The Witness for the Dead

by Katherine Addison

  Azhanharad sighed and said bluntly, “Will you come?”

  And I said, feeling suddenly less despondent, “Yes, of course.”

  * * *

  The Chapterhouse of the Amaleise Brethren was a very old building, probably as old as the mystery of Anmura the Protector, from which the Brotherhood sprang—and which, in all probability, they still practiced. The Church did not recognize the four Anmureise mysteries; I was careful not to ask. The Chapterhouse was built out of massive blocks of stone, carved at eye-level with the names of the dead Praeceptors who lay in the Chapterhouse crypt. In the six or seven hundred years since that practice had started—at a time centuries after the Chapterhouse was built—they had filled twenty-nine blocks.

  Azhanharad led me to the alleyside door rather than the grand front entrance on General Parzhadar Square. I followed him down the twist in the areaway stairs, waited at the bottom while he threw his weight against the ancient lock on the basement door.

  The basement of the Chapterhouse had never been fitted out for gaslight; the brethren kept a rack of lanterns hanging by the door. Azhanharad took one down and lit it, his thick fingers careful and precise as he touched his lighter to the waiting wick. The lantern did not provide very much light, being what they called in Amalo an owl-light, as it was roughly the size of the tiny screeching owls that nested in the city’s eaves. But it was better than candlelight, and far better than no light at all.

  We descended another flight of stairs, and then another, down to the floor of the Brotherhood’s vast crypt. The Chapterhouse crypt was the only place in the Airmen’s Quarter where a body could be stored for long. This woman had to be identified before anything could be done with her—without identification, no one was willing to prepare the body for a funeral. Unlike the southern and western communities where I had begun my prelacy, Amalo had three main sets of funerary practices and a dozen others with smaller followings. It might well be more; no one could keep track of the splintering sects and hero-cults and the secretive kindreds that came down out of the mountains. Each tradition required the body to be prepared in a different way, and the wrong preparation would, at best, offend both kin and congregation. I knew of cases where the luckless officiant had had to petition for a change of benefice.

  The other reason the Brotherhood might keep a body in their cold room was if it took an unusual amount of time to identify the cause of death—a question which often made the difference between unfortunate happenstance and murder. For this body, if she had been pulled out of the canal, it was less about cause of death than about where she died, and therefore about who she was.

  They had laid her out carefully on a clean white sheet. Black was better for sanctity, but black dye that would hold through repeated, frequent washings was expensive, and no one would waste it on mortuary sheets. White was almost as good, signifying that this woman, like all the dead, was under the protection of the emperor.

  She was a young elven woman, no more than thirty judging by her hands and face. She showed no signs of childbearing, and her hands were uncallused. Her white hair hung in a tangle over the side of the table and nearly to the floor. She was no kind of cleric, not a liveried servant, not a manufactory worker. She might be the wife of a nobleman or the daughter of a well-off burgher. She might be a prostitute, but if so, she had to come from one of the elegant houses in the Veren’malo, to show no signs of poverty or disease in her face.

  Her dress, a ruined mass of dark green velvet, had probably been expensive. The cuffs were stained with dye from the embroidery of flowers that decorated them, but they were silk: second grade probably, although it was hard to tell after the canal had been at them. I investigated and discovered a pocket hidden in the folds of the skirt and inside it, a wad of paper.

  “What’s that?” said Azhanharad.

  “We do not know,” I said, unfolding it cautiously. There was no need for caution; the ink had run into a purplish gray blot, with no words still legible. “Nothing useful.”

  I touched the body on the forehead—cold, helpless flesh, a house condemned but not yet torn down. Not quite yet. The inhabitant had not entirely fled.

  “Can you?” Azhanharad said.

  “Yes,” I said. The prayer of compassion for the dead was worn and familiar. The woman no longer knew her name, nor who had wanted her dead, nor why. But she did remember her death. She had been alive when the water slammed the breath from her body. She remembered the fall from the dock, though she had been more pushed than fallen and more thrown than pushed. She remembered the cold dark water, the way her panicked gasps for air had echoed off the bricks.

  She hadn’t known how to swim. Despite the lake and the canal and the river, most Amaleisei didn’t.

  I felt the memory of her clothes dragging her down, heavy velvet getting heavier very quickly. She tried to scream for help, but got a mouthful of foul-tasting water, and before she even had time to realize she was going to die, there was a sudden crushing agony deep into her head and then nothing.

  She had not drowned after all.

  I lifted my hand and stepped back, out of range of the sympathy I had created between the corpse and myself. It would take a moment for it to fade enough that I could touch her again without being dragged back into the memory of her death.

  “Anything?” Azhanharad said, without much hope.

  “No name,” I said, since that was what he most wanted. “But this was definitely murder, not suicide. And not an accident.”

  “The poor woman,” Azhanharad said, with a ritual gesture of blessing.

  “She was alive when she went into the water,” I said. “But she didn’t drown. Here.” I felt my way gently around to the back of her skull, where there was a deep divot, and tilted her head so that Azhanharad could see.

  He almost managed to hide his wince, but his ears flattened and gave him away.

  “It was a better death than drowning,” I said.

  He said dryly, “We will remember not to tell her family that. If she has one. Since we do not know, and time is precious, we make petition to you on her behalf. Can you witness for her?”

  “Yes.” I considered the alien memories in my head. “We think that we can find where she was pushed into the canal.”

  Azhanharad nodded. “We will keep her as long as we can.”

  Even in the cold of the Brotherhood’s vault, they could not keep her forever.

  * * *

  As I knew they would be, my dreams that night were full of drowning. Sometimes it was I who drowned; dreadful as that was, I preferred it to the other dreams, in which I stood helplessly on the brick bank of the canal and watched Evru struggling in the cold dark water, knowing he would drown and knowing I could not help him. I woke before dawn and was grateful for it.

  I got up in the darkness, dressed by touch. I did not light a candle until I was in the tiny michenmeire I had created out of my apartment’s only closet. There I lit the seven candles one by one, saying the silent devotions I had been taught as a child.

  In the cult in which my Velveradeise grandparents worshiped and into which I was initiated when I turned thirteen, just before I began my novitiate as a prelate of Ulis, we knew that Ulis was not the true name of the god of death, of dreams, of mirrors and the moon. His true name was never spoken aloud, save only for the initiation of each child into the mysteries. We worshiped unspeaking, and for myself, I continued the rituals of silence, kneeling in the light of the seven candles before an altar made out of an old dressing table and a black coat too threadbare to be worn. The only precious thing I owned lay on the old black coat on top of the dressing table, the long silky coil of Evru’s hair, as white as moonstone, which I had shamefully stolen when they cropped his hair for his execution. I had no right to it, but I could not have given it up if the emperor himself had demanded it.

  I had called him Evrin, after the mastiff-sized white deer that foraged in the wheat fields of the south. He had never seen one; I described them to
him, their long delicate legs, their wide, lambent eyes. They were not hunted, unlike their bigger cousins, and they were sacred to a goblin sect with a strong following in the border cantons. They were shy, crepuscular creatures, but if one had the patience to remain still, they would eventually come close enough to show the white-on-white dapples of their coats, dipping their heads to graze, then looking up again. If startled, they bolted with astounding swiftness, faster than any horse. Evru, shy and long-legged, was in truth very much like an evrin. If only he had bolted when he had the chance.

  I scrubbed my palms up my face and moved through the Devotion of Folded Hands, blowing out the candles and accepting—or trying to accept—that the past was the past and could not be changed.

  I walked to the Red Dog’s Dream for breakfast. Their cook was Barizheise and made traditional oslov, and while they were dreadful at the more delicate teas, their Airmen’s Blend was strong enough to starch a shirt collar. This morning that was what I needed, something to chase away the cobwebs, the dreams, the memory of Evru’s eyes.

  * * *

  After breakfast I decided to eschew the tram and walked up out of the Airmen’s Quarter, cutting across to Bridge Street and climbing up the hill to the Veren’malo, the Old City, and to the hulking government buildings of the Amaleise Court. I had been given an office here, in the Prince Zhaicava Building (in preference to finding space in the cramped underground warren of the Amalomeire), a box of a room where citizens who required the services of a Witness for the Dead could petition me. There were never very many, hence my relief that the Vigilant Brotherhood was willing to seek me out after hours, as it were, for without them I would have been like a becalmed ship, or a beached whale, with nothing to do but read the three Amalo papers from start to finish and then the imported Barizheise novels in their lurid purple covers that were hawked in the Silkmarket at two zashanei each. I had a row of them, the size and shape and nearly the weight of bricks, lined up along the wall behind my desk.

  I had to be in my office and available to petitioners through the morning hours of the Court. After that, I was free to roam the city in pursuit of my docket of petitions. I had the matter of Mer Urmenezh’s sister, for whom I could not witness if I could not find her body, and the morning brought, along with an unsigned letter in the post from someone who certainly needed help, but not any help that I could give them, a larger than usual handful of petitions, two of which were questions for the Municipal Registry of Deaths, one a matter which had to go to the Amalomeire before it could come to me, and the fourth, brought by a very angry young elven woman, involved a disputed will, with each side accusing the other of fraud.

  “How long has your grandfather been dead?” I asked.

  “Two weeks.”

  “Then even if his spirit has remained with his body, he will not remember what you want to know.”

  “You do not know our grandfather,” she said darkly. Her gaze lowered for a moment, then returned resolutely to mine. “All we ask, othala, is that you try. It is the … the cleanest way to end our family dispute.”

  “Even if what he says is not what you want to hear?”

  She shook her head, frowning. “Even that would be better than this endless squabble. Please, othala.”

  It was not my place to refuse a petitioner. “Yes, then, on the understanding that it may be too late.”

  “We understand,” she said. I hoped the rest of her family would agree.

  * * *

  Her name was Alasho Duhalin. Her grandfather had been the Duhalar of Duhalada and Cedharad, one of the biggest importing firms in Amalo, with arms in several major cities of the south and east. I knew from long and bitter experience that fights over inheritance had nothing to do with the amounts involved, but I also understood why Min Duhalin was so upset. The longer this fight went on, the longer the employees of Duhalada and Cedharad did not know where they stood. (Mer Cedharad lived in Barizhan and thus could not be relied on for guidance.) Min Duhalin, a good burgher’s daughter, was worried about the effects on business and the ploys of the company’s rivals.

  We took the Vestrano tramline down the hill to the wealthy neighborhoods north of the Mich’maika. By virtue of the fact that we took the tram together, rather than her returning home in her family’s private carriage, I knew that Min Duhalin’s decision to bring a Witness vel ama into the proceedings had either been disputed by or was entirely unknown to her family. It was fashionable among the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie to take the municipal trams instead of using their families’ carriages. The young women, however, usually traveled in pairs.

  I asked her, “Does anyone in your family know of your petition?”

  She startled guiltily and I had my answer.

  “Your family will not thank you,” I said in warning.

  “At least they’ll stop fighting about it. Our father and our uncles do not speak together unless it is in argument over Grandfather’s will. And our mother has an undiplomatic tongue.” That, as I knew from my own childhood, was a true curse among the women of a house, who came together not by their own choice. Min Duhalin sighed and said, “We did not think there was such rancor in our house.”

  We got off the tram at the Dachen Csaivanat, the deepest well in the north of the world, and walked two blocks north to a house within sight of the city wall. The neighborhood was of an age to have been new when Min Duhalin’s grandfather made his fortune, and the brick had aged to a soft pinkish red, meaning that it had been made of local clay. Min Duhalin set her jaw and walked straight up the front steps.

  The house steward opened the door before she could, demanding, “Min Alasho, where have you been?”

  “We have brought a Witness for the Dead,” said Min Duhalin, and gestured me inside.

  The house steward stared at me as if I were a rain of frogs, and the atrium of the house was suddenly full of people: the three Duhaladeise brothers of whom Min Duhalin had told me, and an assortment of their spouses, their children, and their children’s spouses; Min Duhalin had not detailed her siblings and cousins to me, but I found, watching, that the Duhaladeise family resemblance was extremely strong, and it was easy to tell a blood relation from a spouse. And the one nervous-looking Barizheise lady was clearly someone’s wife.

  “Alasho,” said the eldest of the men (and therefore her father), “what is the meaning of this?”

  “We petitioned the Witness vel ama to come and speak for Grandfather,” said Min Duhalin, whose forthrightness certainly could not be faulted.

  As I had expected, her announcement was met with a chorus of horrified and angry voices, protesting that there was no need and that she had had no right. I thought it unfortunate that her father seemed to be even angrier than his brothers, berating Min Duhalin as one would a small and disobedient child.

  Finally, when it was clear that the din was not going to resolve on its own, I stepped forward, finding some sour amusement in how quickly everyone fell silent. They all stared warily at me.

  I said, “We have accepted Min Duhalin’s petition as reasonable and proper. It is futile to remonstrate with her, and you may be glad it is not within our remit to inquire why no one else thought to do the same as she.”

  The horrified silence grew a little more horrified.

  I said, “We understand that Mer Duhalar was cremated, but that you retain his ashes?”

  After a very long pause, the eldest Mer Duhalar still living said, “Yes, that is correct. We cannot scatter the ashes until—Our father specified that his heir was to scatter his ashes.”

  And without an heir being determined, that meant that nothing could be done with the ashes. They were lucky that both the real and the fraudulent will had specified cremation. If one had specified embalming, the Duhalada—able then to do neither—would have been in a dreadful mess.

  I was tempted to say, as I had been tempted before, The fastest way to get rid of us is to cooperate. Instead, I said, “We understand that your house is in
a very difficult time, and we do not wish to make it more difficult. It will take us only a moment with Mer Duhalar’s ashes to know if we can even be of help.”

  “It is a sensible thing to do,” one of the younger brothers said suddenly. “If you will follow us, othala.”

  I followed him, although my heart was sinking. Either he was bluffing—gambling that I would be unable to speak for his father—or he was innocent of fraud. And if the younger brothers were innocent, for Min Duhalin had told me that the two of them were united behind the second will, then Min Duhalin’s father was the one who had presented a false will.

  * * *

  The family shrine was elaborate with marble and gold leaf, the name plaques each carved with the family’s wolf signet. The Duhalada’s funerary practices—cremating the bodies and scattering the ashes—were considered barbaric in the capital, but it was the best deterrent against ghouls. It was the custom followed by about half of Amalo’s citizens, those wealthy enough to be able to afford it. The others buried their dead with the best gravestones they could.

  The younger brother indicated his father’s box on the altar, surrounded by the michenothas, and then tactfully withdrew.

  I picked up the box—cedar and beautifully carved with an intricate pattern of interlocking circles—and said a silent prayer to Ulis, asking only that I should find the truth. I knew better than to ask for the unobtainable.

  I began murmuring the prayer of compassion for the dead—such a constant companion that some nights it ran through my dreams—and gently, carefully, opened the lid of the box.

  The dead man’s signet ring rested among the ashes. I touched it with one finger, being careful to maintain my grip on the box. Contrary to my prediction, I got an immediate and strong sense of Nepena Duhalar, cold and grasping and deeply satisfied that his business would prosper in the hands of his son. His son Pelara.