“What for?” I asked.
“She was…working on some kind of project. Something to do with the quakes. The walls had been destabilized. She…she went back to town for a meeting. Couldn’t tell me what it was about. Wasn’t allowed, she said.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Something about not wanting to start a panic, sir,” she said. “Didn’t want people to know how bad the walls were. It felt very secret.”
“I see,” I said. I let the silence linger, then asked, “Did you believe her?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I gazed into her face. Eyes wide and fearful, jaw trembling.
“I’m here to prevent other deaths, Princeps,” I said. “Other injuries like yours. If something’s wrong, I need to know.”
“It was just…just a feeling,” she whispered. “When she went to Talagray for these meetings, she was always quiet after. And there was something she said, both times.” She screwed up her face, and said, “The Engineers make the world. Everyone else just lives in it.”
“This wasn’t the first time she went to Talagray for such a meeting?” I asked.
“No. She’d gone once two months before, sir.”
“And any time before that?” I asked.
She thought about it, then shook her head.
“When was this previous meeting?” I asked. “The exact date.”
“The seventh of the month of Egin, I think.”
“And this…this feeling you got, after she returned from these meetings. Can you tell me a little more about it?”
She stared into the milky waters before her. “I was worried she had met someone else,” she said finally. “And there was a smell about her, each time. She’d washed, I could tell, but…but it’s hard to hide things like that from me. Oranje-leaf, and bitters. Like the sotwine they make in the cold countries. It was strange. Strange enough to make me think she was seeing someone else. But I wasn’t sure, so…so I didn’t want to ask. I just wanted to keep her.”
“I see,” I said.
She looked at me pleadingly. “Did she, sir? Do you know? Do you know if she’d been with someone else, sir?”
“I don’t. But I have to keep looking. Would you like me to tell you what I find out, Princeps?”
She thought about it, the dark, bruised side of her face bent to the waters. Then she shook her head. “No. I’ve lost enough. I want to keep the last few days I had with her, at least. I want those to stay mine.” A miserable laugh. “I mean—I’m owed that, at least, aren’t I?”
CHAPTER 14
| | |
I CONDUCTED FOUR OTHER interviews after Topirak. All of the people were exhausted and grieving and injured—one man concussed, one woman missing a foot, another with her head and face all bandaged up—and none wished to talk to me. Yet I stayed with them, stalking among the bandages and baths; and as I sniffed my ash-scented vial and pulled words from their battered minds, a pattern began to emerge among the dead Engineers.
Princeps Donelek Sandik had returned to the city of Talagray eight nights before the breach to check on an injured comrade—the same night that Jilki had gone back, the sixth of the month of Kyuz.
Captain Atos Koris had gone to Talagray to arrange a shipment of materials—also on the sixth of Kyuz.
That exact same night, Signum Suo Akmo and Princeps Kise Sira had both returned to the city for reasons they claimed to be high imperial secrets. In fact, after I asked more questions, I discovered this wasn’t Sira’s first visit: she had also gone back to Talagray on the exact same date as Jilki’s first visit two months before, the seventh of the month of Egin.
Everything was slowly lining up.
The only outlier was the man I’d been sent to interview about Princeps Atha Lapfir. I went to his healing bay only to find his bath empty and dry, the sole sign of his occupancy a straw cap in the corner. When I asked the medikker, she said simply, “Died last night. We can only do so much.”
I stood in the halls of the medikkers’ wing afterward, thinking this over. Five of the dead Engineers had visited the city eight nights before the breach, all for reasons either vague or mysterious.
And their reasons all tasted, I thought, rather like bullshit. Jilki hadn’t been working on some secret project for the walls, for Kalista would have mentioned it if she had. I began to suspect that if I looked into it, I’d find no shipment of materials that Koris had gone to arrange, nor would I find any injured comrade of Sandik’s in the city. They had gone somewhere in Talagray, all of them, and had lied about it to their friends and lovers.
However, only Princeps Sira and Signum Jilki had gone back to Talagray on the seventh of Egin, two months before.
A regular meeting, perhaps—and a curiously secret one. Secret enough for everyone to lie about. And eventually, someone had come to this secret meeting of Engineers, and brought death with them.
* * *
—
WHEN I FINALLY met up with Captain Miljin, he wasn’t half as enthused or excited as I was. “By Sanctum, this is awful work,” he said, huffing as he walked up. “These poor bastards…I had to talk to one man with both his legs missing! Bastard was worried the medikkers won’t grow the new ones to be the right size…”
“It is rather deplorable, sir,” I said.
“That’s a big word for a shit state.” He grimaced as one attendant wheeled by a man whose face was obscured by linen bandages. “Honestly, you’d have to be a coldhearted, bastardly fuck to question people like these properly.”
I chose not to comment.
“I found fuck-all,” he said. He pulled out a parchment and squinted at it. “Only thing of note I got was that Captain Kilem Terez had been worried the last couple of days that he was being followed. By a damned crackler, of all things.”
“A crackler was following him?” I said.
“Yeah.” He snorted. “It’s got to be bullshit. Cracklers are what, ten span tall? Can’t think of anyone worse to go sneaking and following folk about. Said the crackler had yellow hair, too. Damn odd. I figure the fellow I talked to had a bruised brain. What did you get, lad?”
I told him what I’d found, and his eyes grew wide with amazement.
“You got all that out of them?” Miljin said. “Really? Your bedside manner must be far better than mine, boy.”
“Can’t say, sir. But that’s five out of the ten dead folk who returned to the city—all on the eighth night before they died. What do you think of it?”
“Well.” He snorted and ruffled his mustache with a knuckle. “It almost makes sense.”
“Almost?”
“Yeah.” He consulted his notes, frowning as he flipped through his smudged parchments. “But I have one of the dead ten who hasn’t been back to Talagray for weeks. Which breaks your pattern, yeah?”
I felt my heart dribbling down through my ribs and into my boots. “Who, sir?”
“Signum Ginklas Loveh,” he said. He wrinkled up his nose as he read. “This is what her, ah…hell, I guess her lover said, this Signum Sirgdela Vartas I questioned, of the Legion. He said she hasn’t been near Talagray for almost a month. And if she didn’t go to Talagray at all, then that’s not the place of the poisoning, is it?”
“What about the date of the other meeting?” I said. “On the seventh of the month of Egin?”
Miljin consulted his notes. “No, she wasn’t in Talagray then, neither.”
“Then where was she? Here at the base?”
“No…Vartas said that our dead Signum Loveh went to the walls on some trip with Commander Blas himself. That’s all else he could give me.”
My skin went cold.
“Wait. When? What date in Egin, exactly?” I asked.
He consulted his notes again. “The, ah, seventh and eighth of that month,” he said.
I thought this over. Then I slowly slid out my vial of lye-scent and smelled it.
My eyes trembled, and all the details of the Daretana murder filled my mind, like my skull was once again a bubble of water full of leaping fish.
“He just…he just volunteered this to you, sir?” I asked.
“Yes…why? What’s wrong with it, boy?”
“I…I think this Signum Vartas lied to you, sir,” I said. “No—I know he did.”