Page 15

Chapter 15

Ana sat perfectly still in the dark of her rooms as she absorbed my report, plucking absently at her Pithian lyre every few minutes. When I finally finished, her fingers retracted from the strings, and she slowly turned her blindfolded face toward me, her mouth open in outrage.

“He left…a fucking note ?” she asked, incredulous.

“It, ah, appears so, ma’am. Along with a head.”

Ana’s grumbling stretched on and on. She seemed to have entirely forgotten I was there.

“Ah, ma’am?” I asked. “Are yo—”

“I mean,” she thundered finally. “He left a note ! I just…I just can’t fucking believe that he had the audacity to leave a note ! It bothers me terribly!”

“I, too, was bothered, ma’am,” I said. “Though mostly by the sight of the hea—”

“But frankly, this whole thing reeks of audacity!” She ripped her blindfold off, shot to her feet, and began pacing the room like a convict just told of an extension to their sentence. “Can you imagine how many yards of guts it takes, Din, to prance into such highly guarded institutions with little more than confidence to aid you? Aware all the while that simply running into the wrong person at the wrong time would instantly result in your violent arrest? Why, a delegation member might have traipsed back to the tower for any number of reasons, spied this fucker sauntering about, and said, Hey now, who the hell are you? Such a thing would be especially dangerous here in this city, which is so crawling with soldiers wary of violence, each empowered to cut anyone down without so much as a peck on the cheek! And now—this! A fucking note ! I feel we needn’t bother looking at faces to find this man, Din! Just keep an eye out for the fellow with testicles large enough to cause back deformities, and we shall have our culprit!”

She sat and began furiously tuning her lyre.

“He is no thief, Din,” she proclaimed. “Nor is he a smuggler. For smugglers don’t leave notes—and they especially don’t leave political notes.”

“Political?”

“Yes! Are you so ignorant of your imperial history, Din? The bastard quotes the emperor himself!”

“He does?” I said, puzzled. “I thought the statement was Sen sez imperiya, rather than—”

“Oh, damn it all!” she fumed. Then she cleared her throat and appeared to recite from memory: “ And thus the emperor said to his advisers, ‘We have seen many empires fall, for they did not extend past the breath of their emperors. They decayed, and grew unjust. If I wish this new empire to last, I should not declare to my people that I am the Empire. Rather, I should say to them, You are the Empire. And with that blessing, they shall make a realm for the ages.’? ” She sniffed. “That is from The Letters and Conversations of Ataska Daavir, Fourth and Final Emperor of the Great and Holy Empire of Khanum. The sixteenth letter, if I recall.”

“All right…but what’s he suggesting by quoting this in a note?”

“Hell if I know!” snarled Ana. “But it’s quite a fucking statement! Especially here, in Yarrow, where the status of the Empire is a bit of a big damned question!” She raised her hands and mimed shoving something away. “I disdain it. I disdain it so, all this fucking spectacle! Nothing irks me more than a showy murderer, as if their wretched deeds were some mystical marvel!”

“And the first lines, ma’am?” I asked. “The bit about sipping from the marrow?”

Her face relaxed, ever so slightly. “Yes… For those who sip from the marrow. That is most curious. It is not from any text I am aware of.” She cocked her head. “Hm. Marrow…marrow, in this city of blood.”

I glanced at the veiled window and spied a slice of moonlit waves in the bay beyond. A dull horror crawled over me.

“You think this has something to do with titan’s blood, ma’am?” I asked quietly. “Or the Shroud? The very place where they extract the blood?”

“Perhaps. For in a way, do we not all sip from the titan’s marrow, in one fashion or another?”

I shuddered but did not answer.

Ana’s yellow eyes were now as narrow as a knife’s edge. “You know, there was an imperial proposal I read about ten years ago that referenced marrow…A bunch of Apoths got very alarmed about the Shroud, claiming that our whole system for rendering reagents and precursors was terribly fragile. Which it is, of course! We are rather like those clans in the ancient wastes who could only fell beasts during the rainy seasons and had to find all sorts of horrid ways to make the flesh last through the dry months. Rather than hauling a dead leviathan to Yarrowdale to bleed of its ichors once a wet season, these Apoths proposed removing a piece of one’s marrow and bringing it inland, so it could—perhaps!—continue excreting blood. Thus rendering this whole horrid fucking process moot.”

“What happened to these proposals?”

“Nothing. Dealing with leviathan entrails is a catastrophically dangerous business. What kind of a mad fucker would wish to climb inside one and go poking about? Whole thing got shelved. Perhaps the reference is coincidental. Or perhaps our culprit is simply mad. I cannot tell.”

She lapsed into a grudging silence, and for a while she simply rocked back and forth, and would say no more.

“Then…how shall we proceed, ma’am?” I asked.

Ana’s yellow eyes danced in her skull as she thought. Then she blew a snow-white forelock away from her face and said, “Well, first—you’re going to buy me that damned Pithian lyre, Din.”

I paused for a moment, puzzled. “Oh. The second one. Because you wish to—”

“To play my duets, yes. I simply must have something entertaining to focus on! Ordinarily I’d let my mind go burrowing into all manner of books and research, but I feel I have to keep my faculties mastered for this one. Get me my damned lyre, Din, or I swear by the emperor’s buttocks, every time you report back to me, my mood shall be blacker and blacker!”

I nodded. As bizarre as it was, this was better than her asking me to purchase illegal psychoactive substances: a far more common request. “You shall have it tomorrow, ma’am.”

“Good! Next…I see four fronts to attack on this one.” She stuck four knobby fingers into the air. “First—the safe. Not the Treasury one, but the Apoth one.”

“You’re wondering how the impostor got access to that one as well?” I said. “Kardas even speculated that the man had magic bloo—”

“No!” she spat. “Do you not see? By leaving that head in that goddamned box, this fellow was telling us two very important things about him!”

I paused, and slowly all the disparate pieces tumbled into place. “Ah. He intentionally left a head with a banded tooth,” I said. “A marker that only an Apoth would know of.”

“There’s that,” she said, “ and the head was preserved with an art known well to the Apoths! And here is another critical bit of information—for Malo told you how people get access to those safes! They are given it. Do you not see the obvious answer to this, Din?”

My skin rippled with chill. “He’s an Apoth, then,” I said softly. “And he’s one that was once given access to that very box.”

“Exactly! This would explain many things, but also his skill with disguises—for who is better at shaping flesh than an Apoth? For with those arts, he could grant himself a little thickness of face, or a tuft of hair as needed.”

“And his abilities with the Treasury tests…”

“I assume having a great deal of Sujedo’s blood available would help with passing those!” she said. “I’m still not quite sure he pulled that off, though…There are methods of transferring blood from one person to another, but none are quick, and certainly not easy. Hence, I am focusing on his manipulation of the Apoth vault as opposed to the Treasury one.”

“So…you think the Apoths can just pull a list of all those officers with access to that specific safe,” I said, “and one of the names has to be our impostor?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Ana. “Again, this bastard’s smart. Infuriatingly so.” Again, she began to pace the room. “Hm…I feel it’s unlikely he’s still in service. Thus, I will need a list of all officers who have ever been granted access to that safe. I don’t care if it’s in the dozens or hundreds, we need to check them all.”

A black cloud bloomed in my mind. There was nothing Ana loved more than lists and records, but the Iyalets of the Empire were always notoriously reluctant to give up anything important. Usually I had to put Ana in a room with someone senior and allow her to frighten them witless to get what we needed.

“Think the Apoths will give us that, ma’am?” I asked.

“I’m not done yet!” she snapped. “I want to move to our second attack front before we discuss that. And this one, Din, is a bit heftier…” She plucked a single, haunting chord on her lyre. “For I want to know all of the reagent thefts that have taken place in Yarrow in the past two years.”

“You want what ?”

“It is quite simple. I want a list of every single reagent, every graft, every precursor, every everything that has been stolen from this godforsaken port town in the past twenty-four months! And I also want to know when and where they were stolen from!”

“But…but, ma’am,” I protested. “Smuggling is so rife here. I can’t imagine how long such a list might be…”

“Yet we shall have to trawl through it!” she snapped. “Do you think this is our impostor’s first robbery? His first murder? Remember, Din, that the only reason we’ve come to realize any of this happened is that some fucking turtle satisfied its appetite and happened to leave some scraps in the waters! Without those fragments of flesh, we’d know none of this! And we now know he was possibly responsible for one of the first smuggling murders, years ago. He may well have committed a dozen more such crimes, leaving no evidence of himself behind! So. We need that list, no matter how ponderous, and I shall see what patterns may be divined in its innards.”

“And the missing reagents, ma’am? The healing grafts he did all this to steal?”

“Grafts! Ha!” She made a rude gesture with her hand. “Healing grafts in-fucking-deed!”

“I take it that you, too, do not believe that was what was in that box?”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Respiratory diseases? Utter piffle. Very idea is absurd. And you told me that Ghrelin seemed unusually eager to open that box, even though you told him not to! It makes one think, naturally, there might have been something in that box he did not want any of you to see.”

“Yes. So. What do you think the killer actually stole?”

“Oh, I’ve no idea. Something very, very valuable, surely. I intend to find out what.”

“What could the Apoths be doing that would make them risk lying to the Iudex?”

“Something terribly dangerous, and secret. That is for certain.” She paused. “Tell me…when you first met him, this Immunis Ghrelin seemed nervous, yes? He seemed to know, instantly, what had gone wrong?”

“Yes, ma’am. Something in the way he looked at me. Trying to understand how much I understood myself. And then afterward, in the vault, he was overcome.”

“As if the damage done to him was so great,” she said softly, “he could not believe it had happened…Interesting. And the tapping. He kept tapping throughout everything?”

“Yes.”

“Very loudly?”

“Yes. On his belt buckle.”

“With three fingers?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She whispered, “Tapping. Tapping…” and shut her eyes. “You engraved this tapping in your memory?”

“Of course. All I heard and saw.”

“Then summon the memories, please, Din, and tap out all you can for me. I wish to hear this myself.”

My eyes fluttered as the memories of the bank came swimming up within the dark well of my mind. Then I reached forward and rapped my knuckles on her table corner, imitating the tapping I’d heard and seen Ghrelin perform. Though now that I duplicated it, I realized that the tapping had repeated rhythms, echoing over and over again, mixed in among other rhythms that were totally new. It was very strange to have the sounds brought alive by my own knuckles.

Ana listened closely, eyes closed. When I finished, she whispered, “Fascinating. Very fascinating…Another tapping, yet again.”

I watched her leaning back where she sat, her own pale digits fluttering on her knee. Then I understood.

I recalled the maid I’d interviewed, describing the false Sujedo: His hand twitched, I recall, his fingers flitting against his belly.

And then Klaida: He did tap against his leg, over and over again, as he walked. Like drumming. Like he had a tune in his head and couldn’t help but beat its rhythm against something. It was a little strange, sir.

“The impostor did the same thing,” I said softly. “He tapped his body, just like Ghrelin—is that it?”

“You’ve grown sharp, Din!” she said, grinning. “How glad I am to see that. But don’t get too excited. We cannot clap people in irons at the twitch of a finger. I’d need to hear more of this tapping to see if it means anything, and the only way to do that would be to witness more samples.”

“How might we do that?”

“Well, the simplest way would be to simply go talk to Ghrelin again,” Ana said. “Which we are going to do tomorrow! And that shall be our third attack front.”

“ We, ma’am? You wish to come yourself?”

“Oh, yes. I wish to talk to this Ghrelin personally. Make a request for an interview with the Apoths first thing in the morning, Din. I doubt if we’ll be able to get him alone—odds are some of his superiors will demand to be present as well—but we’ll use that audience to request all our records from them. We shall listen to what Ghrelin says, see what the Apoths give us…and sift through the tea leaves carefully.”

I sighed deeply, now tired to the bone. “And what of the fourth attack front?”

“The fourth?” she said, puzzled. “Did I mention a fourth?”

“Even when I am this fatigued, ma’am, my memory is not.”

“Oh. Ohh, yes! The fourth…” She shrugged. “Well, the fourth is that we wait and see what this impostor is going to do next. Or who he’s going to kill.”

“You…wish to wait for this killer to kill again?”

“Well, I don’t want to, Din. I’d prefer it if I could just toss a stone out my window and strike this fucker in the head! Yet that is unlikely. We shall pursue the threads I’ve laid out here, yet…when he makes his next move, he shall surely be vulnerable again, yes?”

“Is there no chance he’s finished?”

“Oh, Din…” She laughed lowly. “He is not done. He’s left a note, and a trophy with many secret meanings! He has opened lines of communication.” She lay back on her bed, her fingers threaded dreamily on her belly. “The question is—who is his audience? And what form shall his next message take?”