The Fire Seer and Her Quradum Read online

Bel-Sumai held up a small object—it was Gadatas’s vial of nepenthe. “When were you going to tell us about this?”

  Chapter 24

  A shiver ran down Mandir’s spine. A short while ago, that vial had been at the tutor’s house. During the time they’d been outside talking to Bel-Ditana and then to Nindar, somebody had removed that vial from the tutor’s house, placed it in his saddlebags, and tipped the guards to look for it.

  Mandir flashed back to his boyhood, to the dozens of times he’d been blamed by one of his brothers for a crime he hadn’t committed. It was happening again.

  Who had betrayed him this time? Gadatas, perhaps, hoping to deflect suspicion from himself? Or someone who’d eavesdropped on their talk with Gadatas? Ilinos was a known eavesdropper. “Who told you to search our room?”

  “That’s not your business,” said Bel-Sumai.

  “It is my business, because that vial of nepenthe isn’t mine,” said Mandir. “It belongs to Gadatas. Taya and I discovered it among his possessions a little over an hour ago. Someone must have been spying on us, and then they took the vial and planted it here.”

  Taya stepped forward. “He’s telling the truth; I was with him. We don’t carry nepenthe at all, only kimat. That vial belongs to Gadatas, and it was in his quarters a short while ago.”

  Bel-Sumai frowned as he looked from Mandir to Taya and back again. Meanwhile, another guard slipped behind them to block the door.

  “Who told you to look in my saddlebags?” Mandir demanded.

  “I don’t have to tell you that,” said Bel-Sumai. “Mandir isu Sarrum, you killed Prince Tufan.”

  “He absolutely did not,” said Taya. “And if you accuse him falsely, you invite trouble from the Coalition.”

  Bel-Sumai, ignoring her, stepped forward. Mandir held his ground, refusing to back away or make any show of submission. He was not going to be intimidated by this king’s agent who was clearly out to punish Mandir for an old grievance. The other two guards quietly positioned themselves to surround him. Were all the guards in on the conspiracy? Or could it be just Bel-Sumai, who’d convinced the rest of them that Mandir was the killer?

  Bel-Sumai stood so close that Mandir could smell his breath.

  “You threatened the prince’s life on the evening he was killed,” said Bel-Sumai. “And nobody can account for your whereabouts on the evening that the prince’s wine cup was poisoned.”

  “I can account for his whereabouts,” said Taya.

  Bel-Sumai didn’t even glance at her. “On top of that, the poison used to kill Tufan and Yanzu was found among your personal items.”

  Mandir considered his options. The man clearly intended to arrest him, but he didn’t have to submit to that. He could fight and surely win, especially if Taya joined in. But to do that, he might have to kill the guards. Fire was no good for immobilizing people; it was an instrument of death. If he and Taya killed these men and fled home to the Coalition temple, they’d be in a lot of trouble. The king would dispatch more men to collect him, and Mandir would look very guilty, having killed the first set.

  Violence was not the answer, not in this situation. He and Taya needed to find another way out. Persuasion didn’t seem to be working, but he kept trying. “Why would I keep nepenthe among my personal things if I’d killed someone with it? Any sensible man would have thrown it in the river.”

  “Because you’re just that stupid,” said Bel-Sumai.

  “This accusation is ridiculous,” said Taya. “You have no proof of anything. Even if that vial of nepenthe did belong to Mandir, which it doesn’t, we have no idea if it was used to kill Tufan. There’s another vial of nepenthe in Tufan’s own room which the murderer might have used, and for all we know there might be other vials on the property.”

  “You told me in your interviews that the only poison you carried was kimat,” said Bel-Sumai. “And yet we found nepenthe in your things. You lied.”

  “No,” said Mandir. “I told the truth.”

  “I’m taking you into custody,” said Bel-Sumai. “And I ask that for all our sakes, you come peacefully. Otherwise there could be trouble.”

  “There’ll be trouble, all right,” Mandir muttered. Bel-Sumai must have balls of bronze. He knew that Mandir could kill him easily and was relying on Mandir’s desire not to cause strife between the Coalition and the crown. “Where do you propose to take me?”

  “For now, Tufan’s chambers,” said Bel-Sumai. “Tomorrow, the palace, where you will face King Izdubar and be tried for your crimes.”

  If he went to trial at the palace, would the Coalition defend him? They’d punished him once with a Year of Penance; perhaps they thought he was too much trouble to be worth protecting. Even if they did defend him, it might not end well. This conflict could undermine the uneasy peace that the Accords of Let had established between the Coalition and the crown.

  “Mandir is not going to the palace,” said Taya. “This is outrageous. Somebody planted that nepenthe, and I think you know who it was.”

  The guards surrounded Mandir. He decided to buy time. “I’ll come along for now. Taya, you’ve got to find out who planted that vial.”

  Her brow furrowed. “But they’re taking you to the palace tomorrow.”

  “Then you have to find out before then.” If she didn’t find the murderer by morning, she likely never would. Once the guards left for the palace, the household would disperse. His brothers would fly away like windblown seeds, never to be found again. “If you don’t succeed, ride for the Coalition and get help.”

  “I’ll find the murderer,” she said.

  He did not resist as the guards marched him out of the room. Taya was on her own.

  ∞

  Taya paced the floor of the guest room, having no idea what to do. She had until morning to solve this case. But how? Her heart beat rapidly, readying her body for action that she had no physical outlet for. She could confront Gadatas and Ilinos, the two people most likely to have planted the nepenthe. But they’d just deny they’d done it. What would that accomplish?

  There was one man they hadn’t interviewed yet: Shardali. But Mandir didn’t trust Shardali to be honest. Interviewing him might not be the best use of her limited time.

  She needed to think.

  The guards had accused Mandir of killing Tufan but they’d said nothing about Yanzu. Probably they didn’t care about Yanzu’s death; he was only a bastard, not a prince of the realm. But Yanzu’s death was more puzzling than Tufan’s. She and Mandir had said before that while motives for killing Tufan abounded, they were harder to come by for Yanzu. Everyone was treating Yanzu’s death as an afterthought, and yet it had to be important. Perhaps if she spent some time focusing on Yanzu’s murder, she might figure out who’d killed Tufan.

  She ran through a mental list of the suspects. Who had motive to kill Yanzu? Runawir, for one, since he and Yanzu had been rivals in competing for Shala and it was clear that the two had been in a fight the evening of the murder.

  Perhaps talking to Shardali wasn’t such a bad idea. Shardali seemed to spend a lot of time with Runawir and Yanzu and probably understood the dynamic between them. If she asked him about his brothers, she might get more honesty out of him than if she asked him about the night of the murder.

  And if that turned up nothing...well, she’d try something else.

  ∞

  Shardali was in the kitchen, kneeling on the floor and rinsing barley in a bucket. The fire was lit, which suggested that he intended to cook it. The sight of Shardali preparing food surprised Taya. She had not realized he had the skill. “Didn’t think I’d find you here.”

  He glanced at her sidelong. “W-what do you want?”

  “I didn’t know you could cook.”

  “W-when I was y-younger, I cooked all the time.”

  Of course. In this household, the older and stronger boys forced the younger and weaker ones to do most of the work. Shardali had been one of those younger, weaker boys for a while before he’d b
een able to force someone else to take his place.

  “I’m not sharing, if that’s what you’re after,” Shardali added. “You w-want some barley, you m-make your own.”

  What a charming fellow. Taya eyed him. A finger trembled on his left hand as it steadied the bucket. Did Shardali have a nervous condition that caused a tremor as well as his verbal stammer? She supposed his tremor might be the lingering effects of an injury. Injuries were common here.

  “I want to ask you about Runawir and Yanzu,” she said.

  “Why?” said Shardali. “We already know Runawir wasn’t the murderer. It was your partner who killed Tufan.”

  Taya left that alone. Let Shardali believe he and his brothers were safe now that Mandir had been accused of the crime. “I’d like to know why Runawir stabbed Yanzu in the arm.”

  “F-flood and f-fire,” said Shardali. “Who knows? And who cares?”

  “Was it common for the two of them to fight?”

  “Everybody here fights.” Shardali lifted the bucket—his wiry frame was stronger than it looked—and emptied the water into the drain chute, using his hand to hold the barley in place.

  “Even Runawir and Yanzu?” said Taya. “It seemed to me they got on rather well.”

  Shardali laughed as he dumped the rinsed barley into a clay pot.

  “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 lif
ted 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.