Guilt Edged Ivory

by Doris Egan

  "Where do we stand?" asked Eliana suddenly, pushing her long dark hair back over her shoulder.

  Leel consulted her paper. "Twenty-six on this last round for you, which puts you six under Kylla, twelve over Auntie, and eighteen over Theodora."

  "Six under Kylla?" She frowned. "Are you including my bonus points for a perfect flush?"

  Leel held out her paper. Kylla, looking a trifle irritated, said, "Perhaps you'd like to check the math, dear. I'd hate to take advantage of a schoolgirl."

  Eliana took the paper, looked it over, and stated, "This is a nine, not a six, Leel. Raise me three points."

  Kylla bent her head to peer at the scribbles. "It looks like a six to me," she said.

  "Advanced age can have that effect on one's eyesight," replied Eliana. "Take my word for it, elder sister, it's a nine."

  Leel Canerol and Auntie Jace began talking very quickly. "Would you like another hand?" asked Leel, gathering the cards without waiting for an answer.

  "That would be delightful," said Auntie at once. "Or maybe we should all get some tah. Theodora, what do you—"

  Kylla said, "Possibly those long sleeves of yours brushed the figure and smudged it, beloved sister. I meant to compliment you on that robe when I first walked in, by the way; it would have been very fashionable, let me see, about six years ago?"

  "Look at the time!" I said. "Ky, shouldn't we—"

  "I suppose you would be the expert on antique fashions," agreed Eliana.

  Kylla's aristocratic nostrils were starting to flare, not a good sign. Eliana went on, "And it's true, these extra-long sleeves do get in the way. Perhaps you can lend me one of your lace bands to tie them back."

  Ran's grandmother had worn lace sleevebands. I rose to my feet. "We must be going," I said.

  The two of them sat without moving. I said, "Kylla," through gritted teeth. Finally, finally, she stood up.

  Eliana smiled at her and said, "So sorry you have to go. I did enjoy our game, and I must compliment you on your calligraphy when you accepted our messenger's invitation. So very elegant. Who wrote it for you?"

  "I'm glad you enjoyed it, dear. Who read it to you?"

  Kylla turned to leave just as a snarling sound erupted from Eliana's throat and she sprang to her feet. The. little card table crashed over and Eliana grabbed Kylla's arms from behind. It looked as though she were trying to climb up Ky's back.

  Kylla whirled around, knocking her away. Leel Canerol made a dive for her charge and missed. Eliana scrambled up and aimed an enthusiastic but poorly taught blow at Kylla, which she blocked. I threw aside the door hanging and yelled, "Assistance! Steward!"

  Coalis was standing in the passage. I heard a loud slap from behind; somebody had made skin contact. Coalis strode past me and got between the two contenders just as Leel managed to imprison Eliana's arms. He raised his hands, palms up, to Kylla, looking vulnerable with his shirt off. "Our apologies. Our apologies," he got out. There was a red hand-shaped spot on Kylla's cheek and she was breathing hard. "Our apologies," he said again. "We humbly beg forgiveness."

  After a moment, she nodded. Her eyes swept over the room like those of an heir who's just inherited a piece of land too poor to be impressed by. She turned and strode out.

  I followed. A hand tugged at my robe in the passage to slow me down, and Coalis said, "That was something, wasn't it? I had no idea this would happen when I sent the invitation!"

  I stared. "You sent the invitation?"

  "Why not? I'm first son now, I don't have to ask permission to invite people home."

  "Coalis… does the phrase 'asking for trouble' mean anything to you?"

  "Oh, but it was splendid, wasn't it? What entertainment!"

  I stopped, looked him in the eye, and said, "You are fooling with things you don't really understand."

  "Come on, Theodora, I only wanted to see what would happen. What do you think they would have done if there'd been weapons at hand?"

  His face wore its usual calm, but his eyes were glowing. "This family has even more problems than the Cormal-lons," I muttered.

  "Pardon?"

  "I said I have to go now. Kylla will need company home."

  "Oh. Well, you're always welcome back. Kylla, too, of course."

  "Our thanks," I got out, bowed my stiffest bow, and ran after my sister-in-law.

  Leel Canerol caught up with me in the garden. "Please, gracious lady, I'd like to ask you not to mention this incident to Lord Porath."

  I stopped short, remembering this morning's exhibition. "Would he beat her?" I kept my voice low. Kylla was ahead of us, at the gate, and I didn't want to put the idea into her head.

  "He never has before, lady. But he can make things very difficult for everyone in the house when he's unhappy."

  "I see."

  "And—I couldn't help overhearing Coalis—if Lord Porath finds out his son is responsible for this, there could be a second lesson with the strap for him. Now, Grandmother was in her room with a headache this morning, but if she finds out Coalis got beaten, she'll make Lord Porath's life a misery. And if his life is a misery, we may as well all move to the provinces and change our names."

  "Yes, I do see your point. Look, I see no reason to mention anything to Lord Porath, but I can't answer for Kylla."

  "You might speak with her… when she's in a better frame of mind."

  "Umm. I'll do what I can, that's all I can promise."

  "My thanks," she said, and bowed, giving a wry smile when her head came up that suggested she knew very well I was wondering why she worked for the Poraths.

  I shook my head. The smile became a grin. "Oh, it's not so bad," she said. "I've worked around, and they're probably the least trouble of any of the Six Families."

  "Heaven help us all," I said.

  She threw me a casual salute and loped back to the porch.

  Chapter 16

  I gave Kylla my caneblood necklace for safekeeping, explaining that I needed to go somewhere right now and didn't want to wear it. I didn't trouble to be specific, since she clearly wasn't listening to me in any case; but I watched to make sure she put the necklace safely in her wallet.

  Then she took the carriage we'd come in and rode away, looking abstracted, leaving me to start a long trek across the city to the remains of the northwest wall. It took a good hour and a half in the midday heat, and five minutes into the walk I was sweating freely into my party clothes and thinking about a cool bath. The North Gate, where the groundcars and wagons pass through, was several streets to the east, but I'd remembered seeing a footpath for pedestrians near here that ought to lead out a door in the wall and along the east bank of the river.

  So it did. Wildflowers and garbage lined the bank. Once past the wall there were very few people around, and I was glad I'd given Ky the necklace. Still, at least I could see far enough ahead and behind me to know I wasn't being followed. The path branched into two routes here, one well above the bank, among the red and blue flowers, and one leading down to the muddy path beside the water. I took the drier and prettier way. There was a shed set back from the banks, where a sorrel dog barked and laundry flapped in the breeze off the river. The dog, working himself up to a pitch of excitement few manic psychotics could match, gave me to understand that, if it were not for the inconvenience of a wood-and-wire fence, he would have been happy to lunge at me and tear off a few limbs. He threw himself at the fence several times, in fact, and I wondered just how sturdy it was.

  Other than that, there were no human habitations, not till one got out several kilometers into the country and the farms began. But about a quarter of an hour from the wall I came on a section of field and riverbank that the city was using, whether officially or not, as a junkyard. Old tables lay sunken halfway deep in river mud; cracked pottery, broken glass in rainbow colors, and metal parts covered the ground. There were stacks of old used paper with government officialese on the portions that could still be read. River rats prowled, looking interested. And down by
the bottom path, a but had been made of wood boards and junkyard metal; the hut, if Stereth were right, of Moros, the sorcerer who'd killed Kade from Catmeral Bridge.

  Well, I knew for sure that he wasn't home. That didn't necessarily mean the hut was empty, of course. A route had been cleared through the junk and garbage down to the hut, and I followed it past an old solo wagonseat, a set of broken tah-tables, three benches, and part of a bed.

  There was a tiny window near the door, shuttered over. I pulled the door handle, then pushed, then gave as good a kick as I could. It opened.

  The hut was empty. I stepped inside and found myself in a one-room home with cluttered shelves, a stove in the middle of the door with an iron railing around it, a tiny old-fashioned desk stuffed with papers (out of place in its baroque elegance), and a small wooden counter with covered jars of foodstuffs. Some unidentiable piece of meat hung by a string from the ceiling; it was just beginning to go bad. A sort of hammock arrangement had been egged in one corner with a sleeping pallet and a pulley.

  All just waiting for Moros to return. One would think that if anyone else lived here, they would have taken down the meat by now. I pulled off my outer robe and pitched it onto the sleeping pallet. This would be a potentially boring task, but not dangerous, I decided; and I went through the food jars first.

  No, I had no idea what I was looking for. I was following the "ask questions, gather data; and maybe something will turn up" school of investigative thought. Food jars were my first choice because they seemed logically least likely to contain anything of interest; this being Ivory, I assumed secrets were more likely to be there than anywhere else.

  Moros had sugar, rice, and dried fruit. Not a man on a high budget. I opened the stove door; it was empty. I poked around beneath it for a while, then started inspecting Moros's endless collection of bottles, labeled neatly on his crowded shelves. Herbs and oddities, bits of this and that—a recipe book for sorcery, but nothing that meant anything to me.

  I stripped the bedding and looked under the mat. I knocked on floors and walls. I pulled down the oil lamp from its ceiling hook.

  Which left the desk. At least the padded stool in front of it would give me a place to sit.

  We would start clockwise, I decided. I began opening the folded papers stuffed on the far top right.

  A bill for a new robe, recent and unpaid.

  A torn employment notice for a sorcerer willing to travel to the provinces.

  Sorcery notes, apparently unrelated to drowning.

  Interesting: A series of hand sketches of the river and the junkyard outside. A family of rats sat atop the old wagon seat, looking bright-eyed and very funny. Moros was in the wrong line of work.

  Had been in the wrong line of work, anyway.

  A letter. Aha, I thought, now we get to the good stuff!

  Dearest Gernie,

  Of course I haven't forgotten you. This just isn't the right proper most convenient time for you to join me. Things are all up in the air here; it wouldn't surprise me if there was fighting in the streets before long.

  It would have surprised me. So far the summer had been pretty dull in the way of Imperial goings-on.

  So stay where you are, I implore you. Meanwhile, please accept this little help of 25 12 10 tabals. I hope it will ease things for your mother and sister.

  Give my best wishes to everyone. Truthfully, my client list isn't growing quite as quickly as I'd hoped, but I'm doing very well…

  I put down the letter. Gernie, whoever he or she was, would wonder when there was no more correspondence.

  Maybe Gernie would come to the capital to see what was the matter.

  For Moros' sake, I hoped they never tracked him as far as this place and saw how he'd been living.

  Come on, Theodora, you're getting involved again. You'll never get through all these papers if you stop and speculate on every one.

  —A review of the chakon theater-dance season, torn from the Capital News.

  —Three letters from Gernie, folded and unfolded so they were brittle with usage; Gernie's sex was still unclear but his/her passion was not. Gernie kept pleading to come to the capital to be with Moros. Some of the letters were explicit; as a strait-laced Athenan I was a bit shocked, but I must say, fascinated—

  Still, it was getting late in the afternoon. I returned the packet to its cubbyhole. A carved wooden box sat atop a pile of papers; I opened the box and turned it over.

  A mass of ticket stubs from fortune halls in the gambling district. Points for just about any kind of game I'd ever heard of and many I hadn't. Moros, like so many others, hadn't been immune to dice fever, but at least he'd accumulated a stash of tickets to be cashed in at the appropriate halls later. Of course, there was no way of telling how much of his own money he'd had to lay out to win all these. I flicked through them idly: Cloud Hill, Wheel of Illusion, Patens of Bright Gold. The man must have worked his way through every establishment on Red Tah Street. I turned over the crimson ticket from the Red Umbrella Tith Parlor:

  "IOU 85 tab. L. Broca."

  I froze.

  I turned over another. "IOU 32 tab. L. Broca."

  I started to flick them all over. Most were blank, but about half the ones from the Umbrella and the Silver Shoe had Loden's signature below an amount.

  The idiot! Giving a signature to someone you were linked with in a criminal act—

  That was an Ivoran reaction. My next one, which was Athenan, went: Wait a minute, what evidence do we actually have here? So Loden owed Moros money. Loden owed everybody money, apparently. What light could this shed on Moros's assignment on Catmeral Bridge?

  Well, as long as Kade was around, Loden's money was pretty much spoken for. Moros really didn't have a prayer of seeing any of these IOUs cashed. Probably Loden had pointed that out in self-defense.

  Would they really get together to murder Kade just to get Loden out from under? But they couldn't be sure someone else wouldn't pick up Kade's account book, as in fact someone had. Still, Stereth Tar'krim made the tossing of monkey wrenches a way of life. And given Coalis' monkish background, the odds would have seemed pretty good that once Kade was gone, the debt would vanish too.

  I sat on the stool, clutching a handful of tickets, thinking.

  Another possibility: Loden out-and-out hired Moros to kill Kade, and the IOUs were not gambling losses at all, but a plausible means of contracting to pay him after the deed.

  The world was full of options, wasn't it?

  But how did this get Moros dead, with his throat cut, that day in the market? And who were the thugs who tried to get Ran and me? And Loden was just, well, such an idiot… . Even a screwed-up sort of murder seemed beyond him, frankly.

  I wished that damned dog would stop barking back at the shack down the path; I could hear him from here. I emptied the next cubbyhole of papers irritably. The prolific Gernie, with more to say on the same subject: More sketches. A hand-drawn map of the city; nicely done, I thought. I scooped up the gambling tickets and emptied them into my belt pouch, replaced the latest set of papers, and pulled out another.

  That psychotic dog! Finally he seemed to be calming down. His impulse to murder was transitory, probably whoever was walking by the shack had passed out of canine sight.

  I got up suddenly and went to peer out the small, dirty window. Two figures were silhouetted at the top of the bank.

  Loden Broca and Trey Lesseret. There was no reason they should show up here and now, with all the hours and days since the murder to pick from. Oh, the unfairness of the gods! This went beyond coincidence, this was the malign nature of the universe revealed. I looked around the room as though expecting a solution to present itself, like a clown jumping out of a closet in a slapstick farce; but physical law remained physical law. One room. One exit. No place to conceal anything as large as a human being.

  Behind the stove—too small. Behind the desk—too small. The counter. Wait—the bed? I heaved on Moros's pulley arrangement and lowered t
he pallet. Then I tossed my outerrobe up there again, put one foot on the railing around the stove, and rolled myself up after it. Would I be able to pull the bed up higher from this position? —Yes. With difficulty. I strained on the ropes until the pallet was so close to the ceiling I was practically plastered against it, then lay there in a sweaty, clinging tangle of robes. For a second I flashed back to that moment in Trade Square when I'd looked over at the knife. Probably Loden and Trey wouldn't need to bother with knives; Trey would still have his Mercian-issue pistol. I didn't feel concealed at all. You could probably market the hormone smell I was putting out then and sell it to sadists.

  They took forever to get to the hut. It was several centuries before the door opened.

  "Kanz," said Trey's voice. "Look what I stepped in."

  Loden laughed.

  "You think it's funny now," said Trey, "but I'll track it all over the floor, and you'll have to smell it."

  "We're not going to be here that long," said Loden.

  Footsteps on the wooden boards. Trey said, "Where should we start?" Without waiting for an answer, he went on, "You take the desk and I'll take the canisters."

  The sound of jars being opened, lids tossed on the counter. Papers at the desk being thrown to the floor. Then what I assumed were the shelves of bottles being checked. Trey must have finished first and joined Loden at the desk, because I could hear both of them going through the papers.

  "I don't think they're here," said Trey.

  "They have to be here."

  More papers scrunched and tossed. The sound of boots partially muffled by discarded letters on the floor.

  "I don't think they're here," said Trey again, in the sort of voice a father uses to say: Your birthday present didn't arrive on time; be a man about it.

  "He didn't live anywhere else, this is where he lived!

  They've got to be here somewhere, we just haven't looked hard enough."

  "Could someone else have gotten here ahead of us?"

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. Your Cormallons, maybe. You said they'd been told the address."