The Orb of Cairado

Chapter Nine

T HE TRENEVADA lived on the peninsula, between the Second and Third Walls. The house was not large enough to be a compound, but the grounds were extensive, as the Trenevada had lived here since before the Third Wall was built. Csecoro, who was always home, even if somewhat unattentive, to guests in the afternoons, welcomed Ulcetha and Min Mirineth with a puzzled smile. “Mer Zhorvena, how pleasant to see you! But who have you brought me?”

“Osmin Trenevin,” Ulcetha said, “this is Min Mirineth, the Witness for Bruna Aidrina. She wishes to speak with you briefly.”

Csecoro looked even more puzzled. “Of course. But I don’t know what I can tell you. I only met Osmer Aidrina a handful of times.”

“Really, there’s only one question,” said Min Mirineth. She produced a wrapped bundle from inside her coat and unwrapped it deftly. “Do you know this knife?”

Csecoro looked, and they all knew the moment she recognized it. One hand crept to cover her mouth. “Is that…”

“The knife used to murder Osmer Aidrina?” Min Mirineth said, not unsympathetically. “Yes, it is.”

Ulcetha watched as Csecoro pulled herself up, pulled herself together, and said, “Yes. It belongs to my brother. It has been missing from his study for four years. He told me he broke it.”

“Ah,” said Min Mirineth. “I think that’s the only question I needed to ask. Thank you, Osmin Trenevin.”

Csecoro said to Ulcetha, “I will never forgive thee.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She stared at him for a moment as he realized just how completely that had been the wrong thing to say— he had been living with the necessity of betraying her for a week, but she had not—then slapped him hard across the face. “We think it would be better if you left now,” she said coldly.

He nodded, jerked his glasses back into place, and turned to follow Min Mirineth out of the house.

* * *

Much to his somewhat numb surprise, Min Mirineth stopped at the first tea-house they came to and said with great firmness, “I am buying you a cup of tea.”

He followed her into the River-Maiden’s Mirror and obediently sat at the only free table with her. He managed to say, “This is very kind, but you really don’t?—”

“Yes, I do, though,” said Min Mirineth. “You did something very difficult and got an answer I am sure you did not want.”

“No, I didn’t want it to be Osmer Trenevar. I still don’t want it to be Osmer Trenevar, but there isn’t?—”

The server, a part-goblin girl with a thick coronet of ink-black braids, came up and said, “Good afternoon. What is your pleasure?”

Min Mirineth said, “A two-cup pot of golden orchor, and I think a plate of kismitrai.”

“Of course,” said the server, and if she was surprised that it was the woman who gave the order, she did not show it.

“This is the ugliest part of my job,” said Min Mirineth. “For the most part, I enjoy what I do, but it is never pleasant to show a person’s family that they are a murderer.”

“No.”

“Min Trenevin is a brave and honest woman. And she may yet forgive you.”

“How can she?” Ulcetha said bleakly. “I put her in the position of betraying her brother, and almost certainly to his death. Unless you think there’s a chance of clemency?”

“It seems unlikely,” Min Mirineth said. “A premeditated murder—premeditated, for why else would he have had that wicked knife with him?—and for what? What were Osmer Trenevar and Osmer Aidrina in competition for ?”

“Ah,” said Ulcetha. “It is difficult to explain, for I am not sure I understand it myself.”

“Try,” said Min Mirineth.

“The Orb of Cairado…if I say they were in competition for academic honor, that doesn’t at all convey what was going on. They were both obsessed with the Orb—they’d both spent twenty years trying to find it, Osmer Aidrina in the ruins of the Summer Palace, Osmer Trenevar in the diaries of Prince Rinava’s courtiers.”

“How…?”

“He thought one of them might have written down the secret of the Moraclada treasury. Which as it turns out would have been all but impossible, but you can’t know that going in. He got a number of monographs out of his research, just never the thing he sought. And Osmer Aidrina was out at Cleth, using his own money when the Department wouldn’t fund him any farther, not publishing a thing and everyone in the Department making jokes about him, and he was the one who found the Orish Veltavan.”

“It doesn’t sound like Osmer Aidrina was very interested in academic honor.”

The server returned with a tray holding the teapot, two cups, the tiny hourglass that showed how long the tea had to steep, and two forks with the plate of kismitrai—a Barizheise pastry, flaky and crisp and drenched in honey, and one of Ulcetha’s weaknesses.

“Min Mirineth,” he said, trying one more time, “this really isn’t?—”

“Have a kismitris,” Min Mirineth suggested. “And tell me about Osmer Aidrina.”

Ulcetha gave in. The kismitris tasted like afternoon sunlight. He said, “You’re right. Osmer Aidrina didn’t care about academic honor. He didn’t care that he had the smallest workroom in the Department or that he was never asked to teach. He wanted to find the Orb, and I don’t know whether it was something about the Orb itself or something else…solving the puzzle, maybe? Knowing for his own satisfaction that he was the one who found the Orb? I never really understood Osmer Aidrina. I don’t think anybody did—except maybe Osmer Trenevar.”

“I have been told they were friends,” Min Mirineth said, although she sounded dubious. She poured the tea, which was approximately the same color as the kismitrai.

“Yes,” said Ulcetha. “I mean, yes, it’s true. They were very close.”

“But in competition.”

“I’m not sure Osmer Aidrina noticed that part. He was tremendously observant about the ruins of the Summer Palace and then about the Orish Veltavan, but not very observant about people. And Osmer Trenevar couldn’t entirely hide his own obsession with the Orb of Cairado, but I think he did a good job of hiding how deep it went. And he did care about whether he had a good workroom and whether he was asked to teach and whether he had any power in the Department.”

“And would finding the Orb of Cairado mean he got the things he wanted?”

“Oh yes,” said Ulcetha, thinking of that conversation with Osmer Harcenar. He took a sip of tea—more delicate than black orchor, but still bracing—and ate another kismitris.

Min Mirineth took a kismitris for herself. “So Osmer Trenevar wanted to find the Orb of Cairado for what it would mean to his career, but Osmer Aidrina just wanted to find the Orb. Is that…?”

“Accurate,” said Ulcetha. “Although I think Osmer Trenevar also wanted to find the Orb for the sake of finding the Orb. He could have gotten the academic honor he wanted in any number of ways.”

“Did anyone else in the Department feel this obsession? Did you?”

“Me?”

“You found the Orish Veltavan. You found the Orb just as much as Osmer Trenevar did.”

“But I didn’t…” He drank more tea to stall for time. “I didn’t set out to do any of that.”

“Do you not want academic honor?”

The question sounded sincere, and Ulcetha couldn’t help a harsh snort of laughter. “It doesn’t matter whether I want it or not, I’m never going to get it. I’m just grateful the Department let me back in.”

“They had no reason not to.”

“You don’t know Osmer Harcenar. He never liked me to begin with.”

“Why not?”

Trust a Witness to ask the uncomfortable question. Ulcetha said, “I’m a shopkeeper’s son. Zhorvena, not Zhorvenar. Osmer Harcenar thinks history should be written by the same sort of people it’s written about. ” It occurred to him that he was, in his own way, proving Osmer Harcenar right—a shopkeeper’s son writing about shopkeepers—and just how much Osmer Harcenar was going to hate that.

But that was most definitely a problem for another day. He said, “Osmer Harcenar likes Osmer Trenevar, though. There have started to be whispers that he might put forward Osmer Trenevar as his successor when— if —he finally cedes control of the Department to someone else.”

“So Osmer Trenevar has been getting everything he wanted.”

“Yes,” Ulcetha said. “Until I ruined it.”

“ You are not the murderer,” said Min Mirineth. “The responsibility for ruining Osmer Trenevar’s career rests with Osmer Trenevar.”

“Does telling yourself that actually work?”

“It takes practice,” said Min Mirineth. “But it is the truth.”

* * *

The hearing before the judiciar Lord Ospragar into the murder of Bruna Aidrina took place a week after Min Mirineth made her deposition. Some judiciars made their decisions based solely on written depositions; others liked to hear the Witnesses’ testimony. There was great debate among judicial scholars about which method was to be preferred, but all that really mattered as far as Ulcetha was concerned was that Lord Ospragar liked to hear testimony for himself. Ulcetha was required to attend, in case there were questions about the finding of Osmer Aidrina’s body, and it was as miserable a duty as attending the Department meeting where they had ceremonially demanded his keys back and thrown him out as a thief.

He got no sleep the night before.

That morning, he dressed carefully, braided the second-class ribbons into his hair carefully, tried to lose himself in petty details, but ended up watching the hands crawl on the face of his pocket watch for the torturous hours from dawn to the earliest moment he could reasonably start walking to the Vira’theileian.

He took the longest route, walked slowly, made himself stop for breakfast at the Chandler Street zho?n even though he could hardly persuade himself he was hungry. He was still painfully early, and ended up walking slow laps around the Vira’theileian until he could go in without looking like he was avid for Trenevar’s ordeal, which he was not. But finally when he looked at his watch, it told him it was a quarter to nine, and he was able to climb the Vira’theileian’s great marble staircase and go inside.

The Vira’theileian was one of the oldest buildings in Cairado; it had survived at least three major fires and who knew how many architectural fads. The atrium soared three stories to the roof, stained glass windows admitting both light and color, and the dome of the rotunda rose at least three more. There were stairs that would take an intrepid visitor to the top of the dome, though Ulcetha had never climbed them. And he wasn’t going to do so today.

Instead, he followed the signs to the third eshen’theileian, which had a sign on the door: Osmer Vora Trenevar. Wishing mightily to be anywhere else—even Salathgarad’s horrible shop seemed inviting by comparison—Ulcetha pushed the door open and went inside.

The eshen’theileian was a long narrow room, with rows of wooden chairs like a neighborhood opera association’s makeshift theater. There was a dais at the far end of the room which had a horseshoe of tables, open end toward the audience, three chairs on each side and one chair at the back that obviously belonged to the judiciar. The amber and cranberry carpet on the floor was beginning to show wear, and Ulcetha wondered, mind gripping frantically after any topic other than the relevant one, how often it had to be replaced.

He had spared himself the indignity of being the first person there. Csecoro had arrived, with Neli?n Mulabin for support, sometime while he was picking his way through the snarl of alleys behind the Vira’theileian, and was seated at the front of the room. Both women looked back at the door as Ulcetha came in and then looked pointedly away, Osmin Mulabin with a dismissive little ear flip that made his face heat. He took a seat in the back row of chairs and tried to become invisible.

The room filled slowly: clerks and Witnesses, newspapermen and the curious. A small contingent of Trenevar’s students from the Department, who also made a point of ignoring Ulcetha. No one with better than third-class ribbons showed up, other than Ulcetha himself, which said something about the Department Ulcetha wasn’t sure he wanted to decipher. Trenevar’s colorless little wife, whose name Ulcetha could not remember, did not come with Csecoro, but with two men who so strongly resembled her they had to be her brothers—from which Ulcetha deduced that she had fled the House Trenevada and returned to her own.

At nine o’clock precisely, the door at the back of the room opened and Lord Ospragar came in, followed by two members of the Vigilant Brotherhood escorting Trenevar, followed by the Witness for Bruna Aidrina and the Witness for Vora Trenevar. The Witnesses, Min Mirineth and a tall, gaunt man in an old-fashioned wig, looked appropriately solemn. Trenevar looked like he, too, had had a sleepless night. Everyone sat down, Min Mirineth alone on the right, and Trenevar and his Witness together on the left, the Brothers standing behind them. Ulcetha saw Trenevar glance sideways at his sister, and she at once got up and came to the table where he was sitting. The Brothers exchanged a glance and decided to allow it. Csecoro leaned over the table, and she and Trenevar had a whispered conversation that looked like he was trying to persuade her to go home and she wasn’t budging. She touched his hands where he had them folded on the table as if it were an embrace and returned to her seat. Osmin Mulabin put an arm around her and they leaned together.

There was no one in Cairado who would do as much for Ulcetha. He felt cold and very lonely.

“Let us begin,” said Lord Ospragar, who had a high, nasal, finicky voice. “We will hear the Witness for Bruna Aidrina.”

Min Mirineth rose and bowed to Lord Ospragar. She then explained Osmer Bruna Aidrina, calmly, compassionately, and as fully as anyone could who had never spoken to him. She seemed to have grasped the depth of his obsession with the Orb of Cairado, for she finished by saying, “He would never have stopped searching.”

“And for Vora Trenevar?” said Lord Ospragar.

The other Witness rose and said, “Vora Trenevar has requested to witness for himself.”

A little murmur wound through the hearing room. The newspapermen all looked suddenly twice as interested. “That is his right,” Lord Ospragar said, although he sounded dubious. “Very well.”

Trenevar rose. He said, “We thank you, Lord Ospragar, for granting our request.” And then he began: “We were friends with Bruna Aidrina for many years. We shared an obsession, although he pursued it in the ruins of the Summer Palace and we pursued it through the records of the reign of Prince Rinava and the diaries of his courtiers. We would meet periodically and share the results of our researches, more for the comfort of talking to someone who understood than for the sake of any progress either of us was making. But we celebrated when Aidrina found the Orish Veltavan, and we listened to his theories about what it was and how to read it. But it seemed no more fruitful than our endless diaries…until he uncovered the door to the Below-palace, and suddenly he had,” Trenevar made an odd, frustrated little gesture, “he had somewhere he could apply his theories. And we knew that what Witness Mirineth said was true. He would never stop searching. He would find the Orb of Cairado.

“We confess, Lord Judiciar, that we lost our head. All we could think about was how to sabotage Aidrina, how to make it impossible for him to find the Orb of Cairado before we did. We stole the Orish Veltavan—and although we did not intend it, we did nothing to correct the belief that it was Ulcetha Zhorvena who took it—and we hid it in the Library Harcenada. Without it, we thought that no one could find the Orb, for we had been in the Below-palace often enough to know how vast it is, and Aidrina’s methodical explorations would take years . But we reckoned without Bruna Aidrina. He had taken notes about the Orish Veltavan, he had drawn it from a number of different angles, he had measured everything he could possibly measure. And he recreated it, not in wire and jewels, but in his head. He recreated it and he was following it—slowly and with many wrong turns, but he was following it, and we thought he would certainly succeed. We now think that the secret door might have baffled him into thinking his notes were wrong, but that is neither here nor there. We believed he would find it, and we could not bear it.

“So we killed him. We lied to our wife and sister about where we were going. We followed him out to Cleth, where he was happy to see us. We followed him into the Below-palace and listened as he explained the progress he was making, and when he bent over his notebook to determine where he should go next, we drew out our knife and stabbed him. He fell and we thought him dead, but we dragged him two rooms away before we climbed out of the Below-palace, and when we found him with Mer Zhorvena, he was in the room we stabbed him in. So he must have crawled back there and died trying to get one room closer to the Orb.”

“But how did you then come to find the body?” said Lord Ospragar.

“Mer Zhorvena found the Orish Veltavan and brought it to us.”

“How did Mer Zhorvena come to find the Orish Veltavan?” said Lord Ospragar. “Is Mer Zhorvena here?”

Reluctantly, Ulcetha stood up. “We are here.”

“Come forward,” said Lord Ospragar, “and explain how you found this thing that Osmer Trenevar had hidden.”

Even more reluctantly, Ulcetha walked to the front of the room and bowed to Lord Ospragar. And told his ridiculous story, wincing as Lord Ospragar’s eyebrows rose higher and higher.

“Indeed,” said Lord Ospragar when Ulcetha had finished. “But how did Mer Lilana come to have this index number?”

“We have no idea,” said Ulcetha.

“Osmer Trenevar?”

Trenevar wrung his hands and said, “We do not know.”

“Come now,” said Lord Ospragar. “One of you must know.” There was a long silence while he stared at Trenevar, who was visibly starting to tremble. Finally Lord Ospragar said, softly, “Did you know Mara Lilana, Osmer Trenevar?”

And Trenevar said, every bit as reluctant as Ulcetha, “We were lovers.”

Osmerrem Trenevaran gasped.

“Lovers!” said Lord Ospragar. “But how did you meet?”

“At Mer Zhorvena’s second-class honors ceremony,” said Trenevar. “It was…it was the strangest experience of my life. As soon as I saw Mara, I had to speak to him. As soon as I spoke to him, I had to touch him. As soon as I touched him, I had to kiss him. And it was the same for him. Neither of us was strong enough to resist it, whatever it was, even though both of us were married. We were still lovers when he died on the Wisdom of Choharo , and we would still have been lovers if we both lived to be ninety. The attraction between us was that strong.”

“But he read your diary.”

“He must have,” said Trenevar. “We certainly did not tell him that index number. He read our diary and gave Mer Zhorvena the index number in that very odd and roundabout way. But he said nothing to us at any time about the Orish Veltavan.”

“He wouldn’t,” said Ulcetha.

“Mer Zhorvena?” said Lord Ospragar.

“Mer Lilana hated conflict,” Ulcetha said. “He didn’t even like bokh. It was too antagonistic. He would never either have admitted to Osmer Trenevar that he had read his diary nor have accused him of being the thief of the Orish Veltavan, even though he knew that the accusation had destroyed my career.”

“But why did he not come to you directly?” said Lord Ospragar.

“Because,” said Ulcetha, who had had time to think this through, “if he told us he knew where the Orish Veltavan was, he would either have to refuse to tell us how to find it, which we promise would have caused a horrendous row, or admit that he was Osmer Trenevar’s lover. And if he told us, he would have to tell everyone who wanted to know how we found the Orish Veltavan if we weren’t the thief in the first place. So for Mer Lilana, a paper chase that only started after he was dead would seem perfect.”

“But why did he read our diary?” The question seemed to burst out of Trenevar.

“It was a secret,” Ulcetha said, hating that his answer was not better. “Mara—Mer Lilana loved finding out secrets. We used to joke that he should have been the historian, since that’s really all the study of history is.”

“He betrayed me,” Trenevar said and put his face in his hands.

Ulcetha felt more than slightly betrayed himself. That Mara had valued his own comfort over Ulcetha’s entire life was…a little horrifying. Ulcetha supposed he should be grateful that Mara had cared enough about their friendship to leave him the clues he had. He wondered if Mara would ever have given that envelope to him without having died first.

“Very well,” said Lord Ospragar. “Osmer Trenevar, have you anything else to say?”

“No,” Trenevar said without looking up.

“Witness Plasthovar?”

“No,” said the Witness in the old-fashioned wig. “Osmer Trenevar has told the truth.”

“Witness Mirineth, have you anything to add?”

“No,” said Min Mirineth.

“Then our judgment is that Osmer Vora Trenevar is guilty of the murder of Osmer Bruna Aidina and shall be executed by the reveth-atha one week from today.”

“Lord Ospragar!” It was Csecoro, who had shoved to her feet.

Lord Ospragar looked at her, eyebrows raised.

Undaunted, she said, “We would beg clemency for Osmer Trenevar. He is the only adult male of the House Trenevada in Cairado, and his heir is a child of three.”

“That is unfortunate,” said Lord Ospragar, “but it is not much to weigh in the scales against murder.”

“He is a scholar first-class.”

“So was his victim.”

“Surely it is obvious that he will not murder again.”

“Not until he finds a new obsession,” said Lord Ospragar. “Can you swear that he will not?”

She tried. But her ears flattened slowly, and finally she shook her head.

“Our judgment stands,” said Lord Ospragar. He stood up and walked out, the two Witnesses following him.

Csecoro dropped back into her chair and put her face in her hands, mirroring her brother.

Osmerrem Trenevaran was crying.

The Brothers stepped forward and pulled Trenevar to his feet.

Ulcetha, frankly, fled.

* * *