The Witness for the Dead

by Katherine Addison

  When I asked, they admitted that Min Shelsin had patrons. When I asked about names, they said they did not know.

  I raised my eyebrows, and Min Balvedin blushed. “She did not talk about them very much.”

  Min Nochenin said, “She talked about Osmer Ponichar sometimes. She showed us the gifts he gave her.”

  “Gifts?”

  “Jewelry for her to wear in performance,” said Min Nochenin. “He gave her a beautiful set of gold and turquoise earrings, and a silver pendant set with a moonstone.”

  Min Balvedin chimed in, “And a ring that was gold set with amber, and a choker necklace that was silver with garnet drops.”

  “She had to pawn it, though,” Min Nochenin said. “Arveneän was terrible with money.”

  “Just terrible,” said Min Balvedin. “And she’d never let us help. She said she’d rather pawn her jewelry than her friends.”

  This was completely contrary to everything else I had been told about Arveneän Shelsin, but it was impossible to imagine either of these young women successfully telling a lie.

  “Do you know what sect she belonged to?”

  Min Nochenin frowned. “I think she said once that she was raised in the Harnavetai, but I don’t know if she still practiced.”

  “Thank you,” I said. While not definitive, that was enough to be able to bury her without offense.

  Min Balvedin was quick to understand why I asked. “Will there be a funeral? I would like to attend.”

  “Of course. She will be buried in the municipal cemetery of the Airmen’s Quarter. I will send you word when the date and time have been set. It will be soon.”

  They nodded solemnly.

  “Thank you very much for your help, minnoi,” I said. “I think I have taken up enough of your time.”

  They both glanced involuntarily back at the door.

  “If I have more questions, may I come talk to you again?”

  “Of course,” said Min Nochenin.

  “We want to help,” said Min Balvedin.

  “Thank you, minnoi,” I said, and let them return to their work.

  * * *

  When I found my way back to the auditorium, I found Pel-Thenhior alone, scribbling madly in his notebook. He looked up at my approach and answered the question he read on my face: “I made them all go rest for half an hour. They’re healthier that way and Merrem Matano doesn’t glare at me quite so much. Have you had any success?”

  “I have heard,” I said carefully, “that Min Shelsin was very unhappy about your new opera.”

  “True,” said Pel-Thenhior. “She didn’t understand why a goblin girl should get the best role and she said so. Frequently.”

  “Did she threaten to go to the Marquess Parzhadel about her complaints?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Pel-Thenhior. “I told her it would be a waste of her breath and Parzhadel’s time, but she wasn’t listening. No great surprise.”

  “Did she actually go?”

  “I have no idea. If she did, she kept quiet about it, which is exactly what she would do if she didn’t get what she wanted.”

  “Is there a way I can find out for certain?”

  “Of course. Parzhadel’s secretary—Mer Dravenezh. If you go to the Parzhadeise compound and ask for him, he’ll be able to tell you.” He cocked his head at me. “Do you suspect me of murdering her to protect my opera?”

  I managed neither no nor yes, only a weak “Perhaps?”

  It made him laugh. “I might kill someone over an opera, but it would never be one of my singers. Not even Arveneän. I need them all too badly. To be blindingly insensitive for a moment, this is a very bad time to lose a singer.”

  I liked him for being willing to say it outright, rather than leaving it to haunt my investigation unsaid and unknowable. “Perhaps you can tell me where you were when she died?”

  “Here,” Pel-Thenhior said promptly. “We performed General Olethazh. It wasn’t over before midnight, and I have an auditorium full of people who can attest that I was in my box.”

  “That is very useful,” I said.

  “I really didn’t kill her,” he said, “although I can see why you might think I did.”

  “They would have remembered you in the Zheimela,” I said. “I don’t think you were there.”

  He thought a moment, then took my meaning. “I will have to tell my mother that being gaudy has its uses.”

  * * *

  I went home, shared sardines with the cats that were not mine, meditated, went to bed, and dreamed nothing that I remembered. I woke in the middle of the night, as I sometimes did, and could not remember where I was. I lay awake for several minutes, slowly reasoning it out. This wasn’t Lohaiso, where I’d never had a room to myself. It wasn’t Aveio—my heart beat more painfully even at the thought—it wasn’t my tiny barren room at the Untheileneise Court. Finally I remembered Amalo, remembered that I was in my own room with my own things, few though they were, and was able to fall back to sleep.

  When I woke again it was daylight, and I lay for a long time looking at the slivers of sunlight on the wall before I was able to bully myself into getting up.

  * * *

  The Parzhadeise compound was in the plains to the northwest of the city, where the nobles had fled as the wealthy merchants began taking over the districts immediately around the Veren’malo. I made a painful calculation of finances against time and physical fatigue and hired a horse from the municipal livery at the Atta stop on the Kinreho line.

  She was a good horse, a pacer from the western plains, and had probably ended up in a livery stable because her owner had been forced to stave off bankruptcy by selling his horses. She carried me smoothly and swiftly from Atta out along the Kinreho Road to a stone wall and a gate with the Parzhadeise crest on it.

  The elderly elven gatekeeper came out to see who I was, and I said, “I am hoping to speak to Mer Dravenezh. Is he here?”

  “I can see,” the gatekeeper said unencouragingly. “Who should I say is calling?”

  “My name is Thara Celehar, and I am a Witness for the Dead.”

  The gatekeeper’s expression did not change. He said only, “I will inquire,” and vanished.

  I waited. I had no means to compel Mer Dravenezh to speak to me, only the hope that either curiosity or conscience would draw him out. As the minutes ticked by, it seemed increasingly unlikely that he would agree to see me. When the gatekeeper finally returned, I fully expected to be told to leave. But instead, the gatekeeper said, “You are welcome in the House Parzhadada, othala. Please enter.” He swung one leaf of the gate open, and I led my rented horse inside.

  The compound was extensive, but the main house and stables were relatively close to the road. The groom was polite about the livery horse, and Mer Dravenezh was waiting at the door to a covered walkway that led from the stables to the house.

  “We are Ema Dravenezh, othala,” he said, leading me to a small, austerely appointed room, “and we will help you in any way we can.”

  Ema Dravenezh was as I remembered from seeing him at the Opera: a young man, with pale elven coloring except for the red-orange fire of his eyes. He was dressed in a sober-colored frogged coat, black trousers, and black, laced boots, and he wore his hair with two plain tortoiseshell combs.

  I said, following his use of the formal first, “We are Thara Celehar, a Witness for the Dead. We have come on behalf of Arveneän Shelsin.”

  “Min Shelsin has died?” he said with what I thought was genuine shock. “We noted her absence from the stage, but did not imagine it was … What happened to her? She had made an appointment to speak to the marquess, and we were quite surprised she did not keep it.”

  “When was the appointment for?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “She was already dead. Someone threw her in the Mich’maika on the ninth.”

  He flinched a little and made the ritual warding gesture. “How horrible. But we do not quite understand why you are here.”


  “Someone was angry enough at Min Shelsin to murder her,” I said. “One way to find out who is to find out who she was angry at. And we know she was angry.”

  “She wasn’t angry at anyone here,” Mer Dravenezh said defensively.

  “No, of course not. But she was coming out to talk to the Marquess Parzhadel because she was angry. Did she give you any information?”

  “Her note was very brief. Merely a request to talk to the marquess about matters of interest. He said he already knew what she wanted, but that he would see her, that it was the easiest way to head off trouble. But she did not come.”

  “A note? Did you keep it?”

  “We keep all the marquess’s correspondence,” said Mer Dravenezh.

  “Might we see it?”

  He gave me a suspicious look, but said, “Yes, of course.” He was gone for only a few moments, and returned with a plain cream envelope, which he handed to me.

  Min Shelsin’s handwriting was well-educated and assured, the ink she used very black. The contents of the note were as Mer Dravenezh had said. The extravagant curls and swoops of her letters gave me a vivid sense of who she had been, how she had faced the world. I handed the note back to Mer Dravenezh.

  “The Marquess Parzhadel knew what she wanted. Did anyone else?”

  “No one here. The marquess keeps his own counsel. We do not, of course, know to whom Min Shelsin may have spoken.”

  “Of course not,” I said. He was still defensive, as if I had made an accusation. “Had she ever made an appointment with the marquess before?”

  “Once,” Mer Dravenezh said with plain reluctance.

  “Then you saw her? In person, that is, not performing. What did you think of her?”

  He looked startled to be asked, but answered reflexively, as all polite elven children are taught to respond to questions, “Overdressed. Overdressed and bourgeois-vulgar.”

  I thought of Min Shelsin’s closet full of stolen dresses.

  Mer Dravenezh thought something over, then surprised me by adding to his answer: “She was a woman with the worst kind of temper, for she was vengeful. If you angered her, she would not be satisfied until she had found a way to hurt you. The last time she was here, she was trying to get one of the other singers dismissed.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Two years. Maybe a little more. The marquess sent her away and told her she was lucky he didn’t dismiss her.”

  I reckoned that my chances of getting in to see the marquess were nonexistent, but I had to try. “Might it be possible for us to see the marquess? We need only a minute of his time.”

  Mer Dravenezh looked horrified. “The Marquess Parzhadel is a very busy person.”

  That might or might not be true, but it was a clear sign I was not going to get past Mer Dravenezh. I thanked him for his help and departed.

  * * *

  On the ride back to the livery stable, I tried to assess what I now knew.

  On the tenth a body had been pulled out of the canal at the Reveth’veraltamar. Subpraeceptor Azhanharad and I had determined cause and manner of death: no mistaking that this was murder. I knew the dock she had been thrown off of, behind the Canalman’s Dog, and I had found places in the Zheimela where she had been the night she died; in one of them I learned she was Arveneän Shelsin, a mid-soprano with the Vermilion Opera. The Opera had provided a wealth of information, including the fact that at the time of her death, Min Shelsin had been furiously angry about the opera in rehearsal and had in fact made an appointment to speak to the Opera’s sponsor. An appointment she had not been alive to keep.

  But where was the cause of her murder? In the Zheimela district, where her death had found her? Or in the Opera, where she had lived, where she had demanded attention (a conceited child, as Min Nadin had called her)? I would have to ask Pel-Thenhior what kind of salary she commanded, and I wondered if anyone knew how much she had made in gifts and trinkets from her patrons. I wondered if she had known.

  Arveneän Shelsin had been a troublemaker and a thief, but so bad with money that she had a drawer full of pawn tickets instead of jewelry. She had been infuriated by Pel-Thenhior’s new opera, so infuriated that she had genuinely intended to go to the Marquess Parzhadel, even though her previous experience would have suggested it was futile. Did she simply not learn from setbacks? Or had she had some real reason to think that this time Parzhadel would listen? But listen to what? Parzhadel already knew about the opera. Was there something else she could tell him, something about Pel-Thenhior or one of the other principal singers, that she might think she could use as leverage?

  I turned the idea around in my head as the livery stable horse and I went from the long stone walls with which the nobles of Amalo defined and defended their property, to farmland, interspersed with the occasional smaller compound, to rows of small, neat houses, brightly colored, and then to the city proper, where the municipal livery and the tram station awaited us. But I gained no new insights.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, the Vermilion Opera’s auditorium was much busier, not just one woman standing and singing on the stage, but a number of people making entrances and exits; pausing in their singing to argue with Pel-Thenhior; standing just off stage to listen. There was a harried-looking young elven man sitting beside Pel-Thenhior in the auditorium, scribbling notes in a giant bound book that I could just see was full of musical notations.

  Pel-Thenhior saw me and smiled, but continued his argument with a barrel-chested elven man whose voice was a deep grumble, like thunder far in the distance. I could not follow their argument at all. I occupied myself in waiting by watching the other singers. Another elven man and an elven woman were currently on stage; the woman was Toïno, who had been given Min Shelsin’s roles.

  Was that a motive for murder? No woman could have hurled Min Shelsin off the dock like that—her memory of it still vivid in my mind—but men could be hired or (looking at the bass singer’s massive chest) suborned. However, the young woman’s face did not show any pleasure, but only anxiety. I would have to speak to her, but she did not look at all like someone whose schemes had come to fruition.

  The other man, presumably one of the tenors, had what my Celehadeise grandmother would have called “good” elven features. He was tall, lean, beautifully poised. Most opera singers wore wigs for performance, but this man’s hair was long and thick and glossy white, and would clearly take an elaborate court dressing. Not that that would matter for this opera, given what Merrem Matano had said about manufactory workers. I wondered if that bothered him as much as it had bothered Min Shelsin.

  Finally, Pel-Thenhior said, “Tura, we could argue all day, but you’re not going to win this one. My original phrasing stands.” He turned to me and said, “Othala, greetings! How may we help you?” using the first-person plural as if there was no doubt that all the company was equally eager to catch Min Shelsin’s killer.

  “I need to speak to your principal singers,” I said, “as many of them as are here.”

  “What is this?” said Tura—his last name, I remembered, was Olora—bristling. “Who is this person?”

  “This is the Witness for the Dead,” said Pel-Thenhior. “He is here because of Arveneän’s murder.”

  Mer Olora’s face resembled a stunned carp’s, and he did not protest further.

  “We can do that,” Pel-Thenhior said to me, “but first you should come meet a young lady who has a very interesting story.”

  I followed him into the maze of the Opera—a different route than Merrem Matano’s, ending at a set of double doors painted, in beautiful script, with the word WARDROBE.

  “I wanted to know how she’d managed to steal so many costumes,” Pel-Thenhior explained, “so I started asking. And I found Min Leverin.”

  The Wardrobe Department was a stunning experience, Min Shelsin’s closet dozens of times over, racks upon racks of elaborate costumes, silk and brocade and velvet, trimmed with lace and pearls and ermine
and bullion, in a bewildering array of colors and fashions. Pel-Thenhior grinned at the expression on my face and said, “You do get used to it, but it takes a while. But here. This is Min Leverin.”

  She was part goblin, with pale gray skin and tip-tilted eyes as red as rubies. And she was distraught. “Mer Pel-Thenhior!” she cried, starting up from the chair where she had been hemming a heavy brocade skirt. “I didn’t—”

  “Lalo, I told you,” Pel-Thenhior said, “you aren’t in trouble. The only person I’m angry at is Arveneän.”

  “But,” she started. I could see that she had been crying.

  “No,” said Pel-Thenhior. “This is Othala Celehar, the Witness for the Dead who is witnessing for Arveneän. I need you to tell him what you told me.”

  Her gaze turned apprehensively to me. I said, “I seek only the truth, Min Leverin.”

  It did not appear to comfort her, but she sat down again, dragging the skirt back across her lap and anchoring her needle safely beside her last stitch. She said, “I have been a wardrobe assistant at the Opera for five years. Please, Mer Pel-Thenhior, I don’t know what I’ll do if—”

  “Lalo,” said Pel-Thenhior, “I’m not going to dismiss you. Merrem Adalharad has told me you are indispensable.”

  Her skin showed a blush, but something in what he said seemed to calm her, for she looked back at me and said, “Min Shelsin caught me with one of the milliner’s girls.”

  I knew my ears dropped; I could only hope they both took it as simple surprise. “What did she do?” I said, and was relieved that my voice was calm.