The Tainted Cup, page 3
I read it all aloud as fast as I could. It was mostly a record of the commander’s movements as he did his inspections, with entries like ck. Paytasız bridges in the north of the Tala canton—6th to 8th of Egin—all pass, and so on. He’d apparently been very busy just over four weeks ago, during the month of Egin. I had no idea if any of it was pertinent or not, but as an engraver, I was to engrave everything in my memory.
I finished engraving the book, then began crossing the many bridges to return to the house. I had not interviewed anyone as a death witness before, especially not the staff of the house of a gentry family. I wondered how to begin.
I caught a flash of my reflection in the water below, dappled and rippling, and paused. “Let’s not fuck this up, yes?” I said to my watery face.
I crossed the last little bridge and entered the house.
* * *
—
I PRESSED THE servant girls first, being as they’d had access to Blas’s rooms. I started with the girl who’d been crying so hysterically—a little thing, narrow shoulders, tiny wrists. Small enough to make one wonder how she made it down the hall with all those dishes. It’d been she who’d responded to Blas when he’d started calling for help at eight o’clock, she told me, just before breakfast.
“He called for help?” I asked.
She nodded. A tear wove down her cheek to balance precariously in the crevice above her nostril. “He said he…his chest hurt. Said it was hard to breathe. He was coming down for breakfast, and he stopped and went back to his room. I came to him, tried to get him to lie down before…before he…”
She bowed her head; the balanced tear spilled down her lip; then she started wailing again. “I’m suh-sorry,” she sobbed as she tried to regain her composure. “Sh-should have asked…W-Would the suh-sir care for some t-tea?”
“Ah…No, thank you,” I said.
For some reason, this made her sob all the harder. I waited for her to stop. When she didn't, I let her go.
I moved on to the next one, an older servant named Ephinas. She sat down slowly, her movements cautious, controlled. Someone used to being watched, probably. She corroborated the first servant’s story: Blas arrived late in the evening, bathed, went to bed; and all had seemed completely normal until he started screaming for help in the morning. She had not gone to him, so she didn’t know more than that—but she did come alive when I asked if Blas had stayed here before.
“Yes,” she said. “My masters let him stay here often. He is close with them.”
“How was this stay different from other stays?” I asked. “Or was it different?”
Hesitation. “It was,” she said.
“Then how so?”
More hesitation. “He left us alone this time,” she said quietly. “Probably because he never got the chance to try.”
I coughed, snuffed at my vial, and hoped she could not see me blush. “Tell me more about that, please,” I asked.
She did so. From the sound of it, Blas was quite the absolute bastard, pawing at the servants the second he had them alone. She said she wasn’t sure if his advances had been reciprocated by any of the other girls, but she didn’t think so, though all of them got the same treatment.
“What was the nature of his visit here?” I asked her.
Her eyes dipped down. “He was a friend of the Haza family,” she said.
“He’s a friend? That’s the only reason why he stayed here?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it strange for someone to stay at someone else’s house while they’re not here?”
This elicited a contemptuous glance. Her eye lingered on my cheap boots and ill-fitting coat. “It is not uncommon for gentryfolk.”
Even the servants thought themselves worldlier than I, it seemed. But then, they were probably right.
I asked her more, but she gave me less with every question, withdrawing into herself further and further. I made a note of it and moved on.
I asked the next girls about Blas’s advances. While they corroborated the story, all of them claimed they’d never had a relationship with Blas beyond these unpleasant moments, and none of them had much else to say.
“I didn’t hear or see anything before he died,” said the final girl flatly. She was bolder, louder, angrier than the others. Less willing to quietly suffer servitude, maybe. “Not for the whole night. I know that.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“I am,” she said. “Because I didn’t sleep much before the guest came.”
“Why was that?”
“Because I was hot. Very hot.”
I thought about it. “Do you sleep near the kitchens?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because the kirpis shroom is dying there. Could that be why you were hot?”
She seemed surprised. “Another one’s died?”
“They’ve died before?”
“They’re very sensitive to water. Too much and they shrivel up and die.”
“What kind of moisture?” I asked.
“Any kind. Rain. Humidity. Leave a window or door open nearby—especially now, when the wet season starts—and they’ll get sick right away. They’re temperamental as hell.”
I leaned back and focused. A fluttering at the backs of my eyes, and I summoned up my memories of searching the house, each image of each room flashing perfectly in my mind like a fly suspended in a drop of honey. No doors or windows had been open that I saw. So how might the kirpis have died?
“Did you or anyone else in the house happen to close an open door or window before Blas died?” I asked.
She stared at me. “After seeing what we saw, sir,” she said, “we could barely stand, let alone do our work.”
I took that as a no, they had not shut any doors or windows, and continued on.
* * *
—
EVENTUALLY I RAN out of servant girls, so I went hard at the cook, asking her about the blood in the kitchen. She was most unimpressed.
“Why do you think there might be blood in the kitchen?” she demanded.
“Did you cut yourself?” I asked.
“No. Of course not. I am too old, and too good. If you found blood, I am sure it’s from the larfish I cooked for Blas’s breakfast—not that he ever got to eat it.”
“Larfish?” I asked. I pulled a face. “For breakfast?”
“It’s what he likes,” she said. “It’s hard to get, out close to the walls, where he works.” She leaned closer. “If you ask me, he picked up something out there, at the sea walls. Some parasite or another. I mean—think of what the sea walls keep out. Sanctum knows what kind of strange things they bring in with them!”
“They don’t get in, ma’am,” I said. “That’s the point of the sea walls.”
“But they had a breach years ago,” she said, delighted to discuss such grotesqueries. “One got in and wrecked a city south of here, before the Legion brought it down. The trees there bloom now, though they never bloomed before. They weren’t trees that could grow blooms before.”
“If we could get back to the circumstances of last night, ma’am…”
“Circumstances!” she scoffed. “The man caught contagion. It’s as simple as that.”
I pressed her harder, but she gave me nothing more of interest, and I let her go.
* * *
—
THE GROUNDSKEEPER NEXT. Fellow’s name was Uxos, and he was apparently more than just a groundskeeper, performing odd jobs about the house, fixing up walls or fernpaper doors. A most timid man, perhaps too old to still be groundskeeper. He seemed terrified at the idea of trying to fix the damage the trees had done to the house.
“I don’t even know what kind of tree it is,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
“It had a bloom, you know,” I said. “A little white one.” I described it to him—the inner petals purple and yellow, the sweet and sickly aroma. He just shook his head.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s not a flower I know. Not a tree I know. I don’t know.”
I asked him about the kirpis shroom, and he said the same thing as the servant girl: too much water kills them. But how this one had died, he didn’t know.
“Someone probably overwatered it,” he said. “Dumped a drink in it. It’s expensive, but it happens. They’re very hard to care for. It’s a complex process, cooling the air. They make black fruit in their roots you have to clean out…”
Finally I asked him about his oven, and the ashes of the fire out there in the hut.
“I use the fire to clean my tools,” Uxos said. “Some plants are very delicate. Can’t get fungus from one to the other. So I put them in the fire to clean them.”
“Don’t they have washes for that?” I said. “Soaps and such for your tools?”
“They’re expensive. Fire is cheaper.”
“The Hazas don’t seem like people who care much about price.”
“They care,” he said, “if people get expensive. Then the people go. I try very hard not to be expensive. I don’t want to go.”
A worm of worry in his eye. Too old to be groundskeeper by half, I guessed, and he knew it. I pressed him for more, but he had nothing more to give, and I let him go.
* * *
—
LAST WAS THE housekeeper—a Madam Gennadios, apparently the boss of the whole place when the Hazas themselves weren’t around. An older woman with a lined, heavily painted face. She wore bright green robes of a very expensive make, soft and shimmering—Sazi silk, from the inner rings of the Empire. She paused when she walked in, looked me over with a cold, shrewd eye, then sat down, her posture immaculate—knees together at an angle, hands in her lap, shoulders high and tight—and stared resolutely into the corner.
“Something wrong, ma’am?” I asked.
“A boy,” she said. Her words were as dry and taut as a bowstring. “They’ve sent a boy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She studied me again out of the corner of her eye. “This is who’s trapped us in our house, the house of my masters, and won’t let us remove that damned corpse—a great, overgrown boy.”
A long, icy moment slipped by.
“Someone’s died in your house, ma’am,” I said. “Potentially of contagion. Something that might have killed you all, too. Don’t you want us to investigate?”
“Then where’s the investigator?”
“The investigator isn’t able to attend,” I said. “I’m here to review the scene and report back to her.”
Her gaze lingered on me. I was reminded of an eel contemplating a fish flitting before its cave. “Ask me your questions,” she said. “I’ve work to do, a damned ceiling to patch up. Go.”
I inhaled at my vial and then asked her about the nature of Blas’s stay. She gave what might have been the smallest, least sincere shrug I’d ever seen. “He is a friend of the Haza family.”
“One of your servant girls said the same thing,” I said.
“Because it’s true.”
“The exact same thing.”
“Because it’s true.”
“And your masters often let their friends stay at their houses?”
“My masters have many houses, and many friends. Sometimes their friends come to stay with us.”
“And no one from the Haza clan intended to join him?”
“My masters,” she said, “prefer more civilized environs than this canton.”
I moved on, asking her about the locations of the staff’s reagents keys.
“All the reagents keys are locked up at night,” she said. “Only I and Uxos are in constant possession of any during the evening, for emergencies.”
I asked about replacing keys, how to duplicate them, and so on, but she was dismissive. The idea was impossible to her.
“What about alterations?” I said. “Have your staff had any imperial grafts applied?”
“Of course,” she said. “For immunities, and parasites. We are on the rim of the Empire, after all.”
“Nothing more advanced than that?”
She shook her head. I felt a heat under the collar of my coat. I didn’t like how little she moved, sitting up so ramrod straight, shifting her head only to look at me out of the side of her eye like a damned bird.
“Can you at least tell me the nature of the commander’s relationship with the Hazas?” I asked.
A withering stare. “They were friends.”
“How long have they been friends?”
“I do not know the nature of all my masters’ friendships, nor is that for me to know.”
“Do they have many friends in Daretana?”
“Yes. In many of the Iyalets, at that.” Her eyes glittered at me. “And some of them are above you.”
I smiled politely at her, yet the threat seemed very real. I asked her more, but she gave me nothing. I let her go.
* * *
—
THEN IT WAS done: all witnesses questioned, all personnel accounted for, all times of departures and arrivals established. The only person who’d arrived in the past day had been Commander Taqtasa Blas, who’d come to the residence at just past eleven on the night of the twenty-ninth of the month of Skalasi. He immediately bathed and went to bed, awoke on the thirtieth, and then paused right before breakfast to die in the most horrifying fashion imaginable. Though I thought I’d made a pretty good job of it—except for my chat with the housekeeper, perhaps—I could make neither head nor tail of the scene: not whether Blas’s death was murder, or even suspicious.
Contagion did happen, after all. Especially to those who worked at the sea walls.
I stopped by the bedroom on my way out. To see the corpse one more time, yes, but also to replace Blas’s book in his belongings. It felt strange to slip his diary back in his bags, his frozen scream hanging over my shoulder. Despite all the mutilation, the pain of his expression remained striking, like he was still feeling all those shoots threading and coiling through his flesh.
I walked out and thanked Otirios, and he led me across the grounds back to the servants’ gate.
“Is it all right for us to remove the corpse for study, sir?” he asked.
“I think so, but please keep all the witnesses here,” I said. “I’ll report back to the investigator, and she’ll likely want to summon some of the witnesses to question herself.”
“It was well done, sir,” he said.
“What was?”
“Well done. If I might say so. All handled well.” He gave me a grin, beaming and big-brotherly. I’d only ever seen such smiles above a fourth pot of sotwine. “Though next time, sir—might want to be a bit friendlier. I’ve seen undertakers warmer than you.”
I paused and looked at him. Then I turned and kept walking, down through the picturesque garden paths and out the vinegate.
“But I’ve also got to wonder, sir…” Otirios asked as we passed through the vines.
“Yes, Princeps?” I said. “What advice do you have now?”
“Might this have been easier if the investigator herself had come?”
I stopped again and looked at him balefully.
“No,” I said. “I can say with absolute honesty, Princeps, that no, this would not have been easier if the investigator had come.” I returned to the path, muttering, “You’ll have to trust me on that.”
CHAPTER 2
| | |
THE DARETANA CANTON DIDN’T have a true city in any normal sense of the word, but rather a clutch of Imperial Iyalet buildings clinging to the main crossroads, along with countless lots and warehouses and storage barns for all the materials and livestock constantly being routed to the sea walls. That afternoon it was the usual morass of mud and men and the press of horseflesh. I danced south along the corners through the town, pausing for the carts and wagons, and saw the familiar sights: horses with copper red mud churned up to their bellies; crawling swarms of thrumming flies; sweat-drenched officers of the Legion, the Engineers, and the other Iyalets bellowing names and orders, seemingly indifferent as to whether they were heard or heeded. I bowed and nodded and bowed and nodded until I was free of the throng and into the jungle.
The woods were dark and shimmering hot. The sun was in its descent, spears of its tawny light plunging through the canopy. I found the narrow jungle path to my master’s house and stepped along it, greeted by the familiar chirrup of frog and beetle. Then the steam-drenched leaves parted and I glimpsed her little fretvine quarters waiting in the shade.
I picked my way through the tree stumps. The Engineers had cut all these trees down when my master had first been appointed Iudex Investigator of this canton, some four months ago now, and then they’d made her a house from fretvine—the special, altered vine the Apothetikals had tamed to grow into any shape. Whereas I’d trodden this path so many times I practically walked in my own footprints, she had not left that place since she’d moved in. Not once.
I walked up the steps to her front door and saw a stack of books waiting before the door, tied up with string. Delivery from the Daretana post station, I guessed. I squatted and flipped a few open to read their titles. As always, the letters shook and danced before my eyes, making it hard for me to put them together—the shifting jungle light didn’t help—but I made out Summation of the Transfer of Landed Properties, Qabirga Canton, 1100–1120 and Theories Related to the Increase in Mass of the Eastern Scuttlecrab Since 800.
“The hell?” I muttered.
Then I paused, listening. I heard the chirrup of a tossfrog, and the low call of a mika lark; but then I realized I had heard something else: the mutter of a man, within the house.
