The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)(10)

“I told you, Din,” Ana said, “to knock. Always.”

I stood up straight at attention, hands behind my back, heels shoulder-width apart, knees straight. “Thought I heard voices, ma’am,” I said. “Came to check.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to be worried about.” She looked over her shoulder at me, grinning. A strand of her snowy-white hair arched down over her cheek, like the crest feather of some exotic bird. I maintained my stance, but she could not see me, for she was wearing a wide strip of crimson cloth as a blindfold. “The captain and I,” she said, “have been having the most delightful conversation.”

The captain stared at me in naked dread.

“Have you, ma’am,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said. She turned back to her project. “The captain here is in charge of maintaining the irrigation networks about Daretana. During their works they discovered ruins, hundreds of years old, built by some of the folk who lived here before the Empire came. Isn’t that right, Captain Tischte?”

The captain looked at me and mouthed—Help me!

“Most curiously,” Ana continued, “apparently some of the ruins were built using a complex herringbone brick structure, requiring less mortar in their application! Isn’t that fascinating?”

The captain was now gesturing desperately at me and pointing at the door.

“Very fascinating, ma’am,” I said.

“Especially because,” she said, “I have long nursed a theory that many of the Kurmini folk in the third ring of the Empire originally migrated from these lands before the Empire was established. And this would offer some confirmation of that, as the herringbone brick pattern is extremely common in the Kurmin canton! The people migrated inward, obviously, because…” She waved her hand easterly. “I mean, if you wanted to survive, that was what you did.”

The captain paused in his gesturing, having noticed a white cloth on a tray beside him. Before I could stop him, he lifted it and stared in horror at the sight underneath: a little jipti sparrow that Ana had caught some weeks ago, then killed, dissected, and preserved in a glass jar. The captain dropped the cloth, his hand trembling.

I rushed to think up a story. “Actually, ma’am,” I said, clearing my throat, “I happened to run into some officers from Engineering on the way here.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, ma’am. They mentioned they needed Captain Tischte right away.”

Ana paused before her contraption, then cocked her head. “Hm. No. That is a lie, Din. You’re a very bad liar, and I can hear it in your voice. But! I will admit, besides the herringbone discussion, Captain Tischte hasn’t really had anything interesting to say, and I’m getting rather bored of him.” She turned to him, still blindfolded, still grinning. “You can go, Captain. I do appreciate your time.”

Captain Tischte shot to his feet, looking scandalized. He bowed, uttered a single hoarse “M-madam,” and then made for the door.

I accompanied him out into the steamy afternoon, wondering how to undo the damage this time.

“I apologize for that, sir,” I said. “There’s no excuse fo—”

“Apologize!” he squawked once we were outside. “Apologize! She sends me a letter to come round with some maps, and when I oblige, she traps me there for three hours interrogating me about the whole of my life! She even asked me about the shape of my feet!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I bowed, glanced up, saw his furious face, then bowed deeper, until my nose nearly touched my ratty boots. “I would have stopped it if I’d been here, sir, I really would ha—”

“And then…then she has the temerity to call me boring!” he said. “To think that that madwoman is our Iudex Investigator, I just…” He turned and stormed off along the jungle path, back to town.

I watched him go, muttered, “Shit,” and reentered the house.

Ana was still coiled before her contraption in the meeting room, posture taut, fingers thoughtfully dancing over the strings.

I said, “You do know…” then paused to rethink my words.

“Go on, Din,” she said. She tugged off her blindfold. “I almost thought you were about to rebuke me. That would be splendidly entertaining.”

“Well, you do know, ma’am,” I said, “that…that you really can’t keep doing that.”

“Ordinarily I can’t,” she said, “but that’s because ordinarily you’re here stopping me, Din.”

“I do so, ma’am,” I snapped, “because you can’t keep cornering these poor people and wringing them of information like juice from an aplilot!”

“I am simply doing my utmost to make this dismal canton a little interesting,” she said blithely. She tightened a string on her contraption. “But that requires rather a lot of work.”

“Ma’am…”

“For example, are you aware, Din, that the southeasternmost water well in Daretana is almost certainly infected with irida?”

“How fascinating, ma’am.”

“Indeed. No one was aware. But I gleaned such from the sixty-two folk I’ve chatted with over the past months. Twelve of them who drank regularly from that well have, unknowingly, described slight aches and insomnia and an unnatural scent to their urine—all symptoms commonly associated with the disease. I notified the captain of this, and recommended he purge the well.” Another tweak to the wires before her. “That is what I get from all these chats, Din. I just need enough information to divine the nature of the pattern.”