Chapter 25
We quickly summoned the medikkers, who upon arrival pronounced the woman “dangerously drunk.” One went so far as to say, “She is more inebriated than the worst drover I’ve ever ministered to, including the one who nearly drowned in the water trough!”
“Is her brain harmed?” demanded Ana. “If you rouse her, can she answer questions?”
“I can’t say,” said the lead medikker. “I’m more concerned about heat damage.
Her skin is terribly inflamed, like she’s been wandering through a desert!
I suppose she hid in this vault as the mansion burned down around it.
Though she was saved from the direct flames, she was cooked in here—at least a bit. ”
Tauri studied a puddle of vomit in the corner—one of many. “And she had only wine to drink for hydration, of course,” he said. “And, given the state of her clothing, she poured it over herself to cool her body off…”
“Yes,” sighed the medikker. “We shall need to stick her with a potizo crab to rehydrate her. I’ve no idea when she will awaken, unfortunately.”
The medikkers fetched a glass pot containing an exotic sea crustacean with a long, unsettlingly intestinal tube running from its underbelly.
It was very similar to what had been done to Velona Armenta, though I presumed this one did not feature any fertility augmentations.
The tube’s end sported a glittering needle tooth, and they stuck it deep in the woman’s arm.
She was so deeply unconscious that she didn’t groan at this, nor when a dark blue ichor began trickling down the tube and into her veins.
“I swear,” muttered Ana. “I often enjoy the experience of being blindfolded, but at the moment it is a fucking nuisance! We shall have to wait for this besotted wench to awaken before we can learn anything of use from her. Instead, Din, I advise you look to what is in the vault! Tell me what you see, boy! It’s well and good that the medikkers are here, for I myself might soon die of fucking impatience! ”
I paced the vault, describing the contents aloud to her.
There were nearly a dozen shelves here, all filled with ancient tomes.
Some were so aged their spines were unreadable, and many more had no spines at all, having fallen to pieces, and were held in preserved bindings of pressed moss.
The few that I could read had titles like Hymns of the Daaljhiene, or Musicks of the Ancients and the Third Imperial Age, or Barrow-Sites of the Third Ring of the Grand and Holy Empire of Khanum.
Yet it was the final shelf that caught my eye the most. It was filled with tiny statues, all very old, wrought of stone, and each very different from the other—though all were, unmistakably, Daljen.
Some offered cups, others swords, others staves, and still others a crown, but they all had the familiar distended jaw and coned skull.
Each had been carefully labeled: Master Qul, Master Haal, Mistress Vadari, Master Gaddar, and so on and so on.
Ana stayed frozen as I listed these off to her.
“I have heard of…some of these figures,” she said softly.
“But only a few of those books you mentioned, Din. By hell! It seems that Burilis Burav’s vault contains not gold and rubies, but a…
a veritable trove of historical and archaeological materials on the Daljen.
One so extensive I don’t think even the scholars of the first ring have some of these!
” She stuck her hand out. “Give me that one book about hymns, please, Din, as well as a few of those parchments preserved in bindings!”
I moved to do so, creating a stack, and picked them up to carry them to her—and then paused.
“Well?” she demanded.
I ignored her, crouched down, and peered about the floor.
There, all rolled to one side of the vault, were some half-dozen corks. The woman on the floor must have tossed them aside as she drank each pot. I walked to them, stooped, and picked one up.
There, at its end, a stamped symbol: a small red flower.
My eyes shimmered, and I recalled what Velona had said of Lyimo: I recall he was enormously pleased after being sent a crate of prized sotwine…
A Choros Ayak vintage, I believe…It’s a famous winery.
Always put a little stamp of a flower on the cork.
Some high houses fashion displays of them, showing how many pots have been drunk at their tables…
“Din?” asked Ana. “What is it?”
Tauri, meanwhile, was examining the crates stored at the very back of the vault.
“It is not just valuables of the elder days he was sitting on,” he said.
He squatted, reached into one crate, and produced a thurible and many small pots.
“These are the same tools we use to enter the forest. Just having one of these would have been enough to land Burav in prison—if he hadn’t been cooked to cinders, that is…
” He cast an eye at the unconscious woman.
“I wonder if she came in here trying to steal a fortune during the fire, and instead found herself locked in with musty tomes, pots of reagents, and…” He sniffed the air. “…some decent vintages.”
I walked over and peered into the crates. There, stuffed into straw along with many Apoth reagents I did not know, were dozens of wine pots, each one stoppered with a cork bearing the stamp of the flower.
I read the label in the dim mai-light: Choros Ayak.
“Din, what is it?” called Ana.
“There is a great deal of wine here, ma’am,” I said. “And I believe it matches the bottles that were sent to Lyimo Armenta before his apparent suicide.”
Ana sat up. “So…the wine that was sent to Lyimo came from here?”
“That is my guess, ma’am.”
“Then that was surely how he was infected,” she said softly.
“A crate of wine, claiming to be from some gentry admirer—and each bottle filled with the fungus!” She turned her face to the slumbering woman.
“In that case, this unconscious fool on the floor here surely must know more! And yet we don’t even know her damned name, nor how she came here! ”
“Perhaps I can find a Burav servant to identify her. Maybe one of the footmen, for I think we had to leave some of them in quarantine while w—”
A rasping, hoarse voice came from the vault door: “Madi Istelia! She’s alive?”
Tauri and I turned to see the wan figure of Princeps Seriv standing behind us, leaning on a cane. We gazed at him, astonished, but he stared only at the woman on the ground.
“Ah, Seriv,” said Ana. She turned a page, unflappable. “I take it the medikkers patched you up?”
“They have, ma’am,” he said faintly. “Even gave me a cane, though I don’t know why. Issue was my guts, not my leg.” He hobbled forward and peered down at the woman. “By hell…I assumed she’d burned up with all the rest of them!”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“It is Madi Istelia, sir, as I said. She was Burilis Burav’s housekeeper.”
Again, we stared at him, and then all turned our eyes on the unconscious woman on the floor.
“His housekeeper?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. I’d know her anywhere. How did she live?”
“With much wine, apparently!” said Ana. “I am more curious as to why she wound up in here!” She snapped her fingers. “Medikker! Someone! Listen to me now!”
“Y-yes?” said the lead medikker.
“Pump this fool full of whatever is necessary to wake her up. I demand we speak to her this minute.”
“We…could give her a stimulant,” he said reluctantly. “But in her condition it would cause a tremendous headac—”
“I am indifferent!” snarled Ana. “We have a goddamn murder suspect with a body count in the teens who has fled this morning, and this woman is the only person who might know where the little fucker is! If you do not resurrect her, I shall sit astride her chest and slap her awake!”
The medikker pouted. “Oh, well, that would not work…” He saw Ana’s face. “But fine, fine! Though I wish it recorded that I do this with protest!”
The medikker took a small vial of tincture from his supplies and added three crimson drops to the tank with the crustacean. Within minutes, Miss Istelia moaned, then groaned, and then began turning about as if terribly pained.
Ana snapped her fingers before the woman’s face. “Wake up!” she said. “Speak!”
Istelia cracked her eyes and groaned again at the sight of daylight. Then, with much smacking of her lips, she turned her head from side to side to take in her surroundings. “Where…am I?” she croaked.
“Nearly the same place you were!” thundered Ana. “In the halls of the Buravs! But almost all of it is fucking burned to bits, no thanks to you!”
“Not so loud!” Istelia moaned. “Oh, not so loud, please, please!”
“Oh, fine!” huffed Ana. “I shall whisper if necessary. Though what I whisper shall likely be just as dreadful as the timbre of my voice.” She leaned forward.
“For you are out of a job, miss. All the Buravs, young to old, are either dead or missing. And I suspect that it has something to do with you, or whatever you were wrapped up in.”
Istelia stared at Ana in horror. She blinked several times. Then, with another moan, her eyes rolled back into her head, and she fainted straightaway.
We studied her, once more lying unconscious on the ground.
Tauri sighed. “Well, that didn’t go splendidly, did it, chaps.”
“Yes,” said Seriv. “Better give her a moment and then dose her again. This time—perhaps let Kol here do the questioning? He is a somewhat gentler hand, I suspect.”
—
“They…are all dead?” Madi Istelia asked me weakly. “All of them?”
I studied her as she leaned against a blackened fretvine post. The medikkers had brewed up some draught and poured it into a teacup, and she sipped it slowly.
It granted a sense of the surreal to the whole ordeal, this terrified, wine-soaked woman sipping tea in these burned ruins as if at a garden party.