The Fire Seer and Her Quradum (23 page)

“Why do you laugh? I’ve seen the three of you sit together, play games together...”

“That doesn’t mean we get along.”

His stammer was less noticeable now. Perhaps she was being successful in setting him at ease. “What would you fight over in a place like this, where all your needs are attended to?”

“Not
all
our needs are attended to,” said Shardali.

“You have food, you have water, you have clothing, and you have shelter. You barely have to work. What more could you want?”

“Lady, you know nothing about a man’s needs.”

She folded her arms. “Enlighten me.”

“You may have noticed there aren’t many women around here,” said Shardali.

That was exactly where she’d hoped he’d go. “Are you saying that Runawir and Yanzu fought over a woman?”

Shardali shrugged.

“You can’t mean
Shala
. I thought she was Tufan’s.”

“She was Tufan’s when he wanted her.” Shardali added water to his pot of barley and hung the pot over the fire to cook. “When he didn’t want her, she was available.”

Taya’s lip curled in disgust. Shardali apparently thought nothing of someone forcing himself on a woman. So warped was the man’s thinking that he didn’t seem to even perceive it as wrong. “Are you saying that every man in this house has slept with Shala?”

Shardali shook his head. “Just Runawir and Y-yanzu.”

“Not you?”

“N-no.”

He did not elaborate, and his returning stammer suggested she was making him nervous again. She had a feeling that the reason he’d never slept with Shala wasn’t that he was a kinder or more decent man than his brothers. Rather, he didn’t have the strength or the status to challenge them for access to her. “Did you see them fight?”

“A little. It was dark.”

Taya perked up. “What did you see? And when was this?” And where did it happen, and was anyone else around? She restrained herself from peppering him with questions.

“We were looking for the dogs. Shala came out of the house, and Yanzu went to talk to her. Runawir f-followed him and stopped him before he got to her. I didn’t hear what they said, but Yanzu shoved Runawir. They started f-fighting, and Runawir stabbed Yanzu.”

“That sounds awful,” she said, hoping to sound more like a nosy girl seeking gossip than an investigator solving a crime. Shala had deliberately omitted this information from her narrative—why? Perhaps Shala feared that if it became generally known that Runawir and Yanzu were fighting over access to her, she would appear to have a motive for killing Yanzu as well as Tufan. “What happened next?”

“Shala went back inside.”

This would help her with her timeline. It sounded like Runawir, Yanzu, and Shardali had all been outside the entire time Shala was out. Thus none of them could have poisoned the wine cup while it sat unattended in the kitchen. Any of them could, however, have poisoned it later, when it was unattended outside Tufan’s door. “Are you saying Shala came outside and then went right back in?”

“She was out for five or ten minutes.”

A short window for the poisoning to happen but not impossibly short. She’d have to do some more thinking. Part of her wished she could follow up with Shala on some of these details and omissions. But the rest of her was glad that the woman had escaped this awful place at her first opportunity.

Chapter 25

Gadatas’s door, ripped off its hinges, stood propped in the doorway. Taya knocked gingerly. When nobody answered, she pulled the wooden door out of its frame and dropped it onto the dirt, where it landed with a
whomp
.

“Gadatas?” She stepped inside.

The man lay on his bed, unmoving.

“Gadatas!”

He jumped and sat upright, his eyes wide. When he saw it was Taya, he relaxed. He was still shaking, but not as badly as earlier in the day, before he’d taken the
nepenthe
. “What do you want?”

“I want to know—” She paused, noticing several red marks on his neck that hadn’t been there this morning, each a small half-circle. They looked like pox marks. Or they could be fingernail marks. “What happened to your neck?”

His hand went to his neck. “Nothing.”

Fingernail marks, she decided. Someone had attacked him, probably when stealing his
nepenthe
just a little while ago. She’d thought the person framing Mandir would be Ilinos, since Mandir had caught him spying on them earlier. But now it was looking like the culprit was somebody bigger than Ilinos, somebody capable of taking on a full-grown man.

If their betrayer hadn’t been Ilinos and it hadn’t been Gadatas himself—the marks suggested that a third party had been involved—who had it been? “Somebody hurt you and took your
nepenthe
. Didn’t they?”

“No.”

His eyes betrayed his fear.

Taya had a thought. She and Mandir had observed the small, contracted pupils of both Tufan and Yanzu in death. Could the contracted pupils be a symptom of
nepenthe
? They’d tried to determine that earlier, when they’d tasted Tufan’s wine and Yanzu’s water and had a tiny dose of the drug. They hadn’t noticed any effect on their pupils then. But Gadatas had taken a larger dose. She needed to get closer. “Let me see your wounds.”

Gadatas clamped a hand over his neck, but she approached anyway. He sat unresisting on the bed as she peeled his fingers off the neck wounds and looked at them. Definitely fingernail marks, with some light bruising around them. It appeared someone had started to strangle him, but hadn’t finished the job. Maybe that person wanted to scare him, which was odd. Why would somebody who’d murdered two people hesitate to kill a third?

Before retreating, she checked his eyes. His pupils
were
tiny and contracted. Good—that didn’t tell her anything she hadn’t already suspected, but it did suggest that she and Mandir were on the right track. “Who did this to you?”

“Nobody,” said Gadatas.

She stifled a bitter laugh. “Did you do it to yourself, then?”

He rubbed his neck. “Perhaps I slept wrong.”

“Gadatas, somebody came here within the last couple of hours, took your
nepenthe
, and planted it in Mandir’s saddlebags. Now Mandir has been accused of killing Tufan.”

Gadatas blinked. “I’m—I’m sorry.” He struggled to find his words, probably because he didn’t want to tell her the truth. “But nobody’s taken anything.”

“If I search that chest again, will I find your
nepenthe
?”

A moment’s hesitation. “I would think so. Unless I moved it.”

“I’m going to look.” She went to the chest that Mandir had searched earlier that day and lifted the lid. It was crammed with clothes, mostly simple cottons and indigos with a few silk garments mixed in. The silk reminded her that this man had once lived a relatively pampered life at the palace before being exiled to the middle of nowhere. Since the chest was too full to easily dig through, she followed Mandir’s example and removed the garments one by one, stacking them on the floor next to the chest.

She found the wine amphora and placed it on the floor next to the clothes. As she neared the bottom of the chest, she found it was covered with tablets. But that shouldn’t surprise her. Gadatas was a learned man, a scribe and a tutor. It was easy to forget that in the face of his addiction. “Your
nepenthe
is not here.”

“It’s not?” Gadatas’s voice had a false brightness to it. “Perhaps I put it somewhere and forgot about it. I’ll help you look.” He rose from the bed, took a step toward her, and nearly fell on his face. He recovered his balance, but she saw the problem: he could barely put weight on his right leg. Apparently the fingernail marks weren’t the only injuries he’d sustained when he’d been attacked.

Taya sighed. Part of her felt sorry for Gadatas, and part of her was exasperated with him. “It’s not anywhere in this house, because somebody took it away. They beat you and threatened you and told you they’d kill you if you said anything. Didn’t they?”

Gadatas was silent.

“You might as well tell me who it was,” said Taya. “I’m going to find out anyway when I scry and ask the Fire Mother.”

“If the Fire Mother will give you the answers, why ask me?” said Gadatas.

“I was giving you the opportunity to do the right thing.” Taya headed outside.

∞

Come in power, Mother Isatis
, Taya intoned in the mother tongue.
Come in greatness.

Fire encircled her in a swirling dust devil of flaming death. As she spoke the words of flattery meant to entice the Fire Mother into answering her call, the flames danced around her. What
was
fire, really? As a child, she had often wondered. It was ephemeral. It had no substance. It was pure magic, the soul of a goddess.

Sweating profusely in her world of fire, Taya asked Isatis for the vision she sought, and Isatis granted it.

In the dancing fire, Taya saw Gadatas’s small house and the path that led to his door. A man appeared, with his back to Taya. He took a furtive glance around him and went to Gadatas’s door. Taya couldn’t see his face, but based on his bulk, she could rule some people out. He wasn’t Shardali, Ilinos, Setsi, or Nindar.

The man pushed his way inside without knocking.

Taya imagined there was a commotion at this point, because Gadatas would not give up his
nepenthe
without protest. But she did not hear it; fire visions were silent. Since she couldn’t see into the house, all she saw as Gadatas was probably being attacked and threatened by this newcomer was the outside of the house and the surrounding area, both quiet and peaceful.

The man reappeared in the door frame, and this time Taya could see his face. It was Bel-Zaidu. Rage choked her.
The guards themselves
had set Mandir up. No wonder they hadn’t listened to her protests. They knew perfectly well the vial hadn’t been Mandir’s.

Why would they set up an innocent man? Had they killed Tufan and Yanzu themselves and needed someone to blame? Or had someone else done it, and rather than take the time to discover who it had been, the guards had accused Mandir to get back at him?

In the mother tongue, she thanked Isatis for the vision and dismissed her fire. Then she headed back to the guest room. Scrying with fire was physically demanding because of the proximity of the fire; she needed water and rest afterward. Plus she had to write the contents of her vision onto a tablet so that the Coalition, which documented all visions, could add it to their archives.

In the guest room, she summoned herself a cupful of water and fetched her writing supplies from the saddlebags, now hopelessly jumbled from being searched by the guards. The disarray was all the more vexing now that she knew the searching had been for show. They knew where the
nepenthe
had been; they’d planted it themselves.

She wrote down the day and approximate time of the vision and began to transcribe what she’d seen, but it was hard to concentrate. Her thoughts kept returning to Bel-Zaidu and the other guards, and why they would have set up Mandir. Was it personal, or could it be that someone actually
wanted
to drum up conflict between the Coalition and the crown?

The Coalition would not allow one of their own
ilittu
to be prosecuted for a crime when one of their own fire seers had seen a vision proving that he had been set up. And that could be the seed of a serious conflict. The Coalition would take the content of her fire vision seriously, but the king might think she was making it up.

She struggled with the tablet work, as always. On their mission in Hrappa, she’d dictated, and Mandir, a much faster writer, had transcribed. Now she’d been at it for half an hour at least, and had only a couple of sentences to show for her work. She pushed the tablet aside. There was no time for this now; she’d have to finish it later.

It would be useful if she could talk to Mandir. Surely he’d want to know that he’d been set up, and by whom. But she didn’t know a way to do that without confronting the guards or at least being overheard by them.

For now, she’d keep investigating. She still didn’t know who the murderer was. And she still didn’t understand why Yanzu had died on the same night as Tufan.

Taya glanced out the window and saw that she had only a few hours of daylight left.

∞

“I didn’t kill anybody,” said Mandir. “And I think you know it.”

The guards had taken him to Tufan’s room, where they intended to watch over him until morning. He’d submitted reluctantly to sitting in the chair they pointed him toward and having his wrists and ankles bound with rope, knowing this was all a sham. Unless they’d managed to sneak him some
kimat
—and he didn’t think they had, given that he and Taya were drinking only summoned water—he could burn through those ropes in an instant. Either the guards didn’t know he could do that, or they were depending upon his good faith and his desire not to start a war between the Coalition and the crown.

Which was absurd. If Mandir was the sort of person who would willfully murder two people, did they think he would care about preventing a war?

They knew as well as he did that he hadn’t killed anyone. Regardless, they seemed determined to go through with this and follow it to its logical conclusion: a trial at the palace followed by Mandir’s likely execution, unless the Coalition took umbrage at this treatment of one of their members and came to his defense. Then the guards—and the king—would face a more serious conflict.

“If you didn’t kill anybody,” said Bel-Sumai, “why were you hiding
nepenthe
in your saddlebag?”

“It was planted, as I’ve told you repeatedly.”

“When we get to the palace, you can tell that to the king,” said Bel-Sumai. “Maybe he’ll listen to your pretty stories.”

Mandir had never met King Izdubar, but he doubted the man would listen to much of anything. He’d be all too happy to have a scapegoat on whom he could blame his son’s death; he wouldn’t much care who it was, as long as it wasn’t somebody important.

Speaking of pretty stories, Neshi’s so-called wisdom had let him down this time. Neshi had said that anger and resentment twisted Mandir’s heart into knots. But here at Tufan’s, how could it be otherwise? There was no justice here, only scheming and backstabbing and gaining advantage at somebody else’s expense. What a load of tripe that story about Telal and Twisting Arrow was. Mandir couldn’t get forgiveness for poisoning a dog ten years ago, and he hadn’t even done it.