My next words emerged as gentler than I’d expected them to be, gentler by far than anything I’d said so far. I spoke to the people behind the rigid faces, the souls in cages driven to their crimes. “I feel sorry for you, really. In a way, you’re not responsible for what you’ve done. Driven by a loyalty that’s been imposed on you, you’ve served the Bettelhines as best you could, the only way you could, given your suspicions of an internal conspiracy that must have left you agonizing over who to trust.
“But you still murdered the Khaajiir.
“And you’re still a threat to the rest of us.
“And since we cannot determine your identity by communicating with Xana and determining which one of you obtained the Claws and gave the necessary orders, we might have been left with nothing and been stuck here until the air or food ran out.”
I took a deep breath.
“But fortunately we’ve been handed a little help.
“The Khaajiir himself told us who you are.”
That caused a commotion among everybody except the Porrinyards and Bettelhines, who knew where I was going: gasps of astonishment, frenzied conversation among those desperate to remember what the Khaajiir might have said and when he might have said it.
I gestured for silence and got it.
“This is what you need to keep in mind about the Khaajiir. He was a Bocaian, representative of a species that possesses little if any talent for the acquisition of new languages past adolescence. To counteract that limitation he used his staff as a personal translation system, without which he would have been unable to communicate with others.
“We also know something odd about him that flies in the face of this central fact: he admitted to a penchant for multilingual wordplay. When we met he regaled me with a secondary meaning of my name, Cort, and with additional interpretations of the names Oscin and Skye. He had additional information about the derivation of Porrinyard. In fact, he embraced his title, Khaajiir, a K’cenhowten construction, because of its coincidental similarities to his Bocaian name. We know he regaled Mr. Mendez with similar information. I’m sure he did the same to the rest of you. Am I correct?”
Paakth-Doy raised her hand. “When I served him on the way up, he told me about an extinct beast of burden known as the Paarkth by the ancient Riirgaans who domesticated it. Not quite my name, Paakth. But similar.”
Jason said, “And he was fond of telling me stories about an ancient mythological hero with my name. An Earthman, known for journeying.”
There was a hubbub. Colette had been told of another antiquated word, coquette. Jelaine had been apprised of certain words similar to Bettelhine among races I had never heard of. Oscin had been treated to a discourse on witty derivations of the planetary name Xana. I had known of none of these, but I wasn’t surprised at all. They all fit the childlike delight the monolingual Khaajiir felt for the infinite possibilities of cross-cultural vocabulary.
I waited for the moment of mass discovery to die down, then said, “Off-the-cuff observations like these did a lot to further the man’s erudite reputation, but a moment’s consideration will confirm that they likely had nothing to do with him. He cheated.”
Dejah got it first. “His staff.”
“That’s correct,” I said. “He was able to use the databases of extinct and extant languages in its translation program and construct wordplay at a moment’s notice.
“He fell into the habit because he enjoyed it, because it impressed people, and—in my case, and who knows how many others—because it aided small talk and helped to defuse hostile situations. Look at me. I hated him before he pulled that Cort/Court comparison. Afterward I wrote him off as chatty and harmless.”
“Don’t forget boring,” Dina said. “And what does any of that have to do with anything?”
I nodded at Skye, who immediately turned around and crossed to the easy chair still bearing the Khaajiir’s corpse. It was on a swivel, and as she turned it on its base many of those gathered here all gasped at the further deterioration of the corpse, which remained in the same essential position but had slumped still farther into the cushions as its internal structures drained away. As far as I could tell, he had been a friendly and well-meaning sentient, with animus toward none. But now he was just meat.
Neither Brown nor Wethers had made a sound. When I turned to them they were both stone-faced and waiting for the point.
“It’s a hideous death,” I said. “But not as painful a death as it appears. I’ve been told tonight that the Claw of God offers a small mercy all its own, in that it fries the pain receptors and thus leaves its victims largely unaware of the changes taking place inside them. The Khaajiir could have been sitting in this chair for several minutes, melting on the inside and growing steadily weaker as the hemorrhage continued. Because the seat cushion soaked up much of the blood, and the armrests prevented any from leaking out at his sides, the rest of us missed what was happening until it was too late. The Khaajiir, who felt no pain, almost missed it himself. But I noted this at the time. Skye?”
Skye raised the Khaajiir’s left arm by the wrist, revealing a palm stained black with dried gore.
“And this.”
She pointed to the tiny little bloodstain at the tip of the Khaajiir’s nose.
“Now put him back the way we found him.”
She placed his left hand back on the armrest, positioning the palm on the stain it had left. Oscin, who had the Khaajiir’s staff, took it back to the chair and slipped it back where we had found it, resting across both armrests with his arms on top.
Dejah got it first. “Oh, Juje. He knew.”
“That’s right,” I told the others. “The placement of the bloodstains leaves no room for doubt.
“Think back to the first few moments after the emergency stop. We’re all running around dealing with our own concerns, including several serious injuries, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Jason and Jelaine escort the Khaajiir, the frailest and most vulnerable guest, to this chair, ascertaining that he’s all right before abandoning him to deal with other pressing injuries. Several others among us, including Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers, also stop by the Khaajiir’s chair to check up on him. The application of the Claw of God may take place at any point during this interval. The Khaajiir may even feel a slight charge at the moment of contact, but he thinks nothing of it.
“Long minutes pass. The rest of us ignore the Khaajiir because we have other things to worry about. The Khaajiir starts feeling weak. But he’s fragile and old and no doubt attributes what he’s feeling to the shock he’s experienced.
“But then something happens.
“Either because he feels the wetness pooling underneath him and suspects what has happened, or just from random happenstance, he drops his left hand to his side, into the blood pooling around him.