was the usual morass of mud and men and the press of horseflesh. I danced south along the corners through the town, pausing for the carts and wagons, and saw the familiar sights: horses with copper red mud churned up to their bellies; crawling swarms of thrumming flies; sweat-drenched officers of the Legion, the Engineers, and the other Iyalets bellowing names and orders, seemingly indifferent as to whether they were heard or heeded. I bowed and nodded and bowed and nodded until I was free of the throng and into the jungle.
The woods were dark and shimmering hot. The sun was in its descent, spears of its tawny light plunging through the canopy. I found the narrow jungle path to my master’s house and stepped along it, greeted by the familiar chirrup of frog and beetle. Then the steam-drenched leaves parted and I glimpsed her little fretvine quarters waiting in the shade.
I picked my way through the tree stumps. The Engineers had cut all these trees down when my master had first been appointed Iudex Investigator of this canton, some four months ago now, and then they’d made her a house from fretvine—the special, altered vine the Apothetikals had tamed to grow into any shape. Whereas I’d trodden this path so many times I practically walked in my own footprints, she had not left that place since she’d moved in. Not once.
I walked up the steps to her front door and saw a stack of books waiting before the door, tied up with string. Delivery from the Daretana post station, I guessed. I squatted and flipped a few open to read their titles. As always, the letters shook and danced before my eyes, making it hard for me to put them together—the shifting jungle light didn’t help—but I made out Summation of the Transfer of Landed Properties, Qabirga Canton, 1100–1120 and Theories Related to the Increase in Mass of the Eastern Scuttlecrab Since 800.
“The hell?” I muttered.
Then I paused, listening. I heard the chirrup of a tossfrog, and the low call of a mika lark; but then I realized I had heard something else: the mutter of a man, within the house.
I pressed my ear to the front door. I could hear one voice within—my master’s—but then a second, a man’s. One that sounded anxious, even nervous.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “She’s gone and trapped another one…”
I threw the door open and dashed in.
* * *
—
THE MOST REMARKABLE feature of the interior of the little fretvine house, as always, was the sheer number of books: walls and stacks and veritable canyons of tomes, on any number of obscure subjects. My master quite literally lived between books, often using them as a desk and nightstand. She even had to carve out a little cavern in them for her bed.
I peered through the valleys of tomes and approached the meeting room at the back of the little house. I could already see the feet of someone sitting in a chair back there—officer’s boots, black and shiny—and grimaced. I smoothed back my hair and walked into the meeting room.
The meeting room had gotten worse since yesterday: it was now brimming with tangles of potted plants, many exotic and half-dead, and stringed musical instruments in varying states of disrepair. On the left side of the room sat a small stuffed chair, and today a captain from Engineering occupied it, a thin, middle-aged man who looked absolutely terrified.
The reason for his terror was obvious, for most people found themselves terrified to share a room with my master: Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, Iudex Investigator of the Daretana Canton, who was sitting on the floor facing away from the captain as she worked on yet another one of her projects. It appeared to be some contraption of wires and string I could make no sense of. I guessed she’d taken apart one of her many situr harps—she was an avid if inattentive musician—and was making some kind of loom from its strings.
“I told you, Din,” Ana said, “to knock. Always.”
I stood up straight at attention, hands behind my back, heels shoulder-width apart, knees straight. “Thought I heard voices, ma’am,” I said. “Came to check.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to be worried about.” She looked over her shoulder at me, grinning. A strand of her snowy-white hair arched down over her cheek, like the crest feather of some exotic bird. I maintained my stance, but she could not see me, for she was wearing a wide strip of crimson cloth as a blindfold. “The captain and I,” she said, “have been having the most delightful conversation.”
The captain stared at me in naked dread.