didn't want to be widely known as her father's daughter. Not here. Not yet.
On a morning near the end of her second month in the city-two weeks
after Candles Night-the object of her hunt finally appeared. She was in
her rooms, working on a guide to the treatment of fevers in older
patients. The fire was snapping and murmuring in the grate and a thin,
cold rain tapped at the shutters like a hundred polite mice asking
permission to enter. The scratch at the door startled her. She arranged
her robe and opened the door just as the slave outside it was raising
her hand to scratch again.
"Eiah-cha," the girl said, falling into a pose that was equal parts
apology and greeting. "Forgive me, but there's a man ... he says he has
to speak with you. He has a message."
"From whom?" Eiah demanded.
"He wouldn't say, Most High," the slave said. "He said he could speak
only with you."
Eiah considered the girl. She was little more than sixteen summers. One
of the youngest in the cities of the Khaiem. One of the last.
"Bring him," Eiah said. The girl made a brief pose that acknowledged the
command and fled back out into the damp night. Eiah shuddered and went
to add more coal to the fire. She didn't close the door.
The runner was a young man, broad across the shoulder. Twenty summers,
perhaps. His hair was soaked and sticking to his forehead. His robe hung
heavily from his shoulders, sodden with the rain.
"Eiah-cha," he said. "Parit-cha sent me. He's at his workroom. He said
he has something and that you should come. Quickly."
She caught her breath, the first movements of excitement lighting her
nerves. The other times one or another of the physicians and healers and
herb women of the city had sent word, it had been with no sense of
urgency. A man ill one day was very likely to be ill the next as well.
This, then, was something different.
"What is it?" she asked.
The runner took an apologetic pose. Eiah waved it away and called for a
servant. She needed a thick robe. And a litter; she wasn't waiting for
the firekeeper. And now, she needed them now. The Emperor's daughter got
what she wanted, and she got it quickly. She and the boy were on the
streets in less than half a hand, the litter jouncing uncomfortably as
they were carried through the drizzle. The runner tried not to seem awed
at the palace servants' fear of Eiah. Eiah tried not to bite her
fingernails from anxiety. The streets slid by outside their shelter as
Eiah willed the litter bearers to go faster. When they reached Parit's
house, she strode through the courtyard gardens like a general going to war.
Without speaking, Parit ushered her to the back. It was the same room in
which she'd seen the last woman. Parit sent the runner away. There were
no servants. There was no one besides the two physicians and a body on
the wide slate table, covered by a thick canvas cloth soaked through
with blood.
"They brought her to me this morning," Parit said. "I called for you
immediately."
"Let me see," Eiah said.
Parit pulled back the cloth.
The woman was perhaps five summers older than Eiah herself, darkhaired
and thickly built. She was naked, and Eiah saw the wounds that covered
her body: belly, breasts, arms, legs. A hundred stab wounds. The woman's
skin was unnaturally pale. She'd bled to death. Eiah felt no revulsion,
no outrage. Her mind fell into the patterns she had cultivated all her
life. This was only death, only violence. This was where she was most at
home.
"Someone wasn't happy with her," Eiah said. "Was she a soft-quarter whore?"
Parit startled, his hands almost taking a pose of query. Eiah shrugged.
"That many knife wounds," she said, "aren't meant only to kill. Three or
four would suffice. And the spacing of them isn't what I've seen when
the killer had simply lost control. Someone was sending a message."
"She wasn't stabbed," Parit said. He took a cloth from his sleeve and
tossed it to her. Eiah turned back to the corpse, wiping the blood away
from a wound in the dead woman's side. The smear of gore thinned. The
nature of the wound became clear.
It was a mouth. Tiny rosebud lips, slack as sleep. Eiah told her hand to
move, but for a long moment her flesh refused her. Then, her breath
shallow, she cleaned another. And then another.
The woman was covered with babies' mouths. Eiah's fingertips traced the
tiny lips that had spilled the woman's lifeblood. It was a death as
grotesque as any Eiah had heard in the tales of poets who had tried to
bind the andat and fallen short.
Tears filled her eyes. Something like love or pity or gratitude filled
her heart to bursting. She looked at the woman's face for the first
time. The woman hadn't been pretty. A thick jaw, a heavy brow, acne
pocks. Eiah held back from kissing her cheek. Parit was confused enough
as it stood. Instead, Eiah wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took the
dead woman's hand.
"What happened?" she asked.
"The watch saw a cart going west out of the soft quarter," Parit said.
"The captain said there were three people, and they were acting nervous.
When he hailed them, they tried to run."
"Did he catch them?"
Parit was staring at Eiah's hand clasping the dead woman's fingers.
"Parit," she said. "Did he catch them?"
"What? No. No, all three slipped away. But they had to abandon the cart.
She was in it," Parit said, nodding at the corpse. "I'd asked anything
unusual to be brought to me. I offered a length of silver."
"They earned it," Eiah said. "Thank you, Parit-kya. I can't tell you how
much this means."
"What should we do?" Parit asked, sitting on his stool like a fresh
apprentice before his master. He'd always done that when he felt himself
at sea. Eiah found there was warmth in her heart for him even now
"Burn her," Eiah said. "Burn her with honors and treat her ashes with
respect."
"Shouldn't we ... shouldn't we tell someone? The utkhaiem? The Emperor?"
"You already have," Eiah said. "You've told me."
There was a moment's pause. Parit took a pose that asked clarification.
It wasn't quite the appropriate one, but he was flustered.
"This is it, then," he said. "This is what you were looking for."
"Yes," Eiah said.
"You know what happened to her."
"Yes."
"Would you..." Parit coughed, looked down. His brow was knotted. Eiah
was half-tempted to go to him, to smooth his forehead with her palm.
"Could you explain this to me?"
"No," she said.
AFTER THAT, IT WAS SIMPLE. THEY WOULDN'T REMAIN IN SARAYKEHT, NOT WHEN
they'd so nearly been discovered. The Emperor's daughter asked favors of