Child of a Hidden Sea

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “I doubt they’ll do any evidence-gathering as you’d consider it,” Parrish said. “They’ll check the mezmers for brands, but we witnessed Gale’s death. There’s no question as to how she died.”

  “What about corroborating evidence?” Sophie said.

  He stared at her, or through her. “Our word is enough.”

  A crew of workers appeared, dressed in dove gray and wielding mops and buckets. They attacked the clutter and the blood with equal fervor, setting the room to rights. They gathered the scattered contents of Sophie’s duffel, separating out the bloodied things before bringing everything else inside from the hallway.

  Sophie followed her stuff as they carried it into a rose-pink bedroom.

  “You don’t travel light, do you?” Verena was right behind her.

  She bit back an retort: Verena probably needed a distraction just as badly as she did. “It’s just equipment.”

  Verena turned over one of the flippers. “You’re a diver?”

  “Videographer.”

  “What is all this?”

  “Wet suit. Dry suit. Mask. Rebreather. Dive computer. Tanks, with about five hours of air in them. My camera—”

  “There’s a camera around your wrist.”

  “Video, yeah. This bigger rig is my good one. Digital SLR, you know? For stills?” She opened the case, revealing the camera body, five lenses, and a waterproof housing. The tripod was strapped beneath, next to a plastic jug of alcohol—for DNA samples—and a small crate of corkable plastic tubes.

  “And a first aid kit.”

  “Diving’s got its hazards. The rest is clothes: thermal socks, undies, swimsuits, jeans, shorts, sweats, skirt. Sandals, boots, running shoes. Soap.”

  Verena stirred the bits and pieces, peering into one of the boxes. Sophie hadn’t unwrapped the solar battery charger; it was still nestled in its original box, lovingly crated among pillows of plastic and small Styrofoam peas. Finally, she said: “Lotta baggage.”

  “Cheap shot,” Sophie returned.

  To her surprise, her half sister gave her a weak grin.

  “Count yourself lucky.” Bram had trailed after them. “If she’d had another day there’d be an entire film crew packed in here.”

  “Look who’s talking!” Sophie bent, pulling out a heavy surveyor’s transit. “I didn’t bring this.”

  “It wouldn’t fit in my backpack,” Bram said.

  He had that scope, too. A thread of happiness wound its way through all the other emotion. He brought equipment. Maybe he hadn’t entirely believed her, but he’d given her the benefit of the doubt.

  Verena looked over the kit again, her expression sober. “I don’t want to rain on your parade, guys, but the chances of Annela letting you leave here with footage of Stormwrack—she’ll confiscate it all.”

  “Guess we’d better stay out of Annela’s way, then,” Sophie said. Bram grinned.

  The volume of the sobs coming from the other room rose, drawing them back to the parlor.

  Five gray-robed soldiers had brought in a long sheet of the glassy stone that seemed so ubiquitous here, an ornate panel swirled with bright colors and perforated with handholds.

  Parrish knelt, sliding his arms under Gale. His handsome face was absolutely still as he lifted the body onto the bier, arranging her arms at her sides. One of the mourners handed him a small pillow. He placed it under her head.

  He looks devastated.

  Sophie had started to cry again. Bram took her hand, squeezing it hard.

  “What of her throat, Kir?” asked a soldier. Gale’s neck was marked with scratchy red weals. The knife wound in her chest had bled, too.

  “We—” There were twenty or so people in the room now, and they all waited in silence for Parrish to swallow his emotions and answer, waited so long Sophie began to think they might sit there forever, waiting for the body to rot.

  “The Conto gave her a shawl at his elevation. It’s probably…” He gestured at a wardrobe.

  Verena opened doors, digging around, coming out with a coffee-colored sheet of silk covered in small pearls.

  “That’s not it,” Parrish said, but he took it anyway, draping it over her neck and bloody upper body, letting the edges hang. Verena turned back to the wardrobe and produced a frock coat, black in color with silver trim, and offered it to him.

  Parrish put it on, moving with the care of someone who was trying to hide the fact that he was drunk.

  By now, some of the courtiers had sprinkled a path of flower petals and small beads on the floor, making a path to the door and down the front staircase.

  The gabble of murmuring voices, outside the balcony, had been rising. They were obviously going to take the body out the front way and go in a procession to … the palazzo?

  “There really won’t there be any police?” Sophie asked again.

  Parrish had taken a place at the head of the glass panel again. “Pardon?”

  “Police. Forensic investigation. Isn’t anyone going to try to figure out who did this?”

  “Gale’s Verdanii and a Fleet Courier. The Conto will look into whether any Erinthians had a hand in this. If it’s an international matter, the investigation will extend beyond his…” Parrish foundered.

  “Jurisdiction?” offered Bram.

  “Yes, I think that’s the Anglay word.”

  Verena said: “It falls to Gale’s heir to sort out the matter of her death and report the truth to Fleet and family.”

  Sophie was shocked: “They expect you to do it? You just lost her. You’re in mourning.”

  “Ah, you’ve forgotten,” Verena said, with a glimmer of bitterness. “Gale didn’t get a chance to disinherit you. This disaster is your problem, Sophie Hansa, and it’ll serve you right if I go back to the outlands and let you choke on it.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Verena’s words hung in the air like a bad smell on Sophie’s shoe, ugly and inescapable.

  She opened her mouth to answer—I can’t investigate a murder, she was going to say, or We’ll get the stupid estate fixed, so just chill. Maybe she would have just pointed out that if their mother could make Gale her proxy, then she could make Verena hers.

  But the tiniest wince from Bram brought her back to the here and now: the body on the bier of heavy volcanic glass. “What does Gale need from us now?”

  “She’s ready to go to the palazzo,” Parrish said, face as expressionless as if it were carved. “Bring her pouch.”

  She and Verena reached for it simultaneously.

  Sophie drew back. “You do it.”

  Her sister shoved it across the table. “Put it on.”

  The mourners arranged themselves around the obsidian bier, Sophie and Verena behind Gale and the pallbearers, Bram a step behind. Parrish buttoned up the frock coat Verena had given him. Its buttons appeared to be made of curled seed cones. His eyes met hers; they gave back nothing but blackness.

  He fitted a gloved hand to a lower corner of the bier, raising Gale to his shoulder, in perfect sync with the five soldiers. The fragile mourners in their gray robes led the way out the front door.

  It was slow going on a hot evening. The crowd had swelled, but it parted as they emerged. People were sobbing, and Sophie heard whispers spreading: Justo! And En Haggio! Instead of asking for a translation, she kept her head down and her lips zipped as the group inched through the piazza.

  Her thoughts were anything but slow. Investigating a murder. That’s probably not impossible, as long as I can get Verena to pitch in. Parrish, too. Gotta sort out this inheritance thing … will there even be a will? Do they do wills here or is it just a done deal? At least if it takes a while, I’ll get a good look around Stormwrack. Oh, I’m awful, what an opportunist, stop it, Sophie, she’s dead, murdered, and this isn’t a research expedition anymore.

  Parrish’s head came up once, his gaze seeking the harbor. Gale’s cutter had replaced its sails with loose black drapes. They flapped uselessly from its yards, giving the ship
a forlorn, mournful appearance.

  The crew knows, then. But how? She added the question to the list of things she’d ask when they could all speak again.

  They walked directly up to the palazzo, no discreet back path this time. The solemn parade seemed to go on forever. They passed a bird that resembled a lark but sounded more like a shrike, passed a strange assembly of frail, lovely, oddly similar-looking young women dressed in umber togas and leaning on walkers. Old people in plain smocks approached the bier and laid various objects on Gale’s body: flowers, small bound sheaves of wheat, and little wooden tools.

  A flyaway bit of one sheaf blew away and stuck to Sophie’s shirt. She tucked it into her pocket, unable to repress the urge to keep it as a sample.

  Verena said they won’t let me bring anything back.

  We’ll see about that.

  She thought briefly of Gale’s pocket watch; she’d found it behind a Dumpster in the alley where she’d been attacked. Even now it was sitting in their parents’ house, next to their desktop computer.

  Inside the courtyard, Parrish and the others approached a set of posts that had been erected, like tall table legs, in front of an ornate fountain. A man in a gold-colored topcoat awaited them.

  She had an inappropriate humor moment: He looks like that actor from Robin Hood. No, damn, I’m going to laugh.

  The man—the Conto, she assumed—was holding a wreath woven of leaves and small citrusy fruits, red in hue and about as big as ping-pong balls. As Parrish and the others lowered the bier onto the six posts, he laid the wreath on Gale’s chest, taking the time to whisper something in her ear and then leave a kiss on her lips. The crowd loved it. A scandalized murmur spilled out from the plaza.

  A finely dressed woman paid court to Gale next, miming an odd gesture—scratching at her eyes? She was followed by a teenaged boy and then a girl who merely air-kissed Gale’s cheek.

  Finally, the gold-robed man gestured to Verena and retreated into the palazzo.

  “Come on,” Verena whispered. They left Parrish at the head of the bier, following the man and his entourage indoors, into a slightly overheated parlor that overlooked the plaza and the sea. The crowd was filing past the body.

  The Conto said something in the Italian dialect, as Sophie had dubbed it, breaking the silence.

  “My sister speaks only Fleet,” Verena said.

  Sophie glanced at Bram.

  “Translate what you can,” he murmured.

  “I said the day has finally come,” said the Conto. “After a lifetime of courting death, Sturma has been murdered. Verena, my deepest sympathies. My guard is at your disposal.”

  “Finally, someone’s talking cops!” she said to Bram.

  A table had been laid out with an array of white foods—little rounds of bread; anemic, roasted potatoes; slices of a pale meat.

  “Mourning fare—very bland stuff, I’m afraid.” The Conto was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with huge, ring-encrusted hands. It was just him, now—the woman and kids and all the courtiers had left. “I can have some spices smuggled in.”

  “Not hungry.” Verena leaned against the thick red curtains of the window overlooking the courtyard, staring at the body, or perhaps at the figure of Parrish, standing immobile beside Gale.

  The Conto turned his gaze on Sophie. “You are the wayward child who came to her aid at her sister’s, aren’t you?”

  His speech was so stiff she found herself wanting to answer formally, too. Instead she said: “I smashed a guy in the face with a plastic box. Gale did the real fighting. I’m no warrior.” Grief or perhaps regret, surged within her. “If I was, maybe she’d still be alive.”

  “I wouldn’t have seen her again, if she’d met her fate that day,” he said. “Nor been able to honor her wishes now. You’ve done us all a kindness.”

  “You spoke to Gale after she got stabbed? Did she tell you anything about who attacked her?”

  “We talked of the past, of our families. She asked if anyone here might be paid to claim an adult daughter—as illegitimate, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  “She thought to establish a place for you, here on Erinth.”

  “A place—fake parentage, a paper trail?”

  He nodded.

  Sophie couldn’t help but smile: Gale had liked her at least a little, then. “You didn’t set that up, did you?”

  He shook his head. “No time.”

  “Could you still?”

  “No,” Verena said, without moving. “You hold Gale’s pouch now. Besides, if the Conto buys you a fake ID, people will assume you’re his illegitimate daughter. It would cause problems.”

  “And we have plenty of those already,” she said. “Didn’t you say we have to go on a big hunt for the killers?”

  Verena sighed, addressing the Conto. “It couldn’t have anything to do with local politics, could it, Kir? You and Gale were allies. Your elder brother’s oldest son … she mentioned he’d been trouble.”

  “Terzo has been grasping for my throne.” The Conto’s lip curled ever so slightly. “But if your aunt believed she’d been set on by my enemies, she would have told me immediately.”

  Verena slumped a little. “That’s true. She wouldn’t leave you hanging.”

  “Still, Terzo does have a wide circle of questionable friends; he’s close with a Sylvanner boy.”

  “Sylvanna,” Sophie said to Bram. “That’s the country that does a lot of magical research and development. The Stele Islanders were suspicious of them too.”

  “Sylvanners wouldn’t use mezmers. It’s not subtle,” Verena said.

  “It’s a good excuse for me to examine my nephew’s friendships,” the Conto said, “But I suspect your answers will lie elsewhere, girls.”

  “Where elsewhere?” Sophie said. “I gather Gale had a lot of enemies.”

  “Did she ever,” Verena said.

  “I’ll have my ports minister copy you a list of visiting ships here in Cindria.”

  He and Verena fell silent—brooding, maybe, or just letting the grief sink in. Sophie took the opportunity to quickly fill in Bram, who was having a good look at the obsidian panes in one of the smaller windows, at the construction of the casement itself. A few stars were visible in the darkening sky … he had an eye on those too, as he listened.

  “You got international politics flying thick and fast here,” he said, when Sophie was done. “But the murder must be tied to the earlier attack on Gale, right?”

  She nodded. “Conto, the men who stabbed Gale, before, they said something about Tempranza—Temperance.”

  “That was probably just an oath,” Conto said.

  “Temperance is the flagship of the Fleet,” Verena explained. “People say things: By the fury of Temperance, Temperance’s teeth, in the name of Temperance.”

  “Damn, I thought I was onto something. So now what?”

  “Gale’s wish was to pour her bones into the Erinthian fire. We’ll process up to the caldera at dawn tomorrow.”

  “So soon?” Hours spent watching crime dramas on TV kicked in—she found herself wanting to demand that they do an autopsy. But what would they find? They probably didn’t have a crime lab here, or anything like it. And Gale was killed in front of five witnesses. As Parrish said, there was no doubt as to how she’d died.

  “Yes. Ceremonies must be complete before the Allmother of Verdanii can send someone for the body.”

  The Conto’s words seemed to hit Verena hard; she paled, and turned back to the window.

  “I must return to my family,” the Conto said. “You’ll stay here, of course, as my guests. I’ll put a clerk and two guardsmen in your service.”

  “Thank you,” Sophie said. “Um, if I should bow or salute, if there’s some formal thing I should do here, I don’t know it.”

  “No need, Kir.” He nodded and vanished.

  “They’re just chucking her in the volcano at dawn?” Bram said.

  “If the Verdanii show up they�
��ll haul her home and do full burial with honors, for weeks,” Verena said, switching to English. She’d dried her eyes and her voice was steady. “Gale hated that kind of fuss. Besides, she always said she was was more at home with fire than with earth.”

  She looks so forlorn, Sophie thought.

  Aranging a few of the bready things on a plate with a slice of the meat and a fruit that looked like peeled lychee, she took it to the window. “You should have something.”

  “Stay away,” Verena said, voice sharp like their mother’s had been, all those days ago when Sophie had first approached her.

  Fine, I tried. She ate the fruit herself—it was lychee—and sat beside Bram.

  “Fleetspeak,” he said. His pronunciation was better this time. Then, in English: “My name is Bram Hansa—I am learning your language.”

  Sophie translated the phrase, and he repeated it a couple times. Her brother’s memory was remarkable—not truly eidetic, but he had constructed himself an array of weird mental shortcuts: He could remember most anything. If Bram knew one thing, it was how to learn.

  “Please excuse me; I’m not familiar with your customs.”

  She taught him the phrase.

  “Could you write it out?”

  “I don’t know that I can spell everything right. You wouldn’t believe it—what they did to me was only verbal—”

  “Right. Speaking and writing aren’t quite the same. Wow—that is so interesting.”

  “I can sound out words, and once I do I recognize them, it’s fine, but—”

  “Get the clerk to write whatever you need,” Verena said.

  “Won’t we need him to write letters? Notices to people, saying Gale’s died?”

  “Gossip will already be out,” she said. “There was a spell on her. It broke when she died—it must have.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Her ship’s flying black rags.” She beckoned the clerk. “Please write down everything Kir Hansa says to her brother.”

  “Of course, Kir.”

  Verena gestured at the darkening courtyard. “I’m going out to stand with him.”

  “Him?” Bram said, after she’d gone.

  “Parrish, I guess.” Sophie looked downhill, toward the bier.