She could see Torlani wrestling with himself. He picked up one of his own loaves of bread and bit into it, chewing savagely, muttering to himself. He swallowed and said, “If this comes back to me, I will deny everything.”
“I’m not doing this for a magistrate,” Kizzie said bluntly. “Nobody is going to know who it came from.”
He hesitated for several more long moments before he spoke quietly. “Fine. I was standing just here at the moment of her murder. I heard yelling from the square, and when I looked” – he glanced toward the other end of the alley – “a man wearing a plain white mask came sprinting from that way. He tripped right in front of my cart and his mask came off for just a few seconds. I pretended not to see, but he didn’t even look at me. He put his mask back on and took off.”
“And you recognized him?”
“Of course I did. He’s bought bread from me before.”
Kizzie felt her heartbeat quicken. “And?”
“It was Churian Dorlani.”
Kizzie felt her knees go just a little bit weak. Churian Dorlani was not, as these things went, a very important person. He was a mid-ranking cousin in the Dorlani guild-family. The fact that he had the Dorlani name at all was what caused a sweat to break out in the small of Kizzie’s back. They were one of the five most powerful guild-families in Ossa, and their matriarch sat on the Inner Assembly.
This was supposed to be a Grent conspiracy. Why was a guild-family member involved?
“Did you tell the Cinders?” she asked.
Torlani shook his head. “Of course not. Outing one of the Dorlani to the Cinders would be a death sentence.”
“But you told me. Even if you owed Adriana your livelihood…” Kizzie stopped herself. Was she so surprised by this she was questioning the intelligence of her own witness?
Instead of being annoyed, Torlani simply shook his head. “I sold a lot of bread to Adriana and to Demir. People have tried to forget him, but I remember when he was the most important person in Ossa. I remember how hard he tried to get people to see him as a politician instead of a glassdancer. There aren’t many people who pass by my cart who want to change the world for the better, and I make note of those that do. If Demir wants to avenge his mother I will aid him in what small way I can.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Kizzie pulled a wad of banknotes out of her pocket – Demir could afford to be generous – and slipped them onto Torlani’s tray, taking another loaf of bread with her. She walked back out into the square again, pondering her predicament. She’d half expected some guild-family to be involved. But the Dorlani …
This job had suddenly gotten a lot more complicated and a lot more dangerous. Part of her wanted to go back to Demir, return his money, and tell him to deal with it himself. She buried that inclination. She was not a coward. She’d taken on a job and she would damn well see it through.
She would have to be careful from here on out.
9
Demir returned to the Hyacinth in the early morning. He’d been up all night trying to piece together the rest of his mother’s spy network within the Foreign Legion – dozens of contacts, of which only seven proved viable – and he’d done it all while lugging around an injured, frightened falcon. It wasn’t his best work, and by the time he slipped through the back door of his hotel he was exhausted and frustrated. He went directly up the back stairwell to the roof, where there was a flat section set back from the vision of the street below.
The mews here was a large one, nearly as big as a stateroom – a massive cage divided into sections for multiple birds, and with its own equipment closet. It was long-abandoned, seemingly untouched since his own falcon died when he was twelve. He took the injured bird with him into the biggest of the cages and gently let it find a perch before removing the makeshift hood. It shuddered, looking around and giving a loud, piercing screech.
The falcon leapt from one perch to another, favoring its left wing, trembling slightly. It shied away from the sound from the street below, and Demir wondered if he should erect a baffle along that side of the roof to stop some of the racket. It was a project for another day – or one of the hotel staff.
Demir sank down to the floor of the mews, watching the falcon adjust to its new surroundings, and took a deep breath. He’d pored over the morning newspapers on his ride back to the hotel. Every piece of news he came across seemed to read in a completely different light – a minor increase in the price of cindersand made his heart skip a beat; the closing of a major quarry in Purnia caused his jaw to clench; a Stavri cindersand warehouse burning down, all contents ruined, left him feeling genuinely ill.
Yesterday all of those things would have been discarded as unrelated incidents – nothing major to worry about. Today they were obvious symptoms of a greater disease. The world was running out of cindersand. Without intervention, common sorcery would die out.
Just to settle himself down he’d spent the final leg of his journey reading a page 3 story about monsters being spotted in the provinces. That kind of lunatic rubbish usually put him in a better mood, but it had only caused his thoughts to grow darker. How could he solve the world’s problems when the average person believed in ghosts and swamp crawlers and tree men? The effort required to face the road ahead seemed insurmountable.
“Best I can do for you right now,” Demir said to the falcon, looking around at the mews. “I’ll send someone up to tend to that bloody wing, and I bet the kitchen has a hare or two. For now, though, I have something of my own I need to deal with.”
He left the poor animal in the mews and headed down to the hotel garden, purposefully avoiding his own staff – and the problems they’d present him with. He could let Breenen take care of all those, at least for the moment.
The hotel garden was a massive enclosed area the size of a regular city block, lined on all sides by hallways on the main floor and hotel rooms above those. It was a peaceful spot, keeping out the worst of the city noise, filled with trees, the beds layered with winter flowers. On the far side of the garden was an old glassworks – a small furnace room left over from when the hotel used to keep a siliceer on staff, well before Demir was born. He made a mental note to have it fixed, just in case he managed to find Thessa.
The old glassworks was not his destination, however. The only other building in the garden was a mausoleum. It was a beautiful construction of rare white Purnian marble with thick veins of purple running through it, decorated with the likenesses of the founders of the Grappo dynasty, their carved faces looking severe in the stone. On the surface the mausoleum was not very big – just a decorative obelisk with a heavy, worn wooden door. Most hotel visitors walked right past it, more interested in the rest of the massive garden.
The heavy door opened on oiled hinges, revealing a dark pit that Demir lit by turning a screw beneath a gas lantern just inside. White-and-purple marble stairs descended sharply into the ground. Demir proceeded slowly, lighting every lantern, as if dispelling the darkness within the crypt would dispel the same within his mind. The narrow stairway opened into a larger, vaulted room deep beneath the garden; a long chamber bigger than a hotel suite and lined with the marble busts of every guild-family matriarch and patriarch going back thirty generations.
Adriana Grappo’s ashes were contained in an urn near the far end of the crypt. The pedestal above the ashes was empty, as her bust had not yet been completed. Demir gazed at that empty spot with a frown, wrestling with something deeply unsatisfying about seeing her remains without her likeness to gaze upon. Of course, the likeness would not be the mother he remembered – the sculptor would produce a likeness of a young Adriana, taken from a portrait of her in her early twenties. He knew he would struggle with that too.