41. FORTY-ONE
FORTY-ONE
ATTILATIA
Location: Korshuva District, Seraphinden
Attilatia and Pinto lounged on the overstuffed couches in Pinto’s flat, gorging on fruits and cheese, sipping caffeinated tea until she was jittery.
She’d visited the old man every day after work in the ten-day since learning Velinquash’s location.
Pinto’s friends in the public archives had sourced scrolls with information on their query she couldn’t have dreamed of accessing alone.
She had scheduled a visit to Pojanak tomorrow.
Now she wanted to know as much as possible about what she might be getting into… and the man getting her into it.
As highsun approached, Pinto cast the register he’d been scanning to the side.
“I’m with you, Atti. Looking for information on Velinquash was difficult, but Thyatira is impossible.
No wife, no prior relationships to speak of, no family, and no hobbies.
Absent every census until the end of the Gray Period.
Just his name in Ring Wing reports. If I had to say one thing, it is that he is suspicious.
If I could say another, it would be that he is humble. ”
And Roskaad was, at that. She slid her tongue across her teeth.
“Humble men stay humble. They do not rise to control the defenses of an entire nation.” The rise of Thyatira had been plotted.
Planned. By whom? Attilatia lay back on the chaise and stared at the lofted ceiling.
“What do you make of Baem Limtush? Velinquash’s old employer? ”
Pinto crunched into a biscuit and spoke around the mouthful. “Old money, deeply entrenched in the oligarchy. Fourth generation Limtush to live on the Skywalk. Runs a pharmaceutical empire. Has the reputation for being as affable as any good executioner. Why?”
“Because I don’t find a single report where Roskaad is mentioned without Limtush mentioned beside him. And yet in almost two years of working with Roskaad, he never spoke Limtush’s name once.” Secretly, she wanted to blame Dex’s suggested malfeasance on someone, anyone, else.
“I wager their media association is coincidental. They’re in the Red Wing.”
“Yet Limtush’s position is ornamental. Supposedly.” They were up against a wall. They had learned so much, but had yet to find any real answers. Attilatia fell silent for a long while.
“Eat, Atti, eat.” Pinto gestured to the tray of treats, half gone by his own doing. “I’ve grown fat in the weeks of your company, and I don’t want to do it alone.”
But Attilatia kept staring at the ceiling.
Why did this entire investigation feel like a thread that frayed further the longer she looked at it?
“There are no coincidences. The universe speaks with intent. Coincidences are tricks of the mind.” On a macro level, everything happened to serve in reaction or counterpoint to something else.
All things were governed by the Fates to craft balance.
“When we got into something sticky like this, my father used to say that thinking as a scientist usually yielded better results than thinking like a dancer.”
Pinto blinked at her several times. “Atti. What does that mean?”
“In nature, there is a solution to every problem. The human mind can often get in the way of our success, because very little of the way we understand the world is truth. Just the story we have woven to keep ourselves alive. So, we have to change the way we process information to find a solution. One trick he used was to reverse cause and effect.”
“Meaning…?”
“Instead of thinking that grass grows because the rains fall, imagine for a moment that grass growing causes the rain to fall. If the reversed cause and effect makes sense, it creates a paradigm shift. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of true reality instead of what the mind has solidified as ‘truth’.”
“So instead of saying that Thyatira has come into power because Nelfindar has taken a severe economic turn…?”
The skin at the back of her neck prickled. “You understand my problem.”
The more she learned there was nothing to know of him, the more she wanted to know about him. She had never been so fixated on a person in all her life. She couldn’t shake the fluttering feeling that maybe, for the first time, she had met someone just like her.
“Now we do the same with Limtush. Could there be more significance between their pairing?” Limtush was a snippy patrician. Roskaad was a groundling. The former should feel threatened by Roskaad, if not outright resent him, like the rest of the oligarchy. Not keep nipping at his heel like a puppy.
Pinto’s nose wrinkled. “I requested records on Thyatira and Velinquash. Now you expect me to get them on Limtush? These aren’t as easy to procure as a tray of Fekkas, you know. It takes massaging. It takes payment.”
“What, you mean I can’t just wave you around like a magic wand?”
“Certainly not, after a full moon cycle of daily teatimes,” he snorted.
“I thought you were having fun, helping me?”
“The time of my life. I never thought I’d end up using all the favors owed to me. I just want you to understand that information on Limtush won’t be in these records. I may be able to have something for you by the time you get back from Pojanak.”
She nodded. “It is for the best… I scheduled my visitation at highsun.”
Pinto pushed crumbs around his plate. “You’re sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
She did. She’d spent a lifetime fighting alone to stay alive.
She hadn’t realized how much easier it was to have a friend at her side until Pinto.
Still, she shook her head. “I’m sure. Something is happening that we are not supposed to understand.
And if something goes wrong or the wrong people find out… Well, better that it isn’t both of us.”
“You’ve been working for a long time. You should get some rest. Schedule the visit for another day.”
Attilatia bit her lip as she glanced at the time display on Pinto’s far wall.
It was nearing highsun, and it would take an hour for her to get to Pojanak.
“Plenty of time to rest when I’m dead.” It was what her mother had always said when she worked overtime in legislation. “Now it is time to dance.”
Seraphinden’s asylum for the mentally infirm was clean and the staff hospitable, but the walls were blank, and the faces even blanker.
The inhabitants hadn’t made any impression on the building—as though no one was really there at all.
There was little sound beyond muted footsteps and the odd individual mumbling to themselves.
Attilatia followed an attendant through three levels of the four-storied building and towards the end of a lonely hallway. At its center, a seated, hunch-shouldered man watched them approach through dark-ringed eyes. As they passed, he latched onto the silk sleeve of her pastel pink tipiana.
“So pretty,” he croaked, pulling it towards his mouth with unanticipated strength.
Attilatia snatched her arm away with a shriek and boxed him in the nose.
The attendant carried on without her. “Careful. That one bites,” he offered over his shoulder.
“Thank you for warning,” she grumbled, straightening her tipiana and crossing her arms tightly. She gave a wider berth to the other patients they passed.
They stopped outside the hallway’s final door. “Velinquash is not dangerous. But he hasn’t been allowed a visitor in some time.”
“Why?”
“Strict orders.”
And yet she had gotten in on simple request. Surely by Roskaad’s orchestration.
“Would you prefer me to go in with you?” the man offered, with an expression that said he had better things to do.
“Eah… No. I is fine alone, I think.”
He handed her the key. “Close the door behind you. Visitation ends at lowsun.”
Attilatia unlocked the door and creaked it open into a small room.
A single bed with a colorful quilt sat to one side.
At the far wall, a window overlooked the Casowhatan, green with frothing foam peaks from the storm settling in.
Beside it, Tessel sat in a wooden chair, spine so rigid he looked like he might be carved from wood himself.
He didn’t so much as glance in her direction when she entered and closed the door.
He simply gazed out the window, cloud-strangled sunlight dappling salt-and-pepper hair.
“Mesu Velinquash, I presume?”
His head turned, and he blinked slowly. “I don’t often get visitors. And never lovely ones.” A laugh wheezed from his chest in three slow hacks. “You’re here for information, aren’t you?”
Why the assumption? “Do many come to you for information?”
“Not for many tides which have risen and fallen outside my window.” His gaze returned out the paneless frame, his hand running circles over the leg of his sirwal. “None of it really happened. None of it. They know that. They all know.”
There went any lingering suspicion that Tessel might have been wrongfully incarcerated.
“Tell me little more what you mean.”
He paused, like he was still deciding whether she was a figment of his imagination. “Answer me first. Where am I in this room, right now?”
“You sit in chair by window,” she answered quietly.
His mouth split into a smile, revealing a surprising array of shining, stark-white teeth.
“Wrong. I am floating near the ceiling, above your turban.” The fit of giggles that followed made her hands clench and her stomach keel.
“I don’t think it really happened either, it didn’t make sense, see?
You don’t make sense. The ocean doesn’t make sense.
It’s too loud and too quiet at the same time…
All that water.” The laugh turned to a shudder.
His voice fell to a whisper. His face crinkled in fear. “Too loud. Too quiet.”
“Mesu Velinquash,” she tried. “I come to speak with you about your work for Baem Limtush.”
“None of it really happened,” he chirped, rocking in his chair.
“You work for the corporal under the title of ‘Hand’ for three year, eah? Why is it you leave his service?”
“Saw things. Things that weren’t real.”
“While working for him?”