“No, no,” he said. “It’s not a flower I know. Not a tree I know. I don’t know.”
I asked him about the kirpis shroom, and he said the same thing as the servant girl: too much water kills them. But how this one had died, he didn’t know.
“Someone probably overwatered it,” he said. “Dumped a drink in it. It’s expensive, but it happens. They’re very hard to care for. It’s a complex process, cooling the air. They make black fruit in their roots you have to clean out…”
Finally I asked him about his oven, and the ashes of the fire out there in the hut.
“I use the fire to clean my tools,” Uxos said. “Some plants are very delicate. Can’t get fungus from one to the other. So I put them in the fire to clean them.”
“Don’t they have washes for that?” I said. “Soaps and such for your tools?”
“They’re expensive. Fire is cheaper.”
“The Hazas don’t seem like people who care much about price.”
“They care,” he said, “if people get expensive. Then the people go. I try very hard not to be expensive. I don’t want to go.”
A worm of worry in his eye. Too old to be groundskeeper by half, I guessed, and he knew it. I pressed him for more, but he had nothing more to give, and I let him go.
* * *
—
LAST WAS THE housekeeper—a Madam Gennadios, apparently the boss of the whole place when the Hazas themselves weren’t around. An older woman with a lined, heavily painted face. She wore bright green robes of a very expensive make, soft and shimmering—Sazi silk, from the inner rings of the Empire. She paused when she walked in, looked me over with a cold, shrewd eye, then sat down, her posture immaculate—knees together at an angle, hands in her lap, shoulders high and tight—and stared resolutely into the corner.
“Something wrong, ma’am?” I asked.
“A boy,” she said. Her words were as dry and taut as a bowstring. “They’ve sent a boy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She studied me again out of the corner of her eye. “This is who’s trapped us in our house, the house of my masters, and won’t let us remove that damned corpse—a great, overgrown boy.”
A long, icy moment slipped by.
“Someone’s died in your house, ma’am,” I said. “Potentially of contagion. Something that might have killed you all, too. Don’t you want us to investigate?”
“Then where’s the investigator?”
“The investigator isn’t able to attend,” I said. “I’m here to review the scene and report back to her.”
Her gaze lingered on me. I was reminded of an eel contemplating a fish flitting before its cave. “Ask me your questions,” she said. “I’ve work to do, a damned ceiling to patch up. Go.”
I inhaled at my vial and then asked her about the nature of Blas’s stay. She gave what might have been the smallest, least sincere shrug I’d ever seen. “He is a friend of the Haza family.”
“One of your servant girls said the same thing,” I said.
“Because it’s true.”
“The exact same thing.”
“Because it’s true.”
“And your masters often let their friends stay at their houses?”
“My masters have many houses, and many friends. Sometimes their friends come to stay with us.”
“And no one from the Haza clan intended to join him?”
“My masters,” she said, “prefer more civilized environs than this canton.”
I moved on, asking her about the locations of the staff’s reagents keys.
“All the reagents keys are locked up at night,” she said. “Only I and Uxos are in constant possession of any during the evening, for emergencies.”
I asked about replacing keys, how to duplicate them, and so on, but she was dismissive. The idea was impossible to her.
“What about alterations?” I said. “Have your staff had any imperial grafts applied?”
“Of course,” she said. “For immunities, and parasites. We are on the rim of the Empire, after all.”
“Nothing more advanced than that?”
She shook her head. I felt a heat under the collar of my coat. I didn’t like how little she moved, sitting up so ramrod straight, shifting her head only to look at me out of the side of her eye like a damned bird.
“Can you at least tell me the nature of the commander’s relationship with the Hazas?” I asked.