I walked up the steps to her front door and saw a stack of books waiting before the door, tied up with string. Delivery from the Daretana post station, I guessed. I squatted and flipped a few open to read their titles. As always, the letters shook and danced before my eyes, making it hard for me to put them together—the shifting jungle light didn’t help—but I made out Summation of the Transfer of Landed Properties, Qabirga Canton, 1100–1120 and Theories Related to the Increase in Mass of the Eastern Scuttlecrab Since 800.
“The hell?” I muttered.
Then I paused, listening. I heard the chirrup of a tossfrog, and the low call of a mika lark; but then I realized I had heard something else: the mutter of a man, within the house.
I pressed my ear to the front door. I could hear one voice within—my master’s—but then a second, a man’s. One that sounded anxious, even nervous.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “She’s gone and trapped another one…”
I threw the door open and dashed in.
* * *
—
THE MOST REMARKABLE feature of the interior of the little fretvine house, as always, was the sheer number of books: walls and stacks and veritable canyons of tomes, on any number of obscure subjects. My master quite literally lived between books, often using them as a desk and nightstand. She even had to carve out a little cavern in them for her bed.
I peered through the valleys of tomes and approached the meeting room at the back of the little house. I could already see the feet of someone sitting in a chair back there—officer’s boots, black and shiny—and grimaced. I smoothed back my hair and walked into the meeting room.
The meeting room had gotten worse since yesterday: it was now brimming with tangles of potted plants, many exotic and half-dead, and stringed musical instruments in varying states of disrepair. On the left side of the room sat a small stuffed chair, and today a captain from Engineering occupied it, a thin, middle-aged man who looked absolutely terrified.
The reason for his terror was obvious, for most people found themselves terrified to share a room with my master: Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, Iudex Investigator of the Daretana Canton, who was sitting on the floor facing away from the captain as she worked on yet another one of her projects. It appeared to be some contraption of wires and string I could make no sense of. I guessed she’d taken apart one of her many situr harps—she was an avid if inattentive musician—and was making some kind of loom from its strings.
“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.