Page 99 of A Trade of Blood

“You know of that, eh? Yes. That broke him, of course.Brokehim. The boy would bathe in the stalls set up for the laborers there, but he’d still come back with skin stained pink from blood. He’d have…thingsstill in his hair. And he’d talk of it. Whisper of, of viscera, and entrails. And the sounds of the cows lowing. He said they knew what was coming and feared it.”

“He hated the trade, then.”

“Hatewas hardly the word for it.We think of them as scaffolding,he said once to his father.A lattice for culturing flesh. But they are more, and we are less for our blindness to it.There was an awful irony to it…Burilis always wanted his son to be strong. But when Jalin finally showed strength and demanded that the family cease its trade of flesh, Master Burav hated it so.”

I summoned the memory of the sketches I had seen in Jalin’s cottage. The rich, dark eyes, so innocent and soulful.

“So Jalin tried to save them,” I said. “But—did he mean the cattle? Or his family?”

“I don’t know!” she confessed. “He’d probably say both. It all got so much worse after the Armenta boy died…”

“Which one?”

“The eldest. Lyimo. He had always plagued poor Jalin…so much so that I would have thought it would grant Jalin some sense of relief. But instead, he only grew worse. Taking too many moodies. Sleeping all day, wandering at night. One night I found him on the lawns, his head full of tinctures, pupils as big as plates. He was weeping. He said to me—I am owned. My soul is not my own anymore. He owns me utterly. What a fool I was.I asked him what he meant—his father? Lyimo? Someone else? But he would never say.”

I sniffed my vial slowly as I engraved this in my memories. “That was three years ago. Did he ever improve?”

“A…a little,” she conceded. “Yet still, he acted strange. He would watch the woods. Not the ones close to us, but the ones in the distance. And sometimes he would vanish—and when he returned, I’d find his boots muddied, and purple leaves in the grass about his cottage.” She fell silent for a moment. “Perhaps I should have told Master Burav. I just hoped it’d end, that…that the family might reconcile. And how strange it was that Zansay’s murder seemed to be the thing to bring son and father together! How they held each other and wept! I thought they’d found some common ground. But then came Zansay’s memorial. That night was when he kissed me.”

“Who?”

“Jalin, of course. Kissed me on the head. Held me close. Said I was the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother. Said he wanted to apologize for all he’d done wrong.” She swallowed and coughed a little. “I watched him walk upstairs to join the others. Thought he’d…he’d perhaps turned a corner. But then I heard the screaming. I looked out and saw the smoke. Then the halls were consumed with fire.”

“What did you do?”

“There was nothing to do. No way to get out. Only one choice—to go into the vault. So I did. And shut the door.”

“You knew of it? And the combination?”

A fleeting smile. “As I told you, I’ve served the Buravs for time out of mind. Enough to know a handful of secrets, at least.” She rubbed her face in misery. “It was so hot in here, I was sure I would die or burst into flames. And perhaps I…perhaps I should have died. Too many secrets. Too much death. I wonder, if I had spoken out—could I have stopped any of it? Or would anyone have listened at all?”

—

Evening was crawlingthrough the skies when the medikkers took Istelia away. The setting sun turned all the leaning posts and columns into a spiderweb of shadows at my feet, and the steelwalls of the vault flared bright with the last slivers of sunlight, and cast crimson reflections all about.

I slid a shootstraw pipe into my mouth and slowly walked over to the open vault. Ana was kneeling over eight tomes of varying sizes, probing each crackling parchment with her long fingers. She calmly ignored the other Orbiis, who were cataloging and reclaiming all their tools and reagents among the crates. Commander Tauri tarried near Ana, as if hoping she would make sense of all this or perhaps dreading she might reveal some worse revelation. Seriv had pulled up a chair behind them and was leaning in it with a pained face: I guessed his wound still irritated him immensely. Yet he still listened keenly as I told him all we’d discovered when we’d exhumed the Armenta children.

“A story now emerges,” Ana said softly when I finished. “Though an awful one. The bruise on Lyimo’s back, I think,wasfrom Jalin Burav’s ring. And recall, Lyimo Armenta was the first person slain by the web. But wherever and however Jalin learned the arts of breeding the fungus, he did not use it rightly—or, at least, not for that first time! He put the poison in a pot of wine—one, I believe, taken from this very vault—and sent it to Lyimo, claiming to be from some courting family…And then, do you recall what Velona said of Lyimo’s odd behaviors, Din?”

I echoed Velona’s words: “He would walk across our fields, until he came to the border of the forest. And there he would stand stock-still, like a statue, gazing in! Something hadseducedhim there. Called him.Sangto him, perhaps!”

“Jalin was in the wood, you think, ma’am,” said Seriv. “Conditioning him.”

“Exactly so,” said Ana. “Conditioning Lyimo to be drawn to any given place. But Jalin did not condition him enough! The fungus had only festered a little. So when the time came for Jalin to force him into the pond, I think Lyimoresistedthe commands written into his mind! He would not consent to die. Jalin panicked—and intervened.”

“He ran out and held him down,” I said. “Pushed his fist into the small of his back. And drowned him with his own hands.”

“Precisely. And he left a wounding that matched his tughra ring.” She bowed her head. “Of all the many murders we must account for, I believesomecan now be given to Jalin with certainty. Lyimo Armenta, yes. And all the Buravs, yes.”

“Why would he wish to slaughter his whole family, though?” asked Tauri.

“It is not the motivation that troubles me,” said Ana. “We know he hated and disdained his family. Instead, I think about the timing, the suddenness of it—and one of Istelia’s comments that troubles me most…” She gestured tome.

My eyes shivered, and I echoed the words: “I am owned. My soul is not my own anymore. He owns me utterly.”

“Correct,” said Ana. “When he said this, did Jalin mean he, too, was infected with the web? Were his mind and body no longer under his own control? Or did he mean somethingmore? Regardless, one thing is clear. There is another killer. One far cleverer, more cunning, and much more dangerous than young Jalin.”

A fraught silence filled the vault. The last of the Orbiis officers trooped out with the reagents, and we were left alone.