I delicately slid my wrench into the lock, followed by the pin. I set my pin, then felt a fluttering in my eyes as I let the memories return to me, and the movements came alive in my fingers.
I turned the pin, then dipped the wrench up and down, the slightest wiggle. With a click, the lock turned.
I glanced around to confirm I was unwatched, and opened the door.
The stench of rot struck me in a thick, staggering wave. I stepped back, coughing with my arm to my nose, then took a deep breath of clear air and returned to the open door, peering inside.
The house within was a wreck. Cupboards all shoved open, their contents poured out onto the floor. Chairs and tables flipped upside down. Cushions slashed to pieces, their moss stuffing ripped out in clumps. Piles of paper lay everywhere, having been torn from many books. The only thing that hadn’t been dashed to pieces was the small spyglass set on a stand in the corner—a fancy possession for so modest a home.
Someone, it seemed, had come here looking for something. I wondered if they’d found it.
I looked back at the street, confirming I was unwatched. Then I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
* * *
—
I MOVED CAREFULLY throughout the reeking house, studying all the refuse on the floor, shattered reagents vials or bowls of tinctures or shredded books. Finally I came to the bedroom, where the stench of rot was so intense I was nearly sick. Clothes had been hauled from the wardrobes and shredded to pieces. The whole of the room was like a stinking rat’s nest.
I looked to the mossbed in the corner. There on the floor, peeking just past the drape of the sheets, were the tips of two bare feet, the toes curled and discolored.
I hesitated. Then I walked over and looked at her.
The body was female, somewhat elderly, and had been lying here for some days, her skin darkening in patches from the pooling of her blood within her. She had putrefied so much it was difficult to tell her race, yet she seemed a skinny, frail woman, with a thick shock of gray hair. A pool of black, old blood lay on the floor just beside her head, though I could not see a wound.
I cracked the bedroom shutter, allowing a blade of evening light to cut through the gloom. Then I calmed my mutinous stomach and leaned forward to look at her head. At the base of her skull, hidden among the gray tufts of her hair, was a dark, perfect little hole, about half the width of my little finger. A crackling rill of old dried blood wove away from it down her scalp. I had never seen such a wound in all my life and could not imagine what had felled her.
I stood back, studying the body. Rona Aristan, I guessed. Someone had come calling, looking for something, but she either had not given it to them, or could not.
I glanced around the bedroom, listening to the echoes of the curfew bells. My eye fell on a painting, undamaged but askew. Rendered in thick oil paints on its surface was the somewhat familiar face of a man: only somewhat, however, because the last time I’d seen that face, it’d been shot through with shoots of dappleglass.
I moved to the painting of Commander Taqtasa Blas. It was the first time I’d seen an image of the man whole. His eyes were steely but warm, nose proud with a slight bend from some childhood break. Dark Kurmini complexion overcast with the familiar gray. A handsome, haughty creature, I thought him.
I cocked my head, leaning closer. There was a bruise in the wood, at the frame’s corner. Then I saw there were more: another bruise above it, and one more on the bottom. Like this painting had been moved a great deal in its time, and bumped and rubbed up against something.
I thought for a moment. Then I lifted the painting off its nail and turned it around.
A piece of thick parchment had been glued to the canvas’s back; yet there, at the top right corner, it had been carefully torn away.
I shook the painting. Something rattled within. I tipped it over, turning its open corner to my palm.
Something small and twinkling slid out from behind the canvas and dropped in my hand: a key.
I held the key up to the fading light in the window. It was a simple thing, made of bright, rosy bronze. A key to a common lock, or a common door. I turned it over in my hand, thinking.
Why hide this key in such a fashion? Was this what the intruder had been looking for?
I looked back at Aristan’s corpse, frowning. Then my eye returned to the shuttered bedroom window.
An idea slowly began to congeal in my mind.
I returned to the main room, to where the spyglass was mounted on a stand pointing out the shuttered window there. I pushed open the shutters—pausing to peer out in case I was being watched—then put my eye to the spyglass.