The Tainted Cup, page 18
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.”
“All right. And the money, ma’am?”
“The money and the wall pass we shall…use,” she said slowly. “We shall use it to determine if our colleagues on this investigation are true and faithful servants of the Empire. For I still worry, Din—why did they not look into Blas? Why did they not seek out Aristan? These are very common procedural tasks! Did someone on the team know Aristan had been murdered? Did they know Blas was so wildly corrupt?” She cocked her head. “Could Kalista be false? She seems to have a taste for things rich and fine. Or perhaps it is Nusis? For she worked alongside Blas on the Preservationist Boards. Or is Uhad, so old and feeble, willing to be paid for some comfort in his later days? Or perhaps Miljin? Or is none of it malfeasance, and all of it is simple ineptitude? I do not know.”
A tense silence. I felt a terrible sense of dread brewing in me.
“And…how shall we use the money to answer any of those questions, ma’am?” I asked.
“Oh, well, Din.” She smiled wearily. “You’re going to take that money and that wall pass…and you’re going to stick it with Aristan’s corpse. Someplace where it is easily found. Then I shall ask Uhad to investigate…and we shall see how much of that money makes it back to us.”
I gaped at her in horror. “First you want me to run off on our own investigation—now you want me to fabricate a murder scene?”
“Oh, it’s not too much fabrication,” she said, waving a hand. “I’m not asking you to fucking kill someone, or something! Consider it simply a very unusual method of submitting evidence to the investigation.”
“But…I mean…we’ve barely been here a day, ma’am,” I protested. “And you’re already investigating the investigators?”
“Well, yes,” she snapped. “Because we’re the fucking Iudex, Din! We’re the ones who watch the Empire on behalf of the Empire! And something here feels dreadfully wrong! Perhaps it is the breach, perhaps it is incompetence, or…perhaps it is something else. But I must know, if we are to move forward.”
“And what am I doing for this performance, ma’am?” I asked. “Should I just accompany Miljin to Aristan’s house and act surprised at all we see?”
She thought about it. “Good point. You’re a bit of a shit liar, Din. Here—I shall tell them I’ve sent you to see Nusis, have them send Miljin to investigate, and I shall just personally stick close to Uhad and the others to see what happens. It’ll be very taxing for me—all that small conversation—but this is rather important…”
“And if I get caught manipulating a crime scene?” I said angrily. “And am clapped in irons, and stripped of my rank and position?”
“Then I will speak to Vashta,” she said simply. “And make my position known.”
I stared at her, incredulous, but she seemed quite serious. “You’re going to, what, talk down the seneschal? Tell her your mind?”
Ana went very still then. She seemed to turn these words over within her mind, testing how they fit. Then she grinned horribly and leaned forward; and I saw a strange, unsettling light in her eyes that I had not seen before: one I did not wish to look at, let alone challenge.
“I would!” she said cheerily. “I would tell her all I knew. And she would come to agree with our deeds. For who would not, Din? We are here to review the foundations of the Empire’s defenses—and that, of course, begins with testing the resolve of its most important officers. Now go, boy, and sleep. If you can.”
CHAPTER 18
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THE NEXT MORNING I arose before dawn, dressed, picked up the bag containing the thousands of talints and the wall pass—it felt very heavy now—and went downstairs and slipped into the streets.
Once again, Talagray was rumbling to life with countless esteemed and veteran officers beginning their duty. I felt terribly self-conscious as I walked among them, trying to control my gait, my posture, my bearing. Was I walking too fast? Did anyone hear that soft clink from my bag? Yet no one had any mind for me at all. There were far more greater things to care about in this place than I.
I’d left the back door to Aristan’s house unlocked, so it was a simple thing to open it and slip inside. Once again, I was battered with the awful reek of corpse-stink. I prowled through the house like a common burglar and found Aristan still in her bedroom, the toes of her bare feet still purple and curling.
I stared at her body, heart beating. Then I glanced around the room, wondering where to hide a fortune where Miljin and Uhad might find it. Yet I remembered: I’d seen Miljin search a room just the other day, hadn’t I? I knew his methods.
I walked to the other side of the bed, crouched, unsheathed my knife, and pried up a floorboard. There was not much room below but still room enough. I carefully placed the seven thick coins below, along with the wall pass. Then I replaced the board, paced back to the backdoor, cracked it to confirm the lane beyond was empty, and departed, my heart still fluttering in my ribcage.
I made it back to the Iudex tower before midmorning, climbed the steps, and knocked five times on Ana’s door—the signal that that job was done. I was met with a lilting “Thank you!” then ran back down the stairs, suddenly worried any one of these officers might stop me.
Yet they did not. I dabbed sweat from my brow as I continued on to the next task.
How queer it suddenly felt: I’d been a model officer for almost all my career, but I had to join the Iudex to become a true criminal.
* * *
—
“ARE YOU ALL right, Signum?” asked Nusis. “You look a little antsy.”
“P-pardon, ma’am?” I said, startled. I wiped more sweat from my brow and glanced around her office, as if worried someone else might have noticed. “Oh. I apologize.”
“Oh, don’t,” Nusis said. “I was just worried it might be a reaction to your new immunities grafts. Or, maybe it might be something you caught out on the Plains of the Path.” She leaned forward over her desk, interested. “Have you felt any curious flickering sensations when you defecate, perhaps?”
I wondered what to say to that. “I think it might just be the stress of the job, ma’am,” I said honestly.
“I see…Well, if you need any stimulants or sedatives, let me know. I’ve got a variety here, and most are very safe. Now…you have a reagents key for me, I think?”
I handed over the plain little bronze disc I’d found in Rona Aristan’s empty house. “Yes, ma’am. Found it yesterday among the possessions of the individuals we were investigating. I was hoping you could check it for me.” I sweated slightly, though nothing I said was a lie.
Nusis studied the little key. She no longer seemed like the cheery red flicker-thrush as I’d come to think of her, for she moved slower, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in some time. The cause was clear: there were piles of parchments mounded on her desk, enough to challenge even Ana’s usual seas of texts. It had taken me hours to get in to see her, as well: apparently whatever she was working on was even more important than a visit from the Iudex.
“Hmm,” Nusis said, peering at the key. “This one is rather shabbily made. Simple bronze, with tin prongs and a crude bridge. Very amateurish. I don’t perceive any gaseous emissions of note…though they may be masked by my specimens.”
She gestured at the many vials and tanks around her laboratory-like office. I eyed one of the many worms thoughtfully inspecting the seal of its glass prison.
She sniffed the vial. “I can’t catch much scent here that I recognize, unfortunately. But then, I am not altered for aromatics, only vision. But I can run it under the usual tests—exposing it to telltale plants and fungi and the like, which will react if there is anything pheromonally interesting. Could that do?”
“Whatever you can do to assist, ma’am,” I said.
“Very good. Now…” She sighed. “The other business. Captain Kiz Jolgalgan, correct?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.” I nodded at the papers and said, “I hope this isn’t all about her.”
“This? Oh, no. These are Preservation Board approvals. The Legion is preparing a new armament to combat the titans after the breach. Lots of grafts and alterations go with it—mostly explosives.” She gestured along her back wall, where glass jars containing a dark powder sat in a row. “Some kind of bombard. I’m to review and process the paperwork confirming that none of these alterations can escape the canton and cause havoc.” She cast a bleary eye over the remaining parchments. “But paperwork is a task I’m well accustomed to. I manage paper more than reagents these days. Now, I am curious…why did you ask about this Jolgalgan?”
I explained the interviews with the Engineers from yesterday, and all I’d learned with Miljin.
Nusis’s expression grew somber, so much so that I forgot about my own anxieties. “I see,” she said carefully. “Well. I regret to inform you that everyone who knew Captain Jolgalgan is dead.”
“Dead? Truly, ma’am?”
“Yes. She was a member of the Twelfth Cohort of the Apoths. And all of that cohort died at Sapfir, during the breach. Can’t even recover their bodies. Horrid thing. You will have no one to interview, I’m afraid.”
“But Jolgalgan,” I said. “Is she also…”
“Her status is…a different matter.” Nusis pivoted to her safe, then paused. “Might you avert your eyes again, please, Signum?”
I did so while she again went through the laborious process of unlocking her safe. She popped it open and slid out a scroll of parchment. Then she took the reagents key from her desk and placed it in the safe, next to all her boxes of immunities grafts. “Might as well keep that in here for now…I mean, it is evidence, yes? Anyway. I went ahead and fetched Jolgalgan’s alteration papers for you…She’s a Sublime, like you and I. An axiom, inducted and altered some six years ago in the Kurmin canton. Scored very high on her exams. Something else you two have in common, I think.”
I coughed and nodded.
“But Jolgalgan always demonstrated—how shall I put this—issues of the psyche,” said Nusis delicately.
“Issues?” I asked.
“Anger. Fits of rage. And anxiety, and paranoia. She was a hard worker, but she was hard to work with. She has had a pattern of complaints and outbursts throughout her career.”
I opened my engraver’s satchel. “Is it all right if I…”
“Be my guest,” said Nusis.
I selected the ash-scented vial again and sniffed at it, anchoring this conversation in my memories. “What was wrong with her?” I said. “Something to do with her alterations?”
“No,” she said. “No. It is not that.”
I watched her. Eyes still, mouth fixed in a soft frown. She had gone somewhere far away in her mind, I felt. I waited.
“You are aware, Signum,” she said, “that I was assigned to be on this investigation team because I served in Oypat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what do you know of Oypat?”
“I’d never heard of it until Blas. I learned it had been a canton that had been consumed by dappleglass, the same contagion that’s been wielded as a weapon here. That is all of it.”
“Well…I will tell you now, Kol, that what happened in Oypat made many people fear alterations as much as the titans. With good reason. I was a junior officer then, barely out of Sublime training. Axiom,” she said, tapping her head. “Figures and mathematics.”
“I remember, ma’am.”
“Of course you do. I worked on the environmental monitoring team during Oypat, ensuring that no dappleglass escaped the territory. I peered through a spyglass day after day, watching distant hills being eaten by grass. And then in the afternoon, when I served in the medikkers’ wards, I saw people having the grass cut from them—tangles in their kidneys, in their lungs, in their uteri. Many more died, of course. Especially after we sealed the whole thing up. They never made it out.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Those that did survive were resettled by the Iudex. And some…some of the Oypati say that it wasn’t the dappleglass that killed their home. They say it was us. That we imperials killed them with our lethargy. But that isn’t so. We tried. It was just too complex. The great and heavenly world is just all too complex, sometimes.”
“I see,” I said. “But—what’s this to do with Jolgalgan, ma’am?”
“You have heard that Jolgalgan has a curious look to her,” she said. “Yellow, curly hair. Yes?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“That is because though she has a Kurmini last name, the captain was not born to a Kurmini family. She was adopted. Her birth name was Prarasta. An uncommon name—mostly because all the people who’d normally have such a name are now dispersed or dead.” She fixed me in a sad gaze. “Jolgalgan was Oypati, you see. She escaped the dying canton when she was a child. Lost her parents. And was resettled. Such a history…Well, it’s no wonder she displayed afflictions of the psyche.”
I felt my skin break out in goosebumps. “I notice, ma’am, that you haven’t told me whether Jolgalgan died with her cohort.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “Because Captain Jolgalgan has been missing for weeks.” She handed the scroll of parchment out to me. “She vanished just a few days before the assassination of Commander Blas, as a matter of fact. And just before so many Engineers suddenly started dying of the very contagion that killed her canton. Curious—isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 19
| | |
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when I raced across the Iudex tower atrium, Jolgalgan’s parchments rustling in my pocket. I felt I looked quite a sight, but then I saw Captain Miljin doing the same, sprinting across the atrium, though he was going out rather than in.
He skidded to a stop as he passed me. “Kol!” he breathed. “Where the devil…”
I took in his flush face, his wild eyes. Instantly I knew he had found Aristan.
I fought to keep my voice steady, and asked, “What’s going on, sir?”
“We’ve just found the maddest mess of shit, simply the maddest thing, but…” Miljin looked back out the door. “But I have business to tend to. Go and ask your immunis. She can fill you in!” Then he dashed away, moving surprisingly fast for a man of his age.
I watched him go. I wondered if Ana’s little experiment had yielded results.
I raced up the stairs for the second time that day, my head spilling over with thoughts. Yet when I came to Ana’s door, I paused.
Voices from inside: hers, then a man’s. Soft, not agitated—or at least not yet.
I knocked. The customary singing “Come!”
I opened the door. Young Captain Kepheus Strovi sat in a chair in the middle of the room, dressed in Legion blacks with his legs crossed—a casual pose, like he was perfectly at home here. He looked over his shoulder and his eyes widened slightly when he saw me.
I stopped short at the sight of him. It took me a moment to recall he was meant to be helping Ana find information on all the fernpaper millers in Talagray.
I looked about for Ana but couldn’t find her. Then the overpowering scent of fish struck my nostrils, and I heard her voice: “Din! What good timing. Strovi here has just brought me all those fernpaper orders I’d requested.”
I looked down. Ana was lying on the floor on her back at Strovi’s feet, half-concealed in a pile of parchments, blindfolded as usual. To her left was a tray containing the remains of a fish, salted and piled with herbs, the flesh so pink it must have never known flame.
“Why are you…” I said.
“On the floor?” she said. “I can feel the movements of this tower better from here, Din, reading the wind and the weather with my back.” She grinned. “It’s marvelous. You ought to try it sometime.”
Strovi was watching me with a half smile on his face, amused by the madness of it all. He was not nearly as disheveled as he’d looked that night when he and Vashta had come to Daretana: now he was clean-shaven, his mop of curly dark hair was elegantly clipped back, and his black cloak was pressed and his boots polished. Between his size and his vitality he seemed to take up the whole of the room, even sprawled in a chair with Ana on the floor beside him.
There was a ceramic cup in his lap and a pot of tea on the table beside him. I took off my straw cone hat, bowed to him, and entered. Then I glanced into the teapot—half empty—and laid a finger against its side. It was cool to the touch.
“He’s just brought you your orders, ma’am?” I asked. “From the shape of things, he’s been here awhile. You’ve been interrogating him, haven’t you.”
“It, ah…” Strovi cleared his throat. “It has been an hour or so, ma’am. Possibly two. Or, ah, three.”
Ana waved a hand, indifferent. “Possibly. It’s not very often that I get to parley with a Talagray Legion officer.”
“So long as he’s here with consent,” I said. “And you’re being civil, ma’am.”
“I’m as civil as a magistrate,” she said. “Why, I haven’t asked the young captain here about the aroma of his piss once.”
