Imager's Intrigue: The Third Book of the Imager Portfolio (9 page)

The best thing about the next few days was that nothing horrible occurred. We did receive a note from Mother on Lundi asking us to come to dinner on Vendrei evening, explaining that Nellica could watch both Diestrya and Rheityr. Seliora penned a gracious acceptance, and I sent it by messenger the first thing Mardi morning. The remainder of Mardi continued without untoward events, except that there was another elver death, with the unclothed body left in an alley off Dugalle. Seliora noted that Odelia was avoiding her, as we both had thought was likely, and that neither Betara nor Mama Diestra had learned anything more about where the stronger elveweed was being sold.

A light and chill drizzle on Meredi morning made exercising and running considerably less pleasant, and Diestrya cranky about wearing a small slicker that was a shade too large for her. I dropped them off at NordEste Design without any more protests from my daughter, read the newsheets and learned little, and left the duty coach without event at the station.

Alsoran and I talked over possible changes in several patroller rounds, and then Zellyn came hurrying into the station and found me as I was taking a quick look at the reports from the night before. A single look at his face told me that the comparative uneventfulness that had been so welcome on Lundi and Mardi was about to end.

“Captain, we’ve got a problem over on Geusynor Lane. It’s a little lane across Saenhelyn where a lot of factors live.”

“I know where it is.” I should have. It was less than three long blocks from where my parents lived and where I’d grown up. Usually, we had few problems on the north—the northeast really—side of Saenhelyn. “We’ll take a hack.”

“Yes, sir.” Zellyn had been the first patroller I’d done rounds with, and he still had the weathered and reddish face he’d had then. Both his brush mustache and bushy eyebrows were now totally silver, and his pale brown eyes looked sadder with each passing year—not surprisingly for a patroller as good-hearted as he was.

“Lyonyt, if you’d tell the Lieutenant where I am?”

“Yes, sir.”

Zellyn and I walked out of the station. There were no hacks in sight, and we walked up to South Middle. Once there, I flagged a hack, but looked to Zellyn.

“Geusynor Lane, a block and a half off Saenhelyn.”

“We can go that, sir.”

Once we were inside the coach, I turned. “Tell me what you know.”

“Dhean and I were patrolling Geusynor. We only hit it every third round or so, but you never know, when we heard someone scream. So we ran down to this house. It’s not a chateau, but it’s some house, sir. The carriage gate and the front walk gate are closed, but we can see a woman on the carriage way, and she’s shaking, and there’s a body on the stones. We go in, and the body is a schoolgirl, it looks like, and the woman who screamed is her mother.”

“Who is she?” I knew one or two people on Geusynor, or I had, years back. I supposed most of them still lived there.

“Her name is Rauchelle D’Roulet, and her husband is a factor.”

“Roulet D’Factorius?” I hadn’t heard of him.

“She said he deals in musical instruments, and manufactures pianofortes.”

A factor dealing in musical instruments? I’d never heard of one, but that didn’t mean such a factorage didn’t exist. “What happened to the girl?”

“It looks like one of those elveweed deaths, sir.” Zellyn shook his head. “Pleasant-looking girl, too. She would have been, that is, if her face wasn’t so twisted up. Looked like she was running for help or something when it hit her.”

I was the first out when the hack came to a stop. “How much?” I asked the hacker.

“Be three, sir.”

I handed him four coppers. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

We walked toward the front gate, partly open, and through it I could see Dhean standing on the side porch and the top of a woman’s head, as if she were sitting on a bench or chair with a low back. Zellyn’s description of the house showed his own background, and my response to his description, when I saw the place, betrayed mine. The dwelling was slightly smaller than my parents’, with a mansard roof and slate tiles that had to have been wired in place, given the angle. The walls were mortar over brick, in a provincial style, and the trim was a pale yellow. The carriage house was in the old style, barely large enough for a single coach, with a rear stable.

A white woolen blanket, likely Tilboran prime wool, covered the body lying at the foot of the steps up to the side porch. I bent over and took a corner of the blanket, pulling it back to see the girl’s face and upper body. Her face, contorted into a rictus of pain and shock, was narrow and triangular above thin shoulders. She’d only been wearing a filmy white cotton night-dress. I guessed her age at fifteen or sixteen. I eased the blanket back over her.

Zellyn let me go up the steps to the covered porch first. He followed silently.

The woman who rose from the wicker chair with the faded oilcloth cushion was angular, her face similar to that of the dead girl. The mother was the kind who was so nervous she looked like she was always on the verge of shaking all over. Her hair was tinted a shade of henna-blonde unbecoming to someone with white chalky skin, and the redness of her eyes and the blotchy appearance of her face only accentuated the clash between skin and hair.

“Madame D’Roulet, I’m Patrol Captain Rhennthyl.” I inclined my head.

She gave me a second look, then a third, before she spoke. “Oh…you’re the imager. Chenkyr and Maelyna’s son. I’m glad it’s you.”

That could have meant many things, but I just nodded, then asked, “Can you tell me how this happened?”

“I don’t know. Jessya didn’t feel well at breakfast, and she stayed home from school. I heard her moving around upstairs, and then she ran down the stairs…and the porch door opened. I didn’t hear anything after that. For a moment, I thought she had run onto the porch because she needed air. I started to follow her, but then I smelled something burning, and I ran upstairs. There was this funny pipe lying there, and it had charred the carpet. It’s a very good carpet, a Mantean Forssya. Her whole room smelled like bitter weeds had burned.”

“Have you ever smelled that before?”

“I…I don’t think so.”

I let the lie pass. She’d smelled that odor before, but not often, and probably not strongly. “Then what did you do?”

“I ran downstairs and out onto the porch. That was when I saw her…lying there…”

The patrollers in Third District had found a number of dead elvers outside, some of them nude, and I’d thought that was because their bodies had been stripped and robbed, but it sounded like what ever the weed did to some people led to them feeling hot and needing air.

“Where did she go to school?”

“Jainsyn’s School for Girls.”

I nodded. My sister Khethila called the fashionable school “Jayne’s Sins.”

I spent a quarter-glass going over what Madame D’Roulet had seen and done, but it was clear enough that, while she might have suspected her daughter was doing
something
, she hadn’t any real idea what. It was also clear that she hadn’t tried all that hard to find out because she had no idea where Jessya had gotten the elveweed, except that it was probably from school friends.

As I was getting ready to leave, Madame D’Roulet cleared her throat. “What will you do now?”

“There’s not much more we can do for her. We’ll keep looking for dealers and runners, and we’ll report her death.”

“You won’t have to take…her, will you? I wouldn’t want anyone to see her…like this.”

“No.” There wasn’t any point in that. “You can make what ever arrangements you like.”

“Jessya is such a good girl…” Her eyes drifted past me to the blanket-covered figure on the drive.

I didn’t point out that the past tense was more appropriate to the dead schoolgirl, and that any schoolgirl who had access to elveweed couldn’t have been all that good…unless she was truly naïve and had gone along with bad company, but I had my doubts about that. “Sometimes, it’s the innocent who get hurt the most, Madame. They really don’t understand the dangers, and they think nothing bad will happen to them.”

“Why can’t…you stop…things like this?”

“We try very hard. But the people who sell it make a great deal of golds from doing so, and they go to great lengths to avoid us. Those who buy from them also avoid us, and I don’t think anyone would want the Patrol intruding into every home and every business continually, trying to root out dealers. Most crimes are solved because people either come to the Patrol and tell us, or because they’re willing to answer our questions. Most who buy, sell, or use elveweed don’t do either.”

“There must be something…”

“We keep looking, Madame.” What else could I say to a distracted mother who didn’t seem to fully realize that her daughter was dead? Especially since there was so little we could really do. “Is there someone who can help you?”

“My sister Neldya…she’s inside. She sent a messenger to Roulet.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t seem real.”

“Officer?” came a quiet voice from my left. “If you’re through…Rauchelle might need some tea.”

I turned to see a smallish gray-haired woman standing in the porch doorway. “We’re through. Would you like the patrollers to carry Jessya inside?”

“If you would.”

I glanced to Zellyn, and he and Dhean went down the steps to the drive, wrapped the blanket around the body, and then carried it back onto the porch and inside. The ease with which they handled her suggested she’d weighed even less than I’d thought.

When the two returned, we walked back along Geusynor toward Saenhelyn Road.

“She’d been smoking for a while, sir,” offered Zellyn. “Elvers get thin like that.”

“Her mother didn’t notice?” asked Dhean. “The smell alone…”

“Most factors and their families have never smelled elveweed.” Certainly, I never had until I found myself as a Civic Patrol Liaison. “I’ll have to visit the school.”

“Better you than us, sir,” replied Zellyn.

When we reached Saenhelyn, I caught a hack. After a short ride, one I could have walked, it stopped before an imposing set of wrought iron gates fronting the parklike setting due north of the Plaza D’Este that contained the Jainsyn’s School for Girls.

The single guard in the booth beside the gate looked at me and decided not to say a word. I walked up the stone drive and around the circle that held a fountain. The bronze figure was that of a fully clothed girl holding a book in the right hand and a lamp in the other. Water sprayed upward from the lamp into the fall air. On the far side of the fountain was a building with four square columns.

I walked between them and through the doors. The round-faced woman seated behind a tall desk in the middle of the entry hall revealed a look of horror and disgust—if only for the barest moment—when she caught sight of me.

“This is a private school, Patroller,” she said with a cheerful and patently false smile.

“It’s Patrol Captain and Maitre Rhennthyl, Madame,” I replied with an equally false and cheerful smile. “I’d like a moment with the most senior person here.”

Her eyes took in the imager’s insignia on my visor cap and the four-pointed star on my grays. “If you would wait a moment, Master Rhennthyl, I’ll see if Madame Lagryce is free.”

In moments, she returned. “Madame Lagryce will see you, sir.”

I followed her down the hall to the left to the first door and stepped into a study about twice the size of mine at the station, and a chamber far more elaborately furnished, with a large desk of ebon, its legs carved into scrollwork, and four wooden armchairs arrayed in a semi-circle before the desk. Each chair had a padded seat upholstered in green velvet, the fabric matching the wall hangings. The single bookcase was also ebon.

Madame Lagryce, even plumper than her guardian goose, sat behind the desk. She did not rise. Her black eyes were as cold as those of a water serpent above a warm smile. “I must admit that I’m at a loss as to why a girls’ school with such an impeccable reputation as Jainsyn’s would require a visit from such a noted Civic Patrol personage.”

“It’s really quite simple. You have a student by the name of Jessya D’Roulet, I believe?”

“Why yes, we do. She’s very talented, especially musically, and she has a fine hand in drawing. Might I ask why you are bringing up her name?” Her dark and artificially accented eyebrows rose quizzically.

“I thought you might like to know that she died this morning from smoking too much elveweed.” I smiled politely. “As we both know, the Patrol can require nothing of a private institution unless we have evidence of a crime being committed on the premises. We do not have such evidence, but, given the very sheltered life of Jessya, it is likely that she got the elveweed from a classmate here, and I thought you’d like to know.”

“That is preposterous, absolutely preposterous. Our girls would
never
stoop to such…degradation.”

“One of them already did, Madame.” I smiled again. “I also thought you’d like to know that the drug runners are bringing in a more potent variety of elveweed. Deaths are rising throughout L’Excelsis. I won’t take any more of your time, but I do believe that you should be aware of the possibilities.” I inclined my head. “Thank you, and good day.”

If that didn’t get her looking, there wasn’t much else I could do at the moment.

Once I was outside, I walked back to the Plaza D’Este and caught a hack to the station.

The rest of the day was routine, and I actually managed to accompany Ultrych and Caaryh on their rounds. Even so, by the time the duty coach arrived at the station, I was feeling tired—and I knew I had to meet with Shault before dinner.

Seliora had just landed a solid commission for a High Holder whose name I didn’t recognize—Fhernon—and Diestrya had behaved well. So the ride from NordEste Design to Imagisle was cheerful.

Once I helped Seliora and Diestrya from the coach, I hurried south to the quadrangle and to the dining hall, where Shault was waiting. As I walked into the building my eyes strayed upwards to the section of stone that held the name of imagers who had died in service to the Collegium. I always looked for Claustyn’s name, perhaps because he was the first that I’d known to die that way.