“You…you really think this Jolgalgan might be our poisoner, ma’am?”
“Possibly!” said Ana. “I don’t have all the answers yet, of course. Dunno why she’d want to kill all her friends, or why she chose the maddest fucking method ever to do it. Or, indeed, if she also intended to bring down the sea wall and imperil the whole of the goddamn Empire, too! But…it hangs! Though it is but a scrap of information, it hangs together, a bit. Captain Miljin has surely notified the Legion to keep an eye out for this Jolgalgan by now. But please get ahold of Nusis tomorrow, Din, and see what the Apoths can dig up on her. They must have files on the woman’s alterations. I want to know what Jolgalgan can do, where she’s been, what capacities she’s served in, and anyone and everyone who might have served alongside her. Let us see if my hunch is right.”
“Understood,” I said.
“Good. Next—the reagents keys! Show them to me, please.”
I slid them both out—the one Miljin and I had found in Jilki’s quarters, and the one I’d found in the empty house near Aristan’s residence—and gave them to her.
“What an odd thing, to find three in one day…” Ana held Jilki’s key to her eye. “But Miljin wasn’t wrong. This key is for a highly warded portal. I believe only Imperial Treasury banks require five or more reagents…Fascinating. But this other one…” She did the same to the second one, peering through it like a tiny spyglass. “It’s not the same at all. So plain, and so simple…Sanctum knows what portal it’s for.” She chewed her lip for a moment, then held up the advanced one I’d found in Jilki’s quarters. “But I actually think I know what this one goes to—for surely it must unlock the place where all our Engineers were poisoned.”
I nodded. “Whatever room or building or chamber where they were all meeting secretly.”
“Exactly. Which is quite a find! Good work. If all is going aright, Captain Strovi should be out in Talagray now, collecting all the fernpaper orders for all the millers for the past four weeks. If we find one place that suddenly had to replace all their fernpaper…and if that place also happens to have a reagents portal, and if this key successfully opens it…”
My blood began to tick inside my ears. “Then that has to be the place of the poisoning.”
“Yes! And you’ve also gotten us a timeline for all this, dear Din—eight nights before the breach, the sixth of this month. If that all lines up, we can then see if this missing Jolgalgan was present at that place, at that time—and what she did there, and where she’s gone. And, perhaps, how she connects to Commander Blas’s murder, over two weeks ago now.”
My eye wandered back to the sack of talints. “I…don’t suppose all that money has something to do with it, ma’am?”
“Though it feels obvious, I…am unsure,” she sighed. “In fact, your discoveries about Blas are so great, they almost make my head a little heavy…For suddenly he’s not just somewhat corrupt, allowing the Hazas to treat him to lewd holidays at their houses—but is in fact possibly the most corrupt Imperial officer in recent memory! And I worry…What if this corruption doesn’t stop at Blas?” She turned her blindfolded head toward the closed window. “What if other officials are just as complicit as he is?”
There was a tense silence.
I felt my skin crawl as I realized what she meant. “You mean…the investigation team? You’re worried about our own colleagues?”
“I am,” she said quietly. “The investigation thus far does not seem to have been well managed here. Blas should have been looked at. Aristan’s body should have been discovered before now. But I am reluctant to assume maliciousness when incompetence is a better explanation…Hm. Let me see the wall pass.”
I handed it over to her as well. She flipped through it rapidly, fingers dancing across the pages. “What a dirty bunch of business! Business that apparently required Blas to store money in a place far less official than, say, a box at an Imperial Treasury bank, where a commander wielding such sums would be noticed. And if Madam Aristan was traveling back and forth between Talagray and these four distant cantons—Qabirga, Juldiz, Bekinis, and Mitral…Well.” She shut the wall pass with the snap. “She must’ve been the bag man.”
“The…the what, ma’am?”
“The courier, the person who carries the money. Blas must have been sending her to the third ring to either pay people off or take payments from them. A better courier you’d never find—for who’d look twice at an elderly Iyalet secretary? Yet—what was Blas paying or getting paid for? What the hell was the bastard doing? We don’t know yet. But it eats at me.”
She rocked back and forth for a moment, head cocked, yellow eyes thin. I stayed silent, letting her ponder.
“Well, Din,” she said. “I now have another question for you.”
“Y-yes, ma’am?”
She pushed up her blindfold until one yellow eye peered at me from beneath it. “What do you think the odds are that Rona Aristan and Commander Blas were killed by the same person?”
I considered it, my eyes fluttering as I summoned all my memories. I thought about it for a long while.
“I think…I think very low, ma’am?” I said finally.
She nodded, satisfied. “And why is that?”
“One murder was…well, more efficient. More typical. They broke in and…and did something to the victim’s head. Stabbed it, perhaps. And no one even knew anything had happened. But the other was more elaborate and required far more work. Planning well in advance. And a method of murder most unusual. They seem too different.”
“Erupting from within due to a sudden vegetal growth is, I concede, pretty fucking unusual,” Ana said acidly. “But I think you are right. We now have two murderers, Din. Two murderers with two different methods, and two very different sets of interests. The most obvious conclusion for this new murderer is that they are here to clean up. Blas is dead, but his connections to all this dirtiness still exist. Thus, they are here to eliminate anything that could connect Blas with this greater corruption…including any human beings who are inconveniently alive.”
“But…we have no idea who this new murderer could be—correct, ma’am?”
Ana went very, very still, her head bowed. “A hole in her head, you told me…” she said softly. “Tell me—was it very small?” She held up her fingers about a quarter smallspan across. “This big, say?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thereabout.”
“And there were no other bruises or wounding to the body?”
“None that I could see, ma’am.”
“How peculiar,” she whispered. “Do…do you know how difficult it is to pierce the human skull, Din?”
“I, ah, have never attempted it myself, ma’am.”
“It is quite difficult. It takes abnormal strength and speed to do so. Especially speed. The velocity required, and the proper tools…It’s all rather stunning, you see.”
There was another silence, like she’d fallen into a reverie.
“Have you seen deaths like this before, ma’am?” I asked slowly. “Or rather, murders?”
She did not answer for some time. When she spoke again, her voice was low and soft: “Here is what we shall do. First, you’re going to take this to Nusis tomorrow.” She held up the simple reagents key I’d found in Aristan’s safehouse.
I took it from her. “What will she want with this?”
“Well, while I have a good idea what the other key opens, I’ve no idea for this one at all. And Apoths have arts that can reverse engineer many reagents. We can’t learn which exact portal this key opens, but Nusis will be able to tell us what kind of portal it opens. The make of the portal, the breed—that may help us narrow the search.”