“Oh.” Seivarden looked briefly at her crossed arms. “No.”
I took the tea the adjunct poured from a flask on the table, thanked her, and took a seat. The office had been painted a pale green, the floor tiled with something that had probably been intended to look like wood and might have succeeded if the designer had ever seen anything but imitations of imitations. A niche in the wall behind the young adjunct held an icon of Amaat and a small bowl of bright-orange, ruffle-petaled flowers. And beside that, a tiny brass copy of the cliffside in the temple of Ikkt. You could buy them, I knew, from vendors in the plaza in front of the Fore-Temple water, during pilgrimage season.
I looked at the adjunct again. Who was she? Someone I knew? A relative of someone I’d met?
“You’re humming again,” Seivarden said in an undertone.
“Excuse me.” I took a sip of tea. “It’s a habit I have. I apologize.”
“No need,” said the adjunct, and took her own seat by the table. This was, fairly clearly, her own office and so she was direct assistant to the inspector supervisor—an unusual place for someone so young. “I haven’t heard that song since I was a child.”
Seivarden blinked, not understanding. If she had, she likely would have smiled. A Radchaai could live nearly two hundred years. This inspector adjunct, probably a legal adult for a decade, was still impossibly young.
“I used to know someone else who sang all the time,” the adjunct continued.
I knew her. Had probably bought songs from her. She would have been maybe four, maybe five, when I’d left Ors. Maybe slightly older, if she remembered me with any clarity.
The inspector supervisor behind that door would be someone who had spent time on Shis’urna—in Ors itself, most likely. What did I know about the lieutenant who had replaced Lieutenant Awn as administrator there? How likely was it she’d resigned her military assignment and taken one as a dock inspector? It wasn’t unheard of.
Whoever the inspector supervisor was, she had money and influence enough to bring this adjunct here from Ors. I wanted to ask the young woman the name of her patron, but that would be unthinkably rude. “I’m told,” I said, meaning to sound idly curious, and playing up my Gerentate accent just the smallest bit, “that the jewelry you Radchaai wear has some sort of significance.”
Seivarden cast me a puzzled look. The adjunct only smiled. “Some of it.” Her Orsian accent, now I had identified it, was clear, obvious. “This one for instance.” She slid one gloved finger under a gold-colored dangle pinned near her left shoulder. “It’s a memorial.”
“May I look closer?” I asked, and receiving permission moved my chair near, and bent to read the name engraved in Radchaai on the plain metal, one I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t likely a memorial for an Orsian—I couldn’t imagine anyone in the lower city adopting Radchaai funeral practices, or at least not anyone old enough to have died since I’d seen them last.
Near the memorial, on her collar, sat a small flower pin, each petal enameled with the symbol of an Emanation. A date engraved in the flower’s center. This assured young woman had been the tiny, frightened flower-bearer when Anaander Mianaai had acted as priest in Lieutenant Awn’s house twenty years ago.
No coincidences, not for Radchaai. I was quite sure now that when we were admitted to the inspector supervisor’s presence, I would meet Lieutenant Awn’s replacement in Ors. This inspector adjunct was, perhaps, a client of hers.
“They make them for funerals,” the adjunct was saying, still talking about memorial pins. “Family and close friends wear them.” And you could tell by the style and expense of the piece just where in Radchaai society the dead person stood, and by implication where the wearer stood. But the adjunct—her name, I knew, was Daos Ceit—didn’t mention that.
I wondered then what Seivarden would make—had made—of changes in fashion since Garsedd, the way such signals had changed—or not. People still wore inherited tokens and memorials, testimony to the social connections and values of their ancestors generations back. And mostly that was the same, except “generations back” was Garsedd. Some tokens that had been insignificant then were prized now, and some that had been priceless were now meaningless. And the color and gemstone significances in vogue for the last hundred or so years wouldn’t read at all, for Seivarden.