“Oh,” Jainan said. He sounded startled, as if Kiem had broken some sort of rule. Kiem admittedly didn’t pay a lot of attention to palace legislation, but he was fairly sure asking Internal Security for some information wasn’t against the law.
“The Auditor can’t be right about Taam,” Kiem said, dropping the seal back in his pocket. “Someone would have told us.”
“I would just like to know,” Jainan said. The lines around his eyes hadn’t disappeared. He glanced out the window toward the shining dome of the shrine where Taam’s Mournings had all been held, shook his head slightly, and pulled his messages off the wall in the manner of someone determined to be businesslike about things. “Perhaps we should get back.”
“Yes—we should brief Bel,” Kiem said, galvanized into action. He fell in beside Jainan as they started down the stairs. “She might have some ideas. Honestly, this is absolute nonsense. A Galactic from the other side of the universe telling us we can’t speak for our own planets.” At the foot of the stairs, a glass door led outside. Kiem waved it aside and gestured Jainan ahead. “Maybe Bel will find it funny. Taam might have found it funny.”
Jainan gave him an odd look as they passed through the door and into the cold sunlight outside. “No,” he said. “Taam would not have found this funny at all.”
CHAPTER 7
A week passed. Jainan felt suspended, like a fragment caught in the force between two fields. The idea that Taam’s death might have been murder was farcical, absurd, but the memory of the Auditor saying it circled around his head until he was banishing the thought dozens of times a day. He could do nothing about it. No Iskaner was obliged to tell him anything. Internal Security failed to reply to Kiem’s nudge; even Taam’s old colleagues were quiet. Nobody had a duty to interact with Jainan except Kiem.
Kiem was—in public and in private—friendly, considerate, and good-humored. This had nothing to do with Jainan: Kiem was friendly and good-humored to everyone Jainan ever saw him with. Kiem was the person everyone knew, and it showed wherever he went. He walked into a crowded room and three people would immediately greet him like an old friend. Jainan had trouble remembering people’s names; Kiem remembered their children’s names. Every time Jainan thought about how he must look to Kiem—with his awkwardness, his stiff speech, his painful inability to say the right thing in the right situation—he felt a part of him try and spiral into self-pity again. He didn’t let that happen.
His first appointment with Professor Audel was at the Imperial College, on a clear and sharply cold day that dawned free of snow. Even taking a flyer to the College felt more intimidating without Kiem there. Not only had Kiem known where to go, but his easy confidence also attracted people’s attention. By himself, Jainan had to shake the feeling that everyone was staring at him instead. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a reason to leave the palace grounds alone.
Jainan got lost twice in the College’s twisty buildings, a couple of which were unheated and already below freezing. Professor Audel’s office, when he reached it, was in a corridor as stuffy as a sauna. There was a better-kept section adjoining it—Jainan passed three lab entrances, and glanced in with curiosity, and away with regret. The professor’s room had a nameplate and a doorbell. He gave it his thumbprint.
The door opened. The person behind it wasn’t Professor Audel, but one of her students.
The student stared as if Jainan had just landed there on an incoming meteor. “Sweet God, you came.”
Jainan knew that accent. The student was Thean. Jainan fought the urge to step back. “Is Professor Audel in?”
“Professor!” the student yelled behind him—no, her. The way she’d tied her clan neckscarf was definitely female. Jainan had spent so long on Iskat that he was looking for the wrong signals. An unwelcome memory rose from his first few weeks: How do you not understand what a woman is, Jainan? Do they not have them on Thea? At the time, Jainan had laughed. Now he blinked as the student called, “You were right, he’s here!”
“Yes, dear,” Professor Audel said, emerging from an inner part of the rooms. “Would you do me a favor and make the coffee. Count Jainan—do you go by ‘Count’？”
“No,” Jainan said. The Thean student had mercifully stopped staring at him and gone to unearth a battered samovar from under a pile of old lab equipment. Disconcertingly, the pattern on her twisted scarf was one of Feria’s. “Just Jainan, please.”
“Jainan, then—why don’t you sit down.” Professor Audel started sorting through more junk behind her desk. “I’m sure I had—where’s it gone?”
Jainan looked around the room. There were only two obvious chairs. One of them was behind the professor’s desk, and the other was occupied by a glass aquarium. The water it held was so dark it must have had a photoagent in it, and it was probably contributing to the faintly chemical smell that permeated the room. A flipper broke the surface and disappeared again.
“Oh, that’s just our goldfish,” Professor Audel said. “Move her.”
“She’s in three hundred liters of water, and the hover assist broke,” the student pointed out. She kicked what looked like an old porcelain samovar, beautiful but chipped, and it emitted a faint chime. “Sit here, Count Jainan.” She met Jainan’s eyes and shoved out a crate. There was a challenge in there that Jainan didn’t understand. “Sorry it’s not the style you’re used to.”
Taam would have intimidated her into politeness by now. Kiem would have already extracted her name and exactly what was bothering her. Jainan could only look away. “It’s fine,” he said. He sat on the edge.
“Can’t find the abacus,” Professor Audel said, emerging with her hair clips askew. “I have your conclusions from the net, though. Oh dear, look at me jumping into work. One of my bad habits. Gairad, is that the coffee?”
“Coming,” the student said, pouring from the samovar. She passed Jainan and Professor Audel cups of extraordinarily strong coffee then pulled up a beanbag and took the third cup for herself. Something about her profile was naggingly familiar.
An illustration of the Iskat sector hung on the wall behind the professor’s desk. Unusually, it was drawn so Thea dominated the foreground, distinctive with its glittering ring and the cobalt-blue tint of its seas. The artist had delineated a network of ship journeys in gold. Thea had never been easy to reach: the asteroid fields were extensive and difficult to navigate, but there were lines to Rtul and the majestic bulk of Eisafan, and one desultory route to Kaan. But all of those were dwarfed by the gleaming web of trade routes that looped around Iskat and spiraled out to the sector’s one remaining galactic link. The threads were so dense that they came together in a golden river pouring through the known clear paths to Thea: in the picture, it looked like you could take a rowboat from Thea to Iskat’s shores.
“Now then, dear,” Professor Audel said, “didn’t someone say you just got married? How are you finding it?”
Jainan choked. “We’re very happy,” he said. “Thank you.”