Page 58 of The Tainted Cup

I hesitated. Then I walked over and looked at her.

The body was female, somewhat elderly, and had been lying here for some days, her skin darkening in patches from the pooling of her blood within her. She had putrefied so much it was difficult to tell her race, yet she seemed a skinny, frail woman, with a thick shock of gray hair. A pool of black, old blood lay on the floor just beside her head, though I could not see a wound.

I cracked the bedroom shutter, allowing a blade of evening light to cut through the gloom. Then I calmed my mutinous stomach and leaned forward to look at her head. At the base of her skull, hidden among the gray tufts of her hair, was a dark, perfect little hole, about half the width of my little finger. A crackling rill of old dried blood wove away from it down her scalp. I had never seen such a wound in all my life and could not imagine what had felled her.

I stood back, studying the body. Rona Aristan, I guessed.Someone had come calling, looking for something, but she either had not given it to them, or could not.

I glanced around the bedroom, listening to the echoes of the curfew bells. My eye fell on a painting, undamaged but askew. Rendered in thick oil paints on its surface was the somewhat familiar face of a man: only somewhat, however, because the last time I’d seen that face, it’d been shot through with shoots of dappleglass.

I moved to the painting of Commander Taqtasa Blas. It was the first time I’d seen an image of the man whole. His eyes were steely but warm, nose proud with a slight bend from some childhood break. Dark Kurmini complexion overcast with the familiar gray. A handsome, haughty creature, I thought him.

I cocked my head, leaning closer. There was a bruise in the wood, at the frame’s corner. Then I saw there were more: another bruise above it, and one more on the bottom. Like this painting had been moved a great deal in its time, and bumped and rubbed up against something.

I thought for a moment. Then I lifted the painting off its nail and turned it around.

A piece of thick parchment had been glued to the canvas’s back; yet there, at the top right corner, it had been carefully torn away.

I shook the painting. Something rattled within. I tipped it over, turning its open corner to my palm.

Something small and twinkling slid out from behind the canvas and dropped in my hand: a key.

I held the key up to the fading light in the window. It was a simple thing, made of bright, rosy bronze. A key to a common lock, or a common door. I turned it over in my hand, thinking.

Why hide this key in such a fashion? Was this what the intruder had been looking for?

I looked back at Aristan’s corpse, frowning. Then my eye returned to the shuttered bedroom window.

An idea slowly began to congeal in my mind.

I returned to the main room, to where the spyglass was mounted on a stand pointing out the shuttered window there. I pushed open the shutters—pausing to peer out in case I was being watched—then put my eye to the spyglass.

The spyglass had been trained on a set of little houses about a half league up the hill, much smaller than this one. Bland little things that were hardly more than fernpaper, all the shutters of their windows clamped shut.

But one set of shutters—the one in the exact center of the spyglass’s lens—was different: a bright blue cloth was wedged in the shutters’ crack, dangling down the wall. None of the other houses featured such an adornment.

I drew back from the spyglass and peered at the little house, and the blot of blue hanging from the window.

A signal of some kind, perhaps? One Rona Aristan had once observed, from this very window?

I looked down at the little bronze key in my hand. Then I peered back through the spyglass, moving it a little to study the door of the house.

I spied a wink of rosy bronze there on the door—perhaps the same as the metal of the key now in my hand.

—

I SLIPPED OUTthe back door and returned to the drizzling rain, key clutched in my fingers and the curfew bells still ringing in the distance. I approached the bland little house slowly, eyeing the alleys and windows.

No movement. All was still.

I approached the front door—the make of the knob and lock was indeed the same as the key—and pressed an ear to it to listen. I heard no sound within, so I slid the little bronze key in the lock and turned it. With a click, the door fell open.

Inside it was a stark, miserable little place, barely more than afloor, a ceiling, a wardrobe, and a table and a set of chairs. I shut the door behind me and quietly stepped in, glancing about, wary of any intruders.

Yet there was nothing to see, except perhaps a handful of colored cloths hanging from a hook beside the shuttered window, some red, some blue, some green. My hunch was right, I reckoned: many colors, for many signals, should anyone be watching. Just like the flares of the sea walls, perhaps.

I looked around the bare, empty house. There was no bed—so not a place for living, I guessed. As to what could have happened here that was worth signaling anyone over, I had no idea.

I walked across the floorboards, tapping them with my toe and waiting for a creak or a hollow thump. Nothing. Nor was there anything in the cupboards. Then I looked in the wardrobe.