“Who owns this estate? I take it not Commander Blas?”
“No, sir. This house is owned by the Haza clan. Did you not see the insignia?” He gestured to a little marking hanging over the entry door: a single feather standing tall between two trees.
That gave me pause. The Hazas were one of the wealthiest families in the Empire and owned a huge amount of land in the inner rings. The staggering luxury of this place began to make a lot of sense, but everything else grew only more confusing.
“What are the Hazas doing owning a house in Daretana?” I asked, genuinely bewildered.
He shrugged. “Dunno, sir. Maybe they ran out of houses to buy everywhere else.”
“Is a member of the Haza clan here currently?”
“If they are, sir, they’re damned good hiders. The housekeeper should know more.”
We continued down a long hallway, which ended in a black stonewood door.
A faint odor filled the air as we grew close to the door: something musty and sweet, and yet tinged with a rancid aroma.
My stomach trembled. I reminded myself to hold my head high, to keep my expression scowling and stoic, like a real assistant investigator might. Then I had to remind myself that I was a real assistant investigator, damn it all.
“Have you worked many death cases before, sir?” asked Otirios.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just curious, given the nature of this one.”
“I haven’t. Mostly the investigator and I have handled pay fraud among the officers here in Daretana.”
“You didn’t handle that murder last year? The sotted guard who attacked the fellow at the checkpoint?”
I felt something tighten in my cheek. “The Iudex Investigator position was created here only four months ago.”
“Oh, I see, sir. But you didn’t work any death inquiries with your investigator at your previous station?”
The muscle in my cheek tightened further. “When the investigator arrived here,” I said, “I was selected from the other local Sublimes to serve as her assistant. So. No.”
There was the slightest of pauses in Otirios’s stride. “So…you have only worked for an Iudex Investigator for four months, sir?”
“What’s the point of this, Princeps?” I asked, irritated.
I could see the smirk playing at the edges of Otirios’s mouth again. “Well, sir,” he said. “Of all the death cases to be your first, I wouldn’t much like it being this one.”
He opened the door.
* * *
—
THE CHAMBER WITHIN was a bedroom, as grand as the rest of the house, with a wide, soft mossbed in one corner and a fernpaper wall and door separating off what I guessed was the bathing closet—for though I’d never seen a bathing closet inside a house, I knew such things existed. A mai-lantern hung in the corner; in the corner diagonal from it, another kirpis shroom. Beside it were two trunks and a leather satchel. Commander Blas’s possessions, I guessed.
But the most remarkable feature of the room was the clutch of leafy trees growing in the center—for it was growing from within a person.
Or rather, through a person.
The corpse hung suspended in the center of the bedchamber, speared by the many slender trees, but as Otirios had said it was initially difficult to identify it as a body at all. A bit of torso was visible in the thicket, and some of the left leg. What I could see of them suggested a middle-aged man wearing the purple colors of the Imperial Engineering Iyalet. The right arm was totally lost, and the right leg had been devoured by the swarm of roots pouring out from the trunks of the little trees and eating into the stonewood floor of the chamber.
I stared into the roots. I thought I could identify the pinkish nub of a femur amid all those curling coils.
I looked down. An enormous pool of blood had spread across the floor, as smooth and reflective as a black glass mirror.
A flicker in my stomach, like it held an eel trying to leap out.
I told myself to focus, to breathe. To stay controlled and contained. This was what I did for a living now.
“It’s safe to approach, sir,” Otirios said, a little too cheerily. “We’ve inspected the whole of the room. Worry not.”
I stepped closer to look at the greenery. They weren’t really trees, but some kind of long, flexible grass—a bit like shootstraw, the hollow, woody grass they used to make piping and scaffolding. The thicket of shoots appeared to have emerged from between Blas’s shoulder and neck—I spied a hint of vertebrae trapped within them and suppressed another pang of nausea.