The Tainted Cup, page 7
“Nothing wrong has been done!” Gennadios said. “Amorous arrangements are not illegal in the Empire!”
“But they do have political implications,” said Ana. “Who is in bed with who—literally or otherwise—can ruin a man’s career.”
“Then…then what reason could I have had for killing the commander?” Gennadios said. “Or any of us? And how could we have killed him, anyway? Even the Apoths can’t understand it!”
“I’m not suggesting you did,” said Ana. “None of the staff, I think, was the true killer.” She sat back in her chair, and for a moment the shadows fell across her blindfolded face. “But it is also my job, Gennadios, to figure out why he might have been killed. And I must admit, I am mighty curious as to why such a powerful family would ever bother having an estate in the godless backwaters of the Outer Rim. One they don’t even visit. Yet…I am far more curious to see what will happen when the Hazas find out that their housekeeper not only let a commander get murdered on their property, but then went and chatted about it to the Iudex.”
Gennadios now looked positively ill. “You…you made me come here! I was legally obliged to…to…to come here, to…”
“As anyone who’s been past the third-ring wall knows,” said Ana, “the Haza clan is not terribly interested in the boundaries of the law.”
The three servants sat before Ana, bewildered and terrified. Uxos had stopped rocking and was now frozen on the pile of books.
“What did Commander Blas provide to the Hazas?” Ana asked, every word as percussive as the blow from a hammer.
“I don’t know,” whispered Gennadios.
“Was it some act? Information?”
“I don’t know!” she said. She was panicking now. “I don’t! I really don’t!”
“I see. Then you, Madam Gennadios, are going to tell me all of the commander’s movements before he arrived at the estate,” said Ana. “And the timing of all of his previous visits. I very strongly suspect you know this—it would be very useful to have records of when and where a powerful man had been playing about with prostitutes, no matter how legal it may be. If you don’t give me this, I will make it known to the Hazas that you have given me far, far worse things. This would be a lie, but it would be one they’d believe.”
Gennadios was trembling. “You wouldn’t.”
“Of course I would.” Again, the predatory grin. “I’m not at all as morally upstanding as Din here. You give me that, and I’ll stay quiet.”
“But…but just being here,” said Gennadios. “Just this happening at all…I might be doomed already.”
“I think the Hazas may likely forget about that,” said Ana. “After the revelation of how Blas was killed.”
A pause.
“You know how he was killed?” asked Gennadios.
“Of course I do. He was killed by an assassin.” Ana turned her blindfolded face to Uxos, the groundskeeper. “And you helped them do it, sir.”
* * *
—
“WHAT?” SAID GENNADIOS. “You’re suggesting that…that Uxos here…”
Uxos shook his head, his beard mopping his collar like a paintbrush. “N-no. No, I…”
“Dappleglass is what killed the commander,” said Ana. “A very powerful contagion. After all, it killed a whole canton. But besides its murderous, infestatious qualities, it is also known for its odd effect on fernpaper, causing moldy splotches to grow on its surface—notable, as fernpaper is so resistant to other blights. This is what Din saw in the bathing closet—dappleglass stains on the interior of the fernpaper walls and concentrated at the top. Because, you see, the contagion was delivered to Blas in the bath. I suspect a small length of the grass was placed in the shootstraw pipes. Blas arrived, bathed first thing in the evening…and as the water steamed, he inhaled it, lining his lungs with the spores. Yet it also floated up, staining the fernpaper walls.”
Uxos was now sweating prolifically. “But…but I don’t do anything with the pipes…”
“No,” said Ana. “But you do lots with fernpaper, don’t you? Especially fernpaper doors, and windows. You’re the helpful person who replaces them. You let the assassin into the grounds with your reagents key, probably the night before, to tamper with Blas’s bath. The assassin then entered and exited the house through a fernpaper door. But it wasn’t until after they left that you noticed the door they’d used now had black spots on it—a consequence of either carrying the dappleglass past the door, or perhaps the assassin themselves were unusually dusted with the spores, tainting their very touch.”
“But there were no doors stained,” said Gennadios.
“True!” said Ana. “But that is because Uxos, being a gardener, realized that the assassin’s presence must have stained it. So, he removed the door after Blas arrived, replaced it, and then burned the tainted one in his stove.”
A stain of sweat was spreading across Uxos’s shirt.
“One of the servant girls complained of an intense heat the night before,” said Ana. “Because, naturally, the kirpis shroom near the kitchens had died, so it couldn’t cool the air. But how did it die? Well, they’re vulnerable to too much moisture. If someone leaves a door open for too long, and if the air outside is too humid…”
“Then the mushrooms wither,” said Ephinas quietly.
“Correct,” said Ana. “Which is exactly what happened as Uxos—very quietly and stealthily, to his credit—removed the door from its sliding tracks and replaced it. Something he did very commonly, as the groundskeeper. He probably would have replaced the ones in the bathing chamber, too—if Blas himself hadn’t been sleeping in there as the poison spread in his body.”
There was another tense silence. All eyes slowly turned to look at Uxos, who was still paralyzed, eyes wide, brow blooming with sweat.
“I suspect you were paid well for the job,” said Ana. “And you might think that we don’t have any evidence. But…dappleglass is very resistant even to normal fires. It’s a contagion, after all. A normal fire would actually make the spores float about on the smoke, though it does delay their bloom for a little while. But your hut is made of fernpaper as well, isn’t it, Mr. Uxos?” She cocked her head, smiling. “So…when the two Iudex soldiers I sent to the estate review your hut where you burned those doors, I wonder…What colors shall its fernpaper b—”
Then Uxos screamed, stood up, and dove for Ana.
* * *
—
I’D TOLD MYSELF to be prepared, but I had not been ready for this. Uxos had seemed a timid man; yet in one second, he changed into a snarling, furious creature.
I watched as his hand dipped down to his boot; and then, as it came up, there was a glitter of silver in his fingers.
A knife. In his boot. Where I had not searched.
Then I moved.
I hadn’t really intended to move. There was no conscious thought: it was like the muscles in my arms and legs had minds of their own, and they all woke up and hauled me along with them. The next thing I knew I was drawing my practice sword—the big, dull blade wrought of lead and wood—then stepping forward in front of Ana and slashing out with it.
My sword cut across him horizontally, smashing into Uxos’s arm with the knife, and then clipping his chin and splitting his lip. Out of sheer momentum, he kept hurtling forward and crashed into me.
I fell backward with Uxos on top, landing on the floor beside Ana. I managed to keep my sword up, using it as a barrier between myself and Uxos, who was clearly stunned by the blow but still frenzied. He screamed and raised his knife, intending to plunge it into my throat, perhaps; but I held my practice sword like a stave and shoved the pommel up, smashing him in the face again, this time far harder than the last blow.
He fell backward, stunned, and dropped the knife. The whole room seemed to be screaming: me, Gennadios, Ephinas. Then I was on top of Uxos, grabbing his hair with my left hand and pummeling his face with my right fist, again and again and again.
“Din!” said Ana.
I hit him again, and again, and again.
“Din!”
Uxos’s eyebrow split. His nose broke. His mouth was brimming with blood. My knuckles were aching, but I couldn’t stop hitting him.
Then something struck me on the side of the head—not enough to knock me over, but enough to stun me. I blinked, flustered, and stared stupidly as a copy of Summation of the Transfer of Landed Properties, Qabirga Canton, 1100–1120 landed on the floor next to me with a thud.
I realized Ana had thrown a book at my head—how she’d managed to land the hit despite being blindfolded, I didn’t know—and I looked up at her, outraged. “What the hell?” I snarled.
“Din, I don’t mind your violent appetites,” Ana said. “But I would very much prefer it if you didn’t beat the one man who knows anything about Blas’s assassination to fucking death! Especially not in my goddamn house!”
I looked down. Though I’d barely been cognizant of my actions, I had pulverized Uxos’s face to the point of being unrecognizable. He lay on the floor, bloodied and weeping.
My senses returned to me. I grew dimly aware that Ephinas and Gennadios were sobbing in terror.
“You two,” said Ana to them. “Outside. Now. And stay there. Otherwise I’ll send Din after you, and he’ll render you as pretty as Uxos.” Then she sat back in her chair. “Din—get your sword and get this idiot upright. We’ve some talking to do.”
* * *
—
WEEPING, Uxos gave us the full spill of it.
Someone had approached him two months ago, he said, when he’d gone into town to buy more gardening grafts for the plants. This person had told him that Commander Blas was a traitor to the Empire, and had been slated for assassination, and Uxos could either participate in his assassination or be brought up on charges himself. Uxos had been tempted to walk out on such an outrageous claim—until this person had told him of the reward involved. For if he participated, he would be made a rich man.
“Who was this person?” asked Ana. “They didn’t give a name?”
“They didn’t,” he said, sniffing.
“Didn’t mention an Iyalet they worked for? Didn’t show you any documentation of their authority?”
Uxos shook his head.
“What did they look like?” asked Ana.
“He had…had some kind of disease,” said Uxos. “His clothing was very fine, but his face was swollen, disfigured. I could barely understand what he said at first.”
“You’re sure it was a man, though?”
“I…think so. His voice was high. I suppose it might have been a woman.”
“Fuck’s sakes,” snapped Ana. “Can you even tell me what race the person was, you fool?”
“I think…Tala?” said Uxos, terrified. He gestured to me. “Like him?”
“And no residence? No method of contact information?”
No, Uxos said. All Uxos knew was that he would be paid half of the reward money up front when he agreed to help the assassin; then he was to visit the northwest corner of the grounds first thing each day. If he were to find a yellow wooden ball waiting for him, that would mean the assassination would take place that night, and he should return to that very spot at midnight to help the assassin enter the gates.
“And this assassin,” said Ana. “Was it the same person who contacted you?”
“They were all in black,” said Uxos. “Even…even wore a mask, a…an odd one. With a strange nose…”
“A warding helm,” said Ana quietly. “The kind the Apoths use to prevent themselves from breathing in contagion.”
“They didn’t even talk to me.” Uxos sniffed. “They didn’t have a sword or anything. Just a little wooden box in their hands. They walked in, then walked right out. It wasn’t until later that I saw the fernpaper rotting from where they’d touched the door. I panicked and…” He dissolved into tears. “I shouldn’t have taken it. Shouldn’t have taken the money. But I’m so old. They won’t keep me forever. And after that I’ll…I’d have nothing.” He dissolved into tears, head bowed.
“Din,” said Ana quietly. “Your bonds, please. I believe now is the time for their first use.”
I fumbled at the bonds at my side, then knelt and placed them on Uxos’s hands with a click. He kept weeping, as if unaware of what I did.
Too old to be groundskeeper by half, I’d thought when I’d first seen him. Maybe I should have known then.
* * *
—
AFTER I HAD submitted Uxos to the Arbiters at the Iudex office, I picked up some food and returned to Ana. We lunched in her little house, eating fried bean cakes and sipping aplilot tea.
“Sanctum’s sakes,” she muttered. “Next time buy flesh, Din. I require blood and organs to function, the less cooked the better. Offal. Blood pie. Anything but these roots and legumes…”
“Noted, ma’am,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “How’d you do it, though?”
“Do what?”
“Well. How’d you put it all together so fast, ma’am?”
“Oh, I didn’t put it all together,” she said. She slipped off her blindfold to eat and blinked her yellow eyes in the dim light. “I still don’t know who killed Blas, or why. That will take time to figure out. And I still don’t know what Blas was giving to the Hazas. Yet you can’t predict the madnesses of men. Projecting motives is a fool’s game. But how they do it—that’s a matter of matter, moving real things about in real space. The question of how a knife was forged in one place and then traveled across the countryside to be buried in the throat of some dumb bastard entails a lot of tangible, definite facts.” She pointed at me. “You get the facts, Din. I do the rest.”
I chewed my bean cake. “Yes, but—how did you do it, ma’am? What…”
“Ahh. What suffusion do I have?” she asked. “What augmentation? Is that it?”
“Just curious, ma’am.”
“Curious to know what makes me me. What keeps me indoors and makes me muck about with my blindfolds and my books. That’s the problem with the damned Empire these days…All these complacent bastards think the only thing that matters is which tiny beast is dancing in your blood, altering your brain, making you see and feel and think differently. The person an enhancement is paired with is just as important as what enhancement they get. And we get some say in what kind of person we are, Din. We do not pop out of a mold. We change. We self-assemble.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I sensed she wasn’t willing to talk on it further.
“How are we going to pursue this, ma’am?” I asked.
“Well, first off, Blas surely had a secretary,” said Ana. “Someone to manage his day-to-day affairs. We need to get ahold of them, whoever they are, and get them in front of me. Then I take them apart.” She ripped out a piece of parchment and began writing. “This will take time—I’ve no doubt his secretary is stationed in the next canton, and it’s the wet season, so things must be hectic as fuck-all for the Engineers—but it must be done.” She shoved the message in my hands to take to the post station. “Next, I want you to get in touch with the Apoths. Have them check the pipes of the bath. The dappleglass might have been washed away into a drain. I’ll want to confirm that and have them examine it, if so.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“I’ll also need you to get the materials from Gennadios,” she said. “All the dates for Blas’s visits. Whoever killed him knew exactly when he was coming here, so they’ve been watching him for some time. The bigger issue being, I bet Blas spent a lot of time at the sea walls in the next canton—Tala. A very busy one, with its own Iudex division, and its own investigator. Our abilities to trot over there and start kicking over stones are limited, unless we get something really good.”
“Something really good?”
“Yes—something really solid indicating this badness with Blas extends to Tala. But I’m guessing it does. Blas was in bed with the Hazas…and the Hazas definitely have a foothold in the capital of the canton, in Talagray. If we follow this all the way, it may take us there. I’m just not sure when.”
I watched her. There was a queer ferocity in her face now.
“Is there something personal with you and the Haza family, ma’am?” I asked.
“I am decidedly impersonal with all persons, Din,” she said. “Makes it easier when I have to send them to the scaffold. But the Hazas really are a bunch of rotten bastards. I wouldn’t mind seeing all their progeny rotting in the ground like a bunch of fucking dead dogs.”
“I…” I coughed. “I see, ma’am. I was just wondering if that was why you’d asked me to bring Gennadios.”
“Oh, partially. I didn’t really need her to confirm my hunch. I mostly wanted you to bring her so I could fuck up her day. She sounded like such an awful turd.”
“Then why did you also ask for the servant girl, ma’am?”
“Dunno. I needed Uxos to feel comfortable coming. And three just feels better than two, doesn’t it?”
“And your claim about sending two Iudex guards to check on Uxos’s hut? I don’t believe you asked me to arrange that.”
“Ah, that bit was just a lie,” she said. “I just wanted him to move. And he did!” She grinned triumphantly. “How fun it is, when things work out!”
* * *
—
AFTER WE FINISHED, I readied to depart to make my formal report to the Iudex Magistry. I noticed that Ana looked very relaxed, and far less manic than she had in the last few weeks, and commented upon it.
“Of course I feel better,” she said, slipping on her blindfold to see me out. “Fiddling with something interesting is a very elating thing. And this murder is proving quite interesting.”
