A Daughter of No Nation (40 page)

“I will.”

“You will face with him the censure of the living and the wrath of those who fear the lately dead?”

Verena did a decent impression of Annela's placid Verdanii smile. “I will.”

“You'll want gloves,” he said, handing her a long black set. Donning a pair of his own, he produced a thick length of felt, stitched with hair to a pair of what looked like human ribs, or what human ribs would look like if they had been straightened from their natural curve.

“The deceased, Wevvan Highfelling born of Sylvanna, rejected the nation of his birth and never took another. His resurrection is encumbered by no request or law. He has no surviving family and left no will. Does anyone stand in opposition to this fell deed?”

“Fell,” Sophie thought. Now there's a word out of Tolkien.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Bram whuffed softly at that, probably hiding a reaction to the misplaced wedding-ceremony language.

Brother Piper turned to Verena, nodding, and she yarded on the two rib bones, stretching the fabric between. Crimson words appeared on the fabric, neat embroidered stitches that pulled at the felt, resisting the pressure.

The shredding sound filled the room, a raspy tearing, as of ships' sails or machine belts. A stench of boiled blood and sour mash, cabbagey and rotten, gusted out from Verena's outstretched hands. Tonio gagged, quietly. The monk had a wet towel at the ready, and he grabbed at the remnants of the inscription, which were wet and suddenly stringy.

Like guts, Sophie thought randomly.

Sophie looked at Highfelling. He had been quiet as a waxwork figure, with that strange absence, almost fakeness, that the dead possessed.

Now he was breathing.

The corpse opened his eyes and began to cough. He accepted a glass of water from Brother Piper before falling back against his seat, looking from one of them to another.

Choking awfulness all but overcame her. She remembered being on a dive once with a student videographer whose oxygen supply had failed, and that
oh no, oh no, please stop this from happening
feeling. Then, and now, it was an almost physical sensation, like having a stomach full of fresh blood.

“Do you know where you are, Kir?” Piper asked. His face was drawn but his tone was kind.

“No…,” Highfelling began, but before he could say more a number of things happened, all at once.

“I stand opposed!” shrieked a teakettle falsetto that rang off the chamber walls. “There's no making peace with this!”

Parrish turned, saw
something,
and yanked both Sophie and Verena sideways, pressing them against the cave wall. Candle flame cooked her neck on one side; his breath warmed the skin on the other.

Something whisked past them.

A javelin caught Highfelling in the chest, piercing his heart.

“Uhhh!” His eyes bulged. Blood spread across his white robe.

The sense of awfulness broke, like thin glass. Suddenly Highfelling was a man, mortally wounded, suffering.

Sophie disentangled herself from Parrish, running to the stone chaise. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. We didn't mean to—”

“
Hes,
it's best,” the man said, speaking in a thicker version of Cly's Fleet accent. “LoBanning?”

“Uh…” Did he mean was she a Banning? “Sort of.”

“Seek my … plans.”

A glugging exhalation, and he was dead. Again.

Leaving them with a profusely bleeding corpse and Brother No Name.

Brother Piper seized the monk by the scruff. “What have you done?”

“Sorry I'm late,” he whistled. “Brother Stinking Stodgepot wouldn't let me into the crypt, so I had to climb up from the weasel hole where the water pours out the mountain.”

 

CHAPTER    
26

After the second murder of Highfelling, Brother Piper hauled Nameless out to the compound. By the time he returned, two younger monks had appeared and were already shrouding the body in a long, heavy wrap. They took the gory shreds of the spell that had killed him initially and the javelin that did the deed the second time.

“We're going to be arguing about his action for some weeks,” Piper said. “I'm so sorry.”

“What happened?” Bram demanded.

Piper said, “Resurrection is an issue of contention among the brothers. Brother Pict—the nameless brother, that is—tried to enter the crypt last night but was barred. There's disagreement there, too. Anyone who wishes to object to a resurrection should be given a chance.”

“Why wasn't he?”

“The brother is … he's very holy. Devout. His commitment to the penitential duty of the island is extreme. But he's also…” He opened his hands. “Ahhh…”

“A pain in the ass?” Bram offered.

“We are men, flawed and petty like any,” Brother Piper said. “The brother has become a thing of the forest; he comes and goes as he pleases. He offended the night keeper and was barred. Then, as he said, he found his own way into the tomb through the sewer.”

“I bear some responsibility,” Parrish said. “We tried to hide our purpose, but—”

“There are no secrets in a tomb,” Piper said. “Kirs, are you all right? It's a troubling thing, to witness a revivification and then—”

“A murder?” Bram snapped.

From his expression, Piper didn't quite see it that way, but he spread his hands, acknowledging Bram's words.

Sophie was surprisingly unstirred by having seen Highfelling stabbed. The feeling of awfulness that accompanied his waking, tense and lurking wrong, had seemed to fill the room, choking and lethal as smoke. It was only when he'd been fatally wounded that she'd felt able to approach, much less speak to him.

But now they were back to square one with Cly.

Or were they? “He had things, didn't he?” she said. “Someone … Langda said the evidence from his murder was here.”

“Yes. I'll have his possessions brought,” Brother Piper said. He vanished immediately into the crypt and, about fifteen minutes later, four younger men came in bearing a quartet of heavy trunks with smashed locks.

“Seggin bale,”
Parrish said to them, in a tone that hinted that this was monkish for “thank you.”

They stared at each other over the trunks. Then Bram yanked at the nearest lid. Its stonewood hinges crumbled and the lid came off in his hand.

Sophie pried hers open more carefully. It contained a bundle of letters, all in Fleet. She browsed them, finding correspondence among the Haversham Crime Office, The Fleet Judiciary, and Brother Piper's predecessor, the managing brother of the crypt here in Ossuary.

She read one page aloud: “‘He died suddenly, falling to his knees in the garden in his hiding place on Zingoasis, bending backwards in an impossible fashion.'”

“Like John Coine,” Bram murmured.

“Yeah,” she said, remembering. Two captured prisoners gasping, helpless, eyes bulging. Twin death rattles …

“Sofe?”

She returned her attention to the letter: “Highfelling died about a week after Cly's duel with Cordero. The Judiciary had named him as a possible witness in the ongoing dispute with Haversham.”

“The throttlevine thing,” Bram said.

She picked through the next batch of pages. “The next is just delivery arrangements, getting him here. The scroll Verena just shredded”—she, Tonio, and Verena all shuddered “—turned up years later in a … I guess you'd call it a raid? On some kind of rogue inscription house?”

“Yeah.” Verena peered over her shoulder. “The scribe might know who hired him to kill Highfelling.”

Sophie handed over the pages. “It says the scribe was reverted to the innocence of childhood.”

“That means he had an accomplice wipe his memory,” she said. “Pretty typical if you're afraid of getting interrogated.”

“So much for that.” Bram was going through a trunk of clothes and shoes, methodically checking the pockets of the garments and then handing them to Parrish, who felt along the seams, checking for … what? Diamonds? Cocaine?

He came up with Highfelling's Sylvanner sash, faded to no color at all, with all its badges.

“He was married—we could follow that up,” Bram said.

“Piper said his kin were dead,” Sophie replied.

“Ha. Strike two.”

The third crate held an assortment of satchels, inside which were carved pieces of clockwork: gears and curled wooden springs and other pieces that were, unmistakably, machinery, under a layer of oily dust. They gleamed with a strange luminescence, as if they'd been varnished in gasoline.

“Same stuff as these hinges,” Bram said, indicating the remnants of the trunk he'd torn in half. “And swords.”

“Stonewood,” Parrish explained. “The varnishing process makes it hard enough to use for machine parts.”

“Parts of what?” Bram was already fitting the pieces of their find together.

“Plans,” Sophie said. “Highfelling said, ‘Find my plans.'” She dove back into the now-empty trunks, looking for anything that might look like blueprints, coming up dry. “Parrish, take a look at the linings of his coat and whatever, will you?”

“We've done so, Sophie.”

Highfelling had no notebook, no papers of his own, no letters but the official correspondence concerning his murder.

Think.
Sophie leaned deep into the largest trunk, comparing outer height and inner depth, and pushed at the corners. The bottom shifted. False?

She pried it up. Underneath were a leather tobacco pouch and a rolled oil painting of the Butcher's Baste, the passage of water between Sylvanna and Haversham, a beach washed in ghostly whites and grays.

“They do love to paint on Sylvanna,” Tonio said.

Sophie looked at the back of the canvas and then held it up to the torchlight. Lines shone through the thin fabric.

“Blueprints,” she said. They unrolled it over the illuminated pool. The room dimmed, but the drawings emerged.

“Looks like an old-fashioned watch,” Verena said. “Gears and cogs.”

“Bigger,” Bram said.

“Some kind of automaton,” Sophie said. The plans hidden within the painting showed a faint schematic of what looked like a clockwork toy, four-limbed, low to the ground, almost a dinner plate with legs. An animal?

She shot it twice, taking long exposures to compensate for the dimness of the lines. Her brother looked at it fixedly. After about a minute, he said, “Okay, I've got it.”

“Got it what?” Verena said.

“Memorized.” He stirred through the bits and pieces of machinery, the cogs of stonewood. “We're missing some parts, not to mention all the cosmetic finishes, but I can put this about halfway together. Verena, give me those paddles—they're its feet.”

Sophie returned to her examination of their other finds.

Why hide your smokes?
She opened the pouch, which smelled of pipe tobacco. Inside were coarse-haired seedpods, dried to a nearly brown color. Some were embedded in desiccated bits of fruit, rubbery material that smelled of pear.

“I've seen these before; I think they're throttlevine seeds,” she said.

“Cly's vegetable nemesis,” Bram said. “Are you sure?”

“We'll have to germinate a couple.”

Sophie thought of the transformed slaves in the swamp. “All those years ago, Cly had been trying to prove the Havers were sabotaging the Sylvanna lowlands. If this means they're guilty, it's partly Haversham's fault, those goat-people being forced to spend their lives gnawing at the infestation.”

I'll remember this, she vowed.

Fenn thought Cly might get rid of his slaves, if the throttlevine infestation was sorted. He hinted as much himself—when Sophie said slavery was a deal breaker, he had asked what would happen if he got rid of them.

“Sold,” he said “sold.”

It implies he really wants a relationship.

She had no actual evidence that he'd slept with one of the slaves. And she'd been wrong about his betrothing her.

This was a way to test some assumptions about Cly, wasn't it? To find out how far he'd go to make things up with her? If he didn't need the goat transforms, would he really divest the slaves at Low Bann? If she demanded that, and asked that he let Beatrice slide out of the fraud suit … how much did this case, and his daughter, really mean to him?

As Sophie gnawed on the problem of her birth father, Bram assembled the machine pieces within the plate that was their case. He stirred a gear around in a circle and the four paddles made a lazy flapping motion, in sync.

“That looks familiar.”

“There are chambers here in the top plate that could hold a quantity of seedpods,” Bram said.

“It's a delivery system,” she said. “It's how they're infecting the lowlands with throttlevine. This might do it, Verena—Cly wants this case won.”

“More than he wants Mom?”

“Have to prove it,” Bram said. By which he meant:
I'm working, shut up.

They did, watching him fiddle with the various parts, working for so long that Parrish vanished, returning with a tray containing bowls of tasteless whitefish soup. Sophie photographed every stage. Verena fell into playing mechanic's assistant, handing him pieces and keeping quiet.

“It is afternoon,” Tonio said, finally, when Bram came up for air and soup. “Unless we want to spend a second night here…”

“I'll wrap up,” Bram said immediately.

“Let's see if the monks decided to do anything to punish Brother No Name,” Verena said.

They hadn't. He'd whistled his way through an aggrieved complaint about having done the moral thing, sermonizing about the wrong of raising the dead. Half the monks clearly agreed. And when it turned out that the stuff in the trunks had proved useful to Sophie and the others—the rest looked tempted to call “no harm, no foul.”