Tiamat's Kittens: Bending To Break
Oct. 9th, 2006 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithne[Er, Jalena used to be a green, I think but hey, details. :)]
5/16/978
Palil:
The next morning, we checked in with Chaim, who said that though he didn't feel ill, there were a few of the white dragons with him who were. He said he'd bring them through in batches to get them inoculated.
On the heels of that conversation, Coulter messaged in. "Majors. I've just received word that Gada is dead, having committed suicide in the wake of her bondmate Jalena's death. I don't believe it--well, I don't believe that she committed suicide, I believe that she's dead."
I was still feeling a bit wobbly from being ill, and the news hit me like a boot to the chest. I reached out to Sondirra with my mind. I liked her, I said. Didn't trust her, but I liked her.
When do we trust anyone? I liked her, too. Comfort from my bondmate. She didn't kill herself, she said, confidence in her voice. She wasn't the type. She wasn't selfish enough to let her work go undone.
I took a breath. "I'm sorry to hear she's dead," I said.
"So are the rest of us. I need you to go to Seratov, see who's best to take over for her, and get whatever pair are best in. Gada has several children, all daughters. Jalena didn't have any recorded children. The last thing we need right now is for her territory to destabilize. Get in there, stabilize things, and see if Jezik had anything to do with her death."
"Will do," I said. "Palil out." I dropped my head into my hands briefly, and then said, "All right. We're meeting the frost giants with the boys today. Let's get them in here and inoculated, and then take them to meet the Peacekeeper."
That we did, and the Peacekeeper was waiting for us when we arrived at the portal north of Pskov. Zadok was carrying the body of his bondmate, which he refused to put down or let anyone else carry. His handsome face was deeply carved in lines of pain. Completely irrelevantly, I thought to myself, it's too bad he's a Gemini, I bet he'd make pretty children.
I blushed, and the strange feeling in my midsection surged a little bit. I needed to have that conversation with Gannon, and soon. Now, however, was not the time. "How is Isla doing?" I asked the Peacekeeper.
"Devastated," she said. "Happy that Nasser and Folke are all right, but finding one son does not make up for losing another--especially her acknowledged heir. Nasser has been in Reuben's hands too long to be named heir now, and Isla looks like she's aged a century in the last few days. She's pulling back her forced to the cities and towns, leaving the farmland unprotected, and sending part of her army towards her border with Reuben."
"Poor thing," Sondirra said softly. "Peacekeeper, what happened to the person who held Tiamat's Staff before? Was he killed, or did he die of old age?"
"It took four legions of us to defeat him," she said seriously. "We buried it with him in a place that we hoped would never be found. There is another staff out there, but it's never been found. Bahomet's Staff. It supposedly cancels out the effects of the other staff. We never found it, and we're not exactly on speaking terms with Bahomet."
I saw my bond's eyes narrow in thought. "We might be able to find someone who can ask," she said. Kristof and Psyche, she said. They might be able to ask Bahomet.
How do you fight a god?
With another god.
A bit more conversation revealed that the Peacekeeper suspected that Nasser and Folke might be under some sort of mental compulsion that would kick in when they got home, and Sondirra had the bright idea to run and dig out the staff that we have that breaks mental control. There had, evidently, been many layers of control on Nasser and Folke, and the staff took care of all of them. "Keep an eye on them," I told the Peacekeeper, and she agreed.
We said our goodbyes, and turned to the gate once the Peacekeeper and her people left. We started to step through the portal, and pain lanced through me. I gasped and stumbled back. "Something's wrong with the portal--" I swallowed, took a breath, holding out my arms so nobody would step through. "Portal, what's happening?"
"Two portals have been destroyed. Three, now. Three more are endangered."
"The temple portal," I said, and stepped through. In under a minute, I was standing in front of the mother. "Show me," I said, my voice ragged.
The portals that had been destroyed, the ones that were in danger--
All in Reuben's territory. The ones that were not yet destroyed were on the border. "Recall those," I said. Save them--
"Done," the mother said. I closed my eyes and contemplated the image she was showing me, and behind me Sondirra took out our map, marking off the portals gone.
"Two left in Reuben's territory," I said. "The one in the south, on the beach. The other's on the border, in the mountains. If we can move it, we can save it."
"Call Blima," Gannon suggested. "She probably would, she could move it somewhere close by, more hidden."
It was a good idea, and I contacted Blima, the Karop cleric from my home village, and she agreed to move that portal. Reuben's troops were on the move. They had to destroy the portals so we couldn't transport in amongst them.
It was not the best news to start a mission with. We let Orion, who had been heading to Seratov, know what was happening and that were coming.
I arrived this morning to discover that Gada was dead, he said. I'll stay put for the moment.
That taken care of, and being at the mother anyway, we transported to Seratov. We had all of our people with us, eighteen pairs in all. Seratov was a large city, the mood of the place somber, the flags at half-mast. Gada had been well-loved. We stopped at a bathhouse to clean up before we went to the palace, and discovered it was thought that Gada had died of the same illness that had taken Jalena.
They were waiting for us at the palace--Coulter had evidently messaged ahead--and welcomed us in.
We requested to see the bodies, and were shown to a place used, at the moment, as a makeshift morgue. Two bodies were laid out in there, both with magic on them to keep them from rotting before they were buried. One large and snow-white. The other small, covered with a cloth of a rich green. I took a breath, suddenly vividly reminded of the last time we had walked into a place like this where bodies were laid out for our inspection.
Sondirra's hand lighted briefly on my shoulder, and I reminded myself that these were not Garnet and Alvar. I steeled myself, and we began to look at Jalena's body.
Sondirra:
It was Beamer who noticed the really weird thing. "Her claws," he said. "It looks like she's been tearing up bushes or something. Those are bits of leaves, and they're stained a little green.
Bambi lifted the dead dragon's mouth open. "They're in her teeth, look." Beamer reached in and extracted a brown-green scrap of something. He held it up to us. It was definitely an oak leaf.
We called in the doctor, who had been the one who'd shown us in. "She was too ill to leave her bed for about two days before she died. We had to carry her in here when it became apparent that she was dying. There was nothing anyone could do, I've never seen an illness like it." The man rubbed his temples, wincing.
Beamer showed him the grass stains on Jalena's claws, and the doctor stared. "She didn't have those last night," he said. "That's strange."
I smiled. There was something fishy going on here. So, if the dead walked...what did that have to do with Gada's death?
Before we looked at Gada's body, Galen and I went to have a gander at the tracks around here. I found out nothing more than that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to brush away any tracks, but Galen found a tail-swipe in the soft ground outside the large doors. She had walked out into the garden that this palace was built around.
"All right, this isn't work more than a few people can do," Palil said. "My team will go look at this. The rest of you, go check the quarters we've been given."
They nodded, and left. I saw Lida and Elfrida turn to go, and snagged Lida's arm. "Where do you think you're going? You're with us," I told her.
She looked at me, blinked, and I realized that sometime in the last couple of weeks I'd started thinking of Lida and Elfrida as ours rather than Jordan's. We hadn't made it official, but I supposed I just had. I glanced at Jordan, and he raised his eyebrows and jerked his head at Lida. Better with you than me, he said, silently. I nodded, and he turned and left. Gannon followed, reluctance in the set of his shoulders. He'd been physically close to Palil all morning long, as much as he could.
We followed Jalena's path, and found a place that was roped off, with a sign that said it was closed for repair. A gardener we asked said that it was the work of vandals, that it looked like a dragon had crashed into an oak tree in the center of it. "It was a good tree, too," he said. "Damn people."
We asked him to clear out everyone who was working there, and after a bit of back and forth, he agreed. We walked in to find that it looked like a large body had crashed into one half of the tree, breaking off the branches and part of the trunk. The trail continued across the garden, and as we walked I noticed the patterns of travel around us, people walking on various errands, palace staff pausing for a moment in the spring sun. There were a lot of people out here, all on their own business.
How could a huge white zombie dragon have been missed? In a place like this, there was always someone awake, someone insomniac or with a fretful baby. Jalena had walked plain as day across this huge exposed area, and probably made a hell of a lot of noise.
The tracks stopped on the ground beneath a balcony, and beside me I heard Elfrida hiss her breath in. She pointed. "I remember this from when we were here before. That's Gada's private quarters. The one next to hers is Jalena's quarters. Next there is her daughter Honora's, and she shares quarters with her bondmate Cliantha. The last balcony belongs to Baptista, another daughter, and her bondmate Quimby."
"Hunh," I said. Galen and I looked at the tracks here. Someone had tried to mess with the tracks, and there were booted footprints all around, but if you knew what you were looking for, it looked like Jalena had stopped to raise herself up on her hind legs.
I looked up. The balcony was on the fourth floor. Suicide, I thought. If she fell...
Palil's grim thought joined mine. Or was pushed. Or worse--pulled.
Palil:
The scene twisted my stomach, and I put my arms around myself, vaguely nauseated. "We need to go see Gada's body," Sondirra said. "And talk to the doctor about her."
We retraced our steps, and went back to the morgue. The doctor confirmed our suspicion--the cause of death was impact from a fall or a jump from her balcony. She had broken her neck in the fall and died more or less immediately. I stood back and let Sondirra look at Gada's body, nausea kept at bay by an act of will. Sondirra bent over her, murmuring apologies as she ran her hands over Gada's limbs. There had been pastes and powders applied to the worst of the visible wounds.
Sondirra held up Gada's hand. "Scraped on the palm, both of them." She put the hand down. "She grabbed the railing on her way over. She didn't go over voluntarily." She pressed her lips together and gently eased the nightgown that Gada was wearing up high on her legs. "There. That was the other thing I thought we'd find."
It was a line of bruise high on her thighs, the left one scraped deeply. "She didn't go over of her own volition," Beamer said. "This was definitely murder."
"With her dead bondmate as the murder weapon," Lida said. Her face was white, her lips pinched, but she was making herself look at Gada's body. "That's horrible."
Sondirra covered the body again after smoothing the nightgown down again. "You're right," she said. "It is. Let's go see if we can find the person responsible."
First up was the person who had found Gada's body, her personal assistant, the woman who other than her bondmate had been physically closest to the dead woman. The assistant was a plump elf, her eyes red with crying and her nose chapped. When we asked her how Gada had seemed the last time she'd seen her, she said, "Sad. Torn. She was grieving Jalena, but she knew there was work to be done in the wake of her death. She retired to her quarters about an hour after midnight, and I brought her a snack a little while later. I wanted to make sure she ate. I was worried about her. She did eat, and then I saw her into bed and left. I came back just before sunrise, which is when she wanted to be woken. I came in, and the fire--the fire had burned almost out. The doors to the balcony were stand--standing open." Her voice was shaking. "She didn't like being cold. She wasn't in bed, so I went out to the balcony. I looked over and--" She swallowed. "I saw white, in the bushes. I ran to get the guards, then." Her voice dropped low. "Why would she have eaten, if she was going to kill herself a little while later? Why did she tell me she'd see me in the morning? I keep thinking there was something I could have seen, something I could have done--"
"It wasn't your fault," I said, trying to be gentle. "You had no warning."
"I keep trying to tell myself that," the assistant said. "It doesn't help." She took a long, shaking breath. "Anyway, the military police came through here. You can find the four investigators, two bonded pairs, down in the bailey if you need them."
"Thank you, you've been very helpful," I said. She nodded, and fled.
Sondirra:
We walked out to the balcony. The railing was low, made of wood with metal uprights, all painted gold. "Let's see. I'm sleeping, get woken up by the sound of my bondmate's voice. I walk out here--can it be true? Was I just dreaming her dying? I'm half-asleep. Not seeing right away that there's something wrong with Jalena. I get to the rail, here--" I peered over, and saw the trampled place below where Gada had been found-- "And...what? Does someone give me a push? Or does Jalena reach in and..."
I'd dropped to a crouch and started to run my fingers over the rail's uprights. I jumped and swore as I felt--
Wet.
The gold paint came off on my fingertips.
With a cloth, Tchar and I got most of the fresh paint off of the uprights. There was a piece missing from one of them that had been disguised with putty and painted over.
Right now, all the smart money was on her having been pulled off the balcony by Jalena's corpse. Nice. But who would want Gada dead, and who'd have the kind of power required to animate a thousand-year-old dragon's corpse?
I was finding that under my calm, I was starting to get pissed. What a rotten way to kill someone. Someone who had been a friend, of sorts, and by all accounts a decent person. Right now, though, we had no suspects.
We needed to do a bit more investigation before we started interviews, and it took us a few hours to accomplish it. We did the painstaking work of matching the tracks in the part to someone who had legitimate reason to be there. We found only one thing truly out of place. A pair of feet, belonging to either a man or a large woman, had stood beneath Honora's window at about the time Gada had died.
Interesting. We also found, after chopping the oak tree down the rest of the way, that there were scales embedded in it, the milky translucence of white dragon scales, and there was that piece of the banister.
We went to talk to the investigators, two humans, two black dragons. They told us that they did find a bit of blood on the railing, and a scrap of cloth from Gada's nightgown, but they said they thought she'd hurt herself when she had climbed onto the railing. Both men were shaking, nervous.
Lie, Beamer said silently. Bambi motioned to one of the humans, saying, "Can I have a word?"
Out in the empty corridor, Bambi broadcasted to us what she was hearing and seeing. "Now, why are you lying to us?" she asked, her voice low and dangerous.
The man choked, terrified. Bambi has the trick of intimidating people with no more than a lowered voice and a stern look. "I-- I--" His expression collapsed. "They'll kill our families," he whispered. "We both got this delivered to us as we were leaving the scene." He shoved a piece of crumpled parchment into Bambi's hands.
If you breathe a word that this was murder, everyone related to you and your bondmate will die, generations both up and down. It was unsigned.
"Can I keep this?" Bambi asked. The man nodded. "Who do you report to?"
"Captain Murdock," he said. "Are you going to--"
"I won't tell him," she said. "Thank you." Let's go, she said to us.
None of us recognized the handwriting, and we stowed the note. "Next?" Bambi asked as we fell in beside her.
"Gada's children," Palil said. "Let's go see who we can find."
We managed to find Baptista first, and her bondmate Quimby. Quimby was a white dragon, though unrelated to Jalena. (As much as any white dragons are unrelated. They all memorize their ancestors, though Palil only knows three-quarters of hers--her father's mother was a bit of a lightfoot, and either doesn't remember or isn't willing to say who Silvanus's father was. Anyway, it takes them about five minutes, usually, to find an ancestor in common.) Baptista was lean, tall, looked a lot like Gada, she had the same thick blonde hair though hers was cut short.
Quimby was a head shorter than Baptista, solidly built with squared shoulders and a military bearing. He was eyeing Palil as we sat down, something about her attracting his attention. With a start, I realized that he could probably smell her, even in small form, and she probably smelled like a maiden dragon coming into her first season. Without the scent of a male on her, there was a good chance she was unmated. Something a fellow white dragon would be very interested in, indeed.
He turned his attention to the rest of us, and Baptista said, "The ambassadors. What can I do for you?"
"We were wondering if you heard anything last night," Palil said.
Baptista shrugged. "I only got in this morning. I was on my way back from the border when I got the message that Mother was dead. Quimby and I double-timed it, and we got here only about four hours ago. I've been wrangling with Honora over which of us is going to succeed Mother for most of that." There were lines of tension at the corners of her mouth. "Honora and Neva might be able to tell you more. Neva's grieving her bondmate, who died of the plague yesterday. She might not be much help."
"You and Honora have different idea of how to govern the country?" Palil asked.
"Not too different. Honora wants to make certain changes that I don't approve of. I want to govern like my mother intended the territory to be run." She shrugged. "Anyway, she might be more use to you, since she was here."
We nodded, and Palil thanked the two of them and we rose to leave. As we left, I caught Quimby looking at Palil again. We stopped outside to speak to Baptista's personal assistant. When we asked her if she'd heard anything, she shook her head. "I knew Baptista was due home any time, after the cordon around Seratov was lifted, so I'd gotten her rooms ready. I shave the rooms right across from hers, and I'm usually a light sleeper. Baptista tends to come and go at odd hours, and I thought she might be home last night. I slept right through, though, only awakening about an hour after sunrise or so."
I frowned. "Can you tell us what you did last night?"
"I had dinner in the servant's hall, like usual. The only thing odd that happened was that the military police came through to inspect the food, they'd been through only a few days before and they usually check the food once a week. About ten or so, I got a glass of water from the pitchers and went upstairs. About the last thing I remember was having a drink of water."
"Do you have some of that water left?"
She did, and she brought it back. Bambi took one sniff and wrinkled her nose. "This is full of sleeping potion. Something herbal and powerful. There's enough in here to put an elephant to sleep."
Well, now we knew how an entire palace full of people might have missed the huge zombie Jalena shambling through the park. What we still weren't close to was figuring out who might have been in control. A sufficiently powerful cleric or mage might have done it; Neva was a mage, Baptista was a mage, and Quimby was a cleric of Karop. I wasn't convinced it had been any of the kids. Gada had been old; why hurry the succession along when another century would have seen one of them in power. Or, heck, Gada might have handed the reins of power over to one of them after Jalena's death.
Was there someone else working here? Had Reuben sent someone in, or did he have spies among the staff?
We went to find Honora, and were shown into her rooms. Honora apparently took more after her father than her mother, she didn't look a whole lot like Gada, though she had the same hair. That hair was arranged elaborately, every bit in place, and she was impeccably groomed. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but that was the only visible sign of her grief.
Cliantha, who had shown us in, was far more rugged, large for a woman and heavily scarred. A veteran, definitely. Weird pair, those two. I could have sworn Honora had never gotten close to a battle, but Cliantha looked like she'd been through the wars. Palil repeated the same question that she'd asked Baptista. "We went to bed before midnight," Honora said. "I'm a sound sleeper. I sort of remember hearing something in the middle of the night, but I thought I'd dreamed up."
Cliantha spoke up and said, "The only odd thing I heard was Murdock in the hall outside. He's got a distinctive gait. I thought he was going to check to see if Baptista had gotten in."
"Why would Murdock want to know if Baptista was back?" Bambi asked.
Honora made a face. "Murdock's been sleeping with Baptista on and off for years. He finds a new girlfriend, dumps Baptista, then when that ends he comes crawling back to my sister. She's convinced he's going to marry her some day. She's never settled down to have a family because her heart's set on him. I hate to tell her this, but she loves him a lot more than he loves her. First thing I'm going to do when I'm in charge around here is fire him. Maybe I'll ship him off somewhere cold. He deserves it."
Palil raised an eyebrow. "When you're in charge?"
"Baptista and I are still working it out." She shrugged. "I'll probably end up leading, with Baptista as my official heir rather than any of my children. Neva should be in the line, as well, but without Kaeli, well..." She looked away. "It's been a rough few days," she said quietly.
We took that as our cue and got out. Next was Neva. She let us in when we knocked, even though she and her living quarters were both a wreck. She was in rumpled clothing that probably hadn't been changed since her bondmate had become ill, her hair was a mess, and it looked like she had been frantically looking for something recently. Her eyes were red and her mouth was swollen with crying, and as she let us in she blew her nose into a handkerchief.
"I'm sorry," she said without preamble. "I know you're here to ask questions about Mother's death, but I don't know how much help I'm going to be. I was somewhat wakeful last night, I heard crashes outside, but my rooms face away from the garden. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to go see what had happened." She wrapped her arms around herself.
"Do you know who might have wanted to kill Gada?" I asked.
She shook her head. "The only person I could think of is Honora, if she was tired of waiting for Mother to die so she could take over. But they got along well, and I don't think Honora is the type. I just don't know."
"What do you know about Murdock?"
"Oh, him." She blew out a breath. "He's an ass, excuse my language. Stringing Baptista along like that. But she forgives him every time he breaks her heart, so it's not like there's only one partner in that dance. I wish she'd meet someone who was actually nice to her."
I persisted with, "Is he on the level, work-wise?"
Neva shrugged. "As far as I know."
There didn't seem to be any more we could ask from her, and so we trooped out. As we walked down the corridor, Bambi held a piece of parchment up with a grin. "Look what I got."
"What?" Palil asked. I looked sharply at her--she sounded tired, and now that I was paying attention I could feel that she was physically uncomfortable, somehow. I hoped she wasn't ill. It was probably just an aftereffect of being so sick a day ago.
"A shopping list. Come on." We stepped into a side room, and Bambi produced the note that had been giving to the investigators, threatening their families. We compared the handwriting. Completely different.
Palil's face was thoughtful. "If we can get handwriting samples from everyone, we might be able to clear the innocent, at least. Bambi, Beamer, Lida, can you see if you can get samples from Honora, Cliantha, Baptista, and Quimby? Meet us back at the quarters." They nodded and took off.
As we walked to the quarters we'd been given, a complex of rooms that were designed for an ambassador and their staff, I nudged Palil with my mind. You okay?
She shrugged. Touchy stomach today, she said. I'll hunt later and see if it helps.
If it keeps bothering you, go talk to Haven, I told her sternly. She rolled her eyes, but told me she would.
We met up with the others in the ambassador's quarters, and I dragged Jordan off for a few minutes of alone time. (Okay, it's not like he resisted.) When we came back out into the main room, the others had returned. We spread out the handwriting samples on the table.
Blaise blinked and grabbed one of them. "Look, this one matches. Who's this?"
Beamer and Lida looked at each other. "Quimby."
It looked like we had our murderer. We still didn't know why, and...they hadn't been here last night.
"Do you think they came back early, before the cordon was lifted?" Lida said.
"They shouldn't have, they knew that the plague takes the whites the hardest," Aldaric said.
Bambi's eyes were thoughtful. "But if they came back anyway...they must have had protection. Which means they're on the take from Reuben."
Blaise had hopped up on the table, dangling her legs off the edge. "Hey, isn't Jezik still here? Maybe he'll know more."
Palil and I looked at each other. "We should go talk to Jezik," I said. "Now."
Jezik was being kept in a far corner of the palace, guarded by a rather large number of humans and elves. They let the humanoids through, and kept the dragons away. Jezik was at a desk, reading a scroll when we walked in. "If you're here to ask if I killed Gada, I didn't."
"I know," I told him. "Someone else did. Tell me, do you know if Reuben has anyone in the palace who's on the take?"
He shrugged. "Not as far as I know, but he was keeping a lot of things from me."
"Do you have any idea what the situation here is? Have you seen much of Gada's daughters?"
He shrugged. "I met Honora and Neva and their bondmates right after I arrived. I liked Neva, we spent some time talking at dinner that night. She's level-headed. She and her bondmate were very close, I heard she died of the plague."
"We talked to her, she's pretty wrecked," I said. "What about Honora?"
"A priss," he replied. "I've seen the type before. More interested in how she looks than anything else. Cliantha's all right, though." He paused and added, "I did meet Baptista last night. She came in late, about midnight, and wanted to know if I was still in contract with Reuben. I told her the truth, that I hardly even hear echoes of him any more. I think Tiamat's uninterested in having a bondmate."
"Probably," I said, but the hairs on the back of my neck were standing at attention. Baptista had lied. She'd gotten back last night. "What was your impression of Baptista?"
"She had Quimby with her, which struck me as odd. She was angry, and Quimby was agitated. Something was going on there, I don't know what and they didn't give me a chance to ask."
"Strange," I said. "We're working on finding a cure for you being a carrier, by the way."
He smiled wryly. "I guessed you were," he said. "I'll sit tight until you find something."
We said our goodbyes and left, and joined the others. We went to go grab Jordan and Gannon and go talk to Murdock. Murdock, I thought, might need some violence.
As we walked towards the bailey where we'd been told we'd find Murdock, I couldn't help but notice that Gannon fell in right at Palil's shoulder. He was holding his head high, watchful. More watchful than usual. It looked like he was feeling mighty protective of my bondmate right then.
I smothered a smile. Biology was starting to get the better of the two of them. I hoped Palil was planning to have that conversation with Gannon sometime soon, because I sort of thought that things might happen between them whether or not they talked about it first.
I reminded myself to tell Gannon that if he wanted to impress her, he should probably do some glaring at other males in front of her. If I knew my bondmate like I thought I did, a little show of protectiveness and possessiveness would definitely not go amiss, and it might even convince her that he had feelings for her that he didn't usually show.
I smirked and kept walking.
Palil:
Murdock was a man of middling height and average looks. I looked at him, trying to see what Baptista saw in him, and didn't manage it. "Ambassadors," he said. "I hear you've been poking around. Tell me, do you think the same thing's going on as I am?"
I blinked. "And what do you think is going on?"
"Quimby killed Gada. I don't know if Baptista helped, but she can't be innocent, the two of them are too close." He frowned. "I've never liked Quimby, and he doesn't like me. I didn't think he'd kill Gada, though. They came back last night, I went looking for Baptista, but she wasn't in her rooms."
"There may have been extenuating circumstances," I told him. I nudged Beamer with my mind. Do you have the surface-thought reading spell up?
I'll be able to tell you if he's lying, he said back.
"And what might those be?"
"Involvement from another government," I told him. "Tell me, do you know anything about the servants' water being spiked with sleeping potion last night?"
He blinked. "What? Is that why everyone was so hard to wake this morning?"
Truth, said Beamer. He's genuinely surprised.
I shrugged. "The water was something like half sleeping potion. Do you know anything else that might be useful?"
Murdock looked at me steadily. "Not really."
Lie, Beamer said.
I let just the smallest of cruel smiles come over my face. I stepped forward a half-step, holding Murdock's gaze with my own. "I think you do know useful things, Murdock."
I don't know what he saw on my face, but he went just a bit pale. "I-- The portals. I know about the portals."
"How?"
"I saw Quimby take a friend of his through one east of here," he said. "Quimby's best friends have always been these white dragons. Rough crowd. He brought one of them through, and returned a little while later. That was one of the first dragons to die from the plague."
I stopped. Blinked. Tilted my head. "How long ago was that?"
"A week. He died the day Jezik arrived."
Jezik wasn't the vector for the plague--or at least not the only one. The white dragon had gone somewhere, been infected. But if Jezik wasn't a carrier, a vector--
What did all of the people who had originally gotten ill have in common?
I heard Gannon's voice in my mind, strained. The portals. Everyone who got sick originally went through the portals.
They're spreading it, Sondirra said. The plague is living in the portal system.
I was still facing down Murdock. "I suggest that you leave town. Things may be about to get--interesting."
He shook his head. "I was hoping Baptista would be able to come out all right. But--no. I'll go."
We took our leave, and walked back to our quarters. Orion? I called. We have another candidate for a bondmate for you.
Who? he replied.
Neva. She's just lost her bondmate, and I think she's my pick for leadership here. She needs a bondmate if she's going to rule.
I'll go meet her and talk to her, he said, and went silent.
So, what did we do? We could kill Quimby and Baptista. That left Cliantha and Honora in charge. If Orion bonded with Neva, together the pair of them could probably stare down the other two and mostly just declare that they were taking over. But that left Cliantha and Honora as powerful loose ends, ripe for plotting or being influenced by Reuben.
In the end, it was Jordan who suggested the solution.
"You guys haven't thought of this because this isn't the way you think, but why not let the four of them kill each other? I'd give Quimby and Baptista good odds of killing Honora and Cliantha, and maybe we'll get lucky and all four of them will kill each other. Just tell Honora what we've found out, and sit back and watch the bloodshed. Neva takes over, free and clear, and we're done here."
It was simple. Easy. It would work.
Of course I immediately hated the idea.
However, even I had to admit that it was a good one, and it was the only thing that would work out with Neva ending up leading. A few minutes later, Orion reported that he'd bonded with Neva, much to Neva's startlement. He sounded pleased with himself. We were clear to go.
It was the work of about ten minutes to go talk to Honora and tell her what her sister had done. Twenty minutes later, there were raised voices in the garden at the center of the palace. Raised voices led to a fight that left the landscaping in shambles and Cliantha and Honora dead, and Baptista and Quimby heavily wounded.
At that point, we stepped in, told them that their lives were forfeit as traitors, and Jordan finished them both off.
Orion was explaining to Neva who we really were and what all was going on while we gathered in a corner and used a message spell to contact the nearest portal. It worked, much to my surprise. The portal said that there had been canisters of a fluid that carried the plague placed in the system, and the system was under orders to mist everyone who transited through with it. I told the gate to disassemble the canisters in the same way it disassembled people who were disappeared for good in the gate system.
It did so. I then asked it if there were any other Karop clerics who were giving the system orders.
There were three. All of them more highly-ranking than me, and all had ordered the portals not to divulge their names and locations.
I passed the news on to Chaim, who said he'd talk to the portals next time he was close to one. And then, finally, we went to talk to Neva, the new leader of this territory.
She first invited us to stay for as long as we wanted. She seemed a lot less grief-torn than she had before, though still sad. She also said she was going to be making overtures to both Chaim and Isla, trying to get a coalition together to fight Reuben. "Otherwise, we're going to be overrun. Chaim, I trust, will be all right. Isla...Isla worries me. I talked to mother a bit about her. I don't know why she's being the way she is, but we need her. If she stays isolated, she'd going to get taken over. We have a chance, if all three of our territories ally."
"We're probably heading down there soon," I said, thinking ahead. "If we have approval from both Chaim and you to try to broker some sort of agreement..."
She smiled. "I'm sure something can be arranged," she told me. "Are you staying for the funerals? Mother and Jalena's will be two days from now."
I nodded. "If we have your hospitality for that long."
"Of course!" We talked for a while longer, then Neva left to continue the things she needed to do to prepare for the several state funerals in her near future, as well as consolidating her reign.
I didn't envy her what was going to come after she was not so blindingly busy. She had lost so many people, in such a short period of time. I'm sure having Orion was a comfort, but grief was grief.
We were given access to Gada's personal records, and I satisfied my own curiosity about why Gada had given up the Chelyabinsk area of her territory to Yafa so easily. It turned out that Yafa had intended to kill everyone in the territory to get to the giant cache; rather than waste the lives, Gada had given it to her in return for having some of her people trained at #2 on occasion.
Another thing caught my eye as I was flipping through the papers. Gada, at one point, had had a MI. They had found that under the city of Kazan was a completely intact frost giant city, protected by a powerful shield. She had pulled her people out of there and said not a word to anyone.
Interesting, that. We needed to go check it out.
But first, we needed to stay here a few days, and attend yet another funeral...
Quotes:
"Would it be crass to do a Speak with Dead?"
--Beamer
"She probably thinks we're spies."
"Well, we are."
--Bambi, Palil
5/16/978
Palil:
The next morning, we checked in with Chaim, who said that though he didn't feel ill, there were a few of the white dragons with him who were. He said he'd bring them through in batches to get them inoculated.
On the heels of that conversation, Coulter messaged in. "Majors. I've just received word that Gada is dead, having committed suicide in the wake of her bondmate Jalena's death. I don't believe it--well, I don't believe that she committed suicide, I believe that she's dead."
I was still feeling a bit wobbly from being ill, and the news hit me like a boot to the chest. I reached out to Sondirra with my mind. I liked her, I said. Didn't trust her, but I liked her.
When do we trust anyone? I liked her, too. Comfort from my bondmate. She didn't kill herself, she said, confidence in her voice. She wasn't the type. She wasn't selfish enough to let her work go undone.
I took a breath. "I'm sorry to hear she's dead," I said.
"So are the rest of us. I need you to go to Seratov, see who's best to take over for her, and get whatever pair are best in. Gada has several children, all daughters. Jalena didn't have any recorded children. The last thing we need right now is for her territory to destabilize. Get in there, stabilize things, and see if Jezik had anything to do with her death."
"Will do," I said. "Palil out." I dropped my head into my hands briefly, and then said, "All right. We're meeting the frost giants with the boys today. Let's get them in here and inoculated, and then take them to meet the Peacekeeper."
That we did, and the Peacekeeper was waiting for us when we arrived at the portal north of Pskov. Zadok was carrying the body of his bondmate, which he refused to put down or let anyone else carry. His handsome face was deeply carved in lines of pain. Completely irrelevantly, I thought to myself, it's too bad he's a Gemini, I bet he'd make pretty children.
I blushed, and the strange feeling in my midsection surged a little bit. I needed to have that conversation with Gannon, and soon. Now, however, was not the time. "How is Isla doing?" I asked the Peacekeeper.
"Devastated," she said. "Happy that Nasser and Folke are all right, but finding one son does not make up for losing another--especially her acknowledged heir. Nasser has been in Reuben's hands too long to be named heir now, and Isla looks like she's aged a century in the last few days. She's pulling back her forced to the cities and towns, leaving the farmland unprotected, and sending part of her army towards her border with Reuben."
"Poor thing," Sondirra said softly. "Peacekeeper, what happened to the person who held Tiamat's Staff before? Was he killed, or did he die of old age?"
"It took four legions of us to defeat him," she said seriously. "We buried it with him in a place that we hoped would never be found. There is another staff out there, but it's never been found. Bahomet's Staff. It supposedly cancels out the effects of the other staff. We never found it, and we're not exactly on speaking terms with Bahomet."
I saw my bond's eyes narrow in thought. "We might be able to find someone who can ask," she said. Kristof and Psyche, she said. They might be able to ask Bahomet.
How do you fight a god?
With another god.
A bit more conversation revealed that the Peacekeeper suspected that Nasser and Folke might be under some sort of mental compulsion that would kick in when they got home, and Sondirra had the bright idea to run and dig out the staff that we have that breaks mental control. There had, evidently, been many layers of control on Nasser and Folke, and the staff took care of all of them. "Keep an eye on them," I told the Peacekeeper, and she agreed.
We said our goodbyes, and turned to the gate once the Peacekeeper and her people left. We started to step through the portal, and pain lanced through me. I gasped and stumbled back. "Something's wrong with the portal--" I swallowed, took a breath, holding out my arms so nobody would step through. "Portal, what's happening?"
"Two portals have been destroyed. Three, now. Three more are endangered."
"The temple portal," I said, and stepped through. In under a minute, I was standing in front of the mother. "Show me," I said, my voice ragged.
The portals that had been destroyed, the ones that were in danger--
All in Reuben's territory. The ones that were not yet destroyed were on the border. "Recall those," I said. Save them--
"Done," the mother said. I closed my eyes and contemplated the image she was showing me, and behind me Sondirra took out our map, marking off the portals gone.
"Two left in Reuben's territory," I said. "The one in the south, on the beach. The other's on the border, in the mountains. If we can move it, we can save it."
"Call Blima," Gannon suggested. "She probably would, she could move it somewhere close by, more hidden."
It was a good idea, and I contacted Blima, the Karop cleric from my home village, and she agreed to move that portal. Reuben's troops were on the move. They had to destroy the portals so we couldn't transport in amongst them.
It was not the best news to start a mission with. We let Orion, who had been heading to Seratov, know what was happening and that were coming.
I arrived this morning to discover that Gada was dead, he said. I'll stay put for the moment.
That taken care of, and being at the mother anyway, we transported to Seratov. We had all of our people with us, eighteen pairs in all. Seratov was a large city, the mood of the place somber, the flags at half-mast. Gada had been well-loved. We stopped at a bathhouse to clean up before we went to the palace, and discovered it was thought that Gada had died of the same illness that had taken Jalena.
They were waiting for us at the palace--Coulter had evidently messaged ahead--and welcomed us in.
We requested to see the bodies, and were shown to a place used, at the moment, as a makeshift morgue. Two bodies were laid out in there, both with magic on them to keep them from rotting before they were buried. One large and snow-white. The other small, covered with a cloth of a rich green. I took a breath, suddenly vividly reminded of the last time we had walked into a place like this where bodies were laid out for our inspection.
Sondirra's hand lighted briefly on my shoulder, and I reminded myself that these were not Garnet and Alvar. I steeled myself, and we began to look at Jalena's body.
Sondirra:
It was Beamer who noticed the really weird thing. "Her claws," he said. "It looks like she's been tearing up bushes or something. Those are bits of leaves, and they're stained a little green.
Bambi lifted the dead dragon's mouth open. "They're in her teeth, look." Beamer reached in and extracted a brown-green scrap of something. He held it up to us. It was definitely an oak leaf.
We called in the doctor, who had been the one who'd shown us in. "She was too ill to leave her bed for about two days before she died. We had to carry her in here when it became apparent that she was dying. There was nothing anyone could do, I've never seen an illness like it." The man rubbed his temples, wincing.
Beamer showed him the grass stains on Jalena's claws, and the doctor stared. "She didn't have those last night," he said. "That's strange."
I smiled. There was something fishy going on here. So, if the dead walked...what did that have to do with Gada's death?
Before we looked at Gada's body, Galen and I went to have a gander at the tracks around here. I found out nothing more than that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to brush away any tracks, but Galen found a tail-swipe in the soft ground outside the large doors. She had walked out into the garden that this palace was built around.
"All right, this isn't work more than a few people can do," Palil said. "My team will go look at this. The rest of you, go check the quarters we've been given."
They nodded, and left. I saw Lida and Elfrida turn to go, and snagged Lida's arm. "Where do you think you're going? You're with us," I told her.
She looked at me, blinked, and I realized that sometime in the last couple of weeks I'd started thinking of Lida and Elfrida as ours rather than Jordan's. We hadn't made it official, but I supposed I just had. I glanced at Jordan, and he raised his eyebrows and jerked his head at Lida. Better with you than me, he said, silently. I nodded, and he turned and left. Gannon followed, reluctance in the set of his shoulders. He'd been physically close to Palil all morning long, as much as he could.
We followed Jalena's path, and found a place that was roped off, with a sign that said it was closed for repair. A gardener we asked said that it was the work of vandals, that it looked like a dragon had crashed into an oak tree in the center of it. "It was a good tree, too," he said. "Damn people."
We asked him to clear out everyone who was working there, and after a bit of back and forth, he agreed. We walked in to find that it looked like a large body had crashed into one half of the tree, breaking off the branches and part of the trunk. The trail continued across the garden, and as we walked I noticed the patterns of travel around us, people walking on various errands, palace staff pausing for a moment in the spring sun. There were a lot of people out here, all on their own business.
How could a huge white zombie dragon have been missed? In a place like this, there was always someone awake, someone insomniac or with a fretful baby. Jalena had walked plain as day across this huge exposed area, and probably made a hell of a lot of noise.
The tracks stopped on the ground beneath a balcony, and beside me I heard Elfrida hiss her breath in. She pointed. "I remember this from when we were here before. That's Gada's private quarters. The one next to hers is Jalena's quarters. Next there is her daughter Honora's, and she shares quarters with her bondmate Cliantha. The last balcony belongs to Baptista, another daughter, and her bondmate Quimby."
"Hunh," I said. Galen and I looked at the tracks here. Someone had tried to mess with the tracks, and there were booted footprints all around, but if you knew what you were looking for, it looked like Jalena had stopped to raise herself up on her hind legs.
I looked up. The balcony was on the fourth floor. Suicide, I thought. If she fell...
Palil's grim thought joined mine. Or was pushed. Or worse--pulled.
Palil:
The scene twisted my stomach, and I put my arms around myself, vaguely nauseated. "We need to go see Gada's body," Sondirra said. "And talk to the doctor about her."
We retraced our steps, and went back to the morgue. The doctor confirmed our suspicion--the cause of death was impact from a fall or a jump from her balcony. She had broken her neck in the fall and died more or less immediately. I stood back and let Sondirra look at Gada's body, nausea kept at bay by an act of will. Sondirra bent over her, murmuring apologies as she ran her hands over Gada's limbs. There had been pastes and powders applied to the worst of the visible wounds.
Sondirra held up Gada's hand. "Scraped on the palm, both of them." She put the hand down. "She grabbed the railing on her way over. She didn't go over voluntarily." She pressed her lips together and gently eased the nightgown that Gada was wearing up high on her legs. "There. That was the other thing I thought we'd find."
It was a line of bruise high on her thighs, the left one scraped deeply. "She didn't go over of her own volition," Beamer said. "This was definitely murder."
"With her dead bondmate as the murder weapon," Lida said. Her face was white, her lips pinched, but she was making herself look at Gada's body. "That's horrible."
Sondirra covered the body again after smoothing the nightgown down again. "You're right," she said. "It is. Let's go see if we can find the person responsible."
First up was the person who had found Gada's body, her personal assistant, the woman who other than her bondmate had been physically closest to the dead woman. The assistant was a plump elf, her eyes red with crying and her nose chapped. When we asked her how Gada had seemed the last time she'd seen her, she said, "Sad. Torn. She was grieving Jalena, but she knew there was work to be done in the wake of her death. She retired to her quarters about an hour after midnight, and I brought her a snack a little while later. I wanted to make sure she ate. I was worried about her. She did eat, and then I saw her into bed and left. I came back just before sunrise, which is when she wanted to be woken. I came in, and the fire--the fire had burned almost out. The doors to the balcony were stand--standing open." Her voice was shaking. "She didn't like being cold. She wasn't in bed, so I went out to the balcony. I looked over and--" She swallowed. "I saw white, in the bushes. I ran to get the guards, then." Her voice dropped low. "Why would she have eaten, if she was going to kill herself a little while later? Why did she tell me she'd see me in the morning? I keep thinking there was something I could have seen, something I could have done--"
"It wasn't your fault," I said, trying to be gentle. "You had no warning."
"I keep trying to tell myself that," the assistant said. "It doesn't help." She took a long, shaking breath. "Anyway, the military police came through here. You can find the four investigators, two bonded pairs, down in the bailey if you need them."
"Thank you, you've been very helpful," I said. She nodded, and fled.
Sondirra:
We walked out to the balcony. The railing was low, made of wood with metal uprights, all painted gold. "Let's see. I'm sleeping, get woken up by the sound of my bondmate's voice. I walk out here--can it be true? Was I just dreaming her dying? I'm half-asleep. Not seeing right away that there's something wrong with Jalena. I get to the rail, here--" I peered over, and saw the trampled place below where Gada had been found-- "And...what? Does someone give me a push? Or does Jalena reach in and..."
I'd dropped to a crouch and started to run my fingers over the rail's uprights. I jumped and swore as I felt--
Wet.
The gold paint came off on my fingertips.
With a cloth, Tchar and I got most of the fresh paint off of the uprights. There was a piece missing from one of them that had been disguised with putty and painted over.
Right now, all the smart money was on her having been pulled off the balcony by Jalena's corpse. Nice. But who would want Gada dead, and who'd have the kind of power required to animate a thousand-year-old dragon's corpse?
I was finding that under my calm, I was starting to get pissed. What a rotten way to kill someone. Someone who had been a friend, of sorts, and by all accounts a decent person. Right now, though, we had no suspects.
We needed to do a bit more investigation before we started interviews, and it took us a few hours to accomplish it. We did the painstaking work of matching the tracks in the part to someone who had legitimate reason to be there. We found only one thing truly out of place. A pair of feet, belonging to either a man or a large woman, had stood beneath Honora's window at about the time Gada had died.
Interesting. We also found, after chopping the oak tree down the rest of the way, that there were scales embedded in it, the milky translucence of white dragon scales, and there was that piece of the banister.
We went to talk to the investigators, two humans, two black dragons. They told us that they did find a bit of blood on the railing, and a scrap of cloth from Gada's nightgown, but they said they thought she'd hurt herself when she had climbed onto the railing. Both men were shaking, nervous.
Lie, Beamer said silently. Bambi motioned to one of the humans, saying, "Can I have a word?"
Out in the empty corridor, Bambi broadcasted to us what she was hearing and seeing. "Now, why are you lying to us?" she asked, her voice low and dangerous.
The man choked, terrified. Bambi has the trick of intimidating people with no more than a lowered voice and a stern look. "I-- I--" His expression collapsed. "They'll kill our families," he whispered. "We both got this delivered to us as we were leaving the scene." He shoved a piece of crumpled parchment into Bambi's hands.
If you breathe a word that this was murder, everyone related to you and your bondmate will die, generations both up and down. It was unsigned.
"Can I keep this?" Bambi asked. The man nodded. "Who do you report to?"
"Captain Murdock," he said. "Are you going to--"
"I won't tell him," she said. "Thank you." Let's go, she said to us.
None of us recognized the handwriting, and we stowed the note. "Next?" Bambi asked as we fell in beside her.
"Gada's children," Palil said. "Let's go see who we can find."
We managed to find Baptista first, and her bondmate Quimby. Quimby was a white dragon, though unrelated to Jalena. (As much as any white dragons are unrelated. They all memorize their ancestors, though Palil only knows three-quarters of hers--her father's mother was a bit of a lightfoot, and either doesn't remember or isn't willing to say who Silvanus's father was. Anyway, it takes them about five minutes, usually, to find an ancestor in common.) Baptista was lean, tall, looked a lot like Gada, she had the same thick blonde hair though hers was cut short.
Quimby was a head shorter than Baptista, solidly built with squared shoulders and a military bearing. He was eyeing Palil as we sat down, something about her attracting his attention. With a start, I realized that he could probably smell her, even in small form, and she probably smelled like a maiden dragon coming into her first season. Without the scent of a male on her, there was a good chance she was unmated. Something a fellow white dragon would be very interested in, indeed.
He turned his attention to the rest of us, and Baptista said, "The ambassadors. What can I do for you?"
"We were wondering if you heard anything last night," Palil said.
Baptista shrugged. "I only got in this morning. I was on my way back from the border when I got the message that Mother was dead. Quimby and I double-timed it, and we got here only about four hours ago. I've been wrangling with Honora over which of us is going to succeed Mother for most of that." There were lines of tension at the corners of her mouth. "Honora and Neva might be able to tell you more. Neva's grieving her bondmate, who died of the plague yesterday. She might not be much help."
"You and Honora have different idea of how to govern the country?" Palil asked.
"Not too different. Honora wants to make certain changes that I don't approve of. I want to govern like my mother intended the territory to be run." She shrugged. "Anyway, she might be more use to you, since she was here."
We nodded, and Palil thanked the two of them and we rose to leave. As we left, I caught Quimby looking at Palil again. We stopped outside to speak to Baptista's personal assistant. When we asked her if she'd heard anything, she shook her head. "I knew Baptista was due home any time, after the cordon around Seratov was lifted, so I'd gotten her rooms ready. I shave the rooms right across from hers, and I'm usually a light sleeper. Baptista tends to come and go at odd hours, and I thought she might be home last night. I slept right through, though, only awakening about an hour after sunrise or so."
I frowned. "Can you tell us what you did last night?"
"I had dinner in the servant's hall, like usual. The only thing odd that happened was that the military police came through to inspect the food, they'd been through only a few days before and they usually check the food once a week. About ten or so, I got a glass of water from the pitchers and went upstairs. About the last thing I remember was having a drink of water."
"Do you have some of that water left?"
She did, and she brought it back. Bambi took one sniff and wrinkled her nose. "This is full of sleeping potion. Something herbal and powerful. There's enough in here to put an elephant to sleep."
Well, now we knew how an entire palace full of people might have missed the huge zombie Jalena shambling through the park. What we still weren't close to was figuring out who might have been in control. A sufficiently powerful cleric or mage might have done it; Neva was a mage, Baptista was a mage, and Quimby was a cleric of Karop. I wasn't convinced it had been any of the kids. Gada had been old; why hurry the succession along when another century would have seen one of them in power. Or, heck, Gada might have handed the reins of power over to one of them after Jalena's death.
Was there someone else working here? Had Reuben sent someone in, or did he have spies among the staff?
We went to find Honora, and were shown into her rooms. Honora apparently took more after her father than her mother, she didn't look a whole lot like Gada, though she had the same hair. That hair was arranged elaborately, every bit in place, and she was impeccably groomed. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but that was the only visible sign of her grief.
Cliantha, who had shown us in, was far more rugged, large for a woman and heavily scarred. A veteran, definitely. Weird pair, those two. I could have sworn Honora had never gotten close to a battle, but Cliantha looked like she'd been through the wars. Palil repeated the same question that she'd asked Baptista. "We went to bed before midnight," Honora said. "I'm a sound sleeper. I sort of remember hearing something in the middle of the night, but I thought I'd dreamed up."
Cliantha spoke up and said, "The only odd thing I heard was Murdock in the hall outside. He's got a distinctive gait. I thought he was going to check to see if Baptista had gotten in."
"Why would Murdock want to know if Baptista was back?" Bambi asked.
Honora made a face. "Murdock's been sleeping with Baptista on and off for years. He finds a new girlfriend, dumps Baptista, then when that ends he comes crawling back to my sister. She's convinced he's going to marry her some day. She's never settled down to have a family because her heart's set on him. I hate to tell her this, but she loves him a lot more than he loves her. First thing I'm going to do when I'm in charge around here is fire him. Maybe I'll ship him off somewhere cold. He deserves it."
Palil raised an eyebrow. "When you're in charge?"
"Baptista and I are still working it out." She shrugged. "I'll probably end up leading, with Baptista as my official heir rather than any of my children. Neva should be in the line, as well, but without Kaeli, well..." She looked away. "It's been a rough few days," she said quietly.
We took that as our cue and got out. Next was Neva. She let us in when we knocked, even though she and her living quarters were both a wreck. She was in rumpled clothing that probably hadn't been changed since her bondmate had become ill, her hair was a mess, and it looked like she had been frantically looking for something recently. Her eyes were red and her mouth was swollen with crying, and as she let us in she blew her nose into a handkerchief.
"I'm sorry," she said without preamble. "I know you're here to ask questions about Mother's death, but I don't know how much help I'm going to be. I was somewhat wakeful last night, I heard crashes outside, but my rooms face away from the garden. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to go see what had happened." She wrapped her arms around herself.
"Do you know who might have wanted to kill Gada?" I asked.
She shook her head. "The only person I could think of is Honora, if she was tired of waiting for Mother to die so she could take over. But they got along well, and I don't think Honora is the type. I just don't know."
"What do you know about Murdock?"
"Oh, him." She blew out a breath. "He's an ass, excuse my language. Stringing Baptista along like that. But she forgives him every time he breaks her heart, so it's not like there's only one partner in that dance. I wish she'd meet someone who was actually nice to her."
I persisted with, "Is he on the level, work-wise?"
Neva shrugged. "As far as I know."
There didn't seem to be any more we could ask from her, and so we trooped out. As we walked down the corridor, Bambi held a piece of parchment up with a grin. "Look what I got."
"What?" Palil asked. I looked sharply at her--she sounded tired, and now that I was paying attention I could feel that she was physically uncomfortable, somehow. I hoped she wasn't ill. It was probably just an aftereffect of being so sick a day ago.
"A shopping list. Come on." We stepped into a side room, and Bambi produced the note that had been giving to the investigators, threatening their families. We compared the handwriting. Completely different.
Palil's face was thoughtful. "If we can get handwriting samples from everyone, we might be able to clear the innocent, at least. Bambi, Beamer, Lida, can you see if you can get samples from Honora, Cliantha, Baptista, and Quimby? Meet us back at the quarters." They nodded and took off.
As we walked to the quarters we'd been given, a complex of rooms that were designed for an ambassador and their staff, I nudged Palil with my mind. You okay?
She shrugged. Touchy stomach today, she said. I'll hunt later and see if it helps.
If it keeps bothering you, go talk to Haven, I told her sternly. She rolled her eyes, but told me she would.
We met up with the others in the ambassador's quarters, and I dragged Jordan off for a few minutes of alone time. (Okay, it's not like he resisted.) When we came back out into the main room, the others had returned. We spread out the handwriting samples on the table.
Blaise blinked and grabbed one of them. "Look, this one matches. Who's this?"
Beamer and Lida looked at each other. "Quimby."
It looked like we had our murderer. We still didn't know why, and...they hadn't been here last night.
"Do you think they came back early, before the cordon was lifted?" Lida said.
"They shouldn't have, they knew that the plague takes the whites the hardest," Aldaric said.
Bambi's eyes were thoughtful. "But if they came back anyway...they must have had protection. Which means they're on the take from Reuben."
Blaise had hopped up on the table, dangling her legs off the edge. "Hey, isn't Jezik still here? Maybe he'll know more."
Palil and I looked at each other. "We should go talk to Jezik," I said. "Now."
Jezik was being kept in a far corner of the palace, guarded by a rather large number of humans and elves. They let the humanoids through, and kept the dragons away. Jezik was at a desk, reading a scroll when we walked in. "If you're here to ask if I killed Gada, I didn't."
"I know," I told him. "Someone else did. Tell me, do you know if Reuben has anyone in the palace who's on the take?"
He shrugged. "Not as far as I know, but he was keeping a lot of things from me."
"Do you have any idea what the situation here is? Have you seen much of Gada's daughters?"
He shrugged. "I met Honora and Neva and their bondmates right after I arrived. I liked Neva, we spent some time talking at dinner that night. She's level-headed. She and her bondmate were very close, I heard she died of the plague."
"We talked to her, she's pretty wrecked," I said. "What about Honora?"
"A priss," he replied. "I've seen the type before. More interested in how she looks than anything else. Cliantha's all right, though." He paused and added, "I did meet Baptista last night. She came in late, about midnight, and wanted to know if I was still in contract with Reuben. I told her the truth, that I hardly even hear echoes of him any more. I think Tiamat's uninterested in having a bondmate."
"Probably," I said, but the hairs on the back of my neck were standing at attention. Baptista had lied. She'd gotten back last night. "What was your impression of Baptista?"
"She had Quimby with her, which struck me as odd. She was angry, and Quimby was agitated. Something was going on there, I don't know what and they didn't give me a chance to ask."
"Strange," I said. "We're working on finding a cure for you being a carrier, by the way."
He smiled wryly. "I guessed you were," he said. "I'll sit tight until you find something."
We said our goodbyes and left, and joined the others. We went to go grab Jordan and Gannon and go talk to Murdock. Murdock, I thought, might need some violence.
As we walked towards the bailey where we'd been told we'd find Murdock, I couldn't help but notice that Gannon fell in right at Palil's shoulder. He was holding his head high, watchful. More watchful than usual. It looked like he was feeling mighty protective of my bondmate right then.
I smothered a smile. Biology was starting to get the better of the two of them. I hoped Palil was planning to have that conversation with Gannon sometime soon, because I sort of thought that things might happen between them whether or not they talked about it first.
I reminded myself to tell Gannon that if he wanted to impress her, he should probably do some glaring at other males in front of her. If I knew my bondmate like I thought I did, a little show of protectiveness and possessiveness would definitely not go amiss, and it might even convince her that he had feelings for her that he didn't usually show.
I smirked and kept walking.
Palil:
Murdock was a man of middling height and average looks. I looked at him, trying to see what Baptista saw in him, and didn't manage it. "Ambassadors," he said. "I hear you've been poking around. Tell me, do you think the same thing's going on as I am?"
I blinked. "And what do you think is going on?"
"Quimby killed Gada. I don't know if Baptista helped, but she can't be innocent, the two of them are too close." He frowned. "I've never liked Quimby, and he doesn't like me. I didn't think he'd kill Gada, though. They came back last night, I went looking for Baptista, but she wasn't in her rooms."
"There may have been extenuating circumstances," I told him. I nudged Beamer with my mind. Do you have the surface-thought reading spell up?
I'll be able to tell you if he's lying, he said back.
"And what might those be?"
"Involvement from another government," I told him. "Tell me, do you know anything about the servants' water being spiked with sleeping potion last night?"
He blinked. "What? Is that why everyone was so hard to wake this morning?"
Truth, said Beamer. He's genuinely surprised.
I shrugged. "The water was something like half sleeping potion. Do you know anything else that might be useful?"
Murdock looked at me steadily. "Not really."
Lie, Beamer said.
I let just the smallest of cruel smiles come over my face. I stepped forward a half-step, holding Murdock's gaze with my own. "I think you do know useful things, Murdock."
I don't know what he saw on my face, but he went just a bit pale. "I-- The portals. I know about the portals."
"How?"
"I saw Quimby take a friend of his through one east of here," he said. "Quimby's best friends have always been these white dragons. Rough crowd. He brought one of them through, and returned a little while later. That was one of the first dragons to die from the plague."
I stopped. Blinked. Tilted my head. "How long ago was that?"
"A week. He died the day Jezik arrived."
Jezik wasn't the vector for the plague--or at least not the only one. The white dragon had gone somewhere, been infected. But if Jezik wasn't a carrier, a vector--
What did all of the people who had originally gotten ill have in common?
I heard Gannon's voice in my mind, strained. The portals. Everyone who got sick originally went through the portals.
They're spreading it, Sondirra said. The plague is living in the portal system.
I was still facing down Murdock. "I suggest that you leave town. Things may be about to get--interesting."
He shook his head. "I was hoping Baptista would be able to come out all right. But--no. I'll go."
We took our leave, and walked back to our quarters. Orion? I called. We have another candidate for a bondmate for you.
Who? he replied.
Neva. She's just lost her bondmate, and I think she's my pick for leadership here. She needs a bondmate if she's going to rule.
I'll go meet her and talk to her, he said, and went silent.
So, what did we do? We could kill Quimby and Baptista. That left Cliantha and Honora in charge. If Orion bonded with Neva, together the pair of them could probably stare down the other two and mostly just declare that they were taking over. But that left Cliantha and Honora as powerful loose ends, ripe for plotting or being influenced by Reuben.
In the end, it was Jordan who suggested the solution.
"You guys haven't thought of this because this isn't the way you think, but why not let the four of them kill each other? I'd give Quimby and Baptista good odds of killing Honora and Cliantha, and maybe we'll get lucky and all four of them will kill each other. Just tell Honora what we've found out, and sit back and watch the bloodshed. Neva takes over, free and clear, and we're done here."
It was simple. Easy. It would work.
Of course I immediately hated the idea.
However, even I had to admit that it was a good one, and it was the only thing that would work out with Neva ending up leading. A few minutes later, Orion reported that he'd bonded with Neva, much to Neva's startlement. He sounded pleased with himself. We were clear to go.
It was the work of about ten minutes to go talk to Honora and tell her what her sister had done. Twenty minutes later, there were raised voices in the garden at the center of the palace. Raised voices led to a fight that left the landscaping in shambles and Cliantha and Honora dead, and Baptista and Quimby heavily wounded.
At that point, we stepped in, told them that their lives were forfeit as traitors, and Jordan finished them both off.
Orion was explaining to Neva who we really were and what all was going on while we gathered in a corner and used a message spell to contact the nearest portal. It worked, much to my surprise. The portal said that there had been canisters of a fluid that carried the plague placed in the system, and the system was under orders to mist everyone who transited through with it. I told the gate to disassemble the canisters in the same way it disassembled people who were disappeared for good in the gate system.
It did so. I then asked it if there were any other Karop clerics who were giving the system orders.
There were three. All of them more highly-ranking than me, and all had ordered the portals not to divulge their names and locations.
I passed the news on to Chaim, who said he'd talk to the portals next time he was close to one. And then, finally, we went to talk to Neva, the new leader of this territory.
She first invited us to stay for as long as we wanted. She seemed a lot less grief-torn than she had before, though still sad. She also said she was going to be making overtures to both Chaim and Isla, trying to get a coalition together to fight Reuben. "Otherwise, we're going to be overrun. Chaim, I trust, will be all right. Isla...Isla worries me. I talked to mother a bit about her. I don't know why she's being the way she is, but we need her. If she stays isolated, she'd going to get taken over. We have a chance, if all three of our territories ally."
"We're probably heading down there soon," I said, thinking ahead. "If we have approval from both Chaim and you to try to broker some sort of agreement..."
She smiled. "I'm sure something can be arranged," she told me. "Are you staying for the funerals? Mother and Jalena's will be two days from now."
I nodded. "If we have your hospitality for that long."
"Of course!" We talked for a while longer, then Neva left to continue the things she needed to do to prepare for the several state funerals in her near future, as well as consolidating her reign.
I didn't envy her what was going to come after she was not so blindingly busy. She had lost so many people, in such a short period of time. I'm sure having Orion was a comfort, but grief was grief.
We were given access to Gada's personal records, and I satisfied my own curiosity about why Gada had given up the Chelyabinsk area of her territory to Yafa so easily. It turned out that Yafa had intended to kill everyone in the territory to get to the giant cache; rather than waste the lives, Gada had given it to her in return for having some of her people trained at #2 on occasion.
Another thing caught my eye as I was flipping through the papers. Gada, at one point, had had a MI. They had found that under the city of Kazan was a completely intact frost giant city, protected by a powerful shield. She had pulled her people out of there and said not a word to anyone.
Interesting, that. We needed to go check it out.
But first, we needed to stay here a few days, and attend yet another funeral...
sail ho heave ho come on let go
your time on earth is over
I watch you sleeping on the bed
I'm talking to your soul
did you ever think it'd be like this?
did you ever think you'd laugh so much?
did you ever think you'd have to try so hard?
oh...
did you ever think it'd be like this?
did you ever think you'd walk away?
you and me running through
the back streets of the world
like a pack of hounds of two
wanting more and more love
and how much is too much?
did you ever think we'd love so hard?
fighting hard and hurting worse
oh...you're sailing away...
--Jane Sieberry, The Vigil (The Sea)
your time on earth is over
I watch you sleeping on the bed
I'm talking to your soul
did you ever think it'd be like this?
did you ever think you'd laugh so much?
did you ever think you'd have to try so hard?
oh...
did you ever think it'd be like this?
did you ever think you'd walk away?
you and me running through
the back streets of the world
like a pack of hounds of two
wanting more and more love
and how much is too much?
did you ever think we'd love so hard?
fighting hard and hurting worse
oh...you're sailing away...
--Jane Sieberry, The Vigil (The Sea)
Quotes:
"Would it be crass to do a Speak with Dead?"
--Beamer
"She probably thinks we're spies."
"Well, we are."
--Bambi, Palil
