Page 7

Chapter 7

My lodgings were located in the middle of New Town, set among the many Iyalet offices managing the many imperial works in Yarrowdale. It was one of the more modest buildings, but pleasant enough, yet as I approached, I noticed the porter boy standing outside, pacing and fretting in the lane.

When he spied me he scurried over, his face flushed. “Signum!” he called. “Signum, sir, are…are you Iudex? Can you help me, please, sir?”

“Perhaps?” I said, perplexed. “What’s this about?”

“It’s, ah, the other Iudex officer, sir.”

Instantly, my heart sank. “Oh. What’s she done?”

“She’s on the patio, you see, and the…the smell, sir. She’s eating, but…but the smell of it, it’s awful, and I don’t know what to do!”

I sighed. “Please lead the way.”

I followed the porter around the side of the building. The wind rose ever so slightly, and I caught the powerful, noxious aroma of rotting sea life. We rounded the edge, and I came to a stop.

A flagstone patio was laid out on the hill, overlooking the bay, complete with wicker chairs and table. It must have been a merry sight once, but no longer, for it had been turned into a graveyard of oyster shells.

Nearly half of the patio was obscured by piles of glistening carapace and crust and nacre, the pools of the oysters’ cloudy liquor baking in the waning afternoon sun. I could hardly begin to count them; they had to be from several hundreds of oysters, at least. The heaps of shells rose gently to curl about the tea table in the center of the patio, almost like an embankment, and it was there, beside a soaking sack of unshucked shellfish, that my commanding officer Immunis Ana Dolabra sat hunched, plying another mollusk with a dull knife.

“They’re all starting to turn,” whined the porter beside me. “We’ve already had complaints from the officers in the other quarters! The patio shall reek for days if we don’t clear it up soon, but she won’t stop or move elsewhere, and the things she has said to me, sir…”

I watched as Ana pried open the shell, freed the flesh from within, tipped it into her mouth with a slurp, and tossed the shell over her shoulder. Though my stomach had mostly recovered, this sight—along with the aroma of such fetid sea life—set it rumbling again.

Ana’s pale head shot up. She sniffed, then slowly turned to face me—though she could not see me, for her eyes were bound up in a thick red blindfold. As usual.

“Din!” she said merrily. “You’re back!”

“I am, ma’am,” I sighed. I dismissed the boy, then stepped about the heaps of shells, my boots crunching on the flagstones, until I came to stand behind her. “But, ma’am, the proprietors have asked me t—”

She raised a finger. “First! Tell me, Din—how far a trek is it down to the sea?”

I eyed the coastline. “A few leagues. Maybe less. But wh—”

“I have a request,” she said. “I would like to see if you could go down to the waters there, preferably to a spot far from seaweed, and fetch me a pail of seawater.” She grinned so wide the corners of her mouth almost touched her ears. “I’m tasting the city, you see. The region. The seas. ”

I scratched my eyebrow with a thumbnail, awaiting the rest of it. “Are you, ma’am.”

“Oh, yes. The oysters absorb what’s about them as they grow, you know. I can taste where they’re from. ” She wielded the dull little knife with all the deftness of a midnight murderer and popped open another shell with a wet click, the liquor running down her fingers. “All it needs is a little salt. If you were to take a pail of seawater and slowly boil it, we would be left with the purest sea salt. And what a thing it would be, to taste the flesh of the sea itself, seasoned with its own salt! It’s too poetic for us not to. Yes?”

“I did not think your appetite for oysters was so tremendous, ma’am.”

“Oh, I’m not actually hungry, Din. Really, it’s that each oyster is different. You can taste in each one which reef they came from, which side they grew upon, which waters they flourished within. They are like melodies of the ocean itself rendered in flesh.” She tilted her right ear to the coast. “Just listen to it. I’ve never been so close to the sea…All about me the world is bright with patterns. I can hear the heartbeat of the ocean in the wax and wane of the waves. I can feel the wind unspooling from its wild tangles out over the waters. And now I taste those waters, and all that dwelt in them.” She grinned savagely as she pried the lump of gray flesh from the bottom of the shell. “I wonder…is this the closest I’ll come to tasting a leviathan’s flesh? Did these oysters absorb a hint of their essence?” She noisily sucked it back. “For I’ve heard whispers that some parts of the titans are edible, if properly bled…”

I grimaced. Though I did not know the manner of Ana’s cognitive alterations—and indeed, she’d always been irritatingly coy about what they were—she’d always shown a predilection for pattern spotting that far surpassed obsession. From ancient history to masonry to the speckling of colors in the human eye—and now, apparently, oysters—Ana was perpetually hungry for new, obscure information to dissect and analyze, so much so that she often went about blindfolded, claiming that to perceive too much of the world made it difficult to focus on what she found interesting.

“Would you be ready for my reports of the day, ma’am?” I asked loudly.

She flicked the spent oyster shell away, and it went clattering over the heaps. “My, my. You seem impatient. Has your day not proceeded well?”

I grimaced as I thought of the little roll of parchment in my pocket. It felt like I was carrying around a bombard charge with a lit fuse. “No,” I said. “It has not.”

“You mean you did not relish the experience of sailing upriver for six days through rough weather,” she said, grinning, “all to come here and peer at clammy corpses? Our home is wherever the dead are found in difficult or delicate circumstances, Din. You should feel quite at ease here! Tell me—what is the situation? Shall our predicament be difficult, or delicate?”

“I’d say both, ma’am,” I said. “But at the moment, it seems more difficult than delicate.”

Her brow furrowed. “Truly? I didn’t read the wrong orders, did I? It’s the Treasury man, yes? Found dead in a canal?”

“That is only somewhat correct, ma’am. But yes.”

Her brow’s furrows grew until they became small hills. “I would have thought this would be simply a delicate case, given that it’s a Treasury man dead. Yet you say the death is also difficult ? Do you not have any concept of how it was done?”

“None,” I said. “The man apparently vanished from his rooms. There is no motive, nor culprit, nor anything of use. Just a bloodstain in a bed, and little more.”

She nodded, head cocked. “Hum! Well. Perhaps this is a good one. How exciting.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve and stood. “You know, you are not a stupid person, Din.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, pleased.

“Or, rather, not an unusually stupid person.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, far less pleased.

“You often quickly catch a whiff of what’s going on, even if you don’t yet have the full picture. It’s only when you’re really very befuddled that I know the work might offer some mild entertainment.” She stuck her arm out. “Come! Take me back to my rooms and let us discuss this. And bribe that irritating little porter child however much it takes to have him clean all this shit up.”

—

I led Ana back to her rooms, which were arranged as she always preferred: all windows tightly shut, her bed in the far corner, her countless books stacked beside it, her musical instruments laid against the wall—she was favoring a Pithian lyre during this trip—and a tea set and iron stove dominating the center of the chamber.

I shut the door behind her. She removed her red blindfold, blinked her wide, wild yellow eyes, and pushed back her bone-white forelock as she looked around. “This room is a little too big, Din,” she said. “It shall take me time to grow acclimated.”

“Would you like me to cover the windows with rugs, ma’am? That could block out more light.”

“No, no. The light isn’t the issue, but the size…Too much for me to look at. But I shall manage.” She paced a wobbly circle and waved to the teapot. “I asked the porter to procure me the roots of some Yarrow sprinklefoot—I’m told the leaves add an interesting aroma to the tea. Might you oblige me a cup? You can brief me on our intriguing pile of human parts as you do so.”

I slid the appropriate vial from my engraver’s satchel, sniffed at the fragrance of nectar, and began speaking as I went about brewing her a pot of tea, my eyes shivering as I regurgitated every aspect of everything I’d seen that day. Ana listened, blindfolded again to focus, yet she sat not on a chair or on her bed but sprawled on her side on the floor, one long, pale digit tracing the curl of the fretvine surface: a curiously girlish pose, despite her somewhat older age.

It was very late when I finished my report. I could glimpse the pale moon peeking through the gaps in the windows, and the sounds of the port had died away, drowned in the rumble of the seas. I had to flick the mai-lantern in the corner to awaken the grubs within and set them glowing, and soon a soft blue light filled the room.

Ana sat still for a long while, the now-cool cup of tea clutched in her hand. Then she began rocking back and forth: a telltale tic that she was thinking hard.

“I begrudgingly admit,” she finally proclaimed, “this murder is more promising than the last couple we’ve dealt with.”

“Then you do think this was murder here in Yarrow, ma’am?”

“Oh, certainly,” she said. She turned over to lie on her back. “It is most definitely murder. Our dear dismembered Sujedo did not have a fit of the heart, tumble into the tides, and get eaten by wandering turtles. I think he was killed, and I think the manner in which it was done tells us a great deal.”

Ana tossed back the tea, then threw the cup aside and held her hands up, fingers splayed, like a troubadour about to begin a tale-telling. “Imagine it! Imagine Sujedo seated on a canal barge, floating upriver. An arrow from the brush would have been quick, grisly, and—apparently!—not uncommon for this place. Or as he disembarked from the barge and made his way into town—someone could have bumped into him and put a blade in between his ribs while no one saw. That would have been easy, too. Or, as I think you know well, perhaps one could serve the man a slice of dried fish, laced with poison undetectable through the powerful flavor of the aged meat…”

I glared at her. “Your point is taken,” I said. “Death would be an easy thing to deliver in a place like this—is that it?”

“Of course. If the point of all this was the man’s assassination, there would be simpler ways of getting it done! Methods that would have assured his death and still offered safety to the murderer. So—why choose this?” She rubbed her hands together like she was about to tuck into a meal. “I feel akin to the disappointed maiden during her first night in the marital bed—the more I pull at what I find, the more I find to my liking! Let us begin, then.”

—

Ana then asked me many questions. What had been the skin color of the remains? What had been the length and girth of the fingers on the severed hand? How big had the shoulder been? And the jaw? Since I had memorized the sights in the ossuary, I was able to show her the exact size of all I had witnessed, gesturing with my hands as she allowed the barest slice of her yellow eye to peep at me under her blindfold.

She moved on to my trip into Old Town. Had anyone reported seeing anything unusual about Sujedo’s gait, or any other physical affectation? What was the color of the mold growing in the vacant room beside Sujedo’s? And what buildings had been around the tower from which he’d vanished?

I answered these to the best of my ability. When I finished, Ana simply sat there, sipping her tea and thinking, one long, white finger still following the threading of the fretvine floor. “So…” she said. “The shoulder had a patch of skin removed. Deliberately.”

“Think so, ma’am. It was a very circular shape.”

“But the Apoths can’t tell us what it was.”

“No, ma’am. They seemed to find nothing unusual about it.”

“Interesting…And they found Sujedo’s piss and blood—but nothing of any intruder?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yet the man’s clothes had a citrus smell, you say?”

“They did. Signum Malo assumed that was done to cover up the sce—”

“Quiet,” she snapped. “I am thinking! Hm. You say Sujedo also tapped his leg as he went about his business…And he asked the guard about the man’s wedding, you say? Despite being an axiom?”

“Yes. I thought that very odd, too.”

“Being as axioms are usually as socially cognizant as a wet fucking brick, yes,” she said. “It is quite damned odd.”

I pursed my lips, for Ana’s own grasp of social decorum was often nonexistent, but refrained from comment.

“I’ve no idea what to make of the tapping bit,” Ana continued. “Unless the man had some kind of affliction. But one last question, Din, to help me build the scene in my mind…The porter said all the rooms on the leaning side of the tower were difficult to maintain. Yes?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Then,” she said softly, “would that mean there is likely a vacant room below the one you saw, as well?”

“Ah…that is likely, ma’am. But I confess, I did not ask to see it.”

“No matter,” she murmured. “Malo told you she and the other wardens had searched all the rooms and found nothing. It can wait. Now. You couldn’t talk to the rest of the Treasury delegation—correct?”

“Correct, ma’am. They were busy with the king of Yarrow, as Signum Malo told me.”

“So you do not know anything of the dead man’s history or personal nature.”

“Only what the Treasury has already shared.”

“And there is no information,” she asked, “suggesting that Sujedo met with any of his colleagues on his brief day in Yarrowdale?”

“No, ma’am. He was ill and did not have business with them until the next day.”

“But isn’t that also very strange?” she asked softly. “His colleagues were housed directly next door. Even if he was ill, there seems to have been ample time for them to talk to him, or he to they…”

“Don’t know, ma’am. Some did worry what he had was catching.”

Ana sat very still, the fronds of her alabaster hair trembling as a draft rushed through the room. “We shall have to interview his colleagues, then, and soon. Though interviewing the delegation might be tricky, apparently.”

“Yes. This business with the king of Yarrow…”

In an instant, she shed her air of dreamy reflection, and her face twisted into an expression of poisonous condescension. “Business!” she scoffed, and ripped the blindfold from her head. “Business, yes! But business long done! That pot of shit soup has been bubbling for years now…What do you know about all that fucking nonsense, Din?”

I hesitated, unsure what she wished me to say. “I know Yarrow is a tribute state, ma’am—one the Empire both does and does not quite run.”

“And?”

“And…that puts us in a spot, for it produces the most valuable reagents in all the Empire.”

“Quite correct! Squeezed from dead leviathans out in the bay like juice from an aplilot, then rendered in countless Apoth facilities on the shores. A very tricky, very ghastly, very deadly business.” She cocked her head. “Ah! I meant to ask—I assume you have seen it, Din?”

“Seen…?”

“The Shroud, of course! You have seen it out in the waters?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Describe it for me, please. I am most eager to hear of it.”

I reluctantly did so, describing the great, green, fluttering form floating out in the bay, and the hint of a citadel hidden in its depths, though as I spoke the entire thing began to feel less like a structure and more like some great parasite, attached to the horizon and bleeding the whole of the world.

“How fascinating,” Ana whispered when I finished. “A design both amazing and horrid—but it is also invaluable, as it gives us the alterations we need to keep the leviathans back each wet season.” She sprawled out on the floor again. “Allow me to enlighten you on the situation, Dinios. For history, as always, has predetermined much of the circumstances here.”

I sighed, nodded, but said nothing. When Ana talked history, asking questions simply made things last longer.

—

“The truth is that we are all here, Din,” Ana began, “ all of us—including the extremely dead Sujedo—because of a quirk of geography. The currents of the Eastern Seas, you see, render it impossible for our ships to haul dead leviathans southward. And to the north, the Spine of Sarisav makes accessing the deltas of the Great River Asigis with such a burden impossible. So, just over ninety-two years ago, the emperor began looking about for a new port city on the eastern coast…and decided there was only one option—the Bay of Yarrow, tucked away in the Pithian Hills. At the time, it was a crude backwater, run by petty, vicious tyrants calling themselves kings. And when the Empire came parading in, and the emperor’s mighty agents requested to palaver with the king of Yarrow, well…the king, along with everyone else in the Empire, likely thought them mad.

“The Empire negotiated for peaceful imperial rights within Yarrowdale,” she continued. “The right to build, the right to conduct trade. The king of Yarrow demanded a huge ransom, and got it—though he also agreed that in one hundred years, the region would come directly under the rule of the Empire and become a formal canton. Perhaps it seemed an easy deal at the time. The king did not wish to fight the Empire, and one hundred years probably felt like an eternity to folk leading such short, brutal lives.” She grinned savagely. “And he was lucky, of course. If it had been the early days of the First or Second Empire, when the race of the grand Khanum was strong and populous, they’d have simply marched in and torn him and his forces to pieces!”

My skin crawled, but I said nothing.

“Yet then,” said Ana, “neither the king of Yarrow nor anyone else predicted what the Empire would do over the next decades…For then we brought the Engineers, and the slothiks, their great beasts of burden. And we carved tunnels and channels through the Pithian Hills…until we made the Great Canals, connecting the Bay of Yarrow to the Great River Asigis, thus tapping all the wealthy markets of the inner Empire.”

“Ah. So then the deal didn’t look nearly as good?” I asked.

“Oh, it got even worse. For back in those days, no one dreamed that the Empire would eventually slaughter leviathans so efficiently. Yet once we learned those arts and developed a way to render miracles from the titans’ flesh, the Bay of Yarrow became the natural home for such works.”

“The Shroud,” I said quietly.

“Exactly. Now the value of the city is astronomical. And in less than a decade it shall all be transferred over to the Empire itself! And the king, well…he would very much like to back out of the deal his great-great-grandfather made. He wishes to extort more money, more resources, more agreements from the Empire. Which means every day is a fucking temper tantrum with him! Goddamn autocrats. They really are hardly better than shit-stained children.”

“But can’t the Empire simply take the realm whenever we wish? Could the Yarrow king really be a threat?”

“On the field of battle? Not at all. But the Yarrow king still commands the loyalty of his landowners in the west, which gives him some strength of arms—and their forces would assuredly not fight a pitched battle! They know the terrain, the jungles, the rivers. And worse, we have many grand and delicate things to defend here. The Apoth works, the Shroud, the canals…We spend piles of treasure and blood every year just maintaining them, so that they in turn maintain the Empire. It chills the heart to imagine what would happen if any of this was exposed to combat!”

“So the murder of Sujedo…”

“Yes, the abduction and murder of a Treasury negotiator sent here to make sure the damned deal is proceeding as planned is rather alarming. Is this some ploy of the king’s? If so, why target Sujedo? What would his death accomplish? We do not know. Thus, we must proceed delicately—but quickly.”

—

“Do you have any ideas how it was done, then, ma’am?” I asked. “Or who is behind it?”

“For the latter, no,” Ana said, tilting her head. “But for the former—somewhat! To begin with…that piece of iron you found, Din. Do you still have it?”

I took it from my pocket and held it out to her. She removed her blindfold and snatched the piece from me, turning it over in her hands, and even sniffed it.

“No one spotted Sujedo with it,” I said. “And no one knows where it came from. It seems to be nothing so far.”

“Hmm,” she said softly. She held it up close to her eye, then turned to her iron stove, muttering, “Let us see, then…”

She flicked the plug of metal at her stove. With a loud clang, it struck the side of the stove—and, for a fleeting moment, it stuck fast.

I stared, mouth agape. Then the piece of metal slid down the side of the stove—very slowly, in a strange, stuttering, scraping movement—before finally clattering to the floor.

“What…” I said faintly. “How did it…”

“It is lodestone,” she said. She bound her hand up in the folds of her dress and picked up the iron, for it was now hot from the stove. “Or it was made to be lodestone. Though it has lost some of its strength.”

My eyes fluttered as I searched my memory, summoning information. “The rock that sticks to metal?”

“Certain metals, yes. But if you rub a piece of those certain metals upon true lodestone for long enough, the metals shall eventually gain some lodestone properties. This piece of iron was made to be lodestone, but it has lost much of its power…But not all.” She turned to me, grinning. “And what were the locks of Sujedo’s windows made from, Din?”

“Iron, ma’am. Is…is that how the murderer got into the rooms? They climbed to the very top of the tower, and used lodestone to undo the locks from the outside to get in?”

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that. For Malo spoke truth to you today—we are beset by impossibilities. How was no person found within that room? And how was his body found so far away days later? We reconcile these impossibilities, and we are left with the answer.”

“And…what might the answer be, ma’am?”

“The answer, Din,” she said, “lies in asking the right questions. We should not be asking ‘How did the killer get into and out of those rooms?’ but rather…which rooms was Mineti Sujedo in, and when, if any at all?” She grinned widely. “Tomorrow, go to the Treasury bank and interview the engraver there about Sujedo’s visit. But I really want practical things from them—Sujedo’s girth, his gait, his height. Make the engraver show you. Make him point on your shoulder…” She stabbed her own scrawny deltoid with a narrow digit. “…to show how tall the man was, for example. Am I clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But before you go to the bank, best send a message to the Treasury delegation and schedule a meeting with them at their lodgings in Old Town. The man you wish to get hold of is Prificto Kardas. He is the one running that operation. I wish to talk to him personally. You shall likely have to catch him quick before the goddamned king and his people gobble up all their goddamn time. Got it?”

I sighed deeply as I added this to my list of tasks. “Yes, ma’am.”

Ana inspected me closely. “Hm,” she said slowly. “How else was your day, Din?”

I hesitated, for she did not usually ask such plainly personal questions. “I had thought I had described almost all of it, ma’am.”

“Yes, but you said nothing of your emotional well-being, Din. This is our fifth investigation in but a year and a half. We are chewing through the stack at quite a clip! Yet I know not all souls fit easily to such labors.”

I suppressed a sigh of relief, for I’d almost thought she’d known of my new money issues. “I am well-accustomed to how this works now, I think, ma’am,” I said.

“Oh, are you? And how shall it go?”

“Well, first there is the pleasant puzzle, yes?” I said. “The how, and the who. Then all the dirty drudgery, wherein I follow folk about or dig through their refuse. And then, inevitably, either a rope or the slam of an iron door, and tears.”

She cackled evilly. “Ah, child…If this one is as simple as that, I shall be overjoyed! It already has a rotten scent to it. Still—is this work not as glamorous as you wished, Din? Did you think the life of a civil servant was going to be a grand and theatrical role?”

“As long as it pays, ma’am, I shall serve whatever role you desire.”

“What a mercenary statement!” she said. “I’m surprised at your cynicism, Din, given your valiance in Talagray. I am tempted to ascribe it to your illness.” She looked me over. “You are pale. And need rest. But before you retire, go and check the post for me, please. I suspect I’ll have a few letters that have been sent ahead.”

“It’s well past sundown, ma’am,” I said. “Are you sure the post station will be open?”

“This is Yarrowdale, child,” she said. “Home of the Shroud. They receive and send orders all day and all night here. Go and get my post, and then you may rest.”

I bowed. “Of course, ma’am.”

“Note that I said rest, Din!” she called as I retreated. “And nothing else !”

I shut the door.