Chapter 16 #4
“Well,” muttered Ana. “Shit! I did not like Burilis Burav before, but now I emphatically loathe the man. I guess we can’t hope the goddamn murderer is hiding in there.”
There was a surprised silence.
“I…had not thought of that,” said Seriv.
“If they are in there,” said Tauri, “they might have survived the fire, true. But they’d have been very uncomfortable—and stupid, too, to believe they could exit unnoticed.”
“The question seems to be,” I said, “what did Burav put in there—and does it have anything to do with the murders?”
“I’d say it’s got to,” sighed Seriv, “except a rich man might have many reasons for a vault in his house.”
“I rather doubt he had it for aging cheese or wine,” I muttered.
“Shut up, Din,” said Ana. “I am coming to hate this investigation! We have a fire, and a mysterious Tala drover. We have lights in the forest. We have witnesses—poor, stupid Castus, and one singed servant—but neither has anything of use to tell us. And now we have this goddamned door! We are beset with things both tantalizing and useless!” She sniffed.
“Commander—please provide me with a list of all the characters on those stupid little fucking tumblers! I shall take a crack at it as best I can. Meanwhile, I shall demand Burilis Burav’s service record.
Perhaps that will be illuminating. In the meantime…
” She turned slightly to Tauri. “You have dominion over all living things in this canton, sir—correct?”
“I am tasked with its management and stability, yes,” said Tauri.
“Both pasture and crop field?”
“True.”
“And the old wood, as well?”
At that, his eyes grew guarded. “Why do you ask?”
For the first time today, Ana grinned. “Inspiration, sir, given by this vault. So many believe that the altered forest guards the tomb of the ancient Daljen—it is there to keep people from getting in, they say, just like this door. But I wonder now if that is exactly wrong! What if the forest is there not to keep people from getting in—but to keep something inside from getting out?”
A long, tense silence settled over us.
“I cannot discuss these matters here,” Tauri said softly. “And we’ve more ruins to inspect.”
“Then do so,” said Ana. “Come to me this evening, and we shall talk more. And we’ve our own tasks to attend to.” She raised a hand and snapped her fingers. “Din! Princeps Seriv! We’ve a prowler to apprehend.”
“So—you know who the Tala prowler is, ma’am?” I said.
“Oh, yes, I think so,” she said mildly. “And I think I have a decent idea of where to find him!”
—
I dozed fitfully as our carriage rumbled back into Lacanthim, yet it was not a pleasant sleep: my slumber was full of anxieties, discomforts, and nameless thoughts creeping about in my skull.
Perhaps this was a consequence of a tool as insidious as the web: it made even sleep untrustworthy, for any of my dreams might suggest I’d been conditioned.
It was on the sixth time that I awoke that Ana turned her blindfolded head to me and said, “Did you know, Din, that communicating along the vast sea walls of the East is a preposterously difficult undertaking?”
I rubbed a knuckle in my eye. “Didn’t, ma’am.”
“Indeed. So terrific is the expanse of the walls, so complex their artifices and mechanisms and defenses, that just ambling about their ramparts with a bit of parchment in your pocket is utterly fucking impossible. As for scribe-hawks, well—neither can they be trusted. Especially when the leviathans approach, for the very winds turn against you, and information must be speedily communicated. Thus, they fall back upon a very simple tool.”
I went still, realizing what she meant. “Lights.”
“Yes. Lanterns. A source of luminescence with a manipulable shutter, permitting someone to blink it on and off—and in that blinking, one can communicate many things.” She turned her veiled eyes toward the closed window.
“So. If we assume that the flashing you witnessed in the forest was code, and if we also assume that the code has some relation to our murders, well…this leads us to some pretty unsavory conclusions, yes?”
All fatigue left me, and my skin began to crawl. “There’s more than one killer?” I said softly.
“Yes,” she drawled. “Not a sole murderer—a conspiracy. There is not much change in elevation about these lands, but there is some—and where you saw the flashing is one of the higher points of the forest. High enough to be seen from the Armenta spreads…and, if you stand in just the right place, from the Burav lands as well.” She leaned back in her seat.
“Decoding the message was tricky—but only because the code was so simple. It is encoded using the common Legionnaire’s lantern code, but spliced in a rudimentary manner—the middle portion of each word is moved to the end, so it is always preceded by its beginning and end.
It said one word, over and over again—calm. ”
“Calm?”
“Yes. It said, again and again—Calm, calm. Calm, calm.” She turned to me, smiling blithely. “A strange message, no? Yet I rather think that this advice was not heeded!”
“What do you mean, ma’am?”
“I mean, whatever operative was embedded at the Burav estate, well…they most certainly did not stay calm. Instead, they burned the whole fucking place down!”
“You think the perpetrator was someone residing at the estate? Then what of this Tala prowler?”
“Yes, his identity and presence were a bit of a tricky nugget!” said Ana.
“I chose to return to my first, most basic conclusions. It was unlikely that this prowler started the fire. As I’ve said from the beginning, it’d take at least a barrel or two of reagents to burn down that house, and the fellow popped up with little more than his boots and his belt.
Instead, it seemed very likely it was started by one of our web-killers—who we know with reasonable certainty wish harm and death upon the Armentas.
This made me wonder, then…was the prowler’s presence at the fire orchestrated by one of these killers?
Did they want this person there so that they’d perish in the flames along with the Buravs?
Or, perhaps, in hopes they were caught on the scene, and wrongly believed to be our arsonist?
Once you start thinking along these lines, Din, and realize this shadowy prowler might not have been a perpetrator but actually an intended victim, well…
the question gets much simpler. We suspect the killers dearly wished to victimize the Armentas.
This means there is a chance that the prowler was an Armenta himself!
That gives us a pretty piddly pool of options for his identity, as our murderers have already killed so many of them.
” She smiled wearily. “Please tell our pilot to take us to the inn known as the Crooked Horn. That establishment is much favored by the Armentas, yes?”
I did so. The Crooked Horn, of course, was the inn where I had met with Trikao Armenta—yet why she expected the prowler to be there, I couldn’t imagine.
But as we pulled up and I stepped out, I saw that someone was waiting for us, sitting on the top step of the inn’s porch in a beleaguered, downcast pose.
My eyes fluttered, and I recalled what the kitchen maid had said.
A Tala man. Young, strong. Had a beard. Dressed like a drover or field hand.
Of course, I miserably thought to myself. This was the second time during this investigation that I should have realized who I was about to meet.
Ippeas Armenta looked up as I exited. His countenance was haggard and exhausted—very much as if he’d been up all night—and when he saw the shocked expression on my face, he sighed and said, “Well. I wondered when you’d be here.”