The Witness for the Dead

by Katherine Addison

  That was not the name of an eldest son.

  I warned my petitioners that they might not like the answers I provided, but I had never had anyone heed my warning.

  I closed the box carefully and returned it to its place on the altar. I said the prayer of compassion for the dead once more, bowed to the house gods, and left the shrine.

  The younger brother’s face tightened, his ears lowering, when he saw my expression, but he led me without speaking back to the atrium, where everyone was still standing in fraught and awkward silence.

  “Well?” said the eldest Mer Duhalar. Now that I knew, I could see the bluff, and I felt some reluctant admiration for his refusal to yield.

  “Which of you is Pelara Duhalar?” I said.

  “We are,” said my guide.

  I saw Min Duhalin start to frown; she knew she hadn’t told me her uncles’ names.

  “We offer our condolences on your loss, Mer Duhalar,” I said. “You are your father’s heir.”

  * * *

  I left the Duhalada house more than an hour later, exhausted and hungry. There had been, as there always was, a great deal of arguing. No one who had supported the eldest son’s claim wanted to believe he had forged his father’s will, and I had to reiterate several times that the name the dead man had told me was Pelara, not Nepevis. On the other side, Pelara Duhalar very sensibly got two of the servants to come witness a formal testimony, so that there would be no confusion after I left about what I had said. I told him I would make a deposition, to the same end.

  No one said anything about how they were going to deal with Nepevis Duhalar’s dishonesty, but I thought that question would be keeping the younger brothers awake tonight.

  Min Duhalin simply disappeared. I hoped she was not blaming herself, but knew she was. How could she not? She had made her decision, as petitioners often did, based on a belief that she knew what the dead would say. She had been wrong, as petitioners often were. In time, she might find comfort in knowing that she had caused the truth to be revealed. Some people did; some people did not.

  I could not help; I had no gift for comfort, and myself found the truth no comfort at all, only duty.

  I walked back to the Deep Well ostro. Most major shrines in the city were associated with stations, and the Deep Well was no exception; although the station was the size of a wax seal, it did boast a teahouse called the Lady of Rivers, operated by the novices from the shrine’s associated csaivatheileian. I bought a sticky bun and a two-cup pot of orchor and sat in a curtained booth for two people.

  I drank the orchor black, grateful as I usually was for its bite, but also today grateful for its harshness, like drawing a thick black line between me and the Duhalada. I tried not to think about how many miserable families I had left in my wake, and I did strive to remember, as the Archprelate had said to me, that I did not do anything but what I was asked to do. Some days that felt like casuistry, but it was another thick black line like calligraphy on good rag paper.

  I took the tram back east to the Dachenostro and changed to the Zulnicho line, which took me straight south to Ulvanensee. Properly, I should have been going to the Ulistheileian to find a panel of three prelates, but after yesterday’s conversation with Vernezar, I was, not merely reluctant, but actually opposed to going there. Fortunately, I knew where to find three prelates, and even a fourth to serve as scribe.

  Anora had three prelates serving under him, Daibrohar, Erlenar, and Vidrezhen. Daibrohar and Vidrezhen were elves from Zhaö, Erlenar a half goblin from Choharo. Daibrohar and Erlenar were in their first prelacies; Vidrezhen had come from a wealthy benefice in Cairado and said she liked Ulvanensee much better.

  I found Anora and two of the three prelates copying register entries to send to the Municipal Registry of Deaths; Erlenar was washing windows. They were all glad of an excuse to do something else, even if it was something as dull as listening to me give a deposition. They’d done this for me before, since it had become clear to me very early in my stay in Amalo that the Ulistheileian was not friendly to me.

  Daibrohar settled to be scribe, and I related the incidents of the morning, laying particular stress on the fact that the dead man had remembered his heir’s name. And that the name was Pelara, not Nepevis.

  “What an unpleasant business,” said Anora when I was done.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m only grateful that this is the end of my part in it.”

  Anora made a warding sign and said, “Let us hope so. I will deliver the deposition to the Ulistheileian if thou likest.”

  “That would be a great kindness,” I said.

  Anora shrugged. “It’s easy enough. They won’t obstruct me the way they will thee.”

  “No,” I said, feeling suddenly very tired. “No, they won’t.”

  * * *

  I took the tram from Ulvanensee back north to the Bridge Street ostro, where I got off and walked to the Reveth’veraltamar at the bend in the Mich’maika where it curved around the Sanctuary of Csaivo. The Reveth’veraltamar was where all the bodies that ended up in the canal washed aground. There was a gate in the wall there, and stairs down to the water. I had a key.

  Today I walked down to the water not because I expected to find anything useful, but because one of my duties as a prelate of Ulis was to mourn for the unnamed dead, and to mourn for her meant following the path of her body as clearly as I could. The Reveth’veraltamar was where they’d pulled her out; I sought to remind myself of the gray moss-slimy stones; the slap of the water against the walls of the canal; the smell. The Reveth’veraltamar was an ugly place.

  As I was turning to go, something sparkling caught my eye among the stones. I bent and picked up an earring: three clear, faceted glass drops with a broken clasp. There was no guarantee that it belonged to the dead woman in the crypt, but it was not unreasonable as a guess, either. Although inexpensive, it was pretty, and by gaslight the glass might look like diamonds. If I found someone the woman might be, the earring would be a way to try for certainty. I tucked it carefully in an inner pocket and climbed back to the city.

  I locked the gate behind me.

  * * *

  I walked to the municipal ferry dock. In the middle of the day, the ferry was a better way than the tram to get from the middle of town to the Zheimela district. When the manufactories closed at sundown, the opposite would be true, for anyone who wanted something stronger than tea would be going to the bars along the south side of the Mich’maika out toward its eastern end, and so would the prostitutes. And the pickpockets. The ferry was probably how the dead woman had gotten to the place where she died.

  Now the ferry passengers were mostly bourgeois families heading to their tiny bungalows along Lake Zheimela’s western shore, plus the first few bartenders and servers headed out to clean the bars before they opened. I got several curious looks, although no one was impolite enough to ask my business. I pretended to be too abstracted in my own thoughts to notice.

  I left the ferry at the southside docks and walked along the canal, looking for a dock to match the dead woman’s memories. The image was stark and vivid in my mind, as the memories of the dead always were, if there was anything left at all. I saw more than the dead woman had. I knew the way the dock jutted into the canal. I knew there were crates stacked along it, but nothing out at the end, nothing that could have sheltered her or provided a weapon or anything. Whether by luck or by plan, her murderer had chosen his spot well.

  Hulking warehouses lined the canal here, none of them with the dock I was seeking. Then a rope-maker’s shop. Then the only bar open during the day, the Canalman’s Dog, a sprawling establishment—built around an ancient shrine to Osreian—that also operated as a teahouse. The city council had passed legislation that said no teahouse could also be a bar, but it was too late to stop the Canalman’s Dog, which had been both for two or three generations at the point the legislation was proposed.

  And behind the Canalman’s Dog, there was a dock. I recognized it
at once.

  It was cool and dark inside the Canalman’s Dog, and I wandered for some time along its narrow passages before I found the hearth of the teahouse. There, a young goblin man with his hair in the traditional Barizheise braids—although he wore Amaleise embroidered felt slippers—bowed to me and asked how the house could serve me, the traditional Amaleise words. Then, reading my black coat and thick, untidy prelate’s plait, he added, “othala,” and looked uneasy.

  I said, for my calling forbade deception, “I am Thara Celehar, a Witness for the Dead. I’m trying to find the last hours of a young woman who was dragged out of the canal yesterday. A blue-eyed elven woman, probably your own height. Her cuffs were embroidered with flowers.” I showed him the drawing that one of the Brotherhood’s novices had made of the dead woman, easing the angles subtly so that she appeared alive again. He studied it dutifully, but shook his head.

  “She looks like many of our customers, othala,” he said apologetically, “but I will ask Csatha the bartender to come talk to you. He may know the lady.”

  I waited. Csatha was very little older than the goblin boy (who returned to washing teapots at the side of the hearth), but he was elven; he wore his white hair in a thickly braided bun and had enough money for a line of amethyst chip earrings to accent the sweep of his left ear. There was a haze of gold in his gray eyes that suggested Barizheise blood somewhere in his family tree. He looked at the drawing and listened to my description, then said, “She’s not one of our regulars, othala, but more than that I couldn’t say.”

  I hadn’t expected to have any luck on my first try. I got Csatha to draw me a map of the bars in the immediate area, which he did with quick, certain lines. He smiled as he handed me the map and said, “Good luck, othala. You might try the Golden Tea Light. Most of the iönraioi drink there.”

  “Iönraio” was the Amaleise word for an unaffiliated prostitute, just as it was the word for a queen-cat in heat, based on the noise she made as she called her toms. It was a good guess at the dead woman’s occupation. I still wasn’t sure it was correct; she had looked too healthy and too prosperous for the shadowy hand-to-mouth life of an iönraio. But at the moment I had no better guess.

  I explored the Zheimela district that afternoon, finding the bars Csatha had marked, along with chandler’s shops and greengrocers, secondhand clothing shops, brothels, photographers’ studios, an array of pawnbrokers, the district’s municipal baths, the livery stable, a shrine to Csaivo (as Amalo’s lifeblood was the Zhomaikora and the Mich’maika, so the city was full of shrines to the goddess of rivers). Just before dusk, I found a street cart near the manufactories west of the municipal ferry dock and bought a tobastha for half a zashan. Then, with dusk, the bars opened, and I began working my way through Csatha’s map.

  It was in the eighth bar, or maybe the seventh, or the tenth, that the half-goblin bartender, in the act of handing the drawing back to me, suddenly frowned and looked at it again. “Oh,” he said. “Her.”

  “You recognize her?”

  “She was in here night before last. Overdressed. Never seen her before. One glass of rice wine and she took up a table for two hours. Alone. She wasn’t an iönraio, because I saw her turn down more than one man. And then at half past eleven, she got up and walked out.” He thought a moment and added, “I think Athris said she was an opera singer.”

  My ears dropped with astonishment. “She was a what?”

  “Hey, Athris!”

  One of the servers wiping down tables looked up. “Me?”

  “Anybody else here by that name?”

  “I guess not.” He came to the bar, a delicately pretty elven boy with wide violet eyes.

  “You were saying you know who this lady is,” the bartender said, and showed Athris the drawing.

  “Oh!” His face lit up. “Yes, the lady who was here night before last. That’s Arveneän Shelsin. She’s the senior mid-soprano at the Vermilion Opera.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, yes. I saw her in Thormedo last spring.”

  “Why are you looking for Min Shelsin, othala?” asked the bartender.

  “She was pulled out of the canal yesterday morning,” I said, and took no pleasure in the way Athris’s face sagged with horror.

  “Oh no!” he said. “But how could—”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Did she talk to you at all?”

  “She said once she was waiting,” Athris said, “but she didn’t say what she was waiting for.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Oh, yes. She left at half past eleven, and she was as alone as when she came in.”

  So probably her death did not meet her here. But now I knew her name. I remembered the earring and showed it to him, and he said, “Yes. She had crystal drops lining both ears and a strand of crystal beads in her hair. It was a marvelous effect.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You have been a great help.”

  I left the bar wondering who Min Shelsin had been meeting at midnight the night before last. Where almost had to be the Canalman’s Dog, for why else would someone pick that particular dock to throw her off?

  I walked back that way, wondering also why an opera singer from the Veren’malo had come all the way down to the Zheimela to meet whomever her appointment was. It suggested a powerful need for secrecy, and anything that secret was probably also a motive for murder.

  The Canalman’s Dog was raucous now, people in every room, Guild prostitutes moving among them, offering cool, alluring looks from under their eyelashes. I started to fight my way toward one of the bars when it occurred to me that the people to ask were the prostitutes. If she had been here, they would have been watching her to be sure she wasn’t an iönraio; they would have seen who she met.

  I talked to prostitute after prostitute. They were amused and intrigued to be spoken to by a prelate, and they looked at the drawing carefully. But I had to ask several before an elven woman who called herself Haro said, “You know, I did see her, night before last. She had crystal in her hair, and she was overdressed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Was she with anyone?”

  Haro bit her lip, thinking. “She was at a table, and, yes, she was with someone, because I remember the stagey way she laughed at something he said. But I’m sorry, othala, I don’t remember a thing about him.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You’ve been a tremendous help.”

  She smiled, a sudden, shy smile with no coquette in it, and said, “She wasn’t one of us, but I don’t think she was an iönraio, either.”

  Before I could say thank you, or ask another question, Haro’s face and body changed, and she was moving away on the arm of a middle-aged goblin man, as graceful and untouchable as a cloud.

  * * *

  In the morning, it was back to the Prince Zhaicava Building and the post and the papers and the wait for petitioners. No one came, and I used the time to write down everything I had learned about the dead woman.

  Then, with an hour before noon and no petitioners in sight, I went down the hall to one of the other oddities housed in the Prince Zhaicava Building, the cartographers for the Amalo Municipal Tramline Authority, the clerks and mapmakers in charge of knowing exactly where the tramlines ran and of giving exact and accurate directions to the repair crews. Maps, some complete, some half drawn, some still uninked sketches, covered the walls, and there were filing cabinets full of written directions on how to get from the Prince Zhaicava building to every major landmark in Amalo. I had overheard an argument one day about changing the starting point to the Amal’theileian, as being “more suitable,” but Dachensol Orzhimar, the master mapmaker of the Amalo Municipal Tramline Authority, said sharply, “All that would accomplish is that we’d have to add directions from here to the Amal’theileian to the start of every script.” And there the matter rested.

  The mapmakers were an intense group of young elven men, passionately in love with their work. The clerks were mostly middle-aged el
ven ladies, efficient and serious and very proud of their abilities. They were also proud of their well-earned reputation for knowing everything that happened in Amalo, since everyone involved in the city or principate bureaucracies (insofar as the two could be separated) came to them when they needed directions to anywhere. It was amazing, Min Talenin had told me, how often the bureaucrats of the court ended up out in the city, inspecting and interviewing and participating in ceremonies.

  Min Talenin and Merrem Bechevaran, the elven clerks who had the office to themselves this morning, were pleased to see me. Although I did not gossip, I did ask for their help if I had a case that warranted it. I had asked them about Mer Urmenezh’s sister, and now I showed them the drawing of Arveneän Shelsin.

  Min Talenin said, eyes widening, “That’s the mid-soprano from the Vermilion Opera.”

  Min Talenin was a good middle-aged bourgeoise elven lady, the daughter of a clockmaker, thrifty and responsible. The only luxury she allowed herself was the opera. If she and Athris in the Zheimela agreed about the woman’s identity, it seemed most probable that they were correct.

  “Are you sure?” I said, but I knew she was before she said, “Absolutely sure. What happened to her?”

  “She was thrown in the canal three nights ago,” I said.

  “Oh no,” said Min Talenin. I realized that I could perhaps have phrased it more tactfully.

  “Who would want to do such an awful thing?” said Merrem Bechevaran, who was younger than Min Talenin and a widow.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said. “I was hoping you could help me. I need directions to the Vermilion Opera.”

  “Oh, that’s easy!” said Min Talenin, brightening. She dug in one of the filing cabinets beside her desk.

  Merrem Bechevaran went to the wall and began sorting among the maps. She returned with a map leaf at the same time Min Talenin emerged with a beautifully written sheet of directions.