The Fire Seer (24 page)

“Maybe he’s not very smart.”

“That’s not the impression I get,” said Mandir. “Shall we go to the artisan district and buy something to eat?”

Taya nodded. “After that, we need to sit down and go over the case again. A lot has changed since last night.”

“Agreed,” said Mandir.

Chapter 31: Hrappa

Back at the guesthouse, well fed after a late lunch in the artisan district, Taya slid into her chair.

Mandir took up a stylus and a fresh tablet and sat across from her. “Let’s figure this out,” he said. “What do we have so far?”

Taya leaned forward and propped her chin in her hands. She hoped this exercise of Mandir’s turned up something, because if it didn’t, she had no idea how to proceed from here. “Four murders, one drugging, one theft, and too many suspects. Also not enough suspects. None of them look like the woman I saw in my vision.”

“Since the fourth murder and the drugging didn’t involve the use of illegal magic, let’s assume we’re dealing with two separate people,” said Mandir. “We’ll call them the jackal and the poisoner.” He wrote JACKAL and POISONER at the top of the tablet and drew lines in the clay to create a column for each.

Taya eyed the perfectly straight lines of his columns. The man was meticulous to a fault. “You think the poisoner was the one who killed Jaina?”

“For now I’m making that assumption,” said Mandir, “because it happened after the poisoner stole our mission tablets. But I could be wrong. What do we know about the jackal so far?”

“She’s a young woman,” said Taya. “And judging by her clothes, probably farmer caste. I think the other farmers, at least some of them, know who she is but aren’t telling us.”

“You know farmers are the least likely to be blessed with the Gift. Speaking from a numbers perspective, our jackal is more likely to be artisan or ruling caste.”

“Still, it happens,” said Taya. “Farmers can be born with the Gift. I’m proof of that.”

Under the JACKAL column, Mandir wrote YOUNG WOMAN, then beneath that, FARMER CASTE (?). “All right, the poisoner. What do we know about him? Or her.”

“The poisoner was at the magistrate’s party, so he’s probably artisan or ruling caste. He must have money since he possessed Echo.”

“You’re assuming it’s a man, but I’ve heard poison is a woman’s weapon.”

Taya sat back in her chair and rubbed her temples. “It could be either. Whoever it is, he doesn’t want us to find the jackal. He will kill to stop that from happening. And he took our
kimat
, which means he intends to harm us. Or possibly he means to harm the jackal.”

Under the POISONER column, Mandir wrote WEALTHY and then AT MAGISTRATE’S PARTY. “Anything else?”

Taya looked with displeasure at the paltry list. After seven days of investigation, this was all they had? “I can’t think of anything. And this isn’t much to go on.”

“We’ve got a lot of information; we just haven’t put it together yet.” Mandir frowned at the tablet. “I’m not seeing anything useful here. Let’s try another approach.” He took a fresh tablet and wrote, at the top, PERSONS OF INTEREST. Beneath that, he drew four columns and labeled them KALBI, BODHAN, ZASH, and RASIK. “All right, Kalbi. Could he be either the jackal or the poisoner?”

“Not the jackal,” said Taya. “Because he’s neither a woman nor a farmer. He could be the poisoner.”

“He had opportunity to poison us at the party,” said Mandir. “But did he have motive?”

“Flood and fire, I don’t know. His motive could be related to the court cases somehow. He did have a motive to kill his brother Hunabi. But that was the jackal’s crime, not the poisoner’s. Unless we’ve got it all wrong.” The words on the tablet blurred before her eyes. Maybe none of their assumptions were right. Maybe they had nothing at all.

Mandir picked up his stylus and flicked a stray bit of clay off the table. “How about Bodhan?”

“He can’t be the jackal either. None of the people you’ve listed on that tablet can be the jackal. They’re all men.”

“Could Bodhan be the poisoner?”

“I suppose. He’s wealthy and he was at the party. But we have the same problem with him as we did Kalbi. No clear motive.”

“I can think of a motive,” said Mandir. “Bodhan’s been cheating farmers by loaning them money at exorbitant rates and then forcing them to produce cotton for him at below-market prices. Two of the victims appear to be associated with this practice in some way: Hunabi, who apparently took sexual advantage of the people involved, and Narat, who is Bodhan’s own daughter. Could the jackal be enacting some sort of vigilante justice against Bodhan?”

Taya considered. That made some sense, but already she could see problems. “If the jackal’s motive is to punish Bodhan, or stop him from exploiting these families, why kill his daughter? It would be more effective, even more just, to kill Bodhan himself. Plus there’s the third victim, Zash’s sister, Amalia, who doesn’t fit the pattern at all.”

A line appeared in the middle of Mandir’s forehead. “She’s marginally related. Zash owes Bodhan money as well.”

“Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you’re right about the jackal in that she’s trying to stop Bodhan or at least carry out some sort of vengeance upon him. If that’s the case, why would Bodhan want to interfere with our investigation by stealing our tablets and killing the witness? He should
want
us to find the jackal.”

“Unless our finding the jackal will lead us to information he doesn’t want discovered.”

“We already know what he’s doing to the farmers,” said Taya. “And while it’s unethical, I don’t think it’s illegal.”

“Maybe he’s doing more that we don’t know about.”

Taya shrugged. She didn’t have a strong feeling about Bodhan being the poisoner, but Mandir’s logic made a modicum of sense. “All right. He’s our best suspect for the poisoner so far. Let’s move on to the others. What about Zash?”

Mandir sniffed. “There are a lot of things that bother me about Zash, beginning with the fact that he apparently chained his sister to the bed in that weird house in the middle of the banana plantation.”

“His
mad
sister,” she amended.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mandir. “It also bothers me that Amalia’s murder doesn’t fit the pattern of the other two murders.”

“So what do you think happened? Zash murdered his mad sister because she was inconvenient? And covered up his crime by making the scene look like the jackal did it?”

“Exactly that,” said Mandir.

“Even if he did kill his sister, it doesn’t make him either the jackal or the poisoner.”

“The jackal, no. But the poisoner...well, consider this. If Zash killed his sister, he has a very good reason for wanting us not to find the jackal. Because if we find the jackal and question her, we may learn that she didn’t commit that third murder.”

Taya gritted her teeth. That was the most sensible bit of reasoning she’d heard all afternoon, and she didn’t want to believe it, because she liked Zash. Yet she couldn’t ignore the possibility that Mandir could be right. “He fits the profile. He’s wealthy, and he was at the party last night.”

“And he kissed you after you’d been drugged.”

Which she didn’t remember, at least not in detail, but apparently Mandir did. There was something very wrong about all that. Why would Zash kiss her? Had she led him on at the party? She had no memory of doing so, although who knew, given the Echo amnesia. She did find him attractive.

What if the poisoner had never intended for her to sleep with Mandir that night? What if he’d intended something else entirely? Her stomach knotted. Raising her eyes to Mandir’s, she said, “Here’s a possibility. Maybe Zash drugged both of us, but his intention wasn’t for us to sleep with each other. It was for me to sleep with
him
.”

Mandir’s body became very tense. The stylus dropped onto the table with a thud. “Flood and fire. He wanted you to take him back to your guesthouse. Then when you were asleep and under the influence of the Echo amnesia, he would steal your tablets and your
kimat
and leave.”

“But
if
he intended that,
if
that was his plan—and I’m not saying it was—why would he drug you as well?” asked Taya.

“To stop me from interfering,” said Mandir. “And from remembering anything I’d seen that might incriminate him. You know, there was a woman at the party that night who tried to seduce me. She could have been working with Zash to distract me. Or not. I’m just not sure.” He rose from his chair and began to pace.

“I hate to say it,” said Taya. “But I think Zash is our top suspect, given the information we have.”

“Shall we go on to Rasik?” asked Mandir.

Taya glanced at the window. They were running out of daylight. “We’ve got no case against Rasik whatsoever. Our only evidence against him is that he’s angry at the world, and if that’s a crime, half the population of Hrappa would be guilty. I think we need to pay another visit to Zash, and the sooner the better.” Before the poisoner found an occasion to use the stolen
kimat
. “But if Zash is the poisoner, how does the jackal fit into all this?”

“I don’t know,” said Mandir. “Perhaps we’ll find out.”

Chapter 32: Hrappa

Mandir squinted at the sun as they cantered across the plains. It glowed sullen and hazy above the horizon, staining the flooded fields red. The farmers were still at work, but soon they’d be heading back to town. He and Taya would have to move quickly if they wanted to get back into Hrappa before the gates closed for the night.

Taya pulled up Pepper to let the mare catch her breath. As Mandir came alongside, he slowed his own horse to a walk. No sense exhausting the horses when the creatures had a return trip ahead of them.

“Tell me about your Year of Penance,” said Taya.

He hesitated. “Why do you want to know about that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

All kinds of reasons. Until now, she’d shown no interest at all in him as a person; she seemed determined to demonize him. But then he couldn’t blame her. During those years at Mohenjo, he
had
been a demon. “What would you like to know?”

She shrugged. “You said it changed you.”

“It did.”

“How so? And why?” asked Taya.

It was hard to put into words exactly what about that Year had changed him. Yet it had, and thoroughly. He’d never spoken to anyone about this before; it was intensely personal, and it embarrassed him a little. “I can’t say exactly why it had the effect it did.”

“What were you made to do? Manual labor?”

“No. Well...yes, some of it was manual labor. Not like what you’re thinking,” said Mandir. “I cleaned clothes and dishes and rooms. I prepared food for sick people. My assignment was to help a doctor in the city outside Rakigari.”

She looked at him sidelong. “You said you took
kimat
every day. You wouldn’t have had magic for healing.”

“This doctor wasn’t Coalition. He healed without magic, and so did I.”

“Healing without magic doesn’t work.”

“For the ailments this doctor dealt with, it did,” said Mandir. “Many of his patients weren’t so much sick in their bodies as they were sick in their hearts.”

She turned to him, looking perplexed.

“Some of them were Echo addicts.”

Her eyes brightened with understanding. “That’s why you know about Echo.”

Mandir nodded. “Yes. Do you know what Echo does? I mean, obviously you know what it does in the short term because you ended up taking it, as did I. But we had only a single dose. When you take Echo repeatedly, like those people did in Rakigari, your body begins to waste away. Echo addicts don’t eat. Eventually they starve.”

Her brows rose. “Why would someone drink something that makes them starve?”

Mandir smiled. She was made of strong stuff if the notion of self-injury was foreign to her. He’d certainly made her miserable enough at Mohenjo to tempt her down that dark path. But farmers were tough. He, on the other hand, had been tempted by Echo many times. “Some people are so unhappy, so sick in their hearts, that they don’t want to live anymore, at least not in a way that’s fully conscious. They prefer the living death of Echo.”

“I never considered Echo,” she said. “But I did sometimes feel that way at Mohenjo. Sick at heart.”

He felt a stab of guilt. His fault, that she’d been unhappy. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to her, if she would let him. “I’m sorry.”

Taya was silent, riding beside him.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he added, “I wasn’t happy at Mohenjo either.”

“Flood and fire.” She rolled her eyes. “
You
had no cause to be anything but overjoyed at Mohenjo. You had friends, and everyone respected you.”

He stared at the blood bay’s neck in front of him, unable to meet her eyes. “It’s true that I had friends and respect, of a sort.” If one could call those friends; they’d been more like uneasy allies. As for the others respecting him, he would say more accurately that they feared him. It wasn’t the same. “Yet I wasn’t happy.”

“If I’d had the advantages you had, I’d have been
deliriously
happy,” said Taya. “If you were miserable, it was your own fault.”

“It was my fault,” he admitted, staring at the blood bay’s mane. The lower half of the mane draped to the left side of the neck and the upper half to right. He reached forward and fixed it, placing all the mane on the left. “The doctor I worked with during my Year of Penance told me I was starving like those Echo addicts I helped care for. I laughed at him. Obviously I wasn’t starving. I was well fed and healthy. He later explained that I wasn’t starving for food, but for the Mothers’ embrace.”

Taya looked perplexed. “What did he mean by that?”

“Since the Great Atrocity, we have been abandoned—all of us—by the Mothers. And we need them. We crave them. There’s a hole inside each of us that will never be filled.”

“Of course. We pay the price for our ancestors’ crime all of our days, but what can anyone do about it but keep on as best we can?”

“Neshi taught me—that’s the doctor’s name—that you fill that hole by loving and caring for others.” He turned away. “I know you think it’s silly. But as I cared for those sick, unhappy people, I began to feel more content with myself. And I came to understand that I had done everything wrong at Mohenjo, absolutely everything. I was cruel to people. I damaged them—you most of all—and every bit of damage I inflicted was reflected back in wounds upon myself. Upon my soul, if you will. I made that hole wider and deeper. The more I longed to fill it, the nastier I became. You know how it ended.”