Chapter 14 Clean Hands
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Clean Hands
After being officially reassigned to the Whitewings, Auria was summoned to the office of Detective Ténebo Jebat.
Jebat was a Sinyi mage with dark brown skin, wiry black hair sprayed white at the temples, and a gold-and-ruby septum ring. The walls of his chambers were hung with framed paintings of racehorses—he loved the chariots—as well as letters from the families of victims to whom he’d brought justice.
Outside, storm-swollen clouds purpled the sky, and a low fog smothered the city’s infamous spires.
“Detective Marriosan.” Jebat gestured for her to take a seat. He was performing a deep squat, gripping the edge of the desk and grimacing slightly. “Excuse me—bad back. The captain has ordered me to get you up to speed on the Whitewing operation so far.”
“Wonderful,” Auria muttered, her vision rheumy, migraine-smeared. The sweet-spice of the cinnamon and tarmot perfume she’d chosen that morning, rather than filling her well with pleasure, was only making her nauseous. She perched gingerly on the edge of a maroon velvet-upholstered chair.
“You seem unhappy to be reassigned.” Jebat’s voice had the gentle lisp regional to Cape Fala. “But given everything—”
“Everything has given me even more reason to want the Bloodmoons eradicated.”
With an immense middle-aged crunching of bone and cartilage, Jebat rose and leaned back against the waist-high windowsill. “Your colleagues are working themselves ragged on that very thing.”
Not as hard as I would work.
“I know.”
“You’re too close—”
“—to the situation. So I’ve heard.”
Jebat hooked a booted toe beneath the handle of his desk drawer and inelegantly tugged it out.
With a ring-clad hand—nails painted a rich cherry red—he withdrew a stack of rolling papers and a small tobacco tin.
He rattled the tin, raising a brow at Auria.
“Do you mind? Ever since my husband and I separated, I can’t kick the habit. ”
“Go ahead,” Auria said, even though she minded greatly.
“The Whitewings aren’t the only reason I summoned you.” Jebat got to work rolling an achullah joint. “Aspar was mentoring you, before she passed?”
Auria fought hard to dispel the mental image of her captain’s bloody death. “Yes. First in wielding, then in a more general sense.”
“She spoke very fondly of you. Your brilliant mind. Your frankly demented work ethic.” A knowing smile, the corners of his mouth rippling with wrinkles. “I suppose you think nobody else will work quite as hard as you at purging the scarlet rot.”
“Of course not,” Auria lied.
Lighting the end of the joint with his wand tip, Jebat took a deep drag, cranked a window open—letting in a bitterly cold draft—and tapped the ash into a small jade dish on his desk. “I’d like to fill the gap Aspar left behind. Mentor you, if you’d let me.”
“I’d be honored.”
She meant it. Jebat was highly respected.
“So, tell me of your career goals.” A hand wave. “Yes, the Grand Arbitership, eventually—you’ve made no secret of that. But what does the path there look like?”
“Several years in silver, working high-profile cases, perhaps leading my own task force. Then moving into prosecution. I have my Knight’s Scroll in Law, and I think it’d lead nicely into higher office.”
“Interesting.” Another puff of the joint, two, three, the room now filling with the spiced smoke that always reminded Auria of Nissa Naszi.
“You’ll need a squeaky-clean record, though I suspect you know that.
Not just the big, obvious stuff—not being a corrupt piece of shit—but how you carry yourself day to day.
How you talk to suspects, how you interview and interrogate witnesses.
How honest you are when something goes wrong, how meticulous you are with your paperwork. ”
Validation surged inside her—Karvas had made this modus operandi seem so juvenile, so na?ve.
“Good thing I love paperwork.” Auria pulled out a parchment scroll and began making notes in loopy cursive.
She could’ve enchanted the quill to do it for her, of course, but she liked giving her hand and her brain something to do.
“The captain already doesn’t like me. How much of a problem is that going to be? ”
“Karvas doesn’t like anyone, in the traditional sense.
Respect, however—that can be earned. Stay in your lane.
Follow every order to the letter. Work the cases you’re told to work, and no more.
” Then, dropping his voice and eyeing the door to make sure it was closed, he added, “You may earn his respect, his trust—but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily trust him. ”
Auria’s quill stilled on the parchment. “What do you mean?”
“Karvas and Grand Arbiter Dematus are close friends. Allies, even. And…well, Great Gods, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Dematus is compromised.”
“Compromised how?”
“Nobody quite understands the extent of it, but it’s believed the Bloodmoons have some blackmail that keeps her in line. It’s why securing an arrest warrant for the scarlets has been near impossible.”
Auria felt a rocking of her foundations, a seismic shift in her worldview. Though she hadn’t always agreed with Dematus’s policies, she’d always admired her enormously.
“So the new captain is corrupt too?” She gripped the quill so tightly it almost snapped.
“I said no such thing.”
“You implied it.”
“Implication doesn’t get you very far in a court of law.”
Auria could barely comprehend the gravity of these revelations. With a compromised Grand Arbiter and the new captain loyal to her, bringing down the Bloodmoons was going to be…impossible.
It was no longer her job to care. She needed only to focus on the Whitewings, on fulfilling her duty and mourning the loss of her betrothed and somehow besting these damned migraines. Yet she did care. She cared all the time, about everything.
Mind reeling, she lowered her quill tip. “So: play fair, forget the Bloodmoons, avoid Dematus, don’t ruffle the captain’s feathers. Anything else?”
“The Whitewings are a great opportunity to prove your nous. Rising rapidly in profile and threat level, but sloppier than the Bloodmoons, with no clear chain of command. Not tied to one family, but rather a gang of ex-cons who met in Duncarzus and got organized on the outside. Began as ascenite bandits before moving into achullah—which isn’t illegal, but cutting it with darkseed to make it more addictive certainly is.
A sinister operation, if not particularly sophisticated.
“For the full bust, we need evidence of organizational crime. Ascen laundering, widespread distribution of banned substances. We’re working on the darkseed angle, but we can’t get a handle on their distribution model.
They don’t seem to operate from a centralized location like the Bloodmoons.
They’re scattered, mobile, which means even an arrest warrant might not get us very far.
Like trying to gather all the pollen floating away on a breeze.
And a search warrant means nothing when there’s no premises to search in the first place.
“But there are plenty of loose threads to tug at. They’re very curse-happy when it comes to killing collateral.
” He tapped a pointed thumbnail on the metallic lid of his tobacco tin.
“Follow the dead bodies. Two this week we can confidently attribute to the Whites, and likely more by the time Laving rolls around.”
He pushed a manila folder over the desk to her, but she was too busy note-taking to reach for it.
“Files on the first two—patrons murdered in pleasurehouses, both tortured and killed in the exact same way. Find the patterns, tug at the threads. Build the case the way the Academy taught you. Even if you’re just taking down one rotten apple at a time, rather than the whole orchard…
that’s how we save lives. One at a time. ”
Auria’s hand cramped so severely she was tempted to switch to royal shorthand, but she considered such concession a failure.
Jebat watched her furious scrawling with a faint tinge of amusement.
She was famous for her never-ending note-making an all manner of subjects, including but not limited to: the types of soil native to Atherin (so that she might know when a perpetrator’s boot-prints hailed from elsewhere); the least congested routes on the portari gate network (so that she might always find the fastest way to a crime scene); and the most commonly frequented taverns of famous stage actor Dallo Tander (for personal reasons).
“You’re going to tear a hole in the parchment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Call me Tené.” He sighed wearily, rubbing at his eyes.
“Why the Silvercloaks, Marriosan? Dematus never wore silver. No detective in history has made that highest of offices. You might have had a more direct track to the Arbitership if you’d gone straight into the courts or taken the scholarly route.
Why put yourself through five years on the streetwatch and the rigors of the Academy? ”
To prove people wrong was the honest answer, although not necessarily the healthiest one.
She’d always been smart, sparkle-eyed, with a sunshiny disposition and a fundamentally optimistic outlook.
Many people in her life told her they wouldn’t want to see such things beaten out of her.
Her mothers didn’t want her to become jaded, her sisters didn’t believe she could handle seeing a mangled corpse without vomiting.
Even her law professors worried that the dark, seedy underbelly of the world would be too much for her to bear—one had offered her an adjunct teaching position for a more sanitized environment.
Somewhere to ponder the philosophy of law from a safe distance.
She wanted to prove to all of them that not only was she capable of facing down this tainted world, but also that she wouldn’t let it tarnish her.
She smiled, trying not to wince at the hammering pain behind her eye sockets. “To do good.”
Jebat looked, for the briefest moment, troubled by this. He tried to smile in return, but it was too thin, too jaded. “Then I consider it my duty not to let the likes of Vel Karvas stand in your way.”