Child of a Hidden Sea (15 page)

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.

Though day was nearly over, people continued to file past the body. As the sun set they melted into shadows, becoming a river of candles, glimmering down the piazza. Torches stood at the corners of the bier, sending twisting pillars of orange motes up to the waning moon.

“I'm new here; I don't know your customs,” Bram said, in English.

Sophie repeated the phrase.

CHAPTER
12

By dawn, Bram had drawn a phrasebook and a long list of vocabulary out of Sophie and the clerk, and was working on understanding basic grammar. It was an education for Sophie, too—since she had never studied Fleet, she didn't consciously know the rules. She just knew what sounded right. The clerk, fortunately, was happy to spell out the basics for them both.

“This word Kir you've been using,” Bram said at one point.

“It's the honorific. Mister, Miss, or Missus.”

“Gender neutral?” he said.

“Seems that way,” Sophie said, and the clerk nodded.

By then she was reassembling the various flower arrangements in their suite.

Translating for Bram wasn't quite enough to occupy her mind—she kept flashing back to Gale, dead on the floor and the sense memory of cutting off the mezmer's arm. So, as she'd taught him Fleetspeak, she'd also pulled apart the bouquets, taking pictures of each plant, noting the ones she knew and the ones she didn't recognize.

When that was done, she took the video camera out to the balcony, panning slowly across the courtyard, gathering grainy, ill-lit footage of Gale's body, of Parrish and Verena standing vigil over her.

“You could go, too.” She repeated the words before she realized Bram had actually spoken to her. “Sorry, what?”

He had sent the clerk away, and was paging through twenty or so sheets of notes on Fleetspeak, watching her with a concerned expression. “You could go stand by the body too, if you wanted.”

She sat beside him, leaning in. “It'd be wrong to go play sad niece for the crowd. Gale didn't know me.”

“Nobody who knows you would ever believe you were pretending to be sad.”

His words triggered a massive upwelling of feeling: sadness, the urge to cry yet again, and a bit of that mad feeling she'd had aboard
Estrel
. “She was unconscious for most of the time I knew her. It is sad, but it's … selfishness, you know? I'm sad for me. I didn't get to know her.”

“You think that makes you a bad person?”

She put up both hands. “Bramble, this is no time for your amateur therapist routine.”

Before Bram could answer, the Conto swept through the door, leading a small crowd. Sophie recognized the same well-dressed boy and girl who'd been with him at the bier that night. His kids, she assumed. Trailing them were a half dozen of the plainly dressed servants, laden with long, dove gray robes.

“Did you sleep, Kirs?”

She shook her head. “Time to go?”

“It's only been a few hours,” Bram objected. “It's dark.”

“The walk up takes an hour when one is burdened.” The servants cloaked them both, covering Sophie's day-old clothes. The Conto glanced around the room. His eye lingered on the flower arrangements Sophie had disturbed.

You don't miss much, do you?

The cloak was plain, soft, and heavy. The fabric felt expensive, and smelled of sourness and old dust.

“Come, this way.”

They trooped downstairs, arriving to find the soldiers shooing the working- and middle-class mourners from the courtyard. It was a quiet, orderly process that left Verena and Parrish all but alone at Gale's head and feet. The servants had a cloak for Verena, too.

A half dozen men and women, dressed in black frock coats that matched the one worn by Parrish, stood in two rows a few meters from the bier. One, a man of perhaps twenty, handed Parrish a bicorne hat, black in color, with a long, blue-black plume. It matched his black and silver coat. A dress uniform? Parrish put it on, giving it a brisk push to compress his curls, which were so dense they looked like they'd spring it off, given half a chance. The hat was aligned fore-and-aft, not wide, not Napoleon-style. It made him a foot taller.

Parrish took a second to clasp the younger man's arm. He bowed formally to the other five, who responded by stiffening to attention. Then, marching half-time, they encircled the bier.

“They must be from
Nightjar
,” Bram whispered. “Gale's crew.”

Sophie nodded.

The sailors raised the body off the bier and the procession began to move, circling the piazza once before taking a narrow side road up between the tall black buildings. People lined the route, but there were no more offerings. The air was oppressively humid and with the sun only just rising, it was cold.

I could be knitting under this cloak and nobody would know the difference,
Sophie thought. She took the opportunity to fumble out her video camera.

She had long ago taught herself the trick of shooting from the hip, of holding a camera at her side, angling it to catch the faces of passing individuals in crowds and on the street, people who might freeze up if they knew they were being photographed. It was panning for gold: nine out of every ten seconds of footage were useless, but occasionally you caught something brilliant.

She slid her camera hand out of the cloak and aimed at the crowd to her right. Filming made a decent distraction from the building fatigue and the crushing weight of sadness, the woeful and bereft faces, the soft sobs and the reverent whispers that filled the air.

There was plenty to record on the hike to the caldera. They left the city behind soon enough, and with the first glimmers of sun came a symphony of birdsong, blended warbles and whistles, half of them familiar, half not. There was almost no vegetation on these slopes: tufted grasses, a few forbs. It was entirely different from the lush path behind the palazzo, with its amphibians and ferns.

As they climbed up from sea level, the air seemed drier. A baked smell was rising, it seemed, from the soil itself.

Twenty feet away, a lizard stirred on a ledge. In the dim light, it looked like a gecko. A dead beetle on the ground tempted her; she wanted, badly, to just scoop it up, collect it. But Verena trod on it unknowingly before Sophie could give in to the socially inappropriate urge.

A familiar face among the watchers made her breath hitch.