The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)(8)

“They care,” he said, “if people get expensive. Then the people go. I try very hard not to be expensive. I don’t want to go.”

A worm of worry in his eye. Too old to be groundskeeper by half, I guessed, and he knew it. I pressed him for more, but he had nothing more to give, and I let him go.



* * *



—

LAST WAS THE housekeeper—a Madam Gennadios, apparently the boss of the whole place when the Hazas themselves weren’t around. An older woman with a lined, heavily painted face. She wore bright green robes of a very expensive make, soft and shimmering—Sazi silk, from the inner rings of the Empire. She paused when she walked in, looked me over with a cold, shrewd eye, then sat down, her posture immaculate—knees together at an angle, hands in her lap, shoulders high and tight—and stared resolutely into the corner.

“Something wrong, ma’am?” I asked.

“A boy,” she said. Her words were as dry and taut as a bowstring. “They’ve sent a boy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She studied me again out of the corner of her eye. “This is who’s trapped us in our house, the house of my masters, and won’t let us remove that damned corpse—a great, overgrown boy.”

A long, icy moment slipped by.

“Someone’s died in your house, ma’am,” I said. “Potentially of contagion. Something that might have killed you all, too. Don’t you want us to investigate?”

“Then where’s the investigator?”

“The investigator isn’t able to attend,” I said. “I’m here to review the scene and report back to her.”

Her gaze lingered on me. I was reminded of an eel contemplating a fish flitting before its cave. “Ask me your questions,” she said. “I’ve work to do, a damned ceiling to patch up. Go.”

I inhaled at my vial and then asked her about the nature of Blas’s stay. She gave what might have been the smallest, least sincere shrug I’d ever seen. “He is a friend of the Haza family.”

“One of your servant girls said the same thing,” I said.

“Because it’s true.”

“The exact same thing.”

“Because it’s true.”

“And your masters often let their friends stay at their houses?”

“My masters have many houses, and many friends. Sometimes their friends come to stay with us.”

“And no one from the Haza clan intended to join him?”

“My masters,” she said, “prefer more civilized environs than this canton.”

I moved on, asking her about the locations of the staff’s reagents keys.

“All the reagents keys are locked up at night,” she said. “Only I and Uxos are in constant possession of any during the evening, for emergencies.”

I asked about replacing keys, how to duplicate them, and so on, but she was dismissive. The idea was impossible to her.

“What about alterations?” I said. “Have your staff had any imperial grafts applied?”

“Of course,” she said. “For immunities, and parasites. We are on the rim of the Empire, after all.”

“Nothing more advanced than that?”

She shook her head. I felt a heat under the collar of my coat. I didn’t like how little she moved, sitting up so ramrod straight, shifting her head only to look at me out of the side of her eye like a damned bird.

“Can you at least tell me the nature of the commander’s relationship with the Hazas?” I asked.

A withering stare. “They were friends.”

“How long have they been friends?”

“I do not know the nature of all my masters’ friendships, nor is that for me to know.”

“Do they have many friends in Daretana?”

“Yes. In many of the Iyalets, at that.” Her eyes glittered at me. “And some of them are above you.”

I smiled politely at her, yet the threat seemed very real. I asked her more, but she gave me nothing. I let her go.



* * *



—

THEN IT WAS done: all witnesses questioned, all personnel accounted for, all times of departures and arrivals established. The only person who’d arrived in the past day had been Commander Taqtasa Blas, who’d come to the residence at just past eleven on the night of the twenty-ninth of the month of Skalasi. He immediately bathed and went to bed, awoke on the thirtieth, and then paused right before breakfast to die in the most horrifying fashion imaginable. Though I thought I’d made a pretty good job of it—except for my chat with the housekeeper, perhaps—I could make neither head nor tail of the scene: not whether Blas’s death was murder, or even suspicious.

Contagion did happen, after all. Especially to those who worked at the sea walls.

I stopped by the bedroom on my way out. To see the corpse one more time, yes, but also to replace Blas’s book in his belongings. It felt strange to slip his diary back in his bags, his frozen scream hanging over my shoulder. Despite all the mutilation, the pain of his expression remained striking, like he was still feeling all those shoots threading and coiling through his flesh.

I walked out and thanked Otirios, and he led me across the grounds back to the servants’ gate.