I opened Ana’s window and sat beside it, sipping my tea and drinking in the nightscape of Talagray again. After all I’d discovered today, being in the city felt hardly safer than any of my idle fantasies of theft and escape. This place was meant to be the keystone of all the Empire; and yet, in one day, I’d found it rotten to the core.
Then, with a snap, Ana’s trunk popped open, and she sat up like a cursed soul from the grave. She paused as she felt the slight breeze in the room. “Shut that damned window!” she barked. “What are you trying to do to me, child? I’m attempting to think!”
I fumbled to do so, spilling tea on my Iudex coat, then slammed the shutters closed like there was a torrential rain outside, rather than a peaceful evening. “Apologies, ma’am. Didn’t mean t—”
“One needs isolation for the mind to focus,” she snapped at me. “If you want to get no work done, get an office with a beautiful view. But if you want to parse all your problems, yo—fuck.” She slipped on one of her piles of papers as she stepped out, and barely caught herself on the side of the trunk. She then finished climbing out and grumbled for a moment. “Well. Did you make tea, Din?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then I’ll have a cup.”
She sat down on the bed as I poured her one.
“First…I have a question.” She fixed me in a fearsome glare. “I want answers about something you did.”
“Ah. Y-yes, ma’am? Did I do something wrong?”
“Yes! Very wrong! Why the hell didn’t you tell me you knew how to pick locks?”
“Oh,” I said sheepishly. “Well. I don’t really know how, ma’am. I just memorized the movements to unlock three basic types of locks.”
She stared at me, outraged. “That…that is basically the goddamn definition of ‘knows how to pick locks,’ boy! What an absurd thing! What the hell else do you know how to do?”
I handed her the cup. “I do seem to be developing a talent for tolerating verbal abuse and mad questions, ma’am.”
She glared at me again. “I wish to know more of your lockpicking, Din…But for now, let’s start dissecting all this, beginning with this Captain Kiz Jolgalgan. For she is of great interest to me.”
“Since she might be our only witness for the poisoning?” I asked.
A long slurp of tea. “No. Because I rather like her for being our murderer.”
I stared at her as she dabbed her lips on her cloak.
“Beg pardon?” I asked.
“I mean, who’s more experienced than anyone with contagions?” Ana mused. “Apoths. And now you’re telling me an Apoth was going to all these secret meetings with the Engineers? And is now possibly the lone survivor?”
“You…you really think this Jolgalgan might be our poisoner, ma’am?”
“Possibly!” said Ana. “I don’t have all the answers yet, of course. Dunno why she’d want to kill all her friends, or why she chose the maddest fucking method ever to do it. Or, indeed, if she also intended to bring down the sea wall and imperil the whole of the goddamn Empire, too! But…it hangs! Though it is but a scrap of information, it hangs together, a bit. Captain Miljin has surely notified the Legion to keep an eye out for this Jolgalgan by now. But please get ahold of Nusis tomorrow, Din, and see what the Apoths can dig up on her. They must have files on the woman’s alterations. I want to know what Jolgalgan can do, where she’s been, what capacities she’s served in, and anyone and everyone who might have served alongside her. Let us see if my hunch is right.”
“Understood,” I said.
“Good. Next—the reagents keys! Show them to me, please.”
I slid them both out—the one Miljin and I had found in Jilki’s quarters, and the one I’d found in the empty house near Aristan’s residence—and gave them to her.
“What an odd thing, to find three in one day…” Ana held Jilki’s key to her eye. “But Miljin wasn’t wrong. This key is for a highly warded portal. I believe only Imperial Treasury banks require five or more reagents…Fascinating. But this other one…” She did the same to the second one, peering through it like a tiny spyglass. “It’s not the same at all. So plain, and so simple…Sanctum knows what portal it’s for.” She chewed her lip for a moment, then held up the advanced one I’d found in Jilki’s quarters. “But I actually think I know what this one goes to—for surely it must unlock the place where all our Engineers were poisoned.”