Wrapt in Crystal

by Sharon Shinn

  “I don’t know what you were expecting,” Laura said after they had traveled a few moments in silence, “but the Fideles have no automobiles. We walk everywhere.”

  “That’s what I was expecting,” he said.

  “You wore white clothing,” she said. “You must have been prepared for the heat. That is what we always wear, when we walk.”

  He shrugged. “I wore white because it is the official Moonchild uniform. Distinctive enough in most cultures—easily recognized, picked out in a crowd. I have civilian clothes but somehow I’m not comfortable in them.”

  “So you have been a Moonchild your whole life?”

  “Well, for as long as someone can be. Went to the Academy when I was fourteen, graduated, and went to work. So it’s the only life I’ve known for a long time.”

  “And your family? They are Moonchildren?”

  He was silent a moment, taken by surprise. From senya Jovieve he might have expected personal questions, a personal interest, but not from the cool and collected ermana Laura. “No,” he said slowly. “Merchants. Merchants and farmers.”

  He had thought his voice was expressionless, but she must have heard something he did not intend to impart, for she changed the subject immediately. “Semay is a farming planet,” she said. “Visitors think that is strange, because it’s a desert, but we farm and export plants that only grow in extreme heat.”

  “So I was told,” he said. “Spices?”

  They talked a few moments of the major crops and trade agreements of Semay, Laura surprising him with the depth of her knowledge. “I would not have expected a Fidele priestess to be so interested in the worldly matters of finance and barter,” he said at last, smiling.

  She smiled back. Her smiles were rare enough that he was pleased to win one. “Oh yes,” she said. “I could tell you right now the name and estimated bank account of every major merchant and corporate executive in Madrid.”

  “Fundraising,” he guessed. “Of course.”

  She nodded. “It is what keeps us alive. There are donations, of course, but most of the individuals who give the church money have little to spare themselves. So we consider it a holy mission to go directly to the wealthiest members of the society and beg.”

  “And are they generous?”

  “Some are, some aren’t. We survive.”

  “Do the Triumphantes also beg for money?” he asked, thinking back to those gilded statues and that ornamental water playing in front of the temple.

  “The Triumphantes, Lieutenant, are supported by the taxes of the city.” He looked astonished, and she nodded vigorously. “It has been true since the settling of Semay. One percent of all taxes go to the church—this over and above the tithing that most members of the church feel compelled to make. And, I need hardly tell you, most affluent residents of Semay tend to belong to the Triumphante temple.”

  “Yes, of course,” Drake said absently. “So they have wealth and they have power and they claim the allegiance of the most wealthy and powerful factions on the planet . . . Interesting. While you have neither power nor wealth, and whatever wealth you do accumulate, you give away.”

  She was smiling again, a faint expression but unmistakable. “Oh, to do them justice, they give to the poor as well.”

  “Yes, senya Jovieve also mentioned a charity walk. I assume they give out food and alms to the poor?”

  “Directly and indirectly.” She glanced over at him and there was a trace of mischief in her eyes. “The Triumphantes are among the most generous sponsors of the Fidele temple,” she said, her voice grave in contrast. “Their contributions are very welcome.”

  He laughed aloud. “I’ll wager that’s something that’s not generally known.”

  “True,” she acknowledged. “Some people would see it as a way—oh, a way for the Triumphantes to salve their consciences, to atone for their worldly excesses. A way for them to buy the favor of the goddess.”

  “But you don’t think that’s why they contribute?”

  “No. The Triumphantes—from what I know of Triumphantes—believe that their celebration of religion is every bit as sacred, as necessary to the goddess as ours. They believe that jubilation is the only true way to worship Ava, that she smiles on delight and opens her heart to joy.”

  “It is hard to believe that there are two such different interpretations of the same deity,” Drake said.

  “The goddess has two faces,” Laura said seriously. “A face of joy and a face of sorrow. The Triumphantes see only the smiling countenance, and the Fideles see only the grave one. Who is to say they are wrong and we are right? I—I am not myself a Triumphante. I have not that gladness in my soul. But at times, and on days when my own load has been heavy, I confess that it gives me some comfort to know that there are those with whom the goddess rejoices and those who can make her smile.”

  Before he could think of a reply to that, they were hailed by the driver of a passing truck. The man swerved abruptly to the side of the road, waving wildly. Instinctively, Drake’s body went into reaction mode: He assessed the size and strength of the man in the truck, he prepared to toss aside his burdens, he glanced around for weapons. All this took only seconds, and while he prepared, Laura walked calmly forward and gazed into the window from the passenger’s side.

  “Ermana,” the man said, touching his fingertips to the general region of his heart. “A donde va?”

  She answered, and he replied, and she spoke the words that Drake recognized as thanks. She opened the passenger door and climbed in next to the driver, and Drake perforce clambered in beside her. “Gratze,” he muttered and the man returned a voluble response. Laura answered another question and then briefly explained matters to Drake.

  “We walk everywhere, but we are frequently given rides by the people,” she said. “In fact, it is a rare day that someone does not offer to drive me to my destination when I am out walking. Often, these volunteers can only take us part of the distance, but even a mile is a help, and people are eager to be kind.”

  “Accepting rides from strangers is a good way—to get hurt,” Drake said, amending his sentence even as he spoke. A good way to get killed, he had been about to say, and the look she gave him made it plain that she understood. But she would not dignify such small-mindedness with a reply. She turned back to their benefactor and conversed with him softly for the remainder of the ride.

  Drake watched out the windows as they rode. The streets they traveled became progressively more disreputable. The dilapidated stone buildings were replaced by shacks of wood and canvas. The pavement itself was rutted and rocky, giving way now and then to patches of bare earth where the asphalt had completely worn away. Polyglot children played in tumbledown parks or in the rusting metal of discarded automobiles. In the spare shadows of the unkempt buildings, young men slunk by, stripped to the waist, their dark bodies gleaming in the fierce sun. Brightly dressed women hurried by in groups of two and three, trailed by flocks of children. The sunlight lay like a metallic glaze across everything.

  “Aqui,” the driver said, pulling over at the crossroads of two narrow streets. “Bastante?”

  “Si, gratze,” Laura replied. Drake opened his door and got out, then turned to help the sister from the car. She had paused to make her goodbye to the driver. For the second time, the man touched his fingertips to his heart, then gently laid his first two fingers across the ermana’s lips. She kissed his fingers and he dropped his hand.

  “Ava te ama,” she said softly.

  “Tu tambien,” he responded. Laura gathered her bundles and climbed from the car.

  Drake readjusted his own packages and tried to sound casual. “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “Besa de paz,” she said. “Kiss of peace.”

  “You kiss strangers on the hands?”

  “Frequently.”

  It seemed a pastime so fraught with danger that he could
scarcely think of a way to frame his distaste, so he didn’t. “And you said to him?”

  “ ‘The love of Ava upon you,’ or words to that effect. And he said, ‘The same to you.’ ”

  “Ava te ama,” Drake said, to remember the words.

  “Tu tambien,” she replied.

  They had walked only half a block before a group of untidy schoolchildren spotted them from across the street and greeted Laura with shrill shrieks of delight. “Ermana, ermana!” they cried, running helter-skelter across the chipped street. “Ermana, ermana!”

  They clustered around Laura and she dropped to her knees to welcome them. One by one they pressed their grubby hands to her mouth; not content with kissing the children, she hugged each one, smoothing back their hair and speaking to them gaily. She rummaged through her parcels and brought out loaves of bread, small bags of rice, wrapped rounds of cheese. “Por su madre,” she warned as she handed out the staples, but she gave all the children crackers and snacks that they didn’t have to take home to their families. The children stuffed the food in their mouths and skipped away, waving behind them and calling out to her as they disappeared.

  Drake put out a hand to help Laura to her feet. “Did you know them?” he asked.

  “Some of them. I used to come to this neighborhood fairly often.”

  “They seemed to recognize you.”

  She smiled sadly. “They recognize the ‘ermanas.’ Like you, Lieutenant, we dress distinctively. They know that we come here with food, and so they are always glad to see us.”

  “Is there some system of distribution or do you just hand out food to anyone who walks by?”

  “Both, really. In each of the poorer neighborhoods, we have kitchens that we open one day a week. There we hand out food in large quantities to anyone who comes by. We don’t have enough staff—or enough food—to keep the kitchens open all day, every day. So we also go out on frequent charity walks through the neighborhoods, bringing as much as we can carry, and we hand this out to whomever asks. Mostly to the children, though. Mothers will send their sons and daughters to the streets where we walk most frequently, just to wait in case one of us comes by.”

  “But you must run out of food pretty fast.”

  “Yes . . . They are glad to see us for other reasons, as well.”

  “You mentioned—one of the women was killed after she delivered food to a house where she was expected.”

  “Jan,” Laura said instantly.

  “Yes. So you also call specifically on certain families?”

  “Yes, if someone is ill or in dire straits, we will take him food on a scheduled basis for three weeks.”

  “No longer?”

  “We cannot feed everyone, Lieutenant. Too many people need our help. Three weeks is as long as we can afford. This house,” she said, and turned through a gap in a rusty fence into a sandy yard. Drake was taken by surprise and came to a dead halt on the sidewalk. “This is where Ann was found murdered.”

  The windows and doors were boarded up, perhaps by past owners, and those boards were covered with colorful graffiti, surely added by neighborhood teens. The roof was completely torn away. Pale, stringy weeds fringed the concrete base of the house and in patches scratched their way up from the sandy soil. Drake had never seen such an unattractive home.

  “Inside?” he asked.

  “No, around back.”

  He followed her through the needle-edged weeds to the back of the house, fully as unlovely as the front. The whole area that would have been the yard had been inexpertly paved over with some whitish cement, which was broken now in fifty places. Scraggly grass grew up through the cracks.

  Laura pointed, but there was nothing to see. “Here.”

  Drake squatted and examined the baked concrete. There might be a few drops of blood mixed in with the dirt and the grit, but it was hard to say. The rocky surface told no story of a struggle, left no clues like fingerprints and footsteps. Even the hombuenos had concluded that there was nothing to be read here; they had posted no notices, roped off no crime scene. It was clear that no one lived here now—no one, it was possible to believe, had ever lived here. The murderer had lurked in the shadows of the house until his prey had stepped by, then jumped at her, dragged her back here, garroted her . . . and bound her hands . . .

  “Wouldn’t she have cried out?” he said, softly but aloud. “Of course she would have. Wouldn’t someone have heard? Maybe no one here responds to a cry for help after dark. Maybe he didn’t jump out at her. Maybe he approached her. ‘Sister, do you have a loaf of bread? My little boy is back here, he’s starving—’ ” He looked up at Laura. She stood with the light directly behind her, so that her face was completely in shadow. She seemed, nonetheless, to be the cool source of all light.

  “If you were walking back alone late at night,” he said slowly, “and someone begged you to step to the back of this house, would you do it?”

  “I don’t think I would now,” she said. “A few months ago—yes. If he said his son was sick or his wife was starving or his brother needed Ava’s comfort.”

  “At midnight?”

  “I told you, we do much of our work late at night.”

  Drake stood, and from this angle he could again see the sun on her face. “Perhaps that’s a practice that should be discontinued, at least for the duration.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “If we stop ministering to souls in need, we stop serving the goddess,” she said.

  “Stop it only at night,” he suggested. “I’m sure you can find enough needy souls in the daytime.”

  She did not answer, which was a polite way of disagreeing with him. He shrugged and glanced around to see if there was anything else he had overlooked. In the lot behind this one was a vacant shed with its door hanging off the hinges. The houses on either side also appeared to be deserted. The killer could shelter in any of these places, or none of them. The other five murders had taken place in completely different parts of the neighborhood.

  “Have you considered working only in pairs?” he asked, swinging his attention back to the ermana.

  “We would halve the work we could do.”

  “But still live to do it.”

  Again, she failed to answer. “Wait here a minute,” he said. He vaulted over the sagging fence into the yard that abutted this one, and stepped warily into the open shed. The light poured in from the wide doorway. He looked around. A few burlap sacks, some empty, some full; rusted tools; a thin carpet of shattered glass. Into a corner had been wedged a rolled-up ball of paper, white enough to be recent. Drake crunched across the broken glass, bent and retrieved it. Smoothing it out, he was surprised to discover that it was a small advertising poster for a show of antique planetary jets (personal and commercial models). The name of the city was given, but it was not a name Drake recognized, and he could not even guess on what world the show was being held. But the announcement was printed in Standard Terran and that, as well as the merchandise, proved that the poster was an import.

  Might have belonged to the killer; might have belonged to any vagrant who spent the night in the shed, wadding up a convenient piece of trash for a pillow. There was nothing else at all to be found in the shack.

  Drake folded the paper, pocketed it and rejoined Laura. “Find anything?” she asked.

  “Probably not.”

  “Did you expect to?”

  “Have to find something sometime.”

  “You’ve just started.”

  “Been here a little over twenty-four hours and haven’t learned anything except a sketchy history of the crimes and an overview of the major faiths. I have a lot left to do.”

  She put out a hand as if to take the bundles he had just picked up again. “Do you want to go back to the city and start working?”

  He smiled down at her. “I am working,” he said. “Understanding you is part of the job.”

  She
nodded gravely, which gave him no clue as to what she thought about that remark. “Then let’s finish my job,” she said, and led him back out to the street.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when Drake left Laura back at the Fidele temple. They had walked for hours, handing out bread and rice, visiting three sick women and an injured man, playing with children, pausing once to kneel in the street and pray beside some poor slob who called out to them as they went by. He smelled of alcohol and body odors and he refused food, but he clasped Laura’s hand the whole time she murmured some litany over him. Drake was repulsed when the man lifted his fingers and smeared them across the sister’s face, but Laura kissed him as she had kissed everyone else.

  “Ava te ama,” she said, rising.

  “Tu tambien,” he gasped, and fell back to the ground. Tears trickled down his face, quickly drying in the arid air. He closed his eyes and appeared to sleep or fall into a coma or die before they had gone three steps past him. Drake wanted to voice his disgust, but Laura made no comment, and so he made none either.

  They were picked up twice on their way back to the temple, and Drake sat silent through both rides. The second driver brought them all the way to the sanctuary door, although Drake suspected this took him somewhat out of his way. After the ritualistic farewell, the man drove off, and the Moonchild and the priestess were left confronting one another.

  “When will you need to see me again?” Laura asked.

  He shrugged. “In a day or so, maybe. I need to talk with the hombuenos again, visit all the murder sites, go over the case records, interview some of the relatives of the victims. I don’t know when I’ll need to see you again. Is there any time that’s inconvenient for you?”

  “I might not be here every time, but someone will always know where I am. Come whenever you like.”

  “Thank you. I will. It has been—” He paused, because the conventional words did not adequately cover his reaction. He had been impressed and moved by the priestess and her gentle work; he was not prepared to say whether it was the woman or her faith which impressed him more. “Meeting you has been a very eye-opening experience,” he finished up lamely.