by Sam Hawke
Tain stabbed a finger down on the Theater-Guild sigil on the map on the table, pinning Varina’s name like skewered meat. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “This ends now. We can’t keep functioning like this, not being able to trust anyone. I’m going to find out what’s going on. Today.” He stood, his jaw set and a little vein pulsing in his neck. “Are you coming?”
I nodded, not entirely sure what he planned. “Where are we going?”
“We’re going to talk to Varina,” he said, and his smile held nothing but icy anger.
* * *
Varina looked even worse than before, her nose raw, the skin cracked and almost bleeding around the nostrils, her eyes bloodshot and her usually immaculate hair and clothes in disarray. It had taken some time to find her, in the home of Hasan, her Guild favorite. He sat on the floor, naked, staring up at us with wide, wild eyes and an open mouth. The Order Guards we’d brought with us pulled up short, obviously unsure how to deal with the sight greeting us.
Tain seemed unfazed. “You’ve been keeping things from us,” he said, contempt dripping from him as he glanced around the apartment. “Start sharing.”
Varina sniffed, trying and failing for haughtiness as she hoisted the slipping fabric around her bare shoulders. “This is unacceptable.”
Tain nodded to the nearest Order Guard. “Can you assist this man to his feet, and into some clothes?”
Hasan stared, slack-jawed, as the Guard seized an arm and pulled him to his feet.
“Stop this immediately!” Varina’s voice raised an octave as the other Order Guard stepped closer. “You have no right to come here and manhandle us!”
“No one’s manhandling anyone,” Tain said, impassive. “But we have some questions about your relationship with a man named Batbayer.”
Her face tightened and her gaze snapped to her companion. He swallowed, trembling as he dressed in his discarded paluma. Tain picked up a silvery cord draped over a chair and handed it to Varina as calmly as if handing her a drink. She raised her chin and wound it around her torso and hips, watching the Order Guard with narrow eyes.
“You gave something to Batbayer,” I said to her. “Or took something from him. What was is it?”
Varina would never have fallen for something so obvious if she had been her normal self, but she couldn’t have been further from it, and I was ready. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, but her gaze flicked to the carved bone chest by the window. “Don’t you dare touch that!” she shrieked, following my gaze, trying to put herself between me and the chest. Her balance was in the same state as the rest of her, and she stumbled and fell hard against a chair. I grabbed the chest, opening it to reveal a polished horn box, long and shallow.
Varina staggered to her feet, outrage draining to fear. Her full lips quivered. Hasan’s throat worked up and down, frantic, as if he were trying to swallow a rock.
A fine gray powder rose up in a cloud from the opening of the lid. I held it away, blocking my lips and nose instinctively, then closed the lid on what could well have been the poison that killed Etan and Caslav.
I headed toward a table around the corner, spread with a variety of implements useful to both proofer and poisoner. Varina struggled, wild-eyed and desperate, in the arms of the Order Guard.
A wide, flat knife on a marble board, a glass phial in a stand, a small brazier and a series of small jars containing powders, liquids, and crushed greenery. I looked them over numbly. I picked up a jar and swirled the liquid inside, watching it cling to the sides and make little thinning legs down the glass. I’d need time to work out what everything was. Already I began cataloguing, planning how I would analyze it all back in my own workspace.
“Do you want to say anything? Explain?” Tain asked Varina. She stared, stricken and silent, which seemed to increase Tain’s resolve. “You’re a Councilor. And a Credola! Why would you betray us all?” She shrank back from his disgust and disbelief, but offered no defense. I wasn’t strictly sure she could, given her unsteadiness.
“Please take them to the jail,” Tain directed the Guards. “Maybe you’ll be more inclined to talk once you’ve sobered up in a cell.”
We searched Hasan’s apartment and found more tools and some chemicals I recognized, but nothing else of significance. Tain joined me by the table. He ran his fingers over the implements. “So this is it, then?” he asked, voice dull. “This is what killed our uncles?”
I pushed a portion of the powder about carefully with the back of a knife, watching the fine particles rise again. “I’ll need to examine it,” I said. “At the moment all I know is they’ve been distilling it into liquid form, whatever it is.”
“They didn’t exactly leap to deny it, did they?” he agreed, glum. “I thought…”
“That you’d be glad it’s over? That we know who the traitors are?”
“Yeah. Only I’m not.”
“Me neither.” In fact, gathering up the tools and substances spread out over the table, I felt rather hollow. “Varina wasn’t my favorite person, but I never picked her as a murderer.”
“I guess at least we’ll learn more about why this happened after she’s stewed in the cells overnight.”
I nodded. “Varina’s from the wealthiest family in the city. She’s probably never been uncomfortable in her life. A night in jail might make her think about what happens if she doesn’t try to help us now.” I needed her answers to a lot of questions, mostly about whether she had conspired with Doran or had been acting alone against the Chancellor to protect her interests and lifestyle.
“What do we tell the rest of the Council?” I closed the box of powder and placed it in my satchel.
Tain sighed. “Nothing, I think. Marco and the Guards know, obviously, but they won’t say anything to anyone until we tell them to. I don’t want every other Councilor busting down our doors asking questions or arguing about whether we can put a Councilor in jail.”
Despite the grim situation, I almost smiled at the thought of Bradomir’s face when he heard we’d arrested his cousin.
Esto’s revenge
DESCRIPTION: Complex compound derived from the crushed shell of a glintbeetle and alternately combined with salt and sugar over repeated heatings and coolings.
SYMPTOMS: Immediate blurred vision, headaches, dizziness, intense pain in the ears and sometimes upper sinuses, seizures, heart failure.
PROOFING CUES: Virtually undetectable; faint sweet smell and taste only in purest form; essentially odorless and tasteless in food and liquid.
12
Kalina
A noise broke the tense silence: a scraping outside the door. I struggled to my feet. Jov had been testing portions of the powder they’d found at Varina’s in a range of solutions and under a range of temperatures since the early hours of the morning. Once he descended into that level of concentration, I might as well not have been there.
I padded across the tiles and paused at the doorway, but no solid knock followed. Maybe I’d imagined it?
Outside was nothing but a glary, overcast morning. Further down the street, a group of armed men and women traipsed off toward the wall for shift change, and a stiff wind lifted the vines that hung from the windows of the residence opposite ours and kicked debris and a few loose grasses down the road. I squinted against the bright sky, shielding my eyes with one hand. There, was that something? A flash of red or purple, something that didn’t belong among the white stone and greenery. It almost looked like a face, there, in the shadow, a face in a red scarf, but I couldn’t be sure. I took another step, and slipped on something underfoot.
A necklace, made of fine braided leather, and carrying three small carved charms. I picked it up slowly. I recognized two out of the three charms: one for the spirit of Solemn Peak, one for the spirit of Bright Lake, just as Tain’s servant had shown us. The middle charm bore a symbol that looked familiar but I couldn’t immediately place it: a set of interlocking circles bisected by straight diagonal lines
.
“Jov?” I backed inside, fingering the Darfri necklace. My brother didn’t respond. I went into his laboratory behind the kitchen. He was bent over a flame, his lips moving and his eyes narrow, oblivious as I approached. “Jov? Take a look at this.”
He snapped his head up, face caught in a frown. “What? This isn’t … I don’t know what this is.” He removed the small ceramic bowl from the heat and set it down carefully. “I wanted to know exactly what we were dealing with before we … what is that?” He finally registered that I was showing him something.
“It was outside the door,” I said. “Someone left it out there.”
He turned it over in his hands and traced the rough symbol with one finger, his face lost in its familiar mask of concentration. “Darfri,” he murmured.
“I want to talk to the prisoner,” I said, plucking the necklace from him and avoiding his gaze.
He frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lini. You’re barely out of bed. You aren’t going anywhere near the prisoner.”
Irritation flared. “He’s in jail, Jov. He can’t hurt me.”
“He—” Jov began.
“I’m good with people,” I persisted. “Better than you, at reading them and talking to them. You know that. You’re not the only Oromani with skills.”
“I’m only worried about your health, Lini.”
I tightened my arms. I’m twenty-two years old, I wanted to say. And you’re my little brother, not my Tashi. But I squashed down that cruelty and instead pulled on a pair of sandals.
He stared at me. “All right,” he said at last. “Come on.”
I followed, necklace in hand, hiding a smile.
The jail was one of the oldest buildings in the city, the entrance built into the side of Solemn Peak and the majority of the building underground in the mountain itself and beneath the Manor. We met Tain at the entrance, where he left his guards. We spoke in hushed voices as we descended the stairwell entrance.
“I spoke to Baina this morning,” Tain said. “You were right, I don’t think she knows anything. She says she doesn’t even know Batbayer. She left a message for a contact of hers who said he’d send someone who could get her a supply of some metal she needed. She was just meant to meet them at the kori bar.”
“And you believed her?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m the best judge, but I did, yes.”
Jov nodded. “She might be a bit unscrupulous, but I think it’s only driven by ambition and curiosity.”
Truth be told, we couldn’t really afford to disbelieve Baina; we needed our smartest people working on the defense of the city. “What about her contact?” I asked.
“She gave me his name and how she contacts him. I sent one of my household guards to go find him. Hopefully he’ll help us find Batbayer.” We were almost at the foot of the stairs; Tain gestured ahead. “But if not, Varina looked about ready to crumble yesterday. After a night in the cells, she might be ready to tell us everything we need to know.”
“I want to talk to our prisoner first,” Jov said. “If he’s willing to tell us anything, we might be able to use it to check whatever Varina says. We’ll need to know if she’s being straight with us about whether Doran is involved.”
Tain nodded. “Hopefully we can make him understand we’re trying to stop the war and we’re willing to listen. There’s so much more to this than we knew—maybe there’s more to it than he knew, too.”
“And I want to ask him about this,” I added, showing Tain the necklace. It had left dents in my palm where I’d crushed the charms as we walked. “I think someone might have been trying to give us a message. They left this outside our door.”
Tain looked closely. “What do you think it means? Does someone want to talk?”
“We didn’t see who left it, but that’s what I’m hoping.”
The prison guard, a stocky woman with short hair and a dour expression, directed us to a cell. I shivered, wrapping my arms tightly around my body.
“If it isn’t the gracious Chancellor, sharing his exalted presence,” a gravelly voice said from the darkness, making me jump. I drew closer to the barred cell on the left. The light from the hall was set too high in the ceiling to penetrate much of the gloom of the cell, but squinting revealed a figure cross-legged on the ground. He was dressed country style, in baggy trousers and a shirt and vest. Despite the chill, the prisoner spurned the supplied blanket folded on the pallet.
“Good morning,” Tain said.
“Morning, is it?” the man asked. He looked about with exaggerated confusion. “If your Excellence says so, I will defer to you.”
“You’d be in the hospital in a nicely lit room if you hadn’t attacked the physic,” Jov said sharply, but Tain shot him a look.
“We’re not enemies,” the Chancellor said, stepping up close to the bars. “I want you to know that. We want to stop this war. Help us.”
“I think your Worship has been helped by our people for quite long enough.”
“We’re all Sjon,” Tain said. “City or country.”
“Yes? You treat your country people in an interesting fashion, then.”
Tain crouched by the bars so their heads were of a height. “May I have your name?” he asked. “I’m Tain Iliri, but I’m sure you know that.”
Jov detached a lamp from the wall and passed it down to light the cell. The light cast a wedge onto the man’s face, illuminating a narrow bright brown eye, sharp jawline, and below that, a charm necklace much like the one in my hand. The prisoner said nothing as his gaze raked over Jov and me, then dropped away, finding us insignificant.
Tain had seen it, too. “Il-ya, then,” he said, using the formal old-style Darfri address for an adult man.
“Highness,” the man said, deadpan.
Tain winced. “I’m not looking for deference here. I know this city has made a lot of mistakes. Please, I just want us to work together so lives can be saved.” His tone rang with sincerity, and I felt a rush of affection for him. Tain had his flaws; he could be unreliable, irresponsible, certainly oblivious at times. Yet he had the best heart of anyone I knew, and I only hoped the prisoner could see how genuine he was. But the Darfri man didn’t even stir from his position, merely watched with cold eyes.
“We know your people were provoked,” Jov said. “Cut off from the privileges we enjoy in the cities. And people like us have been the biggest culprits, profiting from your work while being blind to what was going on. We know. We want to fix it.” He squatted down close to the bars, beside Tain. “I think we’ve all been tricked into a civil war that doesn’t benefit either side. What do the country estates gain if the Bright City is sacked? Destruction, sure, but even though you’ve cut off our messengers you must know our army will come back sooner or later. And the city gains nothing if half the people outside the walls are killed. We can’t feed any of the cities without the people and lands that support them.” He twisted his hands together. “We had traitors in our midst. Traitors who murdered the Chancellor when he was working to address some of the injustices you face.”
The prisoner did react then—the tiniest twitch, a thinning of his lips. Jov pressed on. “We have those traitors here, up the hall from you right now. There won’t be any more sabotage. We can negotiate, in good faith, to end this siege.
“We just need to know what you want,” Tain added.
The prisoner smiled, a broad, slow smile of pure delight. “We want you brought down,” he said. “There is nothing to negotiate. We will not stop, we will not be tricked into your false peace. Your city will fall.”
Jov and Tain took turns trying to engage with the prisoner, but when the man spoke at all it was only to mock them. I had never seen anyone pay so little respect and courtesy to any Credolen, let alone the Chancellor himself. My initial irritation turned to reluctant admiration. Whatever motivated him, it was no petty issue, and it was not someone else’s cause. He believed in what he was doing.
Eventual
ly, a break in Jov and Tain’s questioning came about. I stepped up to the bars. The prisoner cocked his head the other way, brows rising. “I thought you were just decorative.”
I ignored the jibe. “What is this?” I held out the necklace.
The prisoner snapped his head down, reaching for it with an involuntary twitch, like a suppressed lunge. “Where did you get that?” he asked, and I had to force myself not to step back from his sudden intensity. I shrugged, tossing it between my hands with feigned indifference. Behind me, Jov and Tain melted away without words, and a rush of gratitude washed over me at their show of confidence.
“Where did you get it?” the prisoner repeated. “Did you take that off someone? You have no right to touch our sacred things.” He stood and clenched the bars, his composure shredded into anger and confusion.
“Someone left it for us.”
“Who?”
I shrugged again. “Someone who wants peace between us, I suppose.”
His lips thinned, pulling back over his teeth like an animal. Through his open collar the hollow at the base of his throat sucked in and out with his breath. If I could only stay calm, we might learn something critical.
“No one should have given that away, not to a heathen,” he said, spitting the words out as though each caused him physical pain. “Is there no end to what you will do to us? It’s not enough, what you have already done? Whoever gave you that is a traitor. There will be no peace, do you understand me? No peace. Anything they tell you is a lie. They cannot speak for us.”
“Well, you’re not doing much speaking,” I pointed out. My voice was higher than usual, tight with nerves, but I hoped the man wouldn’t notice. “So if someone else wants to deal with us…”