Miljin went stone-faced. “Did he.”
“Yes. But I’m not yet sure why. I’d like to find out. Is that all right, sir?”
His jaw worked for a moment. Then he made a fist with his right hand, and all the knuckles of his massive hand crackled all at once. “That,” he said, “would be perfectly lovely.”
* * *
—
UNLIKE EVERYONE ELSE I’d interviewed, Signum Vartas was out of his healing bath and lying on a cot, with a tray of tea and a slender shootstraw pipe smoking in an ashpot beside him. He wore a set of silk robes that looked brand new, and while his injuries weren’t mild by any means—he had haal-paste applied in streaks to his shoulder and neck, probably from gashes he’d gotten during the collapse—he seemed to be recovering much faster than everyone else in the bays here. His room even had a window. None of the others had.
He cocked an eyebrow as Miljin and I walked in—a cold, imperious look—and he put down his pipe. “What’s this now?” he asked. “I thought I’d answered all your questions, Captain.”
I sat down in front of him, not bothering to bow or salute. “I just had a few more myself, Signum Vartas.”
He looked down his nose at me. He was a tall, thin Rathras man, with a high brow and deep-set eyes that looked out at you like you were a household servant he didn’t entirely trust yet. “And you are?” he asked.
“Signum Kol, Iudex. Just comparing dates.”
“I gave Captain Miljin here all the dates I knew.”
“I just wanted to check something. Can you tell me again about Signum Loveh’s movements during the days previous to her death?”
“I can confirm all that I told Captain Miljin,” he said, bristling slightly. “Or are you doubting his word and mine?”
“You told the captain that Loveh had never been to Talagray,” I said.
“Yes? Not for weeks before she died.”
“Can you remember the last time she’d gone there?”
“No. Could have been months, really. Why?”
“But you were intimate with Signum Loveh, correct?”
His cold gaze danced over my face. He picked back up his shootstraw pipe and puffed at it. “A shake to your eyes…” he said softly. “You’re Sublime, like me. You know relationships are tricky for those like us.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
“Fine. Yes, I was intimate with her.”
“So you would have known when she went back to Talagray.”
“Yes, and she didn’t!” he said. Tufts of smoke trickled out of his nostrils. “What’s the point of this?”
“And the only other time that you mentioned was one instance, when she went out with Commander Blas.”
“Yes!”
“And where did they go?”
“To inspect the walls! I’m sure Miljin told you that!”
Miljin, however, gave Vartas nothing, staring at him with his flat, dark gaze.
“What date was that?” I asked.
“The seventh and eighth,” Vartas said. “Of the month of Egin. Just over two months ago.”
I watched him. His cold little eyes stared into mine, but I glimpsed a fragile gleam there, a tremble in his pupils.
“That’s not true,” I said. “And you know it.”
“The hell do you mean?” he demanded.
I felt a flutter in my own eyes, and the memory burbled up: me hurrying away into the gardens of the Haza house in Daretana, and reading Blas’s records of his inspections aloud, committing the dates to memory. One line in particular now swam up in my skull: ck. Paytas?z bridges in the north of the Tala canton—6th to 8th of Egin—all pass.
“Because,” I said, “Commander Blas wasn’t at the walls at all then.”
Vartas went very still. “What?” he asked.
“Commander Taqtasa Blas was in the north of the canton, inspecting the bridges, from the sixth to the eighth of that month. I’ve seen his diary. So that is very wrong, Vartas.”
His gaze stayed steady. He slowly replaced his shootstraw pipe in his mouth and puffed at it. “Then I was wrong. She was with Blas during some other day.”
“Which days?”
“The fourteenth and fifteenth of Egin. Just a slight mistake.”
I shook my head. “That’s wrong, too.”
“The hell it is!”
“No. Blas was in the Daretana canton then. From the thirteenth through the fifteenth of the month of Egin. I know that, too. I know all of his movements for the past three months.”
Vartas blinked. The coal of his shootstraw pipe danced as his hand trembled. Miljin slowly rose and came to stand behind me.
“We’ve two options here,” I said. “Either you have no idea where Signum Loveh was during any of these days—or, you told the captain here a lie, and she did go to Talagray eight days before the breach. But you didn’t want Miljin to know that, and when he didn’t ask about it, you didn’t speak up. But I’m guessing you got nervous. You wanted to give her an alibi for the other time she visited Talagray, on the night of the seventh of Egin—the same meeting that two other of the dead Engineers attended. Just in case. But you misstepped there. Picked the wrong person to put her with. Unlucky for you. You could have just kept quiet, and we’d have never known. But now we do.”
“Know what?” Vartas said grudgingly.
“That you know why she went to Talagray,” I said. “None of the others knew, so none of them tried to lie. But you did.”
He lifted his shootstraw pipe back up to his lips. It was positively prancing now. “I don’t know,” he said softly, “what the hell you’re talking abou—”
Then Miljin moved.
I had not been watching him, so I had not been prepared for it. But there was a quick clack-clack sound, like someone unlocking a lock; and the next thing I knew his sword was in his hand, spinning around as lightly as if it were a length of straw—and then he was stabbing it down, thrusting it through the cot directly between Vartas’s legs up to the hilt, a mere smallspan or two away from the man’s crotch.
Vartas screamed, his shootstraw pipe tumbling out of his teeth. He tried to sit up, but Miljin placed a fist on his sternum and shoved him back down.
“Did you lie to me, Signum?” Miljin bellowed. “Did you fucking lie to me?”
I stared at the sword, mere spans before my face. Its blade was not shining steel, I noticed, but a pale, sickly, whitish green.
Vartas’s screams rose into shrieks, and he began slapping at the side of his robe. A small thread of aromatic smoke was gently unscrolling from his clothing above his hip. I darted my hand into the man’s robe, found the shootstraw pipe that had slipped to his side, plucked it out, and stuck it in his teacup, where it died with a sputtering hiss.
* * *
—
STILL TREMBLING AND quaking, Vartas gave us the full spill of it. I sniffed at my ash-scent vial and listened.
“I…I don’t know what it was about,” he said, sniffing. “I don’t know why Gink went to Talagray. But I knew it had something to do with her career. With her prospects.”
Miljin stood huffing over me like an angry boar. I tried to focus on Vartas’s words.
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“Because after she started going, everything started going right for her,” he said. “Plum projects. Faster promotions. Greater pay. Far greater pay, really, working under Commander Blas.”
Every muscle in my body went tight. “Commander Blas? She worked with him?”
He nodded.
“What did she do for him?”
“Engineering stuff, I suppose. Diagrams and bridges and such. I just knew she went to Talagray every few months, and the money came in. And I was told to not ask questions, and keep my mouth shut. Which I did. Not like she ever thanked me, though.”
I took in his fine robes, his tea tray, the aroma of his pipe. Suddenly his living situation didn’t seem quite so remarkable.
“How many times did she go to the city for these meetings?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Ten times. Maybe more.”