Chapter 18
The cot in Seriv’s cells was one of the finer ones, he assured me—“We’ve dedicated cells for drunks,” he confided, “as they neither notice if they’ve pissed the bed or if the previous occupant has done so, and I shan’t put you there, sir”—and as I lay sprawled out, I decided I had slept in worse.
I watched the afternoon light filter through the barred windows and listened to Ippeas and Castus whispering, as they were jailed next door to each other.
For a moment I engraved every word, yet then I decided it was the harmless muttering of young men anxiously sharing news, and I let sleep take me.
I woke to the sound of a cell door opening. I peered out the bars of my own and saw Seriv leading Ippeas out; then there, down the hallway, another open door, revealing the processing room where Ana had interrogated him—and there, sitting at the table, was Fotia.
I nearly started at the sight of her. Her eyes were puffy from weeping, and her face was drawn and greatly wearied.
A thought echoed through my mind like a shot from a bombard: She loves him. She really does.
Fotia stood as Seriv led him into the chamber, her lined face suddenly alight with relief. Then the door was shut, and the scene was hidden from me.
I stood in the shadowy jail cell. A strange thing, to realize how much living your loved ones do beyond your presence.
Then a whisper in the dark: “Are you any closer to ending this, Signum Kol?”
I opened my unlocked door and walked down to where Castus was jailed. He looked much the same as the night I’d interviewed him, yet somehow more drained, like a creature gutted and left hanging upon a hook.
“We’re catching up to them, sir,” I said to him. “So we’re closer.”
“But not close,” he murmured.
“We won’t know how close we are until we’ve caught them.”
“Them?”
I said nothing.
“You think there’s more than one?” he asked.
“We’ve reasons to think so. Do you know more?”
“No. My days before this are all happy bliss. A beam of sunshine, amid the gloom of so many deaths. Perhaps I should have been more suspicious of that. There’s no such thing as a good thing.”
The voices of Ippeas and Fotia rose in the chamber beyond, yet it sounded like reassurance, and affirmations of love.
“Well,” Castus said, sighing. “I hope that’s a true good thing, yes?”
I said nothing.
“Is it true that Fo is your sister?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Must be strange, stumbling over her out here. Must have been a hard sister, too. I bet she tried to spit you like a boar occasionally, yes?”
“No,” I said stiffly. “We weren’t permitted to be together very often.”
“Oh.” He coughed. “Yes. She did say she had a…hard upbringing. Though I wonder now—is there any other kind?”
The voices rose in the chamber beyond again, but they’d changed in tone. Then came Fotia’s voice bellowing: “What do you mean, you went ahead and walked over to their house?”
“Ah,” said Castus. “I suspect they’ve gotten to the part about Ippeas’s midnight adventures. Perhaps you’d better intervene?”
I affixed my cloak about my shoulders and wiped the sleep from my eyes. “I think you’re right.”
“Good.” He smiled weakly. “Try to protect the two of them, at least, yes? Keep that aloft, in memory of me.”
I paused and glanced at him. I knew that Seriv had been giving him the proper medications to withhold the fungus, so his infection shouldn’t have been lethal.
“You are not lost yet, sir,” I said.
He laughed miserably and said no more.
—
As I entered the processing chamber, it took no time at all to see that Fotia and Ippeas’s discussion had tipped over into a full-blown row.
Fotia was practically climbing over the table at him, snarling, “You trusted this goddamn mysterious note, Ip? You went trotting over to the Buravs’ after this oh-so-strangely-perfect note literally dropped in your lap? ”
“I was trying to help Castus!” Ippeas cried, hands raised. “I thought I could—”
“Could what? Let’s say this secret servant was true, and they gave you evidence to clear Castus. What then? You’d dance over to Din’s mad immunis, hoist it onto her, and you thought she’d believe you? Even though you’d have every incentive to lie, and your story was…was perfectly ridiculous?”
“W-well,” said Ippeas, flustered. “Yes?”
Fotia turned to me. “Let us ask our criminal expert here! Din—would you be inclined to believe such a tale?”
I cleared my throat. “Ippeas’s experience at the Buravs has actually been quite helpful to u—”
“Not what I asked! Again—would you believe such a story?”
Ippeas studiously avoided my glance.
“I…would have thought it very suspicious, true,” I said, sighing.
“Suspicious!” she cried. “If not outright stupid! For now, Ip, you’ve no note, no evidence! Just clothes that reek of fire, and a lot of people claiming you were the one who set it!”
“I didn’t, though,” said Ippeas helpfully.
“I know you didn’t, Ip!” Fotia bellowed. “Would I still be here if I thought you had?”
“Fo,” I said. “This is not helping.”
She then turned her wrath on me. “How do you know what’s helping and what isn’t? You only popped up a day ago! You don’t know a damn thing about us!”
There was an awkward silence. Fotia sank into the chair, sighing miserably, and her eyes suddenly shone with tears.
“People say you’re a killer, Ip,” she said.
“They say you went mad and burned down the whole house. They want to see you hanged! Your father is running about trying to reassure all your family allies of your innocence.”
“But I am innocent!” said Ippeas desperately. “I did no such thing!”
“Yes, but people are fools! They’re like our damned herds, they shall follow the back end of the fool in front of them if it appears to move with confidence! How will we get you out of this one? Along with the entire name of your family. For that’s being cursed, too.”
“I don’t care about their name,” said Ippeas to her. “I’ve been clear to you about that. Especially since I’ll get none of its benefit.”
“You’ve already gotten its protection, though, you dotard,” she said. “And now you’ll have none at all! Save what Din and Seriv can grant you out of charity.”
Another silence fell upon the room. Ippeas sat there, his face bleak, his hands on the table, his eyes staring into the wall.
Fotia had her face turned away, perhaps out of anger, or perhaps to hide her tears—yet then, still without looking, she extended her left hand to him.
He took it, and then they sat together hand in hand, suffocated by the misery of their circumstances.
“What can we do,” said Fotia, “to escape this?”
I stepped forward. “You know some of these murders,” I said. “But not all. If I tell you more, perhaps you can help me—and yourselves.”
“Is that permitted?” said Fotia. “I didn’t think Iudex could talk about investigations as if they were sotbar gossip. Or are you desperate?”
“Today?” I said, sitting at the table. “Desperate.”
—
I described the case to them in detail: Ana’s suspicions, Tauri’s tremendous worries, and all the evidence that had piled up about us as we’d tried to glean a pattern within such slaughter.
As I spoke, the more I realized how slight our story was: we had death, but no tangible sign of any killer, nor any concept of a motive.
At the end of it, I took Tauri’s wheel of testing parchment from my pocket and asked Fotia to put her tongue to it.
“To what?” she said. “Why?”
“A test,” I said, “to see if you’re infected. Please do so, Fo. For my and Ippeas’s sake, at least.”
Frowning, Fotia licked the parchment. I stared at it, my heart beating madly in my ears. To my relief, it stayed green.
“Thank Sanctum,” I whispered.
“For what?” said Fotia.
“Yes, for what?” said Ippeas. “My…my test didn’t stay green. Mine went all orange. You lot didn’t say what that meant.”
I glanced at Ippeas and cleared my throat. Yet before I could begin, Fotia cut in.
“Wait,” she said. “You…”
There was a wordless moment as we looked at one another.
“He’s infected?” she said in a quiet voice. “Ippeas…Ip has it in him?”
“Yes,” I said, as gently as I could. “He has tested positive. But he does not appear to be conditioned.”
Ippeas’s sun-browned skin turned a rather nasty porridge color. “Oh, titan’s taint…” he whispered. “Truly?”
“So what does this mean?” demanded Fotia. “What? Is he…is he going to kill himself? Will it kill him?”
“No, no,” I said. “We don’t think so. We don’t believe the fungus has been awoken in him, so it won’t spread throughout his…well, his…”
“His brain,” said Fotia flatly.
Ippeas flinched.
“True,” I said. “And we have medicines that can contain it. And the Orbiis and Apoths are working on a cure even now.”
“But he is poisoned. They did mean to condition him, to kill him.”
“Well. We don’t know. But I don’t believe so.”
“Why not?”
I hesitated.
“Because if they did,” said Ippeas faintly, “I’d already be dead?”
“Thereabouts, yes,” I said.
“Fucking hell!” cried Fotia.
“I mean, the attempt on his life was profoundly clumsy!” I said. “They tried to lure him into a burning house! That’s far less effective than using the web.”
“Oh, so we just have incompetent murderers trying to kill him and infect his brain with fungus!” said Fotia. “Quite a balm to my soul!”
“His poisoning might have even been accidental,” I said. “The only source we’ve found that’s infected is at the Burav estate. We’re trying to test as thoroughly as we can now—without causing a panic.”
“Din!” snarled Fotia. “None of this is reassuring! Stop trying!”
I fell silent. Again, they clasped hands and sat together.
“What do they want from us?” asked Ippeas.
“We don’t know,” I said. “But I doubt they’ll stop. They seem unnerved and will move faster now. We believe that’s why they acted against the Buravs as rashly as they did.”
“So we don’t know what they want,” said Fotia. “And even though they’ve been killing Burav and Armenta alike, no one has actually seen these bastards at work, not even once.”
“No,” I said.
Ippeas swallowed. “W-well. That’s not completely true, is it?”
“Pardon?” I said.
“What about Castus? He said he’d heard someone sneaking about him after…Well. After Zansay.”
“True, that’s so,” I admitted. “But he didn’t see anything of the person.
And the custodi were keen to pursue him that night, and trampled any evidence that might have been available.
I myself didn’t see any sign of a second person around the wood there.
And I’ve no idea why the killer would be there at all, really.
If you wish to frame a man for murder, why hang about him after the job’s done? ”
Fotia sat up. “Where was Castus found, exactly?”
I described how Seriv had led me to the location, just off the Great Spoke Road leading west.
“And…and you’re sure your killer was operating in the Burav estate?” she asked.
“That’s what we’re assuming now, yes. Or one was, at least. Why?”
The two of them glanced at each other.
“Are you thinking, Fo,” said Ippeas, “of Gaddar’s glade?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Fotia thought for a moment and turned to me. “Din—do you really think these people can move through the wood?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been told time and time again that the wood is impassable. But I saw the lights in the distant forest, and…my immunis has suggested she thinks it’s possible.”
“Then, if that…if that is so,” said Fotia, “I think this person might have been going to Gaddar’s glade that night, where the shrine is located.
That was where Castus was going as well, seeking to be cured of his curse.
I think this second person wasn’t following him, they just happened to be going to the same place as him. ”
My eyes fluttered, and I recalled Castus’s testimony to me about how he’d sought to be cleansed of his madness: I thought if I could find my way to the shrine of Gaddar, master of orchards…
“Yes…” I said. “Castus did say he was going there. But why would the killer be going there as well?”
“Because, Din,” said Fotia, “that’s where the forest is narrowest!
The shrine lies about a quarter league into a strip of trees that runs between Lacanthim and the Burav spreads, where the old forest creek runs.
If someone was trying to slip out of Lacanthim, and back into the Burav lands, that’s where I’d do it—if I could pass through the trees, that is.
The wood is very thin there! It’d be easy to cross over. ”
I sat very still as I processed this. “So you’re saying that…that there might be some secret passageway through the forest, connecting the fields outside Lacanthim with the Burav estate?”
“Yes! Which our killer would have used, if they wanted to pass from the Burav grounds into Lacanthim without anyone spotting them!” She stood. “I can take you there now.”
I looked her over warily. “I don’t want you involved, Fo. This is a devilish weapon, and this killer is monstrous.”
“And I don’t care,” said Fotia, indignant. “They poisoned Ip! They tried to kill him! Neither of us will be safe until they’re gone!”
Ippeas closed his eyes. “If…if it’s just taking your brother to the shrine…I suppose that will be safe. But I agree with him, love. I’m half tempted to send you away from the whole damned canton!”
“As if you could manage that,” said Fotia, “while locked up in a jail cell!”
Ippeas rolled his eyes and looked to me for support.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll tell Ana your suspicions, then we’ll go to the shrine. How fast can you get me there?”
“I can have you there in a flash, if we take my mount. But we’ll need two things—mint extract, and handkerchiefs.”