Chapter Eight
H E WAS woken before dawn by a ferocious pounding on his door.
Ulcetha got up, his braided hair flopping down his back, and put his glasses on. “Who is it?” he called, knowing the answer.
“Salathgarad,” snarled Salathgarad through the door.
“What do you want?” Ulcetha said, trying to sound bewildered.
“My diamond . Let me in or I will, I swear by all the gods, kick your door down.”
“Your diamond?” Ulcetha said, still (he hoped) sounding bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“Let me in , Ulcetha.”
Ulcetha had been weighing the advisability of opening the door. It was a bad idea, but he believed Salathgarad when he said he would kick the door down, and that was probably worse.
Ulcetha opened the door.
Salathgarad shoved in, grabbing Ulcetha by the front of his pajamas, and slammed him up against the wall. “Where is my diamond?”
Ulcetha wheezed for breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Someone stole my diamond last night, and I can’t help noticing that you were the last person I showed it to.”
“Someone stole the Star of Cstheio?” Ulcetha said and managed, he thought, to sound horrified.
Salathgarad’s grip tightened. “Someone who knew my desk has secret drawers in it went through them all.”
“Salathgarad, everyone knows your desk has secret drawers in it, starting with every clerk you’ve ever had.”
“Look,” said Salathgarad, “give it back and we can pretend this never happened.”
That was a lie. Ulcetha answered it with a lie of his own: “I don’t have it.”
Salathgarad eyed him suspiciously. “I don’t,” Ulcetha said. “I have no idea where it is or who took it. Except that it wasn’t me.”
“Then you wouldn’t object to, say, my searching your apartment?”
“I would object, actually,” Ulcetha said, truthful this time, but grateful he’d left the other valuables from Salathgarad’s desk cached behind the Neschonori book. “But it’s not like I can stop you.”
“True,” said Salathgarad and let him go. Ulcetha thumped back down off his tiptoes. And watched while Salathgarad searched his apartment.
He was not a barbarian about it. He did not throw things around; he did not break anything. He had clearly done this sort of thing before. He was thorough and methodical. And he did not find the Star of Cstheio.
“Well?” Ulcetha said. He knew his ears were flat, but that would read as anger.
“It’s not here,” Salathgarad said. He sounded baffled.
“No, because I didn’t take it .”
“But who else could it be?” Salathgarad asked, which was hardly flattering.
“You’d know better than I would,” Ulcetha said.
Salathgarad scowled at him. “If I find out it was you…”
“It wasn’t .”
Salathgarad stood a moment longer, clearly wanting to find a way to leave without admitting defeat, then simply turned and walked out.
Ulcetha listened to him thumping down the stairs, then the bang of the front door. Only then did he let himself sit down on the divan, shuddering with reaction. Salathgarad could quite easily have chosen to beat him up, just because, and might have chosen to do worse, if he hadn’t believed Ulcetha’s lies.
Thou art a fool , Ulcetha said to himself and fell back to lie across the divan, staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out what he was going to do about the Star of Cstheio. Or Trenevar. Or, ideally, both.
The trouble was, he had no proof. No proof that he hadn’t stolen the Orish Veltavan to begin with, no proof that Trenevar was a murderer. No proof for that matter that he hadn’t stolen the Star of Cstheio because, oh, wait a minute, he had. That he’d stolen it from Salathgarad, who was the next best thing to a thief himself, seemed somewhat unfortunately beside the point.
He decided the best thing to do was leave the Star of Cstheio alone for a while. Salathgarad would suspect him all over again when it was returned to the Cairad’athmaz’are, but the longer there was between the theft and the restoration, the more other people it would have occurred to him to suspect. And it was quite safe where it was. Trenevar knew the Orish Veltavan wasn’t there. He had no reason to go back.
Unless he stole something else and wanted to hide it.
He wouldn’t, though. It was the Orb of Cairado that Trenevar was a little bit insane about, not anything else, and the Orb was safely in the Museum of Cairado where it (at least arguably) belonged.
Besides, he knew that Ulcetha had found his hiding place. He wouldn’t use it again.
So the Star of Cstheio was safe, at least for the time being. The real question was what he was going to do about Trenevar.
Nothing was certainly the safest answer, and for several days, back in the basements of the Cairad’theileian, he thought he was going to be able to live with it. He found the depositions for the judicial hearings about the great riots, and he sat on the floor there in the basement and read them, taking page after page of notes, learning the answers to questions he would never even have thought to ask. And the causes of the great riots were clarified and obscured and clarified again, and Ulcetha wanted nothing more than to forget about other matters and simply pursue this five-hundred-year-old question.
But at the same time, he didn’t want Trenevar to get away with theft (letting Ulcetha himself take the blame, at that) and murder. He had liked Osmer Aidrina, who never quite seemed in focus unless he was talking about the Orb of Cairado, and it was that he found himself thinking about at night, not his own research. Ulcetha did not delude himself that he could make any claim to be an ethical person—not after working for Salathgarad for five years—but even so. Murder was wrong, whether he had liked Osmer Aidrina or not. Whether he liked Trenevar or not. Murder was wrong, no matter what the consequences might be of finding the murderer—and consequences there would be. He didn’t delude himself about that, either. He might not ruin himself academically (it would depend on how many of the scholars first-class had also liked Osmer Aidrina), but he would ruin himself for sure and all with Csecoro. How could anyone maintain any kind of relationship with the person who got their brother beheaded?
And he might yet be wrong. His theory made sense and fit the facts, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was correct. There might be other facts he didn’t know. There might be a way of looking at the facts that he hadn’t seen. If he was wrong, all this agonizing was unnecessary and pointless, and he could go back to his depositions.
He didn’t think he was wrong.
Finally, sleeplessly, he decided the best thing to do was go and tell the whole story to Min Mirineth. She was the Witness for Bruna Aidrina; maybe she had found something that would prove the truth of Ulcetha’s theory. Or maybe she had found something that would prove Ulcetha’s theory was a pile of nonsense. Either way would be better than what he had now.
Min Mirineth, being a judicial Witness for the Dead rather than a Witness vel ama, had an office in the Vira’theileian, which she shared with three other Witnesses. They were all there when Ulcetha knocked on the door, but Min Mirineth looked at his face and the set of his ears and said, “Mer Zhorvena, would you like privacy for this conversation?”
“Yes,” said Ulcetha, and the other three Witnesses good-naturedly gathered up their things and left.
“Pray be seated,” said Min Mirineth, “and tell me how I can help.”
Ulcetha told her the whole story, starting with Mara and even including the Star of Cstheio, the theft of which (if it was theft, taking it from someone who had no right to it) was outside her remit as Witness for Bruna Aidrina. Min Mirineth listened intently, not interrupting, and when he was done made him go back over certain pieces of the story, most particularly the pieces that made him think the murderer was Trenevar.
“It’s nonsense, isn’t it?” Ulcetha said, almost pleading.
“No,” said Min Mirineth, “it isn’t nonsense. You’ve given a reason for Osmer Aidrina to be killed, which no one else I’ve talked to has been able to do.”
“But I have no proof. It’s just my story against Osmer Trenevar’s story.”
“Thus far, Osmer Trenevar hasn’t told a story,” Min Mirineth pointed out. “He professed himself utterly baffled by Osmer Aidrina’s murder.”
“What did he say about the Orish Veltavan?”
“He said that you had come to him with it—he did quite faithfully repeat the story, for his version matched what you told me, but I admit he was very noncommittal about whether he believed you or not.”
“It is a lunatic’s story, I know that.”
“That doesn’t make it untrue. Frankly, I think if you had stolen the Orish Veltavan, you would have come up with a better story about finding it.”
“Thank you, I think,” said Ulcetha, and Min Mirineth smiled at him.
“In any event,” she said, “the theft of the Orish Veltavan is not in my remit, except insofar as it is linked to the murder of Bruna Aidrina. Which your theory suggests it is. I will go back to the Department of History and ask questions about the Orish Veltavan.”
“They’ll all tell you I stole it.”
“Maybe. But that tells me only that that it is a useful belief. Not that it is true. Witnesses know better than to believe what people tell us.”
“Have you talked to Osmin Trenevin?”
“Osmin Trenevin? No, I have not.”
“She is very close to Osmer Trenevar. If anyone would know something… anything, it would be her.”
“I will talk to her,” said Min Mirineth, “but persuading a sister to give information that will get her brother executed is not easy.”
“Maybe if I came with you?” said Ulcetha, grimly aware that he was only making things worse for himself but also aware that he was already committed to this line of action and there was no point in being half-hearted about it. “We are friends. And she believed me when I told her I had been framed for the theft of the Orish Veltavan.”
Min Mirineth regarded him, ears cocked thoughtfully. “It is an unusual but not unprecedented step. Very well. We will talk to Osmin Trenevin together.”