Page 51 of The Tainted Cup

“Yes!”

“And where did they go?”

“To inspect the walls! I’m sure Miljin told you that!”

Miljin, however, gave Vartas nothing, staring at him with his flat, dark gaze.

“What date was that?” I asked.

“The seventh and eighth,” Vartas said. “Of the month of Egin. Just over two months ago.”

I watched him. His cold little eyes stared into mine, but I glimpsed a fragile gleam there, a tremble in his pupils.

“That’s not true,” I said. “And you know it.”

“The hell do you mean?” he demanded.

I felt a flutter in my own eyes, and the memory burbled up: me hurrying away into the gardens of the Haza house in Daretana, and reading Blas’s records of his inspections aloud, committing the dates to memory. One line in particular now swam up in my skull:ck. Paytasiz bridges in the north of the Tala canton—6th to 8th of Egin—all pass.

“Because,” I said, “Commander Blas wasn’t at the walls at all then.”

Vartas went very still. “What?” he asked.

“Commander Taqtasa Blas was in the north of the canton, inspecting the bridges, from the sixth to the eighth of that month. I’ve seen his diary. So that is very wrong, Vartas.”

His gaze stayed steady. He slowly replaced his shootstraw pipe in his mouth and puffed at it. “Then I was wrong. She was with Blas during some other day.”

“Which days?”

“The fourteenth and fifteenth of Egin. Just a slight mistake.”

I shook my head. “That’s wrong, too.”

“The hell it is!”

“No. Blas was in the Daretana canton then. From the thirteenth through the fifteenth of the month of Egin. I know that, too. I knowallof his movements for the past three months.”

Vartas blinked. The coal of his shootstraw pipe danced as his hand trembled. Miljin slowly rose and came to stand behindme.

“We’ve two options here,” I said. “Either you have no idea where Signum Loveh was duringanyof these days—or, you told the captain here a lie, and she did go to Talagray eight days before the breach. Butyou didn’t want Miljin to know that, and when he didn’t ask about it, you didn’t speak up. But I’m guessing you got nervous. You wanted to give her an alibi for theothertime she visited Talagray, on the night of the seventh of Egin—the same meeting that two other of the dead Engineers attended. Just in case. But you misstepped there. Picked the wrong person to put her with. Unlucky for you. You could have just kept quiet, and we’d have never known. But now we do.”

“Know what?” Vartas said grudgingly.

“That you knowwhyshe went to Talagray,” I said. “None of the others knew, so none of them tried to lie. But you did.”

He lifted his shootstraw pipe back up to his lips. It was positively prancing now. “I don’t know,” he said softly, “what the hell you’re talking abou—”

Then Miljin moved.

I had not been watching him, so I had not been prepared for it. But there was a quickclack-clacksound, like someone unlocking a lock; and the next thing I knew his sword was in his hand, spinning around as lightly as if it were a length of straw—and then he was stabbing it down, thrusting it through the cot directly between Vartas’s legs up to the hilt, a mere smallspan or two away from the man’s crotch.

Vartas screamed, his shootstraw pipe tumbling out of his teeth. He tried to sit up, but Miljin placed a fist on his sternum and shoved him back down.

“Did you lie tome,Signum?” Miljin bellowed. “Did youfuckinglie to me?”

I stared at the sword, mere spans before my face. Its blade was not shining steel, I noticed, but a pale, sickly, whitish green.

Vartas’s screams rose into shrieks, and he began slapping at the side of his robe. A small thread of aromatic smoke was gently unscrolling from his clothing above his hip. I darted my hand into the man’s robe, found the shootstraw pipe that had slipped to his side, plucked it out, and stuck it in his teacup, where it died with a sputtering hiss.