by Sharon Shinn
A possibility of fixing the time of the murder? “Did she arrive at the house as expected?”
“Yes, we checked with the mother later. She left their home a little after sunset. Her body was discovered by the hombuenos the next morning.”
“Didn’t you begin to worry about her sometime before then?”
She raised her deep green eyes to his. “Much of our work is done at night, Lieutenant, which is when the sick and the sore and the troubled are abroad. It is not an infrequent thing for one of the sisters to be out all night, administering to a soul in despair.”
He nodded. “Is there any reason you can think of that someone would have had for killing sister Jan?”
“No.”
“How long had she been with the Fideles?”
“I don’t know. Forty or fifty years perhaps. I know she joined when she was a very young woman.”
“And her family? What are her people like?”
For the first time, the ermana did not answer his direct question. Drake looked at her more closely and repeated it.
“When a woman joins the Fideles,” ermana Laura said slowly, “she gives up everything else. Her family. Her life. Any other ties. She dedicates herself completely to the goddess. She seldom speaks of her secular heritage and we rarely ask. I do not know what her background was.”
He stared, disbelieving. “That makes matters more complicated,” he said.
“I’m not sure why,” she responded.
“To solve a crime, you need to find a motive. Perhaps these women were murdered by someone who knew them before they became Fideles or Triumphantes. If I don’t know who they were before—”
“Whatever they were before they became Fideles, those people have ceased to exist,” Laura interrupted.
“Yes, but their families and friends did not cease to exist,” Drake said with some impatience. “And perhaps did not cease to feel for these women whatever emotion they felt for them before, be it love or hate.”
She bowed her head, as if in silent acknowledgment of his point. “In any case, I do not know anything of Jan’s previous life,” she said.
“And the other two women? Who were they?”
“Ann was the second one. She was younger than Jan—my age, perhaps. She too was in the barrio—the district of town that is not entirely safe.”
“As I understand it, the Fideles spend most of their time in such districts,” he said.
She nodded again. “That’s true. It was also at night that she was killed, returning from a charity walk. Again, we did not miss her quite as soon as we could have, thinking she was with a parishioner.”
“And the third one?” The one killed less than two days ago, he thought.
“Lynn. One of our newest sisters. Very young.” Laura hesitated and shook her head before continuing. Drake could hear no tremor in her voice, but he was sure she had paused to shake away sorrow. “She disappeared shortly after midnight and we missed her very quickly. We have become a little more fearful, you see. But still we did not expect—” She gestured, and did not complete her sentence.
“And again you know nothing about these women’s lives before they came to the Fidele temple?”
Before she could answer, a young woman entered bearing a plain tray which held a pitcher of water and two glasses. Laura thanked her and asked a question, received a reply, asked another question and turned back to Drake.
“About Ann I suppose I know as much as anyone,” she said. “She had no family in Madrid. She had come from a small farming community about five hundred miles outside the city. She spoke once or twice about a cousin, but never about parents or siblings. I think she was quite alone in the world when she decided to join the Fideles.”
“Does that happen often?” he asked.
She smiled faintly. “You mean, are our ranks composed solely of women with no one else to care for them and no one else to love?” she asked.
He felt slightly ashamed of himself. “That’s not exactly how I meant it to sound.”
“Some women come to the church because they have nowhere else to run,” she said. “Those women we usually care for at our shelters, heal as best we can and return to the world. Surely you can see that a woman who chooses religion as a last desperate act is not entirely suited to the charitable work we do. But a few women have turned to Ava in their hours of extremity and found the goddess so loving that they have dedicated the rest of their lives to her. For the most part, however, the sisters are women who have given up some wealth or status or family to serve Ava, because they chose to, because they were called, because they love the goddess. Does that answer your question?”
“Yes,” he said. “About this third woman—”
“I have sent for someone,” she said.
On the words, they were joined by a small dark-haired girl who looked to be just out of her teens. Like Laura, she wore her hair pulled back in a severe style, but in her case it did little to disguise the fresh prettiness of her face. She made a small obeisance to the older woman and folded her hands before her. She looked neither shy nor afraid, but very demure.
“Lieutenant, this is Deb. She was a close friend of Lynn’s and if anyone will know anything about her background, she will.”
“Does she speak Standard Terran?”
“No. I believe I am the only one here who does.”
“Ask her what she knows.”
Laura spoke to the girl in that liquid, lovely language and the girl replied. Again, the quick question and answer. Drake listened, but could only pick out an occasional word he recognized.
Laura turned back to him. “She says that she knows nothing about Lynn’s family, but that there was a man she left behind when she joined the temple, and that this man communicated with Lynn several times after she took her vows.”
Drake sat up straight on the hard stone bench. “Really? Does she know this man’s name?”
“She says she doesn’t, but she believes Lynn kept his letters.”
“Kept his—Does she know where the letters are? Could she find them?”
Laura hesitated, disapproval clear on her face. “I know,” Drake said patiently. “It’s a terrible thing to break into another human being’s privacy. I know. But she’s dead and we can’t hurt her or embarrass her. And perhaps what we find in her private life will enable us to save someone else’s life. Can Deb find the letters?”
The priestess repeated the request to the young woman, who looked every bit as reluctant and unsure as her elder. Laura pressed the matter, perhaps using Drake’s argument, and Deb gestured and acquiesced. Slowly she left the room.
“Was Lynn happy to be here?” Drake asked when she was gone. “Was her heart in her work?”
“Yes, I’m quite sure of it. She was the most cooperative and sweet-tempered girl. She would do anything she was asked and volunteered for more work on a regular basis.”
“Did you have any suspicions of this love affair?”
Laura gave him a direct, quelling look; her eyes were cooler than ocean water. “If she gave the young man up, Lieutenant, I believe she did it with her whole heart. He may have had trouble believing she preferred the church to him, but I don’t think she ran to the temple just to escape his attentions.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I have lived long enough to know that very few people are without their secrets.”
They waited in silence a moment. To break it, Drake spoke almost at random. “How long have you been with the Fideles, sister?”
“I have served the goddess my whole life,” was her answer.
“What made you decide to become a Fidele?” he persisted.
She smiled. “What made you decide to become a Moonchild?” she asked. “Did you ever consider becoming anything else?”
He smiled back. “No.”
�
�Neither did I.”
Drake sipped his water and waited without speaking again. The vagrant breeze wandering through the arched windows was hotter as the sun crawled toward its zenith. Even the green garden looked almost white in its blistering light.
Deb returned slowly, dragging her feet. She handed three slim envelopes to Laura and turned to go.
“Aqui,” Drake said sharply. Here. He could not think of how to word a more polite request. Laura said something else in Semayse, and Deb sank to the stone bench beside the older woman. She did not look at Drake again.
Laura handed him the letters. “There is no seal on the outside—no address,” she said, examining the envelopes as she passed them over. “They may be hard to track.”
He nodded, and slipped the first one out. He skimmed the text, the usual declarations of passion and desire, and went directly to the signature. “David,” he said aloud. “David who?”
Laura repeated the question in Semayse, apparently not realizing it was rhetorical. “No se,” Deb replied. I don’t know.
The tone of the second letter matched that of the first, but Drake was a little luckier this time. David had included an address where Lynn could send her reply. “Bingo,” Drake said. “This address mean anything to you?” He reeled it off.
“It is a general postal address,” Laura said. “A place you can have mail forwarded. So that it does not come to your home.”
“Even so,” Drake said, slipping the letters into his pocket. “They’ll have some record of who rented a box there. I may be able to trace him.”
Deb asked Laura a question. “Can she leave now?” Laura translated.
Drake looked at the young girl consideringly. It was outside the bounds of her training to look defiant, but she did not look happy to be there. “Not quite yet,” he said slowly. “I have one other question for both of you.”
Laura held up her hand, signaling Deb to stay. “Yes?”
Drake glanced again at the goddess-eye pendant that Laura and Deb wore. “The last five women who were killed had their hands bound with rosarios—rosarios carried by women of the other faith. As much as anything, that fact has served to tie the murders together. Why do you think—What reason could the killer have had for doing something like that?”
Laura translated but spoke to Drake in Standard Terran as soon as she was done. “No reason—I can think of nothing,” she said. “It makes no sense. It is stupid.” Deb merely shook her head.
“I know the sects have nothing in common,” he said. “Or so I’ve been told. But this goddess-eye—what does it mean?”
Laura’s hand had risen to cup her crystal pendant, and Deb unconsciously repeated the gesture with her own necklace. “It is the eye of the goddess,” the older woman said slowly. “It watches over the wearer, and protects her. We do not believe, we Fideles, in graven images or holy artifacts, and yet—an ermana’s goddess-eye pendant is the most precious thing she owns. It is a symbol of Ava’s enduring affection.”
Drake was grasping at straws. “Has any sister ever lost one?”
Laura was perplexed. “Not that I know of.”
“What would happen if she did?”
“I don’t know. I suppose we would commission a new one for her. But I don’t know of such a thing happening.”
“Some of the wealthy women in town own such crystals as well, I was told,” Drake said. “Maybe one of them lost a pendant—”
“But even so,” the sister said, “why would that be cause for murder?”
Drake shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps it means nothing except that the killer is binding the women together in death. It just seems to me—it is a clue, somehow, a message.”
Deb asked a quiet question and Laura spoke to her softly. Drake supposed the younger girl had requested a translation of their discussion. He stared moodily at the opal fire of the priestess’s pendant.
“Glass, eye, crystal, jewel, fire,” he murmured, trying word association. “What could one of those words mean to a killer?”
Laura’s low voice accompanied his. “Vidrio, ojo, cristal, joya, fuego.”
“Cristal?” Deb repeated.
“Si,” Laura said.
“La cancione—la poema,” the girl said.
“Cual? O, la oracion? Pero—”
“Si, si, seguro,” Deb said vehemently. She began to recite and Drake knew enough of the words to feel a tingle skitter along his backbone: “Noche cristal, dia del oro, Nos tiene in sus manos—”
“What’s that?” Drake interrupted.
Laura turned to him with a touch of impatience. “It is a line from an old song, an old hymn, really, to Ava. ‘Night of crystal, day of gold—Goddess in your arms enfold—Soldier, servant, saint and sinner—Spring and summer, fall and winter.’ Something like that. There’s more. I cannot translate it all so quickly.”
“Noche cristal,” he repeated in a musing tone of voice. Diadeloro had caught his attention sharply, but he pretended to focus his attention elsewhere. “Nochestrella? Night of stars? They sound like Triumphante names.”
Laura was watching him closely. “The Triumphantes often take their names from hymns and prayers. I would not put much store by that, if you think you recognize a name in this litany—”
He smiled at her so cheerfully she looked taken aback. “Naturally not,” he said. “Would it be possible to get me a whole translation of this hymn? And any other well-known hymns as well?”
The look on her face was not exactly friendly. “Certainly,” she said, but her tone asked why.
“If we are to assume the murders are someone’s protest, either against religion in general or those who worship Ava in particular—it might help me to know some of the popular doctrines, schoolboy prayers, stories, parables. At least I would have a lexicon in common with the killer.”
“Assuming the killer is a resident of Semay,” Laura said in a quiet voice.
He looked at her seriously. “I can’t imagine how an outsider could develop a hatred of the Semayan religions.”
“Perhaps the crimes are not directed at Ava after all. Perhaps they are directed at women—or women who help the poor—”
“No, I don’t think there’s any way to subtract the religious element,” he said. “But whether the violence is directed only at Ava or at some specific woman who serves Ava, it is harder for me to guess.”
She lifted her eyes to his face. “Some specific woman who serves Ava?” she repeated.
He shrugged. “A woman who brought all her wealth to the church, leaving an expectant family destitute. A woman who turned her back on a lover. That family member or that lover may have cause to hate one woman and extrapolate that hate to others. I don’t know. I am looking wherever I can for a motive.”
She nodded and there was a moment’s silence. Deb spoke again, softly, in Semayse. “She wants to know if you have any further need for her,” Laura asked.
“No—she can go. If she thinks of something later—something about Lynn—or if she would ask the other girls if they know anything, I would be grateful.”
Laura repeated his words to the young girl, who made a small curtsey and departed.
“I too have work I must be getting to, Lieutenant,” the ermana said, sitting on the edge of her seat to make it plain she wished to rise. “It is my day to go to the barrios and distribute food. If you have no more questions—”
He was interested. “The barrios? The slums?”
She nodded gravely. “The poorer districts, yes.”
“Will you be going by any of the neighborhoods where the women were killed?”
“One of them, yes. Do you want me to show you the place?”
He stood, so she stood as well. “If you would be kind enough. I saw the place where Lynn was killed. But I need to see the others.”
“Then I will take you.”
Chapter Four
Laura left the room without telling him to wait or to follow, so Drake followed. The hallway seemed wonderfully dark and cool after the brightness of the porchlike room. The singing had stopped completely sometime during their interview, and the only sound was the hollow echo of their footsteps down the stone floors. Every corridor was bare of ornament; every open doorway they passed gave onto a room of plain, hard furniture and unpainted walls. Yet there was nothing dreary about this place—rather, Drake felt a sense of peace and purpose building in him as he strode through the temple at the heels of the priestess. No doubt the Fideles did not allow themselves to feel vanity at the thought that they lived their lives for high purposes; nonetheless the building was pervaded by a sort of calm satisfaction, a knowledge that much had been done, much would be done, to make many lives a little better. Drake liked the lack of ostentation, the sense of mission. He would be glad to think his own life was so free of waste and meaningless trifles. A Fidele could lie down to sleep each evening, guiltless and serene, and Drake would give much to look forward to such a night.
He soon found himself in a kitchen, a large, warm, crowded room filled with many women and many parcels already made up for distribution. Drake earned a number of sidelong looks but his presence did not stop the amiable, indistinguishable chatter of the workers. Laura spoke to half a dozen people as she moved through the room, picking up baskets and tying a bundle over her shoulder.
Drake stepped forward, taking the baskets from her hands. “Here, let me,” he said.
She gave him a straight look, made no answer, and picked up more baskets to replace the ones he had appropriated. “Hasta luego,” she said to the woman who appeared to be in charge, and led Drake out the kitchen door.
He reeled briefly in the blinding light, but managed not to stumble or bump into his guide. Within a few paces, they were on the cracked sidewalk, and they turned away from the street down which he and Lise had driven. Toward the barrios.
