Death's Executioner

by Charlotte E. English

  He said nothing.

  ‘Anyway,’ Tasha said crisply. ‘Never mind all that. What was this about a corpse?’

  ‘The Malykt accepted you as Konrad’s replacement?’ said the inspector, looking sharply at her.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Then why is Eetapi enraged with you?’

  ‘She disagrees.’

  ‘And Ootapi?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  He is gone into the Deathlands, said Eetapi, in an oddly small voice. In search of the Master.

  ‘He is not your master anymore, Eetapi. That’s what I am trying to tell you. You work for me now.’

  The Malykt has not said that this is so.

  ‘I’m sure He is just busy.’

  ‘Where is Nanda?’ said the inspector, and Tasha wished fervently he wasn’t so tenacious of mind.

  ‘I shouldn’t say this part out loud,’ said Tasha. ‘If it were to be known what she’s trying to do—’

  ‘You can tell me. And you will, or I will haul you before Diana by your hair and let her deal with you.’

  ‘Oh, she knows about me already,’ said Tasha airily. ‘She’s completely in support of this. Said I’d be a great Malykant.’

  ‘All lies.’

  Tasha growled. ‘Nanda’s gone into the Deathlands to fetch Konrad back. Which is in total contravention of all natural laws about Life and Death set down by The Malykt and The Shandrigal both, so if she gets out alive They will probably skin her to death.’ She directed a dark glare at Eetapi, which the serpent returned with a snippy hiss.

  ‘What?’ gasped the inspector, and shot out of his chair. ‘And you let her go alone?’

  ‘Someone has to mind the shop while Konrad’s gone. We worked it all out between us.’

  The inspector actually clutched at his hair, a procedure Tasha watched with interest. She did not think she had ever seen anyone literally do that before. ‘She’ll die,’ he said. ‘She’ll die too. They will both be dead.’

  ‘I think you underestimate Nanda.’

  ‘You said it yourself, three seconds ago. If she makes it out of there alive, the Great Ones will kill her.’

  ‘Maybe I underestimate Nanda, too. Look, will you settle down? We can’t help her now, but she is not alone. She has Ootapi, apparently, and she’s a witch. She has resources of her own. Our job is to keep things in order down here, so will one or both of you please tell me who’s dead out there.’

  ‘So you are a temporary caretaker?’ said the inspector, after a moment, and a few deep breaths.

  ‘Maybe. We’ll see, when Konrad gets back.’

  ‘We’ll see what?’

  ‘Whether he wants the job back. And whether The Malykt wants him to have it.’

  ‘You think you’ll be so much better?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tasha, which was a barefaced lie. Nanda had said, more than once, that The Malykt did not appreciate what he had in Konrad, and neither did Diana Valentina. Tasha would never admit it, but privately she agreed. So did The Shandrigal, apparently. Well, maybe The Malykt needed a reminder.

  By the time Tasha was finished, He would be begging Konrad to come back.

  And the power of saying yes or no would rest, as it ought to, in Konrad’s hands.

  The inspector looked at Tasha out of red-rimmed eyes, which surprised her rather. Had he been so attached to Konrad? Or Nanda either? The man was sentimental to a fault, an odd quality in a police inspector. The next breath he took was shuddery, as though there were tears behind it, but he got a grip on himself after that.

  ‘I’m still here,’ Tasha offered.

  A thin smile. ‘Disaster, I name thee Tasha.’

  ‘Charming. Thank you. For what it’s worth, I believe that Nanda will make it back, too.’

  ‘And Konrad?’

  Tasha shrugged. ‘That I don’t know. One could say with some truth that it’s in the lap of the Gods.’

  ‘Are you sure he was blinded by whoever killed him?’ said Tasha half an hour later. ‘Maybe someone else poked his eyes out.’

  ‘That is possible, yes.’ The inspector stood with his hands in the pockets of his shabby, oversized coat, looking down at the mutilated corpse before him.

  Death was so undignified. Here sat a man, old but not infirm yet, the respected elder of his household most likely, in what was probably the best chair in the house. He had that poor-but-respectable look about him, befitting the meagre, well-swept cottage they had found him in. Coat with a patch at one elbow. Some indefinable curve to the lines on his face gave him a kindly air, or might have when he was alive. Grandchildren probably played about his knee, disporting themselves before a blazing late-winter fire while their elder looked benevolently on.

  And now he sat with his torso split open, a knife still embedded in the depths of a few vital organs, and a face bloodied and soiled from the wreck someone had made of his eyes.

  ‘Maybe he put his own eyes out,’ Tasha added, after a moment’s thought. ‘That’s possible too.’

  ‘Is that something you would do?’ The inspector gave her a sideways glance.

  ‘Take a sharp object to my own eyes? Don’t be ridiculous. I might manage to put out one eye, in a moment of madness, but it’s the second one that’s the more chilling thought. The pain, Nuritov. Imagine the agony.’ Tasha did so herself, receiving as usual an odd thrill at the prospect. Not the good kind of thrill, quite. This was not a pain she would seek for herself.

  ‘That seems to put paid to that idea, then,’ said the inspector, moving off to explore the scene.

  ‘I was speaking of me. Who knows what this man was capable of.’

  ‘If there’s a person alive who could stab out both their own eyes, it would have to be you. I think we can rule out the self-blinding theory.’

  ‘Fine. So, then. Why would someone bother to blind him, only to then kill him afterwards?’

  ‘Unless they killed him first, then blinded him afterwards.’

  ‘That makes even less sense.’

  ‘Yes, at present it does. But you must keep an open mind, Tasha. If you become too certain of a particular set of events, without sound reason, that can blind you to the real truth. And as Konrad would tell you, the real truth can sometimes be far stranger than you would imagine possible.’

  ‘Cannot argue with that.’ Tasha took a turn about the room, questing for clues. She found… none. Some blood had descended to the floor, not surprising, a lot of it had come out of the man after all. Enough of it had poured everywhere to suggest that he had been stabbed where he sat, and died there. The room contained little else of interest. The house was tiny, containing only three rooms in total: a rough kitchen, a bedchamber behind, and this front chamber overlooking the narrow street. The harbour lay not far beyond; Tasha could smell the sea, an occasional wisp of salt-tang.

  ‘What information do we have about him?’ she said.

  ‘He was found by a passing costermonger, who, she says, happening to glance through the unshuttered window, saw his body and summoned the constable. His neighbours named him as Rodion Artemo, a former potter, though he had not engaged much in the trade since the rheumatism set into his hands. He has one daughter, Agasha, from whom he is estranged.’

  So much for the grandchildren playing around the fire. ‘That’s it, then?’ said Tasha. ‘Nothing else to work with?’

  ‘Not yet. I was hoping Konrad would be able to extract something… more.’

  ‘How would he have done that?’

  ‘With, er, the serpents’ help…’

  ‘Oh. I see what you mean. Eetapi, can you…?’

  No. His spirit is long gone.

  She uttered the words ungraciously, but at least it was a prompt answer. ‘Eetapi says not,’ Tasha reported. ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘That suggests he was killed some time ago, then. Early in the night, perhaps? Or even yesterday.’

  ‘If it was so easy for the costermonger to spot him through the wind
ow, surely he hasn’t been there since yesterday, or someone would have seen him much earlier.’

  ‘Perhaps. But not everyone is observant enough, or nosy enough, to notice much beyond the sphere of their own business.’

  The hapless Rodion Artemo had the look of a man deceased for some little time. All the blood was dried to a deep brown colour, almost black, and he had the stiff, frozen look that only sets in once every lingering trace of life is drained from the body.

  ‘Nobody saw anything, I suppose?’ said Tasha.

  ‘Karyavin is working on that. So far, the neighbours have nothing to tell us.’

  ‘Right.’ Tasha stood, not at all enjoying an unusual helpless feeling. How did Konrad trace a killer who’d vanished into the night, leaving no convenient clues behind them? How did Nuritov proceed, if his men came back with no real leads and no obvious direction to go in next? Yes, she had solved one case herself, but luck had played a large part in that. If luck refused to favour her… what then?

  ‘I suppose,’ she said doubtfully, ‘we could try to find the daughter?’

  ‘That must be done anyway; she ought to be told that her father is dead. By all accounts, though, she had not been seen in this neighbourhood for some years.’

  ‘So she probably isn’t the killer, and she’s unlikely to have much idea of what was going on in her father’s life either.’

  ‘That is about the size of it, yes.’

  Tasha gave a sigh. ‘Is detecting always this frustrating?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Then why by all the spirits were you mad enough to pursue it as a profession?’

  The inspector shrugged, and put the stem of his pipe between his teeth. ‘A man must have a purpose,’ he said around it.

  ‘You could have picked anything.’

  ‘Not really. For better or worse, I have a knack for this one.’

  ‘A knack. All right, what is your knack telling you right now?’

  ‘That it might be interesting to know why Rodion Artemo was estranged from his daughter.’

  ‘How’s that likely to be relevant?’

  ‘It might not be, but it is a question to ask.’

  ‘And how are we going to find her?’

  ‘We ask around, consult those records we have at our disposal, and… hope for some luck.’

  ‘Luck,’ muttered Tasha sourly. ‘Always it comes back to that.’

  ‘Is that so bad?’

  ‘I am pretty sure The Great Spirit of Luck hates me.’

  ‘There is no such being.’

  ‘Then I am just cursed.’

  The inspector’s lips curved; he was laughing at her.

  ‘You on the other hand are swimming in luck, right? All the time. A whole ocean of luck all to yourself.’

  The inspector’s smile abruptly faded. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Luck hasn’t favoured me at all. Not when it mattered.’

  Aware that she had strayed into something serious, Tasha hastily backtracked. That solemn quality to Nuritov’s tone threatened a return of the tearfulness, and nobody wanted that. ‘So we find the daughter,’ she said quickly. ‘What else?’

  The inspector looked at her in silence.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You volunteered yourself for this role, Tasha. You are a detective, now. What would you do next?’

  ‘When I did that I was thinking more of the executioner bit. That part I can handle.’

  ‘No doubt, but first you must find out who is to receive the honour of the executioner’s attention. Think. What would you do next?’

  ‘Do? I have no idea.’

  ‘Alternatively. What questions might you ask?’

  Questions. Tasha stared sightlessly at the mess someone had made of Rodion Artemo, and cudgelled her reluctant brains into action. Questions. She could do that. ‘That knife,’ she said. ‘It is made of bone. Is that bone?’

  ‘Good. Yes, it looks like bone to me. An unusual weapon, no? What does that suggest to you?’

  ‘Nothing, because I am an ignorant lout.’

  ‘Yes, but it suggests further questions, does it not?’

  ‘What kind of a knife is made all out of bone? Where would somebody get something like that? And why would it be used like this?’

  ‘Exactly. It is likely to be a rare piece, possibly expensive to procure. But this man was poor, and those he knew probably were poor as well. Surely a cheap, simple knife would be a more likely weapon, then. Why this one?’

  Tasha nodded along. ‘Good. Right. In that case, if it was rare and expensive, why did someone leave it here?’

  ‘Such a piece ought to be a prize, oughtn’t it? It is engraved, too — patterned with etchings. And yet it’s been left here as though it’s valueless. An important point, possibly.’

  Tasha began to feel less at sea, the world firming again beneath her feet. Ask all the questions! And then ruthlessly scour the city until answers presented themselves. That was how they did it. That was the essential process she had followed herself, when she had sought the source of a rare poison, and deduced her way to a sensible solution.

  Sensible. The word had passed seamlessly through her mind and she’d scarcely noticed. Tasha the Sensible. How Genri would have laughed.

  ‘Another question! If he couldn’t work, how did he live? Why isn’t he on the street? This house is small and mean but it still cost money to live here.’

  Nuritov looked at her with a twinkle lurking at the back of his eyes. ‘Getting into it, now, aren’t you? Another good question. He received some small charities from his neighbours, here and there, but we don’t yet know how he paid rent, or how else he acquired or paid for food. What can we do about that, do you think?’

  ‘Talk to the landlord. Who owns this place?’

  ‘We will certainly do that. I would like to know if he was in arrears. If he was not, was he ever late with payments? How did he pay?’

  Listening to so drab a list of questions, Tasha felt her heart sink a little again. Combing painstakingly through the intricate details of so ordinary a life, that was detecting. Those were the kinds of questions one had to concern oneself with. How had Konrad stood it? The inspector, that was no surprise; he was a good man, and she was fond of him, but he was not overflowing with vivacity or imagination. She could picture him, plodding his methodical way down the growing list of minutiae until he uncovered something relevant.

  Konrad was more like Tasha herself. He’d prefer to hack and slash his way to a solution.

  ‘Wondering when you’ll get to the violent part?’ said the inspector.

  ‘I was rather.’

  ‘It’s like everything else in life. Labour comes first, the sweets later.’

  ‘I really don’t see why everyone doesn’t just go straight to the sweets.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you would, at that.’

  ‘Wait.’ Tasha, suddenly electrified, leaned closer to the corpse. Close enough that her nostrils filled with the odours of blood and torn flesh, and she could feel the murdered man’s absence of life like a palpable chill. Such a mess had been made of those eyes, so bloodied and blackened and torn were they, that a feature of the blinding had hitherto escaped her attention. ‘Nuritov. Where are the eyes?’

  He nodded once. ‘It appears they were removed.’

  Twin emptinesses stared vacantly back at Tasha, dark holes in a ruined face.

  Tasha’s grin broadened. ‘Why might someone take out their victim’s eyes, Nuritov?’

  ‘No reason I want to know about, but that, too, is a question that must be answered.’

  ‘That,’ said Tasha with deep satisfaction, ‘is much more like it.’

  Chapter Two

  The lingering pungency of a thousand flowers embraced Nanda like… like a punch in the face.

  She had found it pleasant, at first, an unexpected scent to lift the heart. She had stepped into the Deathlands expecting to find it like The Malykt Himself: dark, bleak and without mercy. Instead she ha
d encountered an airy lightness buoying to the spirits, and received the sensation of drowning in an ocean of flowers.

  Well, drowning was never pleasant in the end, whatever one chose to drown in. Fragrance turned to stench in her estimation, her head ached, and she would almost have cut off her own nose if that would take the abominable reek away.

  Staring now at a warped blossom for which she had no name — because it could possess none, inside-out as it was, and twisted out of recognition — she fought with a crippling sense of weariness for some clarity of thought.

  Think. Where would Konrad be, in this nonsensical place?

  She had hoped that she need only step through the divide, and find him waiting there. He had died right beside her, after all; perhaps he had only faded through the invisible veil, and fetched up, figuratively speaking, a bare few inches away. She could reach out, and find him there, and haul him back through.

  But when she had completed the passage from the spiritlands into the Deathlands, a harrowing process she did not care to remember in too much detail, no sign of Konrad had she found.

  Space there had been, and plenty of it. The sky, for a start, went on forever. Most skies did, of course, but this one gave off an impression of so deep an endlessness, Nanda felt dwarfed to nothing beneath it. How a fathomless sky could contrive to be both night-dark and searingly bright at the same time was beyond her comprehension, but one did not ask such questions of the Deathlands.

  Then there was the landscape below, which was sharp and jagged and crisp, like the air at the top of a mountain. Or it was oppressive and deep, shimmering glassily like the bottom of the sea. Or suffocating and hot, like the high summers of Kayesir that Nanda had never known, the air drenchingly damp or bone-dry or— Nanda had to close her eyes for a long time, her mind turning itself inside out with the futile effort to comprehend the Deathlands. They defied logic, sense and reason, and to cross those lands safely and return with Konrad, she would have to find a way to accept that.

  She did not know where the stench came from. Besides their muddling contradictory qualities, they were marked primarily by a lack: a lack of anything alive (or dead); lack of verdure; lack of definition; lack of… impact. Once she knew that Konrad was not near, Nanda walked and walked, and she did not grow tired. Neither too hot nor too cold, but she was not comfortable either. For an hour at least she walked on, stride after stride, and went nowhere.