A knock at her door, and Sigrun looked up, flipping the files into her drawer, and prepared to smile. It’s just new people. It’s not the end of the world. Pretend they’re new-fangled calculi.
Her new teammates entered, looking curiously at her, and Sigrun began the dance that she was all too used to, among outsiders. All of them looked older than she did, physically, at least, and their body-language—other than Mazatl’s—at first suggested that they were . . . uncomfortable. Caught in the midst of cognitive dissonance, anyway. They believed that they were older, had seniority . . . and yet, here she had an office with a window. Damn it.
Haka Gho turned out to be a short, rather bony man, with a gaunt face, glasses over his kohl-rimmed eyes, and a shaved head, like many another Egyptian man. He wore linen slacks and a long, loose white shirt of cotton, and fidgeted nervously on entering and clasping her wrist, dark eyes moving up and down along her body, rapidly. “I’d rather hoped you’d be one of the nieten,” he admitted, unabashedly, and Sigrun’s eyebrows crinkled. “There are so many of them, both here and in Alexandria. I just . . .thought you’d, well, be one of them.”
“I am not,” Sigrun said, and once again, gave some serious thought to kicking Adam in the shins when she got him alone. I remember when we two sat down to decide on our teammates together. But then, we were in charge of a detail, then, and now . . . not as such. She forced her expression to blankness. “So, I understand that you are an Atenist?”
“Oh, well, yes. At least, my family is. I’m not religious about my religion. I mean, I’m not fanatical about it.” A vague sort of smile in her direction, and a slightly nervous expression. “I don’t bring my pamphlets to work, anyway.”
All right, this might be . . . manageable. Ptah was one, too, after all. Sigrun forced her lips to quirk up, and said, more mildly, “So, I must ask, how you regard the Assassin on the tomb wall of Nefertiti. I apologize if the question makes you uncomfortable. Godslayer lore is a hobby.”
Behind the glasses, the kohl-rimmed eyes bulged for a moment. “You have some . . . odd hobbies, then.” He paused. “I like it.” From the focus of his eyes, he wasn’t talking about the Assassin. At all.
Sigrun’s voice cooled slightly. “And the Assassin?”
“Um, well . . . I tend to think that if the Aten is . . . the real god? The one behind all the other gods, the creator of the universe? He . . . kind of didn’t need Akhenaten slaughtering the other gods. He should be above . . . petty stuff like that.” Gho began to rub his arms, as if chilly. “So, the Assassin probably did us all a favor, but looking at that picture—which is in every one of our temples, mind you—gives me the shakes.”
Ayala turned out to be lovely, with dark, wavy hair knotted back from her face, olive skin, and dark eyes, paired with a warm smile. She accepted a wrist-clasp from Sigrun, and asked, “Oh, it’ll be wonderful having another woman on the team. How are you settling into Jerusalem?”
“Quite well, as I have lived here since 1956,” Sigrun returned, and watched the lips drop open, the blink of surprise, and then the way both she and Haka Gho obviously started doing mental math. Yes, yes, seventeen years.
“Oh, so you’re an older woman. Nice,” Gho said, cheerfully. “I thought, since the propraetor retired three years ago, that you were . . . thirty at most, and just well-preserved.”
Sigrun gave him a direct, and level stare, but it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on him. Oh, gods. He’s the oblivious type. Hints do not work. They just . . . slide away from them.
Ayala blinked, and recovered. “Oh. So, you’re . . . not a recent immigrant. Why do . . . why do you live here, anyway?”
“I am married to a Judean.”
“Oh, really? What does he do? Is he in the gardia?” Nothing but polite interest.
“He is a Praetorian, the same as I am. I took a leave of absence to help in the north for the past three years, while he remained here.”
Ayala took a seat in front of the desk, pulling her heels up and setting them on the edge of the chair, and said, sympathetically, “Oh, that’s difficult. A lot of marriages break up when a couple’s divided like that. Why, I heard that the sub-commander here and his wife were on the outs, for exactly that reason. He’s stationed here, and she won’t come live here, or something like that.” She shook her head. “He always has such sad eyes. I’d love to cheer him up.”
Mazatl had, at this point, put a large hand over his face and eyes. Sigrun registered that, peripherally, as Ayala rattled on, “I heard he worked on the propraetor’s detail for a long time. I assume you two know each other? Sub-commander ben Maor, that is?”
Sigrun’s sense of humor had evaporated by now, and she noticed Gho wrap his arms around his torso, shivering, as he glanced up at the air conditioning vent. “You are pleased to jest with me?” Sigrun suggested, after a moment, evenly. “This is a team-building joke of some type?”
Ayala uncurled in her chair, suddenly looking wary. “Ah . . . no?”
Sigrun didn’t release the younger woman’s eyes from her stare. Mazatl Itztli coughed into his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, quietly. “My father sends his regards to you and your husband, Agent Caetia. He’s told me a lot about working with you and Agent ben Maor over the years.”
She saw the oh god no expression cross Ayala’s face before the younger woman closed her eyes. Sigrun then turned her head entirely towards Mazatl, and smiled. “I’m sure he has little good to say. On both of our last two missions together, Ehecatl was wounded. How is he, anyway? I haven’t had a letter from him in years, and I’ve tried to stay in touch with him, Ptah, and Zoskales.” She frowned. “Two, three years . . . no, longer. Since before I was up in the north.”
“He’s doing well. He’s fifty-four now, still training Jaguar warriors. Terror of our calmecacs, really.” Mazatl studied her, his dark eyes opaque.
“I see from your record that you were sent into Tawantinsuyu after the earthquakes?”
“Yes. Terrible business, that.” His voice was distant. “Turned mostly into body retrieval, though my unit fought a few of those stone creatures.”
“Cherufe, or do you mean supay?”
“Both.” He paused. “I have to admit, I want to know what horrible thing will befall Judea.”
Sigrun blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“My father’s never said what you were doing there, but all of you were in Nahautl for the collapse of the Pyramid of the Sun. You were there when the earthquakes started in Tawantinsuyu. At least you were in Rome for the whole business in Fennmark, but I’m thinking of starting an office pool on what will happen here with you in permanent residence. I think smart money is on flood.”
Sigrun arched her eyebrows at him, and smiled, faintly. She could accept that, from Mazatl. He might not be his father, but he was . . . close enough for government work, as Livorus might have said. “Save your coin. My sister, who’s a Pythia at Delphi, calls this place an undying land.”
“Ah, so you do have an inside track on this. I’ll put my coin on nothing at all, and clean up from the others later.” His wicked grin was the image of his father’s, and gave Sigrun a pang. They pass by so quickly.
With introductions out of the way, they headed out to their first real assignment—a body had been found in one of the refugee housing areas. Judean gardia was treating it as a murder, and the refugees in the area were refusing to speak with them.
Many of the refugees had tried building shacks and huts in place of their tents, and had been discouraged by the authorities from doing so; they’d eventually been shuffled out into low-income housing, mostly apartment complexes, hastily built. Sigrun was used to a certain amount of recognition among her own people. Nothing had really prepared her for being mobbed as soon as they entered the housing area, people coming down out of five and six-story apartment buildings and flooding the street. “Valkyrie! Valkyrie, over here, please, just a moment of your time!” “Valkyrie, please, we have an injured man over
here, he hurt himself with a nail-gun, went right through his hand—” “Valkyrie, please—”
I knew it was bad, from Fritti’s descriptions, but I did not know how bad. Sigrun had to give the host city credit; they were trying. But there were just too many people for such small places, and two-thirds of the faces she saw, had . . . wolf eyes. Claws. Scales. Horns. Many of them were trying to hide the changes to their bodies and faces. Some had sawed off their antlers. Many women wore scarves or hoods, and many of the men wore hats. But nothing could really disguise what they were now. Nieten. More of Loki’s children. She walked into the crowd, enduring the hands on her arms and shoulders. Clasped hands, made the sign of Tyr on this baby’s head or that. Pulled the nail out of the injured man’s hand, and healed it, telling him, “You should be more careful,” with a grimace as her own hand began to bleed, freely.
“I will. Just was trying to fix the roof. Landlord’s a little slow to respond, and it rained last night. Leaked right in on us. I figured I’d just try to get a patch on it, you know?”
Sigrun winced as the wound healed. Made a mental note to talk to Fritti and Adam about the housing conditions. Spoke with a few other people as she worked her way through the crowd, usually, after a look for permission, lifting the shawls away from people’s faces, and telling them, calmly, that they looked very well and healthy to her. “You ever try to get a job, looking like this, æðeles ides?” one of the women said, bitterly, gesturing down at a body completely covered in sleek black scales. Noble lady, she’d said, and the respectful address was almost a curse. “I could hire myself out as a prostitute or a dancer, but no one would have me as a secretary or a teacher for their children. Not now.”
Sigrun looked down into the woman’s very human blue eyes. No hair, of course. The features were only slightly obscured by the very fine scales on the face. Sigrun let the rune-scars show, just a little. A bare trickle of energy, to let them all see, around her, that there wasn’t a part of her body that wasn’t marked, in some way. “You will not believe me, but I think that you are beautiful as you are. Do you have a background in education, or clerical work? I might be able to find you a position in either. Our people need to be seen. As they are. And not hide in the shadows, ashamed.”
Sigrun got a half-dozen names, including that of the woman with the scales, and finally pushed her way through the crowd to where the other Praetorians had found their target address. “Prostitution?” Sigrun asked them, as she arrived. “There is demand for nieten in this?” It was legal, though very strictly regulated in Judea. Judean women were forbidden to enter the profession, which meant that all those in the local Imperial brothels were . . . imports. Though I’m sure that there are a few male whores in those institutions as well. Tight regulation and heavy sanitary restrictions prevailed, of course, as with every other brothel in the Empire.
“Oh, yes, definitely!’ Gho informed her, breezily. “Some of them are really amazing dancers, too, especially the scaled ones. I personally like the House of the Veils.” His heavy brows crinkled a little as Sigrun stared at him. “I go watch every dies Jovis. The crowds are a little crazy at the end of the work-week, but that’s when the dancers expect to make the best tips. Of course, dancing is just the warm-up act. The advertisement for the rest of the House’s services.” He paused. “Is there something between my teeth? You keep staring at me.”
I could request a different summoner. But I don’t think Adam placed me with him of his own free will. This reeks of a mandate from above. Which means that if I complain, and cannot deal with him on my own, I will sound like a complaining bitch with whom no one will wish to work. On top of which, since this job is . . . something of a step down for me . . . I will sound arrogant. Sigrun reminded herself that the summoner was precisely half her age, and told herself to deal with it. “Agent Gho?” she said, calmly. “Thank you for that information. I will undoubtedly be paying a visit to that house, myself—”
“—oh, really? Can I watch?” From anyone else, she’d have thought it was smarmy. From this young sorcerer, it was social tone-deafness, coupled with unsettling interest.
“—to ensure that the women are there of their own free will.” Yelling at him would be like kicking a puppy with an incontinence problem. That being said, I really like these boots, and wish that he would stop urinating on them.
Twenty minutes later, they were walking around the crime scene, a bathing chamber in a very small apartment currently shared by two families. Here Ayala pointed out that the victim had had her wrists slashed, and that there had been, in her estimation, signs of a struggle, because there were pools of water on the tile floor around the claw-footed bathtub. “This indicates that the victim was held down in the water, and she struggled, while someone cut her wrists,” Ayala told them. “In the struggle, the water came out of the tub, and splashed all around. And because she fought, that’s why they needed a couple of tries on some of the cuts.”
Mazatl frowned, looking around. “I’m . . . no expert,” the Nahautl man said slowly, “but I think that would have taken two men to do. Wouldn’t there be bruising on her arms and legs from where they held her in place? Wouldn’t there be bruising, against the back of her head, as they shoved her back into the tub? And . . . wouldn’t there have been noise?”
“Both families were away at a social gathering.” Ayala raised her hands, covered in thin rubber gloves. “The girl was alone at home. I propose that multiple assailants did this, yes. There isn’t any bruising though. You’re quite right about that. But she wasn’t cut outside the tub, and then dropped in. There’s no blood splatter anywhere else in the room. My understanding is that blood is used in many magic rituals.” Her lips curved down. “Maybe they wanted to use hers for something.”
“Then the tub wouldn’t have been filled with water,” Gho told her, pragmatically. “No summoning marks anywhere, so no one was bargaining for her blood unless they brought their spirits here with them.”
Ayala choked a little.
Sigrun frowned slightly, and stepped out of the room. Went and spoke, quietly, with the family of the girl, a devastated mother, who wasn’t a nieten. No father. No, no, he turned into one of the mad giants. Killed my grandfather and ran off before he got any of the rest of us. My mother just fell down dead, on the spot. I suppose I was one of the lucky ones. No, my daughter had no physical mutations. She complained of headaches, though, yes. Yes, they were bad.
“Colored lights?” Sigrun asked, gently.
The brother mumbled through teeth that looked like a bear’s, “Headaches. Colored lights. Hallucinations. She said sometimes she didn’t know what was real.”
Sigrun winced. This sounded familiar. “Had they been getting worse?” she asked.
“Yes. She . . . tried not to complain, but she said there were . . . cracks all around us. And she was afraid she might slip through them.”
Sigrun sighed. “I am sorry for your loss,” she told them all, and ducked back in the other room. “The family had no enemies,” she told the others. “They owed no more or less money than anyone else around them. But the girl had suffered from terrible headaches for the past three years. Colored lights. Even hallucinations.”
Ayala frowned. “What does that have to do with her being murdered?”
Suicide was a cultural blind-spot for some Judeans. Because the cultural prohibition was so strong against it—to the point where suicides could not be buried with others—some Judeans would consciously or subconsciously suppress what they knew was the real cause of death, so as not to cause the family any further distress. Sigrun sighed and put a hand down on the cold forehead of the girl in the tub, and flinched. For an instant, othersight was undeniable, and she could see through the girl’s eyes. The colors were neon-bright, seething across her vision, stabbing into her brain. She couldn’t close it off. It was always there. Not like Kanmi and Minori; they can reach out with their senses, or not, as they choose. And this is Judea, where magic is not studied
. She slipped through the cracks, undetected and untrained. It felt like something was stabbing into her brain, like a shard of the sun. I should be grateful that Freya helped me suppress this as much as she did. This feels . . . like a brain tumor.
The girl’s eyes had tracked down as she’d on the edge of the tub, and she’d taken a knife first to her wrists, hesitating the first time, cutting uncertainly. No sense of the thoughts behind the motions. No sense of the motivations. Just raw data, like watching through a camera. “I think that when you measure the cuts and the angles properly, and examine the knife, you will come to the conclusion that she cut herself, and then let herself fall back into the tub, which overflowed,” Sigrun said, snatching her hand away from the girl’s head, shoving it behind her back, so that no one could see her shaking. “She may have suddenly become . . . aware of magic. Or it could have been a brain-tumor. An autopsy can rule out the latter, if nothing else. I will . . . make a note to send sorcerers through the refugee areas, to see how many people may be more sensitive to magic now, than before.”
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