Chapter 2 #4
The voice and the cerebral convulsion faded from me just as quickly as they’d emerged. I stood holding the doorknob as the sensation drained out the back of my head, feeling both mystified and repulsed.
What had that been? Had it been a memory, or something else?
Ana’s hand gripped my arm tighter. “I taste,” she murmured, “a bit of hesitation in you, Din. Is all well?”
I thought about it. “N-no. I…don’t think so, ma’am.”
“Something amiss with the scene?”
“I think…maybe, ma’am,” I said slowly. “But I’m unsure what, just yet.”
For the first time in hours, I saw a crinkle of cheerful surprise in her face. “I see! Well. Let us go in, then.”
I shook myself, led her inside, and shut the door.
—
I stood in the entryway and shot a reluctant glance around the chamber, worried the voice might speak again. My thoughts remained mercifully silent. Perhaps, I hoped, it had been a passing anomaly. Then I surveyed the scene.
A blade of pale sunlight slashed through the shutters, casting one half of the chamber in sharp relief and setting shadows all about the other.
I took the space in carefully. It was a simple room, with few unnecessary adornments.
A mossbed sat in the corner, one fernpaper sheet piled in its corner.
A pot of sotwine stood on the table beside it, and there, half buried in the pillows, two glass cups gleaming like woodbeetles in turf.
I could see only one piece of baggage in the room: a small trunk, bound in fungal leathers, with brass corners and a brass latch, unlocked.
A narrow border of artful fabric marched about the edge of the leathers, dyed a pale red—the Burav hue. Zansay’s trunk, then.
I looked down at the wide slick of blood. It led away from the body, and toward the wall with the shutter. The girl lay upon its border as if reclining dreamily by the edge of a lake.
Ana sniffed the air. “I catch a hint of jasmine here…perfumed gel. Applied to the body, surely. This was to be a place of delights. I wonder why he felt the need to kill her?” She coughed. “Tell me where to stand, Din. I shall wait for you to do your work.”
I spied a tiny closet built into the corner. “You can stand here, ma’am,” I said. “Before the closet door.”
“Ohh? A closet? Open it and see if there is anything of interest within!”
I did so, peering into the small space. “Empty, ma’am. It was unused.”
“Then I shall sit inside and enjoy the contained quiet while you do your inspecting!”
I led her into the closet (I was not perturbed by this request, for she often climbed within trunks and boxes to think), helped her sit, and then shut the door firmly. Then I turned about, pushed my hair out of my face, and sighed.
Nothing else to be done. I strode across the lake of blood, grimacing as it clicked beneath my bootheels, and knelt to study the body.
She had been a beautiful creature in life.
Hardly more than twenty, her dark hair gleaming, her icy gray eyes fixed in an expression of vague confusion, like someone who’d just entered a room and forgotten why they’d done so.
Her hair was so thick it was like spun jet, and she had been something of a hirsute thing—there was a glint of soft, dark down along the back of her neck—yet her arms and the backs of her hands were completely exfoliated: an expensive alteration, but one common to the middle and upper class of the Empire, who disdained body hair.
But it was her eyes that were most indicative of her wealth.
The girl was clearly of Kurmini stock, who were usually black-haired and dark-eyed, but Zansay’s eyes were a startling, unnaturally bright shade of icy gray.
Changing the color of one’s eyes was no cheap thing, even in the third ring of the Empire.
I made note of this, then moved on to review the rest of her.
The wounding had been done to the girl in two distinct acts, the first to the right shoulder, the second to her stomach.
The shoulder joint was nearly split through, the narrow muscles of its front and the bicep below severed as the weapon—a blade, surely—had wound its way about the socket.
I could even see a wink of bone and ligament within the laceration.
But the stomach was by far the worst of it.
The left muscle wall of the abdomen had been sawed through carefully, surely shredding most of her innards as the blade had worked its way down.
The incision turned inward at her pelvis, and then raggedly cut its way across her waist, freeing her intestines of containment.
A bundle of dark, gleaming innards had slipped out to pool upon the floor beside her.
In the dim light of the room it almost looked like a ribboned bow pinned to the side of her waist.
I sniffed my vial as I studied her injuries, anchoring these sights deep within my memories. Then I narrowed my eyes, thinking.
I went back to the shutters, opened them to permit in more light, and returned to look again.
I peered at her shoulder and spied gentle grooves in the darkening flesh there. A serrated blade, then. Teeth about an eighth of a smallspan apart.
My eyes shook in my skull now, and I recalled our briefing: a knife had been found and secured by the custodi after they’d arrived on the scene. I made a note to ask on this.
Yet the wounds seemed a strange thing to me. If someone wished to kill a person with a long knife, a simple stab would do. These wounds were different: ritualistic and careful, with a great amount of sawing. It suggested some intent beyond death.
I moved on to her hand—or the one I could access, as her left arm lay down in the blood. I saw no cuts upon her right hand, nor any bruises. The knuckles were tiny, perfect pearls, a hand that had known neither labor nor violence.
I grunted, surprised, and again studied the wounds on her torso. The cuts were so terribly precise, even at the end. And this should not have been so: while the start of such a wound was often relatively clean, it always grew ragged and uneven as the victim struggled in pain.
Yet there was no sign of struggle on young Zansay. No lacerations on the palms, or bruised fingers. Not even a cracked nail.
I fished her left hand out of the blood to study it, then paused.
“Hum,” I said softly.
Though her left arm lay in the blood, the hand had been turned up, away from its slick surface—and though the interior of her forearm was mostly clean of blood, the entirety of her left palm was red. It was like she’d pressed it securely against the bloodied floor.
I knelt lower, peering at the body, and saw another stain I could not comprehend: an oblong, rounded blot upon the front of her left knee, as if she’d also pressed her kneecap against the bloodied floor before submitting to death.
I studied the blood about me, hoping to find some explanation there.
The majority of it had come from the wound in her stomach, of course, where she’d been nearly disemboweled.
And yet the blood was so evenly distributed: it lay nearly entirely toward the back half of the room, and not at all at the front.
It was as if she’d simply stood here and bled.
More so, there was no sign of violence to the room: no errant smear of blood, or evidence of a struggle, or grappling, or of any attempt to make her submit.
Another trembling in my head. The chambers of my mind pulsed and flexed, like the airs of a passageway shifting as a far door is opened on a windy morn.
The voice returned, whispering—Yes. This.
“Stop,” I said and pushed on my temple.
The voice departed, but slowly. I felt as if a presence was still in the room, lurking behind the bottle of wine or the window shutter.
“Am I going mad?” I whispered aloud, as if wishing to make sure my ears still functioned aright.
Nearly all engravers eventually went mad, of course—though I’d been assured such a fate was many years off.
A quirk, I told myself. Happenstance. You’ve a task to do.
I shook myself, then moved the girl’s trunk to one of the bloodless corners of the room and opened it. Within were clothes, and perfumed gels, and a few paints for her face—and the sheath of a knife, about a full span long, made of old, well-worn leather.
I turned the sheath over in my hand, puzzled. Had this held the knife that had killed Zansay? I did not know, for the custodi had taken the murder weapon, I’d been told. A strange thing to find here, either way. I replaced the sheath but made a note of it.
Lastly, I checked the bed. Almost instantly, I spied waxy, crackling streaks on the sheets. I could have sniffed the bed to confirm my suspicions but did not need to: I knew the sight of a man’s spendings well enough. There’d been a great deal of coupling in this bed, most of it recent.
I returned to the closet and opened the door. Ana grinned up at me like a ghoul emerging from a tomb. “Well, Din? What say you? Is it as straightforward as all claim?”
“I am unsure, ma’am,” I said slowly. “For I’ve no idea what I’m looking at.”
“Ohh? Might this tawdry shit have a faint whiff of something fascinating? Let us see! Spill your observations to me, boy.”
—
I spoke then, sniffing my vial and allowing my memories to come pouring out of my mouth. My eyes quaked and trembled as I did so, and it felt as if I occupied a hundred different places within the room at the same time, peering at everything from every aspect and trying to describe it at once.
And yet the voice—whatever it was—did not speak. For that, I was quite grateful.
When I was finished I took a sip from my waterskin and watched Ana sit there, nodding.
“So,” she said softly. “So, so, so. Again, the innkeeper claimed she did not hear Zansay Burav scream at all during this grievous wounding, correct?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Though you saw no injuries or bruising to her throat that could have silenced her.”
“No, ma’am.”