“Who got killed?” she inquired.
“Well—I’ve been asked to keep it quiet, but—” Smith leaned closer still. “It was Sharplin Coppercut, the writer.”
He watched her face closely. The gleam vanished at once, to be followed by a look of disappointment and chagrin. “Oh, no, really? I never missed his columns! He did that wonderfully steamy unauthorized biography of Lady What’s-her-name, the shipping heiress, didn’t he? The Imaginary Virgin? Oh, how awful!”
“Was he a personal acquaintance of yours?”
“Heavens, no. One doesn’t associate with writers,” said Lady Shanriana, looking even more dismayed. She fumbled with the latch on her door. Smith opened it for her and bowed her in.
“On the other hand, once the news is made public, you’ll be able to tell people you had the room across from the one Sharplin Coppercut was in when he died,” Smith pointed out. She seemed distinctly pleased at that. “I hope you weren’t inconvenienced when it happened?”
“No; I was out on the terrace all night. At least, I think I was. Yes, I’m sure I must have been, because there was a whole party of officers from somebody’s war galleon, and they all claimed me because they serve the Spirit of the Waters, don’t they, you see? So we had a lovely time all evening. I must have missed the killing. I suppose it was a dreadfully bloody affair? Assassins all in black leather, hooded?” Her eyes glazed with a private fantasy.
“Something like that,” Smith said.
“Ooh. Send up that porter quickly, please. And a plate of sausage.” Lady Shanriana rubbed her hands together.
Descending the staircase, Smith crossed her off his mental list of suspects. In his previous line of work, he had developed the knack of reading people’s expressions fairly well. Lady Shanriana might have a kink for bloodshed, but she had been genuinely startled to hear of Coppercut’s death.
He caught New Smith in the lobby and gave him Lady Shanriana’s breakfast order, just as a naval officer came stumbling in from the terrace, struggling into his tunic.
“What time is it?” he demanded wildly, as his face emerged from the collar.
“First Prayer Interval was an hour ago,” Smith told him. He calmed down somewhat.
“Where’s the nearest bathhouse?” he inquired. “I’ve got blue stuff all over me.”
“The Spirit of the Waters…?” Smith prompted him, mentally adding the word alibi next to Lady Shanriana’s name.
“Oh! That’s right.” The officer grinned as memory returned to him. “Gods! She started with the midshipmen at sundown and worked her way through to the admiral by midnight. Drowned us all. Joyous couplings! Great food here, too.”
“We get a lot of celebrity clientele,” Smith said. “Sharplin Coppercut, for example.”
“Who’s that?” The officer dug a sequin out of an unlikely place.
“The writer.”
“Really? Never heard of him. Say, did I ask you where there was a bathhouse?”
“There’s one around the corner on Cable Street,” Smith said. “Joyous couplings.”
“You too,” said the officer, striding across the lobby. At the door he turned back, a look of inquiry on his face.
“It has a prophylaxis station, also,” Smith assured him. Beaming, he saluted and left.
In the course of the next hour, Smith worked his way through the surviving hotel guests as they became conscious. The occupants of Room 4 were an elderly married couple from Port Blackrock who were in their room all evening, except for a foray onto the balcony to watch the fireworks. They had only vaguely heard of Sharplin Coppercut, being under the impression he was somebody who’d run for dictator of their city three terms ago, or was it four? They bickered about whether it was three or four terms ago for several minutes, until abruptly deciding they were both wrong and that Sharplin Coppercut had been the name of their grandson’s first rhetoric tutor, the one who’d had such bad teeth.
“You didn’t happen to hear anything unusual last night, did you?” Smith inquired, whereupon they got into a debate over what could be considered unusual in a hotel like this at Festival, with a lengthy reminiscence on how Festival had been celebrated in the old days, followed by a rumination on hotels both general and specific. Half an hour later, Smith thanked them and left. He was fairly confident they were not Coppercut’s killers.
The occupant of Room 5 was a thickset, sullen businessman who had to be retrieved from under a table on the terrace and revived with a dose of hangover powders. He was profoundly surly even after the powders had taken effect, was missing his purse and sandals and threatened to beat Smith to a pulp if they’d been stolen, and was barely more gracious when Crucible located them safely tucked away under the chair he’d been sitting in the night previous. He ostentatiously checked the contents of the purse, threatening to fracture Crucible’s jaw if anything had gone missing.
When it proved that nothing had been stolen, he ordered breakfast and threatened to break Smith’s legs if it wasn’t delivered to his room in fifteen minutes.
Not the sort of man to employ poison as a means of killing someone.
Returning down the corridor, Smith saw pink smoke curling out from under the door of Lord Ermenwyr’s suite and heard terrifying laughter coming from the room beyond. Shuddering, he walked on and went back to the kitchen.
“…much more digestible,” Mrs. Smith was saying as he walked in. She and Burnbright were bending over another sea dragon, but this one was a dessert with a fruit bombe forming its body and a curved neck and head of marzipan. Lined up on trays on the table were row upon row of sugar scales, like disks of green glass, and Mrs. Smith was carefully applying them to the sea dragon’s back with a pair of kitchen tweezers.
“Hello, Smith,” she said, glancing up at him. “Any progress?”
“Some,” said Smith. He pulled out a kitchen stool and sat down, staring glumly at the sea dragon. “This is our entry for the Festival cooking contest?”
“The Pageant of Lascivious Cuisine for the Prolongation of Ecstasy’,” Mrs. Smith informed him. “I’ve got a good chance of winning, or so my spies tell me. The chef over at the Sea Garden failed to get in a special shipment of liqueurs he was counting on, and the chef at the spa’s entry is simply an immense jam roll frosted to look like a penis. Ought to be quite a subliminal qualm of horror amongst the judges when it’s sliced up and served out, wouldn’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Smith, wincing and crossing his legs.
“We’ll do the wings next,” Mrs. Smith told Burnbright. “Melon sugar, pomegranate dye, and rum, boiled to a hard syrup the same way. I’ll show you the shapes I want it cut once it’s cooled. How’s our little mystery going?” she inquired of Smith.
“None of the other guests did the murder,” said Smith, rubbing his temples.
“It still wasn’t me,” said Burnbright, clouding up.
“Silly child, nobody ever thought it was you for a minute. You know, Smith, anyone might have wandered in from the street and done for Coppercut, in all that pullulating frenzy of lust going on last night,” Mrs. Smith remarked, setting scales in a ring around the dragon’s eye. “And it’s not as though there’s any shortage of people with motives. After the way he told all about the scandalous lives of the well-to-do? Especially Lady Quartzhammer, who, as I believe, was depicted in the best-selling The Imaginary Virgin as having a passionate affair with a dwarf.”
“And a bunch of goats,” added Burnbright, stirring pomegranate dye into sugar syrup.
“Something dreadfully unsavory, in any case. To say nothing of the expose he did on House Steelsmoke! I shouldn’t think they particularly cared to have it known that Lord Pankin’s mother was also his sister, and a werewolf into the bargain.” Mrs. Smith turned the sea dragon carefully and started another row of scales.