Thirteen #3
“So if someone was up in one of the galleries, with the curtain fully drawn—even you wouldn’t have been able to see or hear them?” Clement asked Decroy. Their heart sank. This didn’t seem to be leading anywhere useful.
Decroy nodded.
“Is the proctor geas linked to the timekeeper as well?” Moyna asked.
There was the start of an excited stream of words from the artificer with the broom, but Decroy waved him silent.
“No point you trying understand the geas. No offence, Scholars. You wouldn’t ask me to heal a stab wound.
It’s simply a different sort of knowledge, and unless you’re an elemental mage or possibly a stoneworker, the explanation’ll make no sense.
It’s a piece of magic that’s old as the building itself, which is a fine thing too, given how much power it must have taken to establish it in the walls.
We only have to go in and do maintenance on it every year.
Dredging up the power for a new geas in the Teaching Theatre, even a temporary one, was an absolute bitch of a job.
And yes—it does have a resonance with the timekeeper, too.
It would have come into play at midnight.
The doors would have magically locked and warded at that hour, too, to preserve all the other charms.”
Midnight. And he’d left an hour after sunset.
That left a long stretch of time in which someone might have been in the Rondelle with Ysabel and shoved her over the balcony, and still be able to talk about it now.
Clement clenched a frustrated hand. The gendarmes could be doing this.
They could question anyone about what they were doing on that night, if they weren’t so smirkingly determined to be useless.
Before they left, Clement checked again on the sleeping Joley and repeated their instructions, jotting down a note for Joley to present at the clinic.
Moyna healed the shallow cut and the burned cheek that the other artificers were sporting.
They returned to the residence hall and parted ways with a gloomy acknowledgement that they didn’t have much to tell the others, when their group reconvened at chorale that evening, except that Ysabel hadn’t been lying dead on the floor of Exam Chamber Two until at least an hour past sundown.
Clement grabbed a ham roll and a cup of berries, exchanged a nod with Jehan—tucked at the end of a table, working his way through an enormous bowl of grain salad topped with spiced chicken and yoghurt—and then went on a search of the fifth-year hall’s common areas.
Ysabel’s notebook had to be somewhere. All their instincts screamed that Ysabel would have had it with her, and that whomever killed her had it now—or had burned it, or thrown it in the river—but Clement was restless with frustration. They needed to be acting.
They checked under every cushion of the old, stained couches in the common rooms of every floor of the hall.
They searched each nook of the communal showers.
They went back to the dining hall, now empty and echoing with the sounds of the cooks already starting to make dinner in the nearby kitchens, and searched there.
They went out into the sunlit glare of the hall’s rooftop, where someone had already prepared for the Lantern Night festivities by stashing a huge basket of paper, glue, and wire in the covered doorway alcove.
A scrawled label read STEAL THIS AND MAY THE SPIRITS GIVE YOU ACUTE TESTICULAR AND/OR OVARIAN TORSION.
Points for creativity, but should be snappier, said Clement’s inner Ysabel. May your kidneys fail. May your aorta dissect.
May pigeons take a shit on your head.
A pair of pigeons were in fact pecking hopefully at the basket, accustomed to crumbs from scholars having rooftop picnics. Clement let out a choke of uncomfortable near-laughter and went to look in all the linen rooms and every pigeonhole in the main foyer.
When they were footsore and couldn’t think of a single other place to look, they reluctantly went to their own room to do the hours of study that had been their original plan for this week. Before.
It felt wrong. They should be indefatigable.
They should be shaking the world by the shoulders from dawn to midnight, until answers and justice fell out.
But . . . Ysabel herself would have been the first person to tell Clement, at length, how much they owed it to themself not to fall at the final hurdle.
Not before they could get out there and change the world the way they—using a they that meant Ysabel-and-Clement, this time—had always planned to.
And Clement wanted to think about anything that offered an escape, no matter how short-lived, from the suffocating cloud of their grief.
In the end it wasn’t the distraction they’d hoped.
Or at least, it was, but it came with a horrible side effect.
Instead of feeling the loss of Ysabel like a constant throb, they would forget for ten whole minutes at a time—and then look up from a paragraph on Defaloise’s dictum and its applications in febrile illness of children, and remember all over again with a sharp, swift stab, every one as bad as the last.