The Witness for the Dead

by Katherine Addison

  He waited, eyebrows raised, until I said, “Which was?”

  “Nothing,” said Ulzhavar. “No grief, no horror, not even anger—which I’m sure you know is very common.”

  “Yes,” I said. I had been called a ghoul and a vulture and all sorts of terrible things, and I knew it was worse for Csaiveise clerics, who were often blamed for deaths they were helpless to prevent.

  “But nothing of the sort from Segevis Michezar. He organized Drachano’s funeral as quickly—and cheaply—as he could, and then he vanished.”

  “Vanished.”

  “Completely. Temet never saw or heard of him again.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Almost five years.”

  “Do you think it’s the same man?”

  “I think it very likely,” said Ulzhavar.

  I hesitated. “Do you think you could learn anything from Merrem Michezaran’s corpse?”

  “I certainly intend to try. Do you want to come with me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  * * *

  Merrem Michezaran had been buried in the precinct of the municipal ulimeire of Aishan’s Grove, in the paupers’ quarter, a wide, flat, barren stretch of ground, as desolate as the people who were buried here. Her headstone, a flat square, said only DRACHANO—the bare minimum allowed. The prelate of the ulimeire, a tired-looking middle-aged elven man, who recognized me immediately although I had no memory of ever seeing him before, was somewhat skeptical of the idea that Merrem Michezaran could have been poisoned, but he also recognized Ulzhavar and bowed to his greater authority. He even came with us to dig up the grave himself. “My sexton,” he said, “is the biggest gossip in Aishan’s Grove. I would certainly prefer to keep this quiet, and I’m sure you feel the same.”

  I said, “It would defeat our entire purpose if Mer Michezar read about this in the papers.”

  “The vulture-eyed old people will complain,” Othala Bonshenar said. “But the poor girl had no family that we know of, so there’s no one who will be truly distressed. She barely lived a week after they moved here. Not long enough to make friends.”

  “With two Ulineise prelates and a cleric, we can hardly be more respectful,” said Ulzhavar. “And I must believe that Merrem Michezaran wants her murderer caught.”

  “Are you sure it’s murder?” Bonshenar said plaintively.

  “We won’t be until we look,” Ulzhavar said.

  I took off my coat and helped Bonshenar dig. It wasn’t long before our shovels struck wood. Mer Michezar had paid for only the shallowest of graves.

  “Such prudent economy,” Ulzhavar murmured darkly, then shook himself. “We may not need to do more than open the coffin. If he used calonvar, we’ll be able to tell.”

  “All right,” said Bonshenar. “Let’s find out.”

  The grave was shallow enough that Bonshenar had no difficulty in prying the coffin open. He and I said the prayer of compassion for the dead, and we lifted the coffin lid and set it aside. The woman inside was beautifully preserved, looking, as Bonshenar said, as if she’d only died yesterday.

  “Calonvar,” Ulzhavar said simply.

  Only her face and hands were uncovered by her winding sheet, proving that she had been buried according to the rites of the Ploraneisei, one of the two most prominent sects in Amalo. She was sallow and gaunt, but it was something of a toss-up whether that was the result of death or of the sickness that had killed her.

  “All right,” said Ulzhavar, “let me look at her hands. Then we can be certain.”

  I stood back from the horse-faced young woman in the coffin, wondering grimly if Mer Michezar made a specialty of the plain ones, for Mer Urmenezh had admitted once, as if it pained him, that his sister had been as plain as a doorknob and that she had despaired of ever finding anyone who wanted to marry her. Were they grateful, Mer Michezar? Did that make it all the easier for you to woo and win and kill them?

  “Yes,” said Ulzhavar. “Those scaly patches along the fingers. They’re small, probably because he killed her so quickly, but they’re definitely there.”

  “Calonvar?” said Bonshenar.

  “No doubt about it. It must have been a terrible dose.”

  “Maybe she was the first,” I said, feeling sick. “Maybe he didn’t know how much he needed.”

  Ulzhavar looked up at me, pale gray-green eyes sympathetic. “Is there anything else you need here, Othala Celehar?”

  “No,” I said. “I think the signs of calonvar poisoning are clear enough, and the other parts of Merrem Michezaran’s story sound all too much like what happened to Min Urmenezhen.”

  “Was there a will?” Ulzhavar said.

  “Yes,” said Bonshenar, surprised. “They went to Mer Chelavar the first day they were here. He was the only person who attended her funeral, and he was very distressed that she had died so soon after she made her will. Distressed, too, at how cheaply Mer Michezar chose to bury her. In truth, it made him indiscreet. He was fuming, later, that she should have left all her money to her husband and he repay her in such base fashion. She had stipulated no more than that she be buried according to Ploraneisei rites, you see, and he did that.”

  “So he did,” Ulzhavar said in a grim aside.

  Bonshenar’s ears dipped, but he continued. “And Mer Chelavar never said anything to indicate that he suspected murder.”

  “Did he say how much money was involved?” I asked.

  “A lot,” said Bonshenar. “Enough to surprise Chelavar, and he was pretty much unflappable after all those years as a lawyer.”

  “Might we speak to Mer Chelavar?” I said.

  “He died two years ago,” Bonshenar said apologetically. “But if he had suspected murder, he would most certainly have done something about it.” He hesitated, then added, “Enteric fever is very common in the part of Aishan’s Grove where they were living. There was nothing surprising about her death, merely sad that she had been married such a short time.”

  “If Merrem Michezaran had money,” said Ulzhavar, “why were they living in such a poor quarter of Aishan’s Grove?”

  “They were saving,” Bonshenar said. “Or, at least, that was what Mer Michezar told me at the funeral, that they had been saving to purchase a house.”

  “Presumably he told her the same thing,” Ulzhavar said, and shook his head as if to dislodge a biting fly.

  “I understand about murder,” Bonshenar said as we filled in the grave, “but the cruelty of it!”

  “Maybe calonvar is the only poison he knows,” Ulzhavar said. “It’s certainly easy enough to come by.”

  That was true. Calonvar was used in all kinds of preparations, from hand lotion to hair tonic, and pure calonvar was readily available as rat poison. It would come easily to an intending murderer’s hand.

  We finished filling in the grave, and Othala Bonshenar—probably glad to see the last of us—pointed us in the direction of the tram stop.

  As we walked, I asked Ulzhavar, “Does any of this get us closer to finding him?”

  “It depends,” said Ulzhavar. “If either Michezar or Avelonar is his real name—and I think Avelonar almost certainly is not—or if he’s used one or the other again, we may be able to find him that way. Or someone who knows him. Otherwise, all we can do is keep collecting stories. Knowing the pattern won’t hurt our chances.”

  “At the moment,” I said grimly, “it seems to be the only chance we have.”

  * * *

  I returned to the Sanctuary with Ulzhavar, in order, as he put it, to round up a panel of clerics so that we could give sworn depositions about what we had discovered in examining Merrem Michezaran’s body.

  The first three senior clerics we found—two in the Sanctuary’s library and the third in a workroom with the half-dissected corpse of a pig—grumbled at being dragged away from their work, but none of them seemed genuinely resentful, and they listened attentively as Ulzhavar dictated an account of his findings to the junior cleri
c he’d collared to serve as scribe. Ulzhavar clearly had had a great deal of practice in giving depositions; he spoke at a steady pace, pausing regularly to let the scratching steel nib catch up, and marshaled his facts in logical order. When he had finished, the panel asked questions, but not many. Then Ulzhavar read over the junior cleric’s transcription, while I in turn deposed before the panel. My deposition confirmed Ulzhavar’s, and the clerics’ questions all concerned the investigation in Min Urmenezhen’s case that had led us to Merrem Michezaran.

  The junior cleric wrote a tolerable secretary hand, and he was an accurate scribe. “They all have to take a turn at it,” said Ulzhavar. “We give depositions nearly as frequently as Witnesses do. It saves any number of nightmares later, when the family decides there was something suspicious about the death.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I signed the deposition, and the clerics signed as witnesses. I walked out of the Sanctuary into the waning gray-gold of an autumn afternoon.

  I found a canalside teahouse, the Splinter of Stonanavee, and sat in the back corner with a scone and a pot of green tea, appropriately enough from the same canton as Stonanavee itself. The tea was smoky and denser than I usually liked, but today it suited my mood.

  After the first cup of tea and half a scone, I felt able to take stock of the situation.

  First, I was officially separate from the Ulistheileian, which gave me some of the same relief as having a headache go away. The Amal’othala had authority over me, but he did not have the authority to dismiss me from my post. Only the Archprelate could do that, and I had confidence that he would support me if someone from Amalo complained of me. And behind him, I knew that the emperor would listen if I wrote to him—which I had no intention of doing, but it was good to know that last resort was there.

  Second, I had fulfilled my promise to Osmer Thilmerezh. Whether, in Chonhadrin, he got what he desired was not a problem I could solve.

  In the case of Min Urmenezhen, I had another probable victim, but still nothing that seemed likely to be the murderer’s real name, and nothing I could think of at the moment to do.

  That left Min Shelsin and the Vermilion Opera. And Pel-Thenhior, who had frightened me badly through no fault of his own.

  Irrelevant, I told myself. The issue was finding Min Shelsin’s killer, not my personal feelings, and the Opera was still the most likely place to find someone she had confided in. Gambling was clearly where all of Min Shelsin’s money had gone, and it seemed fairly clear that blackmail—an ugly word for an ugly practice—was where at least some of it had come from. Thus, the question was, how much she might have admitted and to whom?

  Not to her friends. Min Nochenin and Min Balvedin had admired her too deeply. They would have been the last people she would have told about something so sordid. And, of course, maybe she had been one of those rare people who felt no need of a confidante. Maybe the answers were all dead with her.

  Maybe I was of a melancholic disposition and prone to despair.

  I finished my scone and drank tea slowly, watching the teahouse custom bustle around me. A tableful of adolescent elven girls, flushed with excitement at being grown-ups without nannies or governesses or parents to supervise, were doing their best to suppress their giggles and behave appropriately, but I thought they were fighting a losing battle. At the next table, a middle-aged elven woman sitting alone was looking wistful, as if remembering her own girlhood. Two courting couples were sitting by the window, an elven man and a half-goblin woman leaning over the table to talk together intently, and a goblin pair who were having a lighthearted conversation in Barizhin.

  I drank my tea and finished my scone and acknowledged that I did not know how to solve any of my problems.

  * * *

  That evening, in desperation, I sought Azhanharad out in his preferred teahouse, the Vedriveise Gambit. As the name suggested, it was a haunt of bokh players. I did not know if Azhanharad himself played bokh; my suspicion was that he merely liked the intense quiet to be found in most of the rooms.

  He did not look pleased to see me, but I did not expect him to. “Othala,” he said, getting up. “Let us go to a room where we will not disturb anyone with our conversation.”

  I followed him into a long, narrow room that had obviously started as a corridor. There were several doorways and a number of patrons and servers walking in and out, so that although the two-person tables were perfect for bokh, there was no one playing.

  “Sit,” said Azhanharad. “Would you like tea?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. Common politeness made him ask, but accepting would have implied a social quality to this meeting that we both knew was lacking.

  He had brought his cup and teapot with him, and I waited while he poured tea into the cup and took a first cautious sip. Then he said, “What can we do for you, othala?”

  “We are witnessing for a woman who was murdered by her husband,” I said, “and there is more and more evidence to show that she was not his only victim.”

  “That is very alarming,” said Azhanharad.

  “He changes his name,” I said.

  Azhanharad made a ritual gesture of aversion. “Then how do you expect to catch him? For we assume he is not in your custody.”

  “No, he is not. We were wondering if the Vigilant Brotherhood might help.”

  “When you have found him, we will arrest him. What more can we do?”

  “Could you not ask your brethren if they know of cases of young women, recently married, dying of what looks like enteric fever?”

  He stared at me. “That is not within our remit.”

  “But you could do it,” I said.

  “Celehar, do you know how many people die of enteric fever in this city every day? And it is not within the remit of our brotherhood to go poking about in people’s private lives. We arrest criminals and hold them until their case can come before a judiciar. And we carry out the sentence.”

  “You patrol the streets,” I argued, although I knew it was hopeless.

  “The streets, not people’s homes.” He sounded sincerely scandalized. “No, if you find your murderer, we will arrest him so that you may take your case before a judiciar. More than that, we cannot do.”

  “Good evening, Subpraeceptor,” I said, and left him to drink his cooling tea.

  * * *

  The next afternoon I went back to the Sanctuary of Csaivo to tell Ulzhavar that we would get no help from the Vigilant Brotherhood. As I came in the door, Ulzhavar was coming up the stairs from the autopsy room. He said, “Othala Celehar, you come in good time! I am just on my way to meet a cleric who has what sounds like a most interesting story. Do you want to come along?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  The meeting place was only two tram stops away, a teahouse called the Rose Minuet. “Why here?” I said. “Why not come the rest of the way to the Sanctuary?”

  “Mmm,” said Ulzhavar. “Othalo Darnevin has a somewhat checkered history, and she was reluctant to come to the Sanctuary, which for her is full of bad memories. And it does me no harm to get out.”

  With that introduction, I was not sure what to expect from Othalo Darnevin, but she proved to be a perfectly unremarkable elven woman, middle-aged, with crow’s feet around her pale blue eyes and laugh lines bracketing her mouth. I liked her on sight.

  She stood when she saw us and said, “Othala Ulzhavar, thank you so much for coming.”

  “Nonsense, Aisharan,” said Ulzhavar. “This is Othala Celehar, who started us after this hare.”

  “Othala,” she said.

  “Othalo,” I said in return.

  “Sit,” said Ulzhavar, sitting down himself. “Aisharan, tell us your story.”

  “It happened maybe five, maybe seven years ago,” she said. “A young couple, just gotten married, and the woman got sick. Vomiting and purging and racked with cramps. She’d have an episode, and then she’d get better for a day or two, and then she’d be horribly sick agai
n. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her, and I was trying every remedy I knew, and nothing seemed to help. The poor woman—girl, really—was scared as well as most miserably ill, but the strange thing was that her husband didn’t seem worried at all. ‘It’s just his way,’ the girl told me, but I thought then and think now that it was a very strange way to behave when your wife was dying.”

  The server approached us and Ulzhavar ordered a pot of kolveris for the table, and a family plate of steamed buns. “I forgot to eat lunch,” he said, “and I hate to eat alone.”

  I remembered Iäna Pel-Thenhior saying the same thing and pushed the memory away.

  “You are very kind,” said Othalo Darnevin.

  “There is nothing that says I can’t be kind if I want to,” Ulzhavar said unanswerably. “Go on, Aisharan.”

  “She was dying,” said Othalo Darnevin, “and nothing I tried made the slightest difference. It took almost a month, and I have never felt so incompetent, so helpless. She turned seventeen the week before it finally killed her, and she might have died of simple exhaustion. And again, her husband behaved so strangely. He made all the funeral arrangements as efficiently as a secretary, saw his wife buried without shedding a tear, and disappeared like a mirage the next day.”

  Ulzhavar raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded. It sounded like the same pattern. “What was his name?” I said.

  “Broset,” she said. “Broset Sheveldar. I will never forget it.”

  * * *

  The tea and the steamed buns arrived, and we shared our information with Othalo Darnevin. I told her about Min Urmenezhen and Ulzhavar described the exhumation of Merrem Michezaran. Her eyes got wider and wider as she listened. “Then you think Mer Sheveldar murdered his wife.”

  “It seems unpleasantly likely,” Ulzhavar said. “Did the thought of poison never cross your mind?”

  “I asked Merrem Sheveldaran about what she ate, of course,” said Darnevin. “But she and her husband ate from the same dish, drank tea from the same pot, and he was perfectly healthy. I couldn’t see how it could be poison.”