“Well. How’d you put it all together so fast, ma’am?”
“Oh, I didn’t put it all together,” she said. She slipped off her blindfold to eat and blinked her yellow eyes in the dim light. “I still don’t know who killed Blas, or why. That will take time to figure out. And I still don’t know what Blas was giving to the Hazas. Yet you can’t predict the madnesses of men. Projecting motives is a fool’s game. But how they do it—that’s a matter of matter, moving real things about in real space. The question of how a knife was forged in one place and then traveled across the countryside to be buried in the throat of some dumb bastard entails a lot of tangible, definite facts.” She pointed at me. “You get the facts, Din. I do the rest.”
I chewed my bean cake. “Yes, but—how did you do it, ma’am? What…”
“Ahh. What suffusion do I have?” she asked. “What augmentation? Is that it?”
“Just curious, ma’am.”
“Curious to know what makes me me. What keeps me indoors and makes me muck about with my blindfolds and my books. That’s the problem with the damned Empire these days…All these complacent bastards think the only thing that matters is which tiny beast is dancing in your blood, altering your brain, making you see and feel and think differently. The person an enhancement is paired with is just as important as what enhancement they get. And we get some say in what kind of person we are, Din. We do not pop out of a mold. We change. We self-assemble.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I sensed she wasn’t willing to talk on it further.
“How are we going to pursue this, ma’am?” I asked.
“Well, first off, Blas surely had a secretary,” said Ana. “Someone to manage his day-to-day affairs. We need to get ahold of them, whoever they are, and get them in front of me. Then I take them apart.” She ripped out a piece of parchment and began writing. “This will take time—I’ve no doubt his secretary is stationed in the next canton, and it’s the wet season, so things must be hectic as fuck-all for the Engineers—but it must be done.” She shoved the message in my hands to take to the post station. “Next, I want you to get in touch with the Apoths. Have them check the pipes of the bath. The dappleglass might have been washed away into a drain. I’ll want to confirm that and have them examine it, if so.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“I’ll also need you to get the materials from Gennadios,” she said. “All the dates for Blas’s visits. Whoever killed him knew exactly when he was coming here, so they’ve been watching him for some time. The bigger issue being, I bet Blas spent a lot of time at the sea walls in the next canton—Tala. A very busy one, with its own Iudex division, and its own investigator. Our abilities to trot over there and start kicking over stones are limited, unless we get something really good.”
“Something really good?”
“Yes—something really solid indicating this badness with Blas extends to Tala. But I’m guessing it does. Blas was in bed with the Hazas…and the Hazas definitely have a foothold in the capital of the canton, in Talagray. If we follow this all the way, it may take us there. I’m just not sure when.”
I watched her. There was a queer ferocity in her face now.
“Is there something personal with you and the Haza family, ma’am?” I asked.
“I am decidedly impersonal with all persons, Din,” she said. “Makes it easier when I have to send them to the scaffold. But the Hazas really are a bunch of rotten bastards. I wouldn’t mind seeing all their progeny rotting in the ground like a bunch of fucking dead dogs.”
“I…” I coughed. “I see, ma’am. I was just wondering if that was why you’d asked me to bring Gennadios.”
“Oh, partially. I didn’t really need her to confirm my hunch. I mostly wanted you to bring her so I could fuck up her day. She sounded like such an awful turd.”
“Then why did you also ask for the servant girl, ma’am?”
“Dunno. I needed Uxos to feel comfortable coming. And three just feels better than two, doesn’t it?”
“And your claim about sending two Iudex guards to check on Uxos’s hut? I don’t believe you asked me to arrange that.”
“Ah, that bit was just a lie,” she said. “I just wanted him to move. And he did!” She grinned triumphantly. “How fun it is, when things work out!”
* * *
—
AFTER WE FINISHED, I readied to depart to make my formal report to the Iudex Magistry. I noticed that Ana looked very relaxed, and far less manic than she had in the last few weeks, and commented upon it.
“Of course I feel better,” she said, slipping on her blindfold to see me out. “Fiddling with something interesting is a very elating thing. And this murder is proving quite interesting.”
“I thought, ma’am,” I said as I stood on her porch, “that our purpose was to deliver justice. The Legion defends the living. The Iudex defends the dead and the wronged.”
“Don’t be so moralistic, Din, it’s boring. And justice is a tricky thing. I mean, Blas sounded like such a shit, didn’t he?”
“Not so much as to deserve murder, ma’am. Especially like that.”
“Not yet, at least. We shall find out more.”
I paused on her doorstep. “I did have one more question, ma’am…”
She sighed wearily. “Yes, Din?”
“What happened to the canton of Oypat? The one that was destroyed by the dappleglass?”
“Oh, well…the Apoths and the Engineers tried to devise a way to save it, if I recall. But they dithered too long. By the time they’d decided upon a plan of action, it was too late. The Apoths applied a burn—not a normal one, but a phalm oil burn. Same thing they use to dispose of the carcasses of the leviathans. The whole canton is now uninhabitable, cordoned off by the Engineers, and the people of the canton became like refugees. They live here and there among us, in pockets and tiny clans. And I suppose they must have some difficult questions on their minds.”
“What d’you mean, ma’am?”
“I mean…the Empire spends endless amounts of blood and treasure defending a whole continent from sea beasts the size of small mountains. But it can’t save a canton from one damned plant?” She cocked her head as a faint chime sounded behind her: her quake instrument was ringing again. “But then, the Empire’s only defended us thus far. There’s always another wet season, Din.”
She closed the door with a snap.
CHAPTER 6
| | |
I RETURNED TO THE Haza estate one final time to pick up the material from Gennadios. She beckoned me into her own room to hand it over—a furtive, guilty handoff—and I took it from her and examined it.
It was a slim little tome with a red leather cover. I opened it up and squinted hard at the letters. Like every piece of text I saw, the letters tended to wobble and shake and dance around—but I was pretty sure it was all in shorthand, reading CV.—4.1127 and the like.
“Is this code?” I asked Gennadios.
“It’s dates!” she snapped at me. “If you’re too stupid to read it, your investigator should be able to! She asked me for the book, and now she has it.”
She gave me the boot and I wandered around back. There a whole swarm of Apoths were draining the boiler and searching the gutters, all clad in leather warding helms and suits: protective gear their Iyalet had developed to safeguard them from contagion.
One Apoth saw me from a distance and waved. He lumbered over and removed his warding helm, revealing the flushed, sweaty face of Princeps Otirios.
“Found it, sir!” he said. He jerked his head backward toward the drains. “A slender slip of grass. It’d washed down the drains just as your investigator suggested.”
“How big was it?” I asked.
He held up his hands about eight smallspan apart. “Not big at all. Odd to think such a small thing could kill a man so horribly. But it must be a different breed, perhaps altered or grafted. Dappleglass normally spreads everywhere, and if it does get in people, it only grows in small clumps.”