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.”
“Was that why you asked that Legion commander about the smell of his piss, ma’am?”
“Oh, no, not at all. At the time, I was merely curious.”
I allowed a quick glance at her. She was a tall, thin woman in her late forties or fifties—it was hard to tell with some altered folk—and though her skin had gray undertones like mine, hers was decidedly on the paler end. That was mostly because she never went outside, but part of it was likely because she was Sazi: a lighter-skinned race from the inner rings of the Empire, whose faces were more angular and narrower than Tala folk like me. With her bone-white hair, wide smile, and yellow eyes, she often seemed vaguely feline: a mad housecat, perhaps, roving through a home in pursuit of a suitable sunbeam, though always willing to torture the occasional mouse.
Today she was wearing a long black dress, and on top of this she had on a smudged, dark blue Iudex Iyalet cloak whose heralds were all arranged very much against imperial code, organized into perfectly symmetrical groups. Their sorting was different from yesterday’s: now organized by color, rather than size.