“Princeps?” I said, louder.
With a snort and a moan, Topirak awoke. “Wh…wha?” She opened her swollen eyes. Their whites were utterly bloodshot. When she saw me, her eyes went even wider and she cried out in alarm, shouting, “Who the hell are you?”
“Ahh,” I said, bewildered. I looked behind myself, wondering if someone was standing behind me. “I…I’m Signum Dinios Kol of the Iudex, Princeps. What’s wrong?”
She stared at me for a moment, then sighed in relief. “Oh, thank Sanctum…Do you know, when I saw you standing there over me, all dressed in darks and glowering down at me…” She laughed wearily. “I thought you were Death himself come for me, sir.”
I paused, wondering what to say. I’d been called all kinds of names during my short career with the Iyalets, but no one had ever mistaken me for the Harvester.
“It’s the bath, sir,” she explained. “There’s stuff in these waters that does stuff to your head.” She sniffed it. “Murgrass, mostly. A type of algae. Its feces offers many healing properties. That’s what makes the water white, you see…” She sniffed it again. “Also ceterophins, a sleeping reagent…And altias oils. For constipation. Don’t want me shitting in here.”
“Impressive skill,” I said.
She smiled weakly. “Blessed Atir of the Khanum, they say, had altered herself so she could awake and sniff the air, and know the placement of every bird and beast and flower about her for a mile…Though I doubt if she ever wound up in a bath like this. I sleep so much…I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”
“It’s the eighteenth of the month of Kyuz,” I said, “and I’m not from the deadlands, but the Iudex. I’m hoping you can help me with a few questions about the breach.”
“Why’s the Iudex investigating a breach, sir?” she croaked.
I ignored the question, took a chair from the corner, and sat down beside her. “I need to ask you about Signum Misik Jilki,” I said.
A shadow of sorrow crossed her face. “M-Misik’s dead, sir,” she whispered.
“I know that, Princeps. Did you know her well?”
She shifted in the milky fluid, her expression pained. The white tide sloshed about her torso, revealing a luminous curve of a breast, blackened with storm clouds of bruises. “Yes.”
“Very well?”
She glared at me. She was waking up now. “We were lovers, sir. But that’s not against policy, being as we’re from different Iyalets, is it?”
“I see,” I said. I was learning to stop being surprised when Ana’s hunches turned out to be right. “How long were you involved with her?”
A slow, sluggish blink as she did the math. “God…three years now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, and…” I resisted the urge to look down at her missing hand. “…and for what happened to you. I’m trying to learn a little more about how Jilki died.”
“Why?”
Again, I ignored her question. “Would you have seen her the day before her death?”
Topirak shook her head.
“No?”
“No, sir. She was at the walls,” she murmured. “Stayed there overnight, sir.”
“She was there all day?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. And the two days before that.”
“And she went nowhere besides the walls?”
“Not as far as I’m aware, sir.”
“Nowhere with steam, or water, or the like?”
“Don’t…don’t quite know what you’re asking, sir. Has something gone wrong?”
I considered what to say. One of the snails trailed across her severed wrist, leaving a stripe of pink flesh behind.
“When was the last time you saw Jilki, Princeps?” I asked.
“I saw her four days before she died, I think, sir?”
“And what were her movements on that day?”
“She went to the walls in the morning, and came back, sir.”
“And the day before that?” I asked.
“The same.”
I narrowed my eyes as I put this together. “So…just to make sure. For the six days previous to her death, the only places she went were here, at these quarters, and to the walls?”
“Yes, sir.”
I did not like the feel of this. I knew from Uhad’s report that two of the ten dead Engineers had been stationed in Talagray and had not visited either the walls or the Forward Engineering Quarters. Hearing that Jilki had only visited these places before her death would mean there was no commonality among the ten, which would make determining where they’d all been poisoned much harder.