Captain Miljin rumbled to life, clearing his throat rather extensively. “This is so,” he said. “Dernpaste is the preferred one. Swells the areas you apply it to, makes it so your own mother wouldn’t know you. Skin tone’s harder to alter, but…Well. They have stuff for that, too.”
“And I suppose if you all had seen some shadowy figure with a swollen face,” said Ana, “skulking around Blas here with a piece of dappleglass in their hand, you’d have mentioned it by now.”
“Of course,” said Uhad. “But Blas was very active. He moved around a great deal. Many people knew him.”
“What investigatory steps have you taken for him here?” asked Ana.
“With the wet season approaching,” said Uhad, “we’ve only been able to do the minimum, unfortunately. The Apoths reviewed Blas’s offices and living quarters. They found nothing of note.”
“All right…” Then Ana paused. She seemed to be waiting for something. Her smile slowly retracted, and she swiveled her blindfolded face about the table. “Is that all? No one has anything else to say on the matter?”
An uneasy silence followed. Kalista watched Ana, her dark eyes heavily lidded. Nusis stared at the floor, like Ana had just made some embarrassing blunder in etiquette. Uhad watched nobody, his pupils dancing as memories flooded his mind. And Miljin, to my surprise, watched me, arms crossed, his gaze inscrutable.
“Unfortunately,” drawled Kalista, “nothing comes to mind.”
“I see…” said Ana. “Well then. One critical takeaway is that the perpetrator had to be operating here, in Talagray, for weeks if not months. This is the only way they could have known Blas’s movements.”
“That doesn’t necessarily narrow it down,” said Uhad. “There’s a lot of movement here in the months before the wet season.”
“Of course,” said Ana. “But there’s been one distinct signal that dappleglass gives off. One that even Din here, who’d never heard of it before, noticed right away.”
They all looked at me.
“Fernpaper,” I said. “It stains it.”
“Correct,” said Ana. “And I saw quite a lot of fernpaper out there in the city. Lots of quakes here, after all. Has any been found stained? For that would likely lead us directly to the killer—or the site of the poisoning.”
Uhad gestured to Captain Miljin. “If you please, Miljin,” he said, sighing.
Miljin leaned forward, his chair creaking under his bulk. “We read your letter, ma’am,” he said. “And we did look for stained fernpaper. Spoke to a few Legion chaps and discreetly sent them out about the city, asking if anyone had seen any fernpaper blackened since the breach. Heard nothing. Then they toured the city from end to end, examining all the fernpaper walls and windows and doors. Saw nothing. Seems to me, ma’am, that either the perpetrator found a way to contain the spores—which seems unlikely, given all we’ve learned about it—or the poisoning didn’t take place in Talagray at all. If so, that puts us in a spot. We can’t search the whole of the canton.”
I found this news dispiriting—but Ana was just nodding impatiently. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “But we need to broaden our timeline! How can we find out if any fernpaper was stained before the breach? Because apparently some mad fucker was running around the city for a good while with this poison in their pocket, possibly leaving a trail behind!”
Kalista laughed, the sound slightly contemptuous. “Well—we can't! There’s no way to find that out.”
“I’m inclined to agree…” said Uhad.
Ana rubbed her hands together, running her pink fingertips over her knuckles. “Captain Miljin—how many fernpaper millers are there in the city?”
“Dozens, ma’am,” he said. “Most of the common structures are made of it, given the quakes.”
“Can you ask these suppliers if they’d replaced any stained fernpaper panels in the four weeks previous to the breach? Or—better yet—can we get a list of all the orders they delivered in that time?”
Miljin nodded. “We could try that, ma’am. I could ask Captain Strovi of the Legion to help—Vashta’s second. He’s been assigned to provide support, as needed.”
“Then I propose we do so,” said Ana. “If we find an unusually big order of panels, that could indicate either the site of the poisoning, or the site where the poison was stored or developed.” She turned her blindfolded face to Uhad. “Though, of course, it’s not my dance…”