Page 47 of A Drop of Corruption

“Perhaps.” She was silent for a very long time. “I shall say only—some Iudexii learn the value of justice while they serve. Others come with the conviction alreadywithinthem. I am of this latter group.”

“Why was justice so important to you, ma’am?”

“Why do you think?” she snapped. “You’re not stupid. You will come to the conclusion eventually, I’m sure.”

I fell silent, abashed. I was saved only by a sharp knock at the door. Ana waved a hand and said, “Go. Let us see what new madness this realm drops at my doorstep.”

I went to the door and opened it to find a man holding yet another package, this one carefully wrapped in mosscloth.

“Was told to bring this round, sir,” the man said. “From the music workshop. I believe it’s already been paid for in full?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I took it from him, thanked him, and bowed. Then I shut the door and returned.

I set the package down before Ana. “I think you shall appreciate this, ma’am.”

She frowned, puzzled, before her face lit up, and in an instant it was like she’d forgotten all we’d argued about. “Ahh! Is it? Oh, my goodness…” She clapped, girlishly giddy, and unwrapped the mosscloth to reveal a small, finely made Pithian lyre. “Oh, tremendous.Tremendous!” She scooped it up, tuned it for a bit, then set it down on the floor next to her other one. Then she simultaneously played the same chord progression on each with her left and right hand, a strangely haunting tune. “How excellent. Did you know that the lyre duet is one of the ancient arts of Yarrow, Din?”

I nudged the fire in the stove and began making another pot of tea, this one for myself. “Is it, ma’am?”

“Yes. Some say it reflects the dominance of twins and triplets in the royal lineage here—a rather fascinating biological quirk. Led to someveryinteresting issues with inheritance, and many brothers killing brothers, sometimes at ages as young as six. Horrible shit, really!” Another simultaneous chord progression. “But it did make for such beautiful music…”

I watched as her pale fingers danced across each lyre, plucking out the sad, woodsy music, a dreamy smile splashed across her face as she meditated on these horrors. I thought of all she’d said but could make no sense of it. I still knew remarkably little of her history, really; indeed, I’d never met anyone who could explain her. Even Thelenai had been bewildered.

Ana had only grown close to telling me what augmentations she possessed once, back in Talagray, saying:My situation made me amenable to an…experiment. An alteration. The nature of which should not bother you—for you would not be able to comprehend it.

Yet this, like everything else, still meant very little to me.

“When are you going to tell me what augmentations you have, Ana?” I asked quietly. “And how it is you can do all you can do?”

“When I need to, you little shit,” she said, “and no earlier! Now, go get some rest. Somerealrest, this time. For tomorrow the drudgery begins!”

Chapter 20

For the next four days,I bounced across the Bay of Yarrow like a cricket fleeing a vole. I rode mules, horses, carriages; I floated about in canal barges and little sloops and rowboats and carracks; but, most of all, I walked, so much so that I wore a hole in my right boot and had to purchase new ones from an Apoth shop. “New material!” the man confided in me. “Mushroom leather blended with algaeoil. Very resilient!” The boots felt unnervingly soft and pliant, but they held, and I continued on in my drudgery.

Yet I found nothing. I spoke to over thirty Apoth officers of many senior ranks—captain, immunis, immunis-prificto, commander—yet all I interviewed not only gave verifiable alibis for their movements during the tenth of Hajnal, but most of them claimed they hadn’t been in the bank vault in months, if not years. The more I searched, the less I seemed to find.

As I did my drudgery, Ana’s chambers came to resemble a rat’s nest, with pages of parchments stuck to the walls, ceiling, and floor. Soon she was quite literally cocooned by records of thefts, living in a swirling world of pilfered reagents and precursors. If she made any progress, she did not say so; she simply sat in the storm of it all, plucking at her lyres. Most unsettlingly, she had pinned the note from the skull’s lips on the highest point of one wall, and worked day and night under the small, strange banner ofTe siz imperiya.

On the third day I visited Madam Poskit at the Usini Lending Group offices. There I heaved over an enormous sack of talints, thefirst of many payments I’d have to make to her. She made a show of counting each coin, and when she finished she gave me her wide, treacly grin and said, “I shall look forward to seeing you again soon!” I trudged away, muttering and miserable.

On the fourth day I could bear it no longer and sought out the Yarrow girl from my first night. I could not find her, so I settled for an older Kurmini man, a Treasury officer, who had a weary charm to him. He insisted on making me a full dinner and serving me wine. I sensed immediately he was trying to replace someone lost, and consented to play his game. He wept in his sleep in the middle of the night. I didn’t have the heart to tell him in the morning.

Meanwhile, the rest of Yarrowdale stayed quietly busy, moving on from the theft and murder as if it had been a fight among friends. Ships trundled up and down the canals; merchants came and went from the Treasury bank; the Shroud billowed and rippled in the bay; and I walked the many muddy roads, wondering if this might be the first investigation Ana and I might never close.

—

On the morningof the fifth drudgery day I discovered that the officer I had planned to interview—my fortieth of the lot—had recently been seconded to Prificto Kardas’s Treasury delegation to replace the dead Sujedo. This meant, I was told, that if I wished to speak to this officer, I would have to track down Kardas and his little band of muttering number-readers.

“But they are in the west today,” said the Treasury clerk guardedly. “Speaking to officials from the king’s court.”

“What do you mean, the west?” I asked. “Can you give me anything more specific than a direction?”

She pulled out a map and pointed to a building well west of Old Town, set high in the hills above the city. With a sigh, I started off.

I paid a handful of talints to hire a horse for this trip, and this proved a wise choice: a soft drizzle came pattering down as midmorning wore on, rendering the paths slick and unreliable, yet my mount’s footing was sure and steady. The landscape unfolded about me as wetraveled: behind every hill there seemed to be another, each higher than the first, and as the rain swept over us the landscape came alive with trickling creeks and chuckling waterfalls.

Then the rain broke, and a tuft of low cloud rose like a veil, revealing a structure nestled in the western peaks: a white stone citadel, shining in an errant beam of sunlight. The High City of Yarrow, I gauged. It was an almost celestial sight in this strange, wild place. Then another tussock of cloud came rolling in, and the vision was lost.