by A. J. Demas
After a moment Aradne said, “Nione’s already been speaking to a lawyer she knows. She thinks he’ll be willing to help.”
Varazda nodded. “Thanks.”
“Pretty sure you know you don’t deserve to be called names either, right?”
“Right,” said Varazda, smiling. “I do know that.”
They made their way up through the grubby streets of the Skalina, sleepy and near-deserted in the cold morning sun. Aradne took Varazda’s arm and gruffly forbade him to tease her about it.
“It’s just because these streets are uneven, and this stupid gown is too long.”
When they reached the ruined apartment building blocking the road, Varazda saw the red-haired girl from the other day, sweeping the front steps of a nearby house.
“Hello!” she called out, waving. “It’s you. You’re back.”
He bowed.
“You made a conquest,” Aradne whispered.
“Shush.”
Since they had stopped, the girl left her broom in the doorway and came down into the street.
“I do not know your name,” said Varazda. “I am Varazda son of Nahaz, and my companion is … ” He hesitated a moment, wondering if he should tell her Aradne’s real name. “Zora the Seer.”
“I’m Simoe,” said the girl. She looked narrowly at Aradne. “Are you sure about her? Don’t get fooled, sir. There’s a lot of people who pretend to be seers but aren’t. And between you and me, she looks fake.”
Varazda and Aradne glanced at one another and both burst out laughing.
“All right,” said Varazda, toning down his accent and his grand manner without dropping them altogether—he didn’t want to disappoint the girl. “What can we do to make her look more real?”
Simoe gasped. “Soukos! She really is fake. Are you—you’re still looking for the killer, aren’t you? Because the soldier, the one everyone thinks did it—he’s your lover. I knew it! And she’s helping you? Well, she’d look more like a real seer if she was dirtier.”
Varazda looked at Aradne, who shrugged. “It’s for a good cause,” she said. “Nione will understand.”
They thanked Simoe and spent some time dragging the hem of Nione’s red gown through the muddy basin of the fountain on the corner and disarranging the purple turban. Then they went on up the stairs to the street above.
It was easy to get in the window of Helenos’s old room, even in broad daylight. It was on the top floor, and the buildings here were so close together on all sides—the dead-end alley behind this block was barely shoulder-width—that all Varazda had to do was find one of the neighbouring buildings with access to the roof, jump across to the roof of Helenos’s building, and swing down to unlatch the shutters on Helenos’s window. Compared to the production involved in finding and getting to Dami’s window a few nights ago, it was child’s play.
As he swung down through the window, he heard Zora the Seer speaking in a loud voice to Old Cosmo next door.
“The spiiiiiirits have a messsssage for youuuuuuu!”
Helenos’s room was in exactly the same state as Varazda had last seen it. This time, he took it apart methodically. He found a purse with two copper coins in it stuffed between the mattress and the bedframe, and a jar which smelled strongly of vinegar under the bed. He studied the empty wine bottles on the floor, and found he’d been right to think none of them had a bird on it. He searched the cupboard, and when he found that the shelves could be removed, he pulled them all out—not because he expected to find anything by doing this, but because he couldn’t think what else to do.
“What do you want?” he heard Ora demanding. “Who in the hells are you?”
Old Cosmo gabbled something unintelligible, and Aradne announced, “I am Zzzzzzora the Sssssseeer! The spiiiiiirits—”
“Oh, no you don’t! We don’t want any witchcraft around here! Get out!”
The shelf at the bottom of the cupboard had stuck for a moment but now popped out suddenly, and something that had been stuck behind it clunked to the cupboard floor. Varazda reached down to snatch it up, and looked toward the still-open window.
“Get out, I tell you!”
“Ow! Take your hands—”
Varazda dove for the door and opened it. Aradne was in much the same situation he had been in two days ago: backing toward the stairs while Old Cosmo waved his arms and capered furiously in his doorway and Ora shouted epithets and brandished her loom-weight.
“You again!” the old woman shrieked, seeing Varazda.
He shot out an arm to catch Aradne as she stepped on the hem of her too-long gown and teetered at the top of the stairs. Old Cosmo dove back into his room, and Varazda knew what was coming next.
“Quick!” he told Aradne. “Down the stairs—turn your back on them!”
“I couldn’t get—a look—in his room,” she panted as they plunged down the stairs.
“Cosmo, no!” Ora shouted in alarm.
Something sailed past Varazda’s shoulder and smashed against the wall, scattering fragments all down the steps. It was a wine bottle.
They ran down the steps, dodging shards of pottery, while above them Ora yelled, “You can’t throw that!”
“Go on,” Varazda told Aradne suddenly, turning back. He realized what he had just seen on the stairs.
“Are you mad?” Aradne yelped.
He sprang back up a couple of steps and snatched one of the shards of wine bottle before plunging back down after her.
“What’s going on up there?” a man’s voice boomed up from below.
Varazda leaned over the railing to look down. A huge man in a dirty tunic stood in the bottom of the stairwell, looking up. Beside him was Simoe, with her baby on her back again. She waved tentatively.
“It’s my friends that I told you about,” she said to the big man.
“I see. Old Cosmo and Ora giving you trouble up there?”
“Er—” The shouting from the top floor seemed to have ceased. “Yes, some trouble, but we’re all right.”
Varazda and Aradne managed to descend the rest of the stairs with dignity, and no loom-weights or other projectiles came flying after them. The big man was standing by the door to the street when they arrived, listening with a look of scepticism while Simoe told him how Zora the Seer was using her powers to uncover the truth about Helenos’s murder.
“Well, I can solve the mystery for you without consulting the spirits,” he said with a grin. “Sorry about Old Cosmo, though. He’s a real piece of work. Lived here since my father’s day, and he always pays his rent—I don’t know where he gets the money, and I don’t much want to—or I’d have had him out a long while ago. Do you know, when your boy Hilaros was lying dead up there, Old Cosmo goes into his room and takes away the bottle of wine he’d been drinking before he died—and drinks the dregs himself. Can you believe that?”
“No!” said Simoe. “Did he get sick?”
Big Tio—this was presumably Big Tio, the landlord—shook his head. “He was fine. Scampering about chanting weird nonsense like usual. So it wasn’t the wine that killed your boy, was it? The spirits tell you that, Madam Seer?”
Aradne straightened her turban and gazed at the ceiling as if in deep thought—or a trance, or something, Varazda wasn’t sure. “I see a jar,” she said vaguely. “With liquid … there is something floating.”
“Oooh,” said Simoe, “what do you think that could be?”
Big Tio was looking startled. “Well, I’ll be. You’re right—it was the pickles.”
“The pickles?” Varazda repeated.
“Demos, the pickle-seller at the Rhina Market. He drinks at the Crow across the street, and I saw him get into a fight—well, more like an argument, I guess—with your Hilaros … huh, that wasn’t his name, was it?”
“Helenos,” Varazda supplied. “And he was no friend of mine.”
Big Tio laughed harshly. “Didn’t seem like he would’ve had many friends, if you ask me. Anyway, it was Demos with the
pickles, mark my words. Well—you don’t have to listen to me, do you? You’ve got the spirits telling you what’s what.” He looked impressed.
“Did you get anything?” Simoe asked, when they were back out in the street. “Old Cosmo didn’t hurt you, did he? Or Ora?”
“We’re all right,” said Aradne, “but by all the gods, it was a near thing. I appreciated the rescue,” she added to Varazda.
“We got a couple of things,” said Varazda. “Aside from the tip about the pickles.”
“You don’t set any store by that, do you?” said Aradne.
“Not really, no, but there was an empty pickle-jar in the room. And I suppose vinegar might be strong enough to mask the smell of the poison. Maybe. But no—I was talking about these.”
He withdrew the two things that he had managed to tuck into his sash in the course of fleeing down the stairs: a folded writing tablet and a piece of pottery.
“That’s what you went back to grab on the stairs,” said Aradne. “A bit of the wine bottle he threw at us?”
The fragment of pottery was stamped with a delicate seal in the shape of a bird.
“It’s a bit of the wine bottle that Old Cosmo took from Helenos’s room—the one, apparently, that Helenos had been drinking from before he died.” At least it was probably that bottle. It was certainly the bottle that Eurydemos had brought to Helenos that morning, and it had certainly been in Old Cosmo’s room.
Aradne seized Varazda’s wrist and brought the fragment to her nose to take a deep sniff. “It just smells like wine.”
“Well, yes. As we would expect, if it’s true that Old Cosmo drank off the remaining wine and felt fine.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. What’s the other thing? A letter! That looks more promising.”
“What does it say?” Simoe asked.
Varazda slipped the piece of wine bottle back into his sash and flipped open the writing tablet that he’d found in Helenos’s cupboard.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “This is more promising. This is proof that someone has been lying to me.”
The letter began: To my once-beloved pupil Helenos, from your sometime master, Eurydemos, greetings.
Chapter 13
“We can’t possibly accept money from your ex-girlfriend!” Philion cried. “Think how that would look! It’s out of the question. You’re staying here.”
“How can you even think of heaping further disgrace on your family at a time like this?” Korinna murmured.
“Sir,” said Damiskos, pointedly addressing himself only to his father, “you have misunderstood the situation. Nione Kukara is a former Maiden of the Sacred Loom, and she has not offered me any money—I’m sure she is as sensible as you are of the impropriety of that. She has secured my release on bail using her authority as a former Maiden.”
“Well!” said Korinna, and then couldn’t seem to follow it up with anything.
Philion subsided into his chair, nonplussed. “Well, all right then.” He rallied a little. “Let’s rub Kontios Diophoros’s nose in it, show him we have friends in high places.”
“That strikes me as distasteful, sir. The man has recently lost his son.”
Philion shrugged. “Well, parade about the city a bit, anyway. Show them you’re free to go where you like. But you don’t need to go stay at this Maiden’s house, do you?”
“It’s her freedwoman’s house. And I do intend to go there, sir. She has invited me. I will probably stay the night, as it is late already.”
“Oh,” said his father, now looking simply confused. “Myrto!” he bawled finally, in the direction of his wife’s dressing room. “Tell Gaia there’ll be one less for dinner!”
“Philion, surely—” Korinna began as Damiskos turned on his heel and left the atrium.
The guard was already gone from the downstairs door when Damiskos exited the house for the first time in more than a week. He was in such a good mood that he couldn’t even feel disappointed at missing the opportunity to flourish Nione’s court document in anyone else’s face.
He walked all the way to Aradne’s house—refreshingly, it was mostly downhill—and made it there by the twelfth hour. The girl at the door recognized him, and was about to go tearing off into the house to announce him, but he put his finger to his lips, and she indulged him and just pointed him in the direction of the dining room, letting him walk quietly in and open the door himself.
Varazda was sitting cross-legged on his couch, the way he sometimes did, and Damiskos thought he looked tired. He was deep in conversation with Nione. It was Aradne—reclining on her own couch, with little gold flower clips in her hair—who was the first one to look up and see Damiskos.
“Pharastes … ” she said in a singsong tone.
Varazda looked up, frowning, and saw Damiskos. He gave an adorable yelp of surprise.
“Dami! How did you— Don’t tell me you climbed out a window?”
“No, of course not. Nione exerted her influence to get me released from house arrest.”
“I would have done it sooner,” said Nione, “but it took me several days to contact the proper authorities and have the document drawn up. I didn’t tell you what I was doing, Varazda, because I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
By this time Varazda had sprung up from his couch, run across the dining room, and was in Damiskos’s arms. Damiskos realized that he was holding onto Varazda so tightly that he might be making it difficult for Varazda to breathe, and he made an effort to relax. Then he noticed that Varazda was holding onto him just as tightly.
“When you have a moment,” said Aradne dryly, “do come have something to eat.”
“At first I couldn’t see my way out of it,” Damiskos said, later that night as they lay facing each other on Varazda’s bed in Aradne’s house. “You have to drop everything when it’s your family, you know? And it wasn’t as if they were asking anything of me that I couldn’t do.
“They never actually asked all that much of me. They didn’t need to—I was ambitious in my own right, and successful in the career I’d chosen. I gave them reason to be proud of me. And of course they took advantage, they were always wanting me to send them money and come to parties where I could introduce them to people, but none of that was much trouble. It wasn’t anything worse than embarrassing.
“Even after I was injured, they could trade on my former rank and my record, and it seemed to make them happy—and, to be fair, my mother certainly realized how hard it was for me to have my career cut short, and was sympathetic—and neither of them ever made me feel like I’d let them down, particularly, I’ll give them that. But I think that might have been mostly because they didn’t quite realize that I wasn’t going to go on and cover myself with glory working for the Quartermaster’s Office.”
He fell silent. Varazda was stroking his hair, something that he didn’t ordinarily do.
“How’s the—how’s everyone at home?” Damiskos asked.
“Worried about you.”
“Oh.”
He hadn’t expected that, and it made him feel guilty. What had he thought—that their lives had been going on as normal with Varazda away in Pheme trying to save him from a murder charge?
“They know about the murder?”
“Yes, I told them. I didn’t explain the business with Ino and your family. Ari would just have lectured me about making sure I’m satisfying you in bed.”
“He’d what?”
“I mean, no, that’s certainly not something he would do.”
“I’ll shake him until his teeth rattle, the little brat.”
Varazda laughed. “You manage to make that sounds utterly unthreatening.”
“It’s important to know how to be unthreatening when you’re, you know—” He gestured at himself. “—and a civilian. I, uh, could stand to get better at that, apparently.”
“It might help you attract fewer murder charges, yes.” Varazda was silent for a moment, still stroking Damiskos’s hair. “Did he—
Helenos—did he say something about me?”
“Mm.” He should have known Varazda would have worked that out.
“That’s what made you knock him down.”
“Yes. But don’t think that makes you my ‘weakness’ or something.”
“Ah. If you say so.”
“I do.”
Varazda rearranged himself on the bed, leaning on one elbow. “You were talking about your family’s situation, and I want to understand that better.”
“Of course.” He sighed. “Well, it’s only in the last few years, since my father started gambling, that things have become as bad as they are. They’re not just asking us for money any more—they’re taking it. They used Timiskos’s name to borrow from people who wouldn’t lend to them.”
“They what?”
“They ran up debts in their son’s name. They spent the money I’d been sending them for Xanthe, too, but that seems pretty minor by comparison. Look, I know none of that’s right. But I also know they’re doing it because they’re desperate—even if they wouldn’t say it or don’t even know it themselves. I got my father to stop betting on the races, but now Timiskos says he’s going to gambling houses instead, and it’s not like in Boukos where all those places are legal—some of them are run by people you really don’t want to owe money to. So if there was something I could do to really help them …
“But I know this was never that. It’s obviously a nightmare—you can tell just from the way Ino’s mother talks about it. They had got her engaged to this ex-archon who’s just been charged with profiteering during a time of emergency—I mean they got her engaged to him before the evidence came out and he was charged, but really, everyone knew for years, even before he was elected, that he was corrupt. And I think—they haven’t said, because of course they wouldn’t—that they knew very well, because they were up to their necks in something with him. They’ve obviously had a financial catastrophe themselves, sold their house in town and moved in with my parents, before they decamp to their country place I guess. It’s not a villa, it’s just a house in the mountains, and Ino hates it up there.
