“Thought what?”
She shook her head. Even though she was blindfolded, I could see fear in her face—the first time I’d ever seen any fear in it at all.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Doesn’t seem to be nothing, ma’am.”
“Well, it is, damn it! And now that I think of it, you did do something wrong, Din! You should have checked the building completely before going down into that basement!”
“Why?” I said.
“Because you didn’t know if you were truly alone in the house!” she said. “There could have been someone else in there with you, and you might not have known! Another deserter or…or something worse. You need to be smarter, child. I don’t get on well without an assistant, and I damned sure don’t want to lose you now!” She poked me in the chest. “People have been killed in this city for knowing things they shouldn’t—like Suberek! And Aristan! Yet it is our job to know things. Act accordingly to make sure you aren’t cleaned up as well!”
“You think this new killer is foolish enough to come after an Iudex officer, ma’am?”
“Of course. Of course!”
That flicker of fear to her face again. I remembered what Miljin had told me: Rumor has it, Dolabra’s previous assistant investigator ran into the wrong end of a sword…
“Now focus, boy,” said Ana. “Let us search the mill carefully. And try not to make it too hard for me to keep you alive!”
* * *
—
WE SEARCHED THE mill for an hour, all together. We could find almost no writing at all: no documents, no ledgers, no bills of sale, nothing. The only thing of note was Nusis’s report as she emerged from the basement of the mill. “A perforation at the base of the skull—and based on the bleeding of the man’s left eye, the weapon nearly penetrated straight through. A spike of some kind, I think. For the edges of the perforation are quite smooth.”
“Then that would suggest the murderer is physically augmented, yes?” said Uhad. He nodded toward Miljin. “Perhaps like the captain here.”
I glanced at Miljin—yet I saw he was staring at Ana, a worried look on his face.
“I would say so, yes,” said Nusis. “A very powerful individual—but not a large one. Not if they could fit in that basement. No crackler or augmented Legionnaire could manage that, I think. It’s very strange.”
“Disturbing…” Uhad sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “Yet we still don’t know where Suberek sent his last shipment of fernpaper.”
“I can’t find a damn thing,” said Kalista around her pipe. Her breath shivered with smoke as she spoke. “This is a professional, surely. They removed everything of note. From the look of it, I almost doubt if Suberek knew how to write.”
Ana rocked forward, her hands still probing the workshop table. “No,” she said softly. “He knew how to write. And he did a lot of it right here.”
There was a long silence as everyone turned to look at her, her hands placed on the slab of wood like a reedwitch telling fortunes at a canton fair.
“You…” Kalista laughed, incredulous. “You aren’t suggesting you can…You can, what, feel what was written there?”
“I can feel many things,” said Ana quietly. “He was a very hard writer, you see. Pressed his ashpen with tremendous force…The tricky thing is identifying what was recent.” Her index finger paused on one spot of the scarred table. “Here, for example…Wrote down an order for two panels…Dated sometime in the month of Hajnal. I think. Tricky to read this…”
Uhad looked to Nusis. “Is this really possible?”
“Of course,” said Nusis. “I know some sensitivity grafts help sculptors and surgeons find the weaknesses in many materials.”
“If we get a length of ashpen,” said Ana, “and a sheet of thin fernpaper, I can discover more.”
Miljin and I fetched these for her. Then we watched as Ana carefully ran the length of ashpen over the scarred table, covering its surface with a layer of fine, black powder.
“And now the paper…” she said.
Like gentry servants laying down a table spread, we took a thin sheet of fernpaper and slowly placed it on the table. Then Ana took a piece of shootstraw and ran it back and forth, pressing every inch of the paper to the table.
“There,” she said. “Now if we take it away…”
Miljin and I lifted the paper and turned it over. Everyone gasped quietly—for there on the other side it was all black and gray, yet it was covered in mangled white writings, like the inverse of an imprint.