Klaristen’s eyes were open, and there was life in them, but no sign of consciousness. They were set in a fixed stare like those of a statue; and only when Varaile passed her hand before them, which produced a blink, did they give any indication that her brain was still functioning. Klaristen looked even more broken and twisted than the other two. A two-stage impact, Varaile supposed, shuddering: Klaristen hitting the two strangers first, rebounding from them, coming down again and landing hard, perhaps head first, against the cobblestoned street.
“Klaristen?” Varaile murmured. “Can you hear me, Klaristen?”
“She’s leaving us, lady,” said Bettaril quietly.
Yes. Yes. As she watched, Varaile could see the expression of Klaristen’s eyes changing, the last bit of awareness departing, a new rigidity overtaking them. And then the texture of the eyes themselves altered, becoming weirdly flat and strangely flecked, as if the forces of decay, though only just unleashed, were already taking command of the girl’s body. It was a remarkable sight, that transition from life to death, Varaile thought, greatly astonished at her own analytical coolness in this terrible moment.
Poor Klaristen. She had been no more than sixteen, Varaile supposed. A good, simple girl from one of the outlying districts of the city, out by the Field of Great Bones, where the fossil monsters had been discovered. What could have possessed her to take her own life this way?
“The doctor’s here,” someone said. “Make way for the doctor! Make way!”
But the doctor very quickly ratified Varaile’s own diagnosis: there was nothing to be done. They were dead, all three. He produced drugs and needles and attempted to jolt them back to life, but they were beyond rescue.
A big rough-voiced man called out for a magus to be fetched, one who could witch the dead ones alive again with some potent spell. Varaile glared at him. These simple people, with their simple faith in wizards and spells! How embarrassing, how annoying! She and her father employed mages and diviners themselves, of course—it was only sensible, if you wanted to steer clear of unpleasant surprises in life—but she hated the modern credulous popular faith in occult powers that so many people had embraced without reservation or limit. A good soothsayer could be very useful, yes. But not in bringing the dead back to life. The best of them did seem to be able to glimpse the future, but the working of miracles was more than their skills could encompass.
And why, come to think of it, Varaile asked herself, had their household magus, Vyethorn Kamman, given them no warning of the dreadful deed that the housemaid Klaristen was planning to enact?
“Are you the Lady Varaile?” a new voice asked. “Imperial proctors, ma’am.” She saw men in uniforms, gray with black stripes. Badges bearing the pontifical emblem were flashed. They were very respectful. Took in the situation at a glance, the bodies, the blood on the cobblestones; cleared the crowd back; asked her if her father was home. She told them that he was attending the coronation as Count Fisiolo’s guest, which produced an even deeper air of deference. Did she know any of the victims? Only one, she said, this one here. A maid of the house. Jumped out of a window up there, did she? Yes. Apparently so, said Varaile. And had this girl been suffering from any emotional disturbance, ma’am? No, said Varaile. Not that I know of.
But how much could she really ever know, after all, of the emotional problems of a fourth-floor chambermaid? Her contact with Klaristen had been infrequent and superficial, limited mostly to smiles and nods. Good morning, Klaristen. Lovely day, isn’t it, Klaristen? Yes, I’ll send someone up to the top floor to fix that sink, Klaristen. They had never actually spoken with each other, as Varaile understood the term. Why should they have?
It quickly became clear, though, that things had been seriously amiss with Klaristen for some time. The team of proctors, having finished inspecting the scene in the street and gone into the house to interview members of the household staff, brought that fact out into the open almost at once.
“She started waking up crying about three weeks ago,” said plump jolly old Thanna, the third-floor maid, who had been Klaristen’s roommate in the servants’ quarters. “Sobbing, wailing, really going at it. But when I asked what the matter was, she didn’t know. Didn’t even know she’d been crying, she said.”
“And then,” said Vardinna, the kitchen-maid, Klaristen’s closest friend on the staff, “she couldn’t remember my name one day, and I laughed at her and told it to her, and then she went absolutely white and said she couldn’t remember her own name, either. I thought she was joking. But no, no, she really seemed not to know. She looked terrified. Even when I said, ‘Klaristen, that’s your name, silly,’ she kept saying, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’ ”
“And then the nightmares began,” Thanna said. “She’d sit up screaming, and I’d put the light on and her face would be like the face of someone who had just seen a ghost. Once she jumped up and tore all her nightclothes off, and I could see she was sweating all over her body, so wet it was like she’d gone for a bath. And her teeth chattering loud enough to hear in the next street. All this week she had the nightmares real bad. Most of the time she couldn’t tell me what the dreams had been, just that they were awful. The only one she could remember, it was that a monstrous bug had sat down over her face and started to suck her brain out of her skull, until it was altogether hollow inside. I said it was a sending of some kind, that she ought to go and see a dream-speaker, but of course people like us have no money for dream-speakers, and in any case she didn’t believe she was important enough to be receiving sendings. I never saw anyone so frightened of her dreams.”
“She told me about them too,” Vardinna said. “Then, the other day, she said she was starting to have the nightmares while she was awake, also. That something would start throbbing inside her head and then she’d see the most horrid visions, right in front of her eyes, even while she was working.”
To Varaile the head proctor said, “You received no report of any of this, lady?”
“Nothing.”
“The fact that one of your housemaids was apparently having a mental breakdown on your premises was something that you never in any way noticed?”
“Ordinarily I saw very little of Klaristen,” said Varaile coolly. “An upstairs maid in a large household—”
“Yes. Yes, of course, lady,” said the proctor, looking flustered and even alarmed, as though it was only belatedly dawning on him that he might be seeming to lay some share of responsibility for this thing upon the daughter of Simbilon Khayf.
Another of the proctors entered now. “We have identities of the dead people,” he announced. “They were visitors from Canzilaine, a man and a wife, Hebbidanto Throle and his wife Garelle. Staying at the Riverwall Inn, they were. An expensive hotel, the Riverwalclass="underline" only people of some substance would stay there. I’m afraid there will be heavy indemnities to pay, ma’am,” he said, glancing apologetically toward Varaile. “Not that that would be any problem for your father, ma’am, but even so—”
“Yes,” she said absently. “Of course.”
Canzilaine! Her father had important factories there. And Hebbidanto Throle: had she ever heard that name before? It seemed to her that she had. The thought came to her that he might have been some executive in her father’s employ, even the manager of one of the Canzilaine operations. Who had come to Stee with his wife on a holiday, perhaps, and had wanted to show her the stupendous mansion of his fabulously wealthy employer—
It was a chilling possibility. What a sad ending for their journey!