Beneath Ceaseless Skies #161

by Margaret Ronald

  Crighton was already out from behind the listening-wall. “Of all the—What was the purpose of that, Swift?”

  “To be honest, I have no idea.” I picked up one of the napkins and mopped up the spittle, careful not to touch it. “If she wanted someone who faced the Davala before, there are many more respectable candidates.”

  “Respectability was not the question.” Mieni emerged, hands clasped before her as if she were a professor. “The Usurper’s ambassadors have no real reason to visit the Inspectors. So the Davala must have hoped to glean some information from you that only Inspectors would have, and out of her companion la flor’s hearing.”

  “Well, yes,” Crighton said, running a hand through his thinning hair. “That’s obvious.”

  “It is?” I asked.

  Both ignored me, though Mieni smiled very slightly. Crighton continued. “The only problem is that I don’t see what Swift here could have told him, aside from how crap he is at diplomacy.”

  “It is not clear? Perhaps my grasp of your tongue is not as strong as I thought.” Mieni grinned, and I knew she meant “command of language,” but something about her grin made Crighton put a hand to his mouth. “First, she determined that the war goes unforgotten—small news there, to be sure. Second, she determined the limits of our—of Mr. Swift’s knowledge, and therefore that of the Quarter. And last, she knows there is another Davala in the City. Though I think she knew that before.”

  “Then why ask?” I said. Crighton, to my surprise, nodded instead of telling her to go away.

  “Because by waiting for you to ask, she found that you—the Inspectors—had cause to know of the other Davala. And where you have cause, there is often trouble. I wonder...” She walked to the far door, the one opening out onto the gallery and the Yard. “Mr. Swift, I think we had better return to the alley. There is more here than I quite understand—”

  She stopped, staring out the window into the yard, gold eyes widening. Crighton and I followed her gaze to see two Patrol escorting a small, wilted figure. “Mieni—” I began.

  Too late. In true kobold fashion, she discarded the stairs in favor of the window, prying the latter open and jumping down to the ground. “Quite the goblin you have there,” Crighton said.

  “Kobold,” I corrected, and hurried out.

  Mieni was in full force when I reached her, explaining in great detail why the Davala could not have been killed by a kobold and certainly not by poor Zio. Zio drooped listlessly between the two officers, and I realized that she hadn’t expected any other outcome.

  “Stands to reason, ma’am,” the Patrolman said with an inflection that turned “ma’am” into something just short of ‘goblin.’ “She got the bear with the honey jar. Simple as that.”

  “Simple? There is nothing simple—” Mieni said hotly.

  “I’ve been on scene,” I said, raising my voice. “It’s unlikely that Zio could have thrown that pot with such accuracy.” Unlikely, but not impossible—but someone had to speak for her, and they’d listen to me before they listened to Mieni.

  Not that that would stop Mieni. “That is not even the first of the reasons! The prints, the wound, the time of the death—do you no longer even bother to look at the evidence?”

  I turned to Crighton, who had finally made his way down to the yard. “Sir, there has been a mistake. You know we can’t just sweep this onto her.” I gestured to Zio, who flinched reflexively.

  “I don’t know anything of the sort, Swift.” But he stood with arms crossed a moment, gazing not at Zio but at Mieni. “There’s one too many damn bears around this City, and I’d like to find out why it’s not two too many. You think you can get something I can give the council without it blowing up in our faces?”

  I hesitated. “I can get something,” I said finally.

  Crighton snorted, but he was still watching Mieni. “Egg on you, then, if it falls. You, Patrol: Take this—kobold—back where she came from. Put a watch on the whole block.”

  “A watch will not be necessary,” Mieni said quietly. I glanced at her; it was the kind of quiet that often preceded trouble. “With Patrol like this on the street, we koboldim will be staying indoors.”

  Crighton shrugged and turned away, and the Patrol took Zio back the way they’d come. Mieni remained, hands closed tight into fists. I hesitated, then knelt next to her. “It might be best if we took a moment away,” I said quietly. “Patrol will be at the scene for a good while longer; we’ll go back to investigate after.”

  “After,” Mieni agreed, or simply repeated.

  There are a few tea-houses that cater to the Quarter, though there are more pubs and smoke-houses. None of the latter establishments look kindly on our city’s refugee population, and so I brought Mieni to the Yellow Bell, an tea-house of such mediocrity that no one could be bothered to care what the clientele was like.

  To my surprise, Mieni headed straight to the back, claiming a table and a stool so that she could sit close to my height. “Two of the kitchen staff here are koboldim,” she said at my raised eyebrow. “If they know I am here, we shall have better food.”

  “I was thinking just a cup of tea.” I nodded to a server. “Zio looked—well, she looked like she’d lost hope.”

  “She may be right to do so—but truly, if she only would speak to me!” She glared at the table while I ordered a pot of tea and biscuits. At last she shook her head. “She is trying to cover for her family, which is foolish because it is obvious what they have been doing.”

  “It is?”

  Mieni’s white brows furrowed as she looked up at me, then with a laugh she straightened up. “Ah, Mr. Swift, sometimes I think you are a flatterer. Why else would you entice me to speak of what must be clear to you? I know you have a brain, if only,” and here she leaned across the table and tapped my forehead with one clawed finger, “if only you would let yourself use it, Mr. Swift!”

  “Thank you,” I said dryly. The server placed a pot of tea and two cups on our table and left without saying more. “But in truth, all I saw was an impossibility: one dead Davala, no footprints, no reason for him even to be in the City.”

  “The last should be obvious, I think, from Zio’s reticence if nothing else.” The server brought a pair of honey-pots to the table, and Mieni gestured to them. “She and her family were smuggling honey to the Davala.”

  “But—the quality—”

  “Is irrelevant, Mr. Swift. Even the Davala occasionally seek novelty, and as a connoisseur of wines might sample a fine vinegar to taste what had once been, so a Davala might sample City honey.” She dragged a cup over to her and ran a claw around the edge. “But there is more strangeness here, and I cannot see a way to it. Perhaps what the Davala paid was more than money; perhaps there is espionage here...” She shook her head.

  “It leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” I said at last. “It’s too close to the joke Fries made about bears and honey.”

  “He also thought Zio guilty, and I believe—I know she is not. Pour, please? The cooks may be koboldim, but the teapot is not, and my hands are not proportioned to it.” I did so, and she took the cup between her hands. “But even all this does not explain the death. If I knew why, I would know who... perhaps if I knew the smuggling routes, as I did back in Poma-mél...” She moodily stared into her cup, lapsing into faint koboldim mutters.

  I gazed at her a moment. Mieni, and all her kin and kith, were not just refugees but exiles, cast out for siding against the Usurper. We humans may not all have returned to the City, but those who did return had a home to return to. I pushed the little jars across the table. “Here. Have some of the Poma-mél honey. I’m paying, so don’t worry about the extra cost.” I smiled weakly. “I’d always assumed it was a surcharge for the special flowers.”

  Mieni’s spoon clattered against her teacup, and I glanced up from my own tea to see her staring at the untouched jar. “Mar de sang! I am a fool three times over, Mr. Swift, a fool. What is it the Davala told you? Mistaking them
for rainclouds?”

  “I—yes,” I said. “It’s an expression, I think—”

  “An entirely accurate one! Come!”

  * * *

  Mieni’s concept of an explanation is lacking in several regards, and I’m afraid I was no less in the dark as I stood in front of Zio’s home for a good forty minutes, waiting for an answer to my sparrow.

  The street itself was quiet; the koboldim were staying inside, and the other inhabitants were scared off enough by the presence of a City Inspector. I shivered, wishing I’d had any of that tea.

  The Davala move quietly, but they are more suited to wilderness than an urban setting. I saw Isto well before I heard her, a great shadow in the fading light, gliding soundlessly between the buildings. If I had been doing this properly, I would have stepped out into the street and announced both her name and mine; instead, I waited until she had reached Zio’s front door. “Isto of the Three Claws,” I said, and gave her the salute of soldier to opposing soldier.

  “Arthur Swift,” she rumbled. “I tell you true, I did not expect this.” She opened one hand to reveal my brass sparrow balanced on her palm. “I understood that calling challenge within the City was forbidden.”

  “It is,” I said. The back of my shirt was damp with sweat, despite the cold. “I could think of no other way to bring you here alone.”

  The slow change of expression was very much like the shifting of snow on a steep hillside. “A false challenge is a stain on both our honors, Arthur Swift.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” I said, hoping that Isto didn’t decide to treat it as a real challenge regardless. I retreated a few steps, not turning my back on her but leading her down the walk that separated Zio’s home from the next, toward the yard behind her home. “You know there is another Ursa Davala within the city.”

  “Of course,” she said, a bright flicker of amusement in her voice. “Honey is honey, mead is mead. Though that you asked told me that you had not caught him—perhaps that will be enough for me to convince him such trips to your City are too risky even for us—”

  She paused as we reached the corner, and her snout lifted. Her lips drew back from teeth hard and yellowed. “I smell my family’s blood, Arthur Swift,” she growled. “I will break your sad human neck.”

  “Indeed,” a piping voice answered before I could protest. I turned to see Mieni standing in the middle of the yard, an open glass jar in her hand. Around her stood hives—or the remnants of them. The boxes had been smashed, combs and honey strewn about, and even though Zio’s family had worked hard to salvage them, the damage was clear. A hum of spared bees now came from smaller hives in the corner, but most had been crushed beyond repair, as if by a giant’s hand.

  “Indeed you could break Mr. Swift’s neck,” Mieni went on with more composure than I thought strictly necessary. “But you would not do so without giving your name in challenge, or without warning.”

  Isto raised her snout. “No. I would not.”

  “Not all are as honorable.” She held out the jar—the same into which she’d scraped honey and blood that morning, the latter of which had clearly caught Isto’s nose. “There were no footprints around your brother’s body, Isto of the Three Claws. He was alone, perhaps he saw a shadow, he looked up—” She tapped her head as if to imitate the blow. “You know what this means as well as I.”

  I didn’t know myself, but there are times when it’s better not to interrupt.

  Mieni made her way across the broken hives, the drone from the rescued ones seeming to hush as she did so. “He was killed by that which he sought to smuggle out, by the same honey.”

  Isto’s eyes narrowed.

  Mieni went on as she reached Isto, standing nearly toe-to-toe with her. “It was a blow he did not expect, since he was a trusting soul, and he had not yet gotten the honey he’d come for.” She held up the jar again. “This is your answer.”

  “Honey?” I said before I could think. “The murder weapon was a honey-crock, but—”

  “Honey from Zio’s hives,” Mieni said, never taking her eyes from Isto. “Honey made in the City. Honey that made the mead you would have tasted and approved—had someone not loathed what it was and stolen it, smashed where it came from, and then left to prevent any taste of it leaving this City of men.”

  Isto was still a moment, then dug one claw into the jar, coming away with red-smeared honey. She put it to her mouth, and if I had thought she was still before, this was the stillness of a stormcloud before the thunderclap.

  I risked sidling close to Mieni. “I don’t understand.”

  “Taste for yourself. Or, if you are squeamish, taste from the hives themselves.”

  Squeamish or no, there are limits. I cleared away a few of the dead bees from a shattered hive and got a drop on the edge of my pocketknife. I put it to my mouth, tasting raw sweetness—and more than that. The faint tingle of Poma-mél’s magic shivered through me, the echo of a land far from here, the note that could only translate itself in my head to a sweet wordless singing. And yet it was manifestly not Poma-mél honey but City honey, with the harsh tang that I’d known from boyhood. “This—the honey must be mixed—”

  Mieni shook her head. “Unmixed. Or do you distrust your own abilities, Mr. Swift? Has someone mixed it between your hand and mouth?”

  I stared at the gold smear on my knife. “The bees can’t be going so far as Poma-mél.”

  Isto raised her head, snout questing at the air. “ No. They cannot.” She turned to face me, and I knew with a chill certainty that my false challenge would go unmet. There was something worse here now.

  “Honey on its own, that is nothing special, is it?” Mieni’s gaze flicked briefly to me, then back to Isto. “But honey of the City, honey that has changed as we exiles have changed the City, honey that seems to echo something once thought exclusive to the green land—well, that is troubling. Particularly when a Davala plans to give mead of that honey to his clan. That is cause for Zio to remain silent. And that is cause, by some reckonings, for worse actions still.”

  The bees’ hum suddenly intensified, with a new note on top of it: a different hum, of larger wings. I looked up in time to see the angie drop to the ground before Isto. “Running off again?” he demanded of her. “You can’t just drop everything when challenged—”

  Wings, I realized. The angie had them—all angies did. The lack of footprints around the body was suddenly clear.

  “Bon flor, attend,” Mieni said softly. “Have you tried the honey here in our city? I think you would find it—interesting.”

  The angie glanced at her, fine features contorting in a frown—and then, as he saw the bloody honey, froze. It was not an admission of guilt, but it did not have to be.

  The Davala move quickly when they want to. I did not see Isto move, but I heard the crack and thump, and I saw the angie hit the far wall, carapace shattered, one delicate wing torn in half. He blinked at the sky, stunned, then gave a slow, bubbling gasp as the pain hit. I knew that expression. I had worn it or one like it once. “Isto,” I began.

  “I am not sure you are authorized to do anything, Mr. Swift,” Mieni said calmly. “Envoys are untouchable, after all. Such a carefully sought status, I am sure, not thinking it would therefore apply to them both.”

  “I can’t just stand by!”

  “Nor will I make you.” Isto moved to stand over the angie, then pulled him upright by one arm. The angie whimpered. “I believe I have recalled an urgent reason to return to Poma-mél,” Isto went on. “And I will have some news for my clan when I do.” I began to speak, but Isto held out her free hand. “Because we were on even footing, I am following the rules of your City, Arthur Swift. But do not presume more.”

  The angie gave another whimper as she slung him across her back and walked off. I hesitated, one hand going to the whistle that would summon Patrol. But after a moment, I let my hand drop. “How did you know?” I said finally.

  Mieni shivered, the first sign of c
old I’d seen in her that day. “The bee, Mr. Swift. A lone bee does not go out in search of honey, not in this cold. Its presence spoke that the hives had been damaged, at the very least. And Zio would admit normally to smuggling, but the honey itself worried her—that was why she would not speak even to me. We are perhaps a little sensitive to traces of our home, we koboldim.” She shrugged, a single rise and fall of narrow shoulders. “Only la flor would find it so distressing that blossoms outside their jurisdiction could begin to carry the echo of Poma-mél.”

  “Enough to kill over it?”

  “More than enough.” She glanced sidelong at me. “You still do not quite understand how tied those of Poma-mél are to their natures, Mr. Swift. The Davala are bears in certain ways, the flor—” She shrugged. “The flor navigate by their own knowledge, by the flowers of the green land. You saw how angry he was at having to search rather than knowing where he was right away; with the City flowers changing, and the flowers of home a memory—perhaps he did not even realize we were in the same place as his rampage. They, too, are blossoms, and jealous ones.”

  “Deadly ones.” I looked at the gold on my blade, thought of how the City’s long relation with Poma-mél had changed so precipitously in recent years, thought of the strange taste still on my tongue. “Do you really think the City flowers are changing so much?”

  “Perhaps. One never can tell with bees.” She looked into the little pot of bloody honey, then ran a finger around the inside and sucked on it. “You and I never did have that tea, Mr. Swift. Come; I will tell the koboldim who work at the Bell to make you something comforting and warm. And, I think, more savory than sweet.”

  I turned my knife again, then wiped the honey from it and licked it from my finger. The angie had been right in a way - this was a city of men, and not meant to hold as much magic as must come from Poma-mel. But, I thought, tasting the singing sweetness cut with murk of the City, that didn’t mean the changes were all bad. Mieni nodded as I put away my knife, and we walked on to the Bell.