Cyrion, page 8
The tiny mouth was sucked in and for a second disappeared, returning moist and avid. “She was—well formed. But I have explained. I am celibate and disciplined.”
“However,” wondered Cyrion, “did she get by your guard at all?”
“Oh, she would come to me in my role as physician—I attend the entire household, even the servants—and say her head ached, or her heart beat too quickly. After the first examinations, when I learned her drift, I was wary. Though she constantly approached me.”
“Remarkable. When was the last time she tried this foolish assault on your virtue?”
“The day before her death. The usual tale. She put my hand upon her breast before I could snatch it away.” Naldinus breathed heavily. “I found it easy to refuse her.”
“Despite your ministrations, she died of the poison. Did that disturb you?”
“No. I did my best for her, but the—the corruption was too far advanced. I was powerless.”
“Dear me,” said Cyrion.
He rose and stretched, catlike. The four in the tomb, and maybe the fifth dead one, waited for him in a vast new soundlessness.
“I have,” said Cyrion, “just a single question. It concerns you all.”
Jolan, who had sat up, his head upon his fist, said dully: “You had better ask it, then.”
“We have established,” said Cyrion, “that I am not the first passerby you have forcibly elected to judge you. What I should like to know is the number of my predecessors.”
Radri snapped out: “You need not trouble with that. Suffice it to say they got the answer wrong. And paid for it.”
“If I assure you,” said Cyrion, with enormous patience, “that the answer to my question profoundly affects my judgment, will you consider telling me then?”
Jolan got up. He glared at Cyrion, distraught, and rasped defiantly:
“Do you want an exact number? There have been—over forty.”
Cyrion nodded. “That will do.” He reseated himself. He said: “And now I am ready to tell you the identity of the murderer.”
* * *
• • •
“To begin with,” said Cyrion, “my opinion of Marival is that she was indeed all Sabara supposes her, and maybe more. But that a woman so driven by unconfidence, despite such beauty, to prey on and destroy the lives of those around her, in order to have proof of her ability, is more to be pitied than hated. On the other hand, if any laid this fate on you, this anguished and interminable search for the truth, it was she. Though she is free and you remain in torture, I think it was her final jest with you, an ultimate demonstration of her power over you. You are still her slaves. And she has seen to it that all of you have other deaths to burden you, aside from hers—the hapless judges you killed when they failed to solve the mystery and set you at liberty from guilt and indecision. As the nomads say, you have torn down the wall in seeking the broken brick.
“But now I will tell you the real story of the afternoon and the night of Marival’s death.
“In the afternoon, Radri forced his way into Marival’s chamber. She was restless and reluctant to join him in their normal duet, and an argument ensued. During this argument, the lady informed the steward that she was done with him, being about to make a splendid marriage amid her peers. Radri, who for some while had scented imminent retirement from her service, had a desire to snap her neck. Aside from her physical enticements, he had spent his life worming into the family’s good graces, hoping eventually not merely to be treated as its son, but actually to become such. Marival had seemed as eager as he was, and he had even once put to her, to stress the genuine burnish of his feelings, a scheme that they run away together and wed. Radri had hoped every day to get his mistress with child. He, perhaps too trustingly, believed Jolan could not dispossess her, but would settle on them both a generous marriage endowment. Now, with Marival’s retreat, Radri beheld disappointment no less crushing for being feared. But he did not dislocate her neck, which in any event would have been an act something obvious of its instigator. Radri is vain. He had an idea that aloof Sabara might be yearning for him, and that he need only bend his charms on her to win her. There would be no point to that, however, if he had only her paltry share of the inheritance to look forward to. Conversely, though, if Marival were dead, Sabara would succeed to Marival’s portion in the general way. Of course, her death must be of natural appearance—but blood poisoning is hardly uncommon. Radri had already planned, and doubtless had the remedy about him for some time. He got it the way any in the house might get it, by going to the priest on some pretext of indisposition. To rummage among the herbs might be a trifle incriminating, but, while Naldinus tinkered over a healing potion for an invented complaint, what could be more simple than inadvertently to wipe up a smear from his dissecting bench, ripe with the toxics of decayed tissue. Many know the poison inherent in mortified flesh, particularly those who have seen the soldier’s side of a battlefield, which Radri has. This rather nasty bane Radri either introduced into the wine or food of Marival at dinner, or, more probably, clasped against her skin. The smallest scratch would be sufficient doorway to let in almost certain death.”
Radri rose slowly from the couch. His eyes bulged, his face was convulsed.
“You say it is I, then?”
“I say,” said Cyrion, “that you used poison against Marival. Now sit down, and let me continue.”
Staring, his mouth open, Radri crashed back on the couch.
Cyrion went on.
“Sabara had heard the quarrel from her own apartments, and her fury with her sister reached its summit. Her desperation was mainly to protect Jolan, her brother, whom none of you, even she, have ever properly noticed that she loved. No doubt her self-admitted envy of Marival (a misguided envy, for Sabara has twice the resource and fascination of her pathetic sister, had she only realized) played a large part in what she determined to do. Entering Marival’s room, Sabara reasoned with her. They drank wine together. Marival sulked at the day’s heat. Marival scorned Sabara’s counsel and her demand for peace to be made. It is actually doubtful if peace could have been made by then, and maybe Sabara knew as much, her debate with Marival merely the excuse for what came next.
“I would say,” said Cyrion gently, “one of the lady’s many rings was ready-primed, either from Naldinus’ store or by her own knowledge of drugs and magic. Whatever the ring carried, she caused to spill in Marival’s cup. Some slow-acting powder, most likely to induce sleep and to kill in the sleep. I do not think Sabara’s hygienic mind would let her stoop to inflicting anything messy or agonizing. It was a legal execution to Sabara. She was hangman, not torturer.”
Sabara’s fortitude had deserted her. She sank in a chair, hiding her eyes, and whispered. “You do accuse me. You do.”
“I state facts,” said Cyrion. “Radri poisoned Marival. So did you. And now I am going on.”
“Jolan saw Marival at some point before dinner. He was suffering beneath his new knowledge of her, her carnal frolicking, her predatory demands to be married to a rich nobleman. Jolan was in love with Marival, and writhed at his incestuous desires, all the more so since they had never been gratified, while those of so many men apparently had. At the interview, Jolan eventually refused to make a match between his elder sister and any lord of the city. His motive, he probably declared, was that her unchaste state, learned on the wedding night, would bring humiliation and dishonor to her house. Marival, whose temper was on short leash, accordingly gave Jolan the verbal lashing of his life. In those moments, worship turned to antipathy. He was adept enough to conjure some sorcerous blight to blast her, he did not need to resort to poison at the dinner table. Indeed, by dinner time, the spell was already cast, was it not, Lord Jolan?”
“Yes,” Jolan said. Dry-eyed, he stared into the rug. “Just as you say. As I hazard you have been correct with all of us. Three stinking murderers. It is almost a vile and horrible joke.”
“It gets,” said Cyrion, “better still.”
“During the meal, Marival gasped, caught at her throat and side and presently lost consciousness. Each of the trio, concealing their guilty joy and horror from each other, saw Marival to her bed. There, as her state worsened, each of you, thinking you alone had been responsible, trembled and palpitated, awaiting the end. But the end did not come at once, and at last you stole away to nurse your terrors and your righteousness. You left Marival to the ministrations of Naldinus.” Cyrion looked up, and at the priest. The man’s hollow and aesthetic eyes winced and hooded over. “Naldinus,” said Cyrion, “priest—scholar—magician—physician—innovator. Celibate Naldinus. Disciplined Naldinus, whose creed does not permit him to lie with living feminine flesh.
“Naldinus,” said Cyrion, “knew the mood of the house. He needed no scholarship in medicine to deduce what ailed Marival, and it is conceivable—you must not be modest, sir—that he thought he might have saved her. But Naldinus, alone in the bedchamber with this half-dead lady, had become possessed by two overwhelming concepts. The first he put into practice swiftly, administering the potion by some insidious method known to the physician. It was not, you understand, a restorative. It was a seal to what had gone before, something that made absolutely sure that Marival would never open her eyes again upon this world. It was also the first important stage of the embalming procedure. His best experiment yet. And when she was securely dead, my friends, Naldinus gave rein to the second concept. He did with Marival that which he had always wanted to do, but which his office had not permitted him, while she lived.”
Radri and Jolan had both risen with appropriate spasmodic cries. Sabara lay eclipsed in her chair, unmoving. Naldinus glided backward until his shoulders rested on the wall of the tomb.
“I’ll gut you,” said Radri, his bluster frighteningly gone to a hiss, “I’ll stuff your entrails through your putrid mouth—”
“I believe,” said Cyrion, in a soft chill tone that somehow stopped the men in their tracks, “that you are forgetting the uselessness of such an act. I would remind you, gentlemen and lady, that you have all committed a heinous crime against the woman on the bed. None of you has any right to take arms against any other. Nor have you had, as yet, your delivering omen, the omen you were promised, I can only conclude, by the unquiet ghost of Marival.”
Radri turned on Cyrion with frustrated anger.
“You have it there—no omen. Indeed, all this is probably a bag of lies, spun by you to deflect our wrath. I never admitted your charge. Nor did the priest there, nor Sabara. And if Jolan did, well, he is mad. How dared you offer us such a preposterous dish of dung! We all four poisoned Marival! How did you arrive at that?”
“Your equal appearances of and motives for culpability,” said Cyrion lightly. “Allied to your avowal that over forty judges (although I think there have been rather more) had been employed by you to unearth the truth. Even out of forty, by the laws of chance alone, one at least should have hit on the identity of the assassin. Which led me to assume you had all, at one time or another, been accused. Since your omen had still failed you, I came to the conclusion you had collectively had fingers in the pie.”
“But since the omen still fails,” grated Jolan suddenly, “you also are in error. Each of us is guilty of the attempt, but who is responsible for my sister’s death?”
“All of you, by intent,” said Cyrion. “None of you, in fact.”
There was an outcry. Even Sabara roused herself to stare at him. Even the priest crept half a step forward once more.
“Egomania, I am afraid,” said Cyrion, “has been the undoing of you. You have suffered for uncountable years, from the lingering unsatisfied malice of Marival. She fastened on your guilt and drove you to excesses, and all because you saw nothing in your world capable of murder, save yourselves. But there was another killer in the house that day. I would guess Naldinus guesses too, of the four of you, and perhaps he guessed that night, though if he did, his resultant actions were ridiculously foolhardy. I make no indictment there. Nevertheless, if he had examined Marival as she wished, the day before her death, he would have had some inkling. No, she was not in pursuit of your virtue that time, priest, it had verity, her aching head, her pounding heart beneath her breast. And the next day, her short temper, her complaint of the heat. . . . My poor babies, as each of you poisoned her, she was already dying. Marival had the plague. It was plague that struck her down at dinner. It was plague which, left to itself, would have finished her.”
“But I closed the house!” Jolan cried, with inappropriate and ludicrous indignation.
“And before you closed it, you provisioned it. A sick baker, or butcher, or vintner, or even a seller of lamp oil.”
“Gods!” Jolan cried, like a great and terrible choking. “Gods! Gods!”
And then the priest shrilled and jumped all the way from the bed to Sabara’s chair.
For the lovely embalmed woman was crumbling, turning into snow and into ash and into a fine white pollen that melted and was no more. In a few seconds nothing remained of that luminous body save a faint imprint in the embroidered sheet.
“The omen?” Cyrion asked. “Or would it be a faulty embalming?”
Dawn was breaking, the amorous shade of Sabara’s hair, as Cyrion walked out on to the street. His leave-taking of the eccentric family had been swift as the deliberations before had been lengthy, which had not surprised him. As for the promised reward, he had been handed a key. He would find a chest on the north side of the Remusan temple. . . . Another might have thought he was being fobbed off, but Cyrion knew quite well that he was not.
Marival had set her ghostly curse on them. Its effects were more apparent than they knew, even through their sorcerous disguises. In the wake of her embalmment, unease, next suspicion, accusation—and, unavoidable, nemesis. And when she had hunted them to the brink and beyond, Marival had cast the last despair upon them, and only one who solved their plight, and its deception, could set them free.
Just before the magic door had reappeared to let him out, Cyrion’s concluding sight of the family had shown Naldinus huddled on the floor, and Radri and Jolan leaning on each other for support—they would not have long for that renewal of comradeship, just till sun-up. But they—even the priest—had seemed glad, relieved, as well they might, that it was over. Jolan’s voice was so harsh beneath the tall collar that probably he had been throttled, and no doubt by Radri. Radri had rubbed his chest: the memory of a stabbing at Jolan’s dying hand? Sabara’s voice had been whole and beautiful, so most likely it was the veins of her wrists she had cut, the marks hidden under the gold bracelets. She would have done it in a bath of hot water, the traditional female suicide of Remusa. For they were all Remusans. Despite their changed names, their sorcerous overlay—which translated their apparel, their furnishings where essential, into the current mode—despite their sorcerous ability, being dead, to speak one of the new tongues of the land they were still forced to frequent, once a year, on the deathnight of Marival. Marival, more dead than they, but free as they were not.
The child sun flew abruptly over the pillars of the forum on its young wings. Cyrion turned, and the house was gone, and the garden, and the marble tomb. He had anticipated nothing else.
Naldinus had died of the plague, some lingering germ of it, having seen the others go before him. That had a certain justice. And wherever they were now, they were no longer in the earthly hell. Unable to confess, they had pleaded to be given peace, pleaded with tears, cries and ghoulish murders.
Only Sabara had watched Cyrion depart. Sabara—her name alone was Remusan, unchanged. There was some nuance beyond words in her eyes. But there were only minutes then before sunrise, and now no time at all.
A peculiar unevenness ran over the waste ground that led off the street to the steps of the Remusan fane. It seemed to mark some ancient boundary, not illogically, the wall of a house. The bones had been found here, the bones of more than forty—many, many more—who had failed four angry guilt-ridden mad ghosts.
On the temple’s north side grew a slim green tree. The earth about its roots was colossally displaced, as if by an earth tremor that had strangely vandalized no other spot. Among the earth lay a large box of gilded iron, in portions gone to rust.
The key fitted the lock, which broke on the twist, yet somehow sprang open. Cyrion pushed back the lid.
Within, two gold collars, one with a pendant portrait of a black-haired woman, surrounded by sapphires and rubies; several pearl talismans; a richly jeweled dagger; five cups of hammered silver (yes, who would not have detected that rich Remusan wine of which poets sang, and to which sunset oceans and blood and women’s lips had been compared?); a heap of glittering flawless rings; two bracelets of gold. Only Marival had not left him her jewels. Great antiquity had turned everything a little dim, had given it a fine green tarnish, more fabulous than the metal, like treasure redeemed from the sea. In weight alone, it would be stupendously valuable. In antique worth, it would be next to priceless.
Cyrion left the casket open, for the lucky ones to find, whoever they were, when they came by. He took with him a solitary thing. A single slender bracelet of greenish gold, which for twelve centuries or more, though only on one night of the year, had clasped Sabara’s wrist.
3rd Interlogue
The noon dinner was being served at the Honey Garden. The succulent kid was coming in with loaves of golden bread and platters of vegetables fried crisply in oil and pepper. The delirious smells had roused even the soldier from the stupor into which the scholar’s complex narration had thrown him. Roilant, however, had remained alert throughout.
“That is really—very clever,” he said, as the main dish was placed on his table.
“Thank you,” said the slave modestly.
