“I mean…What was your read on that?” asked Ana. “Wasn’t something missing from all that? Or am I mad?”
I silently reviewed her friendly discussion with Uhad. “Did…did you expect your discussion with Immunis Uhad to go…elsewhere, ma’am?”
“What?” she said. “No! Not that! I mean that whole goddamned meeting down there! Didn’t you notice something wrong with that, Din?”
“Besides your consistent use of wildly inappropriate language, ma’am?”
She glared at me from behind her blindfold. “Come, come. Think. Did that meeting feel right to you?”
I thought about it. “No.”
“Good. Now tell me, honestly—what did you see that felt wrong? This is important.”
I thought about it, my eyes fluttering as I summoned each memory of the meeting: each fleeting glance, each gesture, each turn of the head and twist in the seat.
“They were…nervous,” I said finally. “About the breach, yes. But also about…something else.”
“Go on,” said Ana.
“It was something when you asked if they knew Blas,” I said. “They all went quiet. Nusis stared at the floor. Kalista only watched you. Tried to pretend she didn’t care what you were saying, but she very clearly did. Uhad was all up in his own head. Looking at memories, trying to figure out something on his own, probably. And Miljin…Well. He looked mostly at me, ma’am. Not sure why. But the man stuck his eyes on me and didn’t take them off.”
“Good,” she said. “Well seen, well captured. But you still haven’t noticed what was missing. Before your vomit of words, all those people down there testified that Commander Blas was an upstanding, admirable, studious imperial officer. Brilliant and beloved and all that bullshit.” She stabbed the air with her index finger. “But then you, dear Din, stood up and told them how he’d gotten killed during a fun countryside jaunt to a Haza house to get his prick wet in paid quim! And what did they say about that?”
“Oh! Well…nothing, ma’am,” I said.
“Nothing!” she said triumphantly. “None of them seemed shocked, appalled, or even interested! They didn’t say a damn thing, even when I gave them every chance to do so! Just went on discussing the case! Isn’t that terribly strange to you?”
“Yes,” I said. I summoned my memories of the last days of Blas’s case. “And you didn’t include that information in the letter you sent here, so they didn’t already know it.”
“Hell no. I’m not stupid enough to commit accusations of whoring to parchment. So it should have been a revelation.”
“And you don’t think they were trying to focus on the breach, ma’am?”
“You hear a sordid tale like that, you at least say something. But none of them even reacted to it.”
“And what’s the significance of this, ma’am?”
“Ohh…dunno yet,” said Ana. “But nothing good. I shall have to think on it.” The breeze played with her white hair, and she turned to the window in her chamber. “Window’s open, Din. Please shut it, or I’ll never get acclimated to this place.”
I went to the window, then paused, watching as the mai-lanterns of the city winked out one after another, the whole of Talagray growing dark like some rising tide was snuffing it out. Soon all I could see was the curve of the towers and the shimmer of the gleaming jungles to the north and the west. I looked east, toward the sea walls, but could see nothing at all through the mist. I closed the shutters and fastened them.
“We need,” said Ana behind me, “to get ahold of Blas’s secretary. The woman who ran his life for him—Rona Aristan. You remember her address, don’t you, Din?”
I did. I’d read it aloud to myself when I’d gotten her letter, and the words still echoed in my ears. “The woman who claimed she knew nothing about Blas’s trip to Daretana,” I said.
“Yes, but she’s obviously full of shit there,” said Ana. She ripped her blindfold off and massaged her eyes. “I want to get her and squeeze her like a fucking rimefruit. Something’s going on here that no one wants to discuss, and I think she must touch some of it.”
I watched Ana glowering into the floor, her face tight like she’d swallowed a lump of sour porridge.
“You say this, ma’am,” I said, “like this will be some bit of skullduggery.”
“Oh, it is,” said Ana, “because we’re not going to tell Uhad or the rest of them about her.”
“Why not?”
“Because they should have brought her up already,” said Ana. “In fact, they should have already interviewed her! But all of them seem reluctant to look too much into the dead Commander Blas. And I want to find out why.”
A knock at the door. I opened it to find a young Engineering officer, his knees quaking as he held a giant box full of coils of parchments. “Documents for the…the investigator,” he panted.
I thanked him, took the load, and hauled it inside. “Think this is what you asked Immunis Kalista for, ma’am.”
“Good!” She sat down on the floor and dug into them. “Hopefully I can figure out some pattern among all these people and figure out who you need to talk to tomorrow. We have to understand all the locations those dead Engineers visited the days before the breach. Because despite all that we’re lacking here, Din, what we really need is the place the murder happened. These people were all poisoned somewhere—maybe in more than one place, but I’m betting against it. They all passed through one space in creation, one cursed little spot of this earth—and when they left that space, they were dead. They just didn’t know it yet. That’s what you and Miljin must find.”
“Anything I should know about Captain Miljin, ma’am?” I asked. “If I’m going to be working the interviews with him tomorrow, any advice would be welcome.”
“I know he’s a war hero. Fought in one rebellion or another. He’s a bit like the Empire itself, I suppose. Very well thought of, famously tough—and also old. Maybe too old, these days.” A flash of a grin. “He was once rumored to be terribly handsome, if I recall. Tell me—does he still have thick wrists, Din? Thick wrists, and big, square, meaty hands?”
“How is that pertinent, ma’am?”
“Just because I blind myself doesn’t mean I’m not allowed my indulgences, Din.” Her grin grew wider. “Go get your new immunities from Nusis before curfew. Tomorrow, get something good from these interviews—and then, before curfew falls again, get to Blas’s secretary and give her this.” She hurriedly scribbled out another summons, much like the ones she’d made for Gennadios and the Haza servants. “I want her here and talking about Blas. Because I’m starting to get a very unpleasant feeling about this investigation.”
“Beyond what we’ve already talked about, ma’am?”
“Oh, yes.” She pulled open one of the parchments and started reading. “Kalista said Engineers always travel in pairs. That’s why we have so firm an idea of who died during the breach.”
“So…”
“So, the killer’s been in Talagray for a while,” she said. She tossed the page away and started on another. “What if they’ve murdered someone besides Engineers, so no one ever noticed?”
CHAPTER 12
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“THE THING ABOUT WORMS,” said Nusis cheerily as she riffled through her shelves, “is how resourceful they are. Resourceful, and so very durable.”
I glanced about her Apoth office. The place had more of the look of a laboratory, with glass bottles and tanks and bell jars winking from nearly every surface. Some contained furry molds or bulbous fungi or the occasional cross-section of bone, possibly human. In the center of the room sat an operating table made of brass. Though its surface was clean, the floor about it bore faint blooms of old stains. I wondered if the occupants had been alive or dead when those fluids had fallen.