Snowtear Page 5

  “That mouth get you in a lot of trouble?”

  “Occasionally,” Riken said. “It also gets me out from time to time.”

  “Look like you need all the help you can get. Don’t you ever eat?”

  “When I’m hungry.”

  “You’re skin and bones.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  She took the time to look him up and down disapprovingly. Riken knew the look well. A childhood illness had left him bedridden for two years. Ever since, he’d been unable to add meat to his scrawny bones. In truth, he ate like a man thrice his size, but still he wouldn’t put a dent in a merchant’s scale. He’d long ago give up caring about his emaciated appearance and the problems it sometimes caused. Never would he be able to win a fair fight with anyone over the age of ten and four, but in his time, he’d acquired a few tricks that afforded him the luxury of continuing to draw breath.

  “Some more than others,” the woman said.

  “Are we close?” Riken asked, wanting to steer the conversation elsewhere.

  “Aye, almost there.”

  The extravagant mansions of Saffrom dwindled into the slightly smaller, slightly less luxurious homes of Abigail Row, then Alazel, then Renton. The changes in scenery were subtle – fewer streetlamps, a tinge more wear on the cobblestone streets, a few less stories to the estates. When finally they reached Chastity, the grandiose, stone mansions behind them had conceded to homes just as impressive, blemished only by being constructed of log. Chastity’s citizens dressed every bit as sharply as those in their neighboring Rows, but might not be able to change thrice in one day.

  Beatrix’s expeditious pace ended abruptly in front of a lavish townhouse with long, stained-glass windows extending the full length of its three levels. They walked under the high porch, able to use the first-story entrance since only a few inches of snow presently coated the ground. The townhouse was divided into two separate residences. Beatrix pointed out the door on the right as Anastasia’s, then turned to leave.

  “Not coming in?” Riken asked.

  “I’ve work to get back to,” she said. “Some of us have mouths to feed at home.”

  “I have mouths to feed.”

  “Mouths?”

  “Well, mouth.”

  “Good day, Mon Snowtear.”

  “Good day to you, Min,” Riken said to the woman’s already turned back.

  Amused, Riken watched the prickly woman retreat up the street and around a corner, then gave Anastasia’s brass knocker a hearty bang. When a third attempt offered no response, he tried the handle. The door swung open.

  “Min…” he started, then realized he didn’t know her surname. “Anastasia, it’s Riken Snowtear. I’m the one looking into Sage Ullimar’s disappearance. We talked a few days back. I wanted to ask you a few more questions.”

  He was speaking to a modest foyer with a single long table equipped with two vases filled with wilted wildflowers. Kicking the snow from his boots, he edged further into the darkened entryway and called again. Receiving the same reply, he pushed the door all the way open to let in some light and poked his head around the corner of the small room.

  Peering down a dim hallway, he saw a faint light at the end that looked like the crack of a door. He announced himself again as he walked the length of the short hallway.

  “Min? Are you about?”

  He knocked at the door.

  “Min?”

  Trying the knob, he found it locked.

  Riken sighed, hoping that Uther was having more luck on his assignment. He thought about trying the girl again tomorrow at the Ullimar house, but didn’t really care to wait. Sage had been missing for almost week. As these things went, that was never a good sign. He needed some kind of break in the job. He decided to check out the townhouse’s two remaining levels.

  Feeling along the walls, he found a winding staircase in the second hallway when his head clocked into it and climbed up it. Only the obscured light from the stained-glass window granted any illumination, making it difficult to maneuver. From what he could discern, Anastasia hadn’t yet gotten around to decorating her new home. He called to the girl a few more times, checked two empty rooms, hit his head on the second winding staircase, then ascended to the final level.

  Upon reaching the summit, he heard glass crunch beneath his boots. Only the tip of the window was visible, so the darkness was even more consuming. He walked blindly, crunching more glass as he went.

  When he bumped into and tripped over a fallen chair, he started to wish he’d brought his dagger along. Weapons were illegal to carry inside Winter Moon, but that rule only applied to honest citizens. His instinct told him something had happened in this house, and he didn’t often ignore that sense. It had kept him alive more times than he’d like to count.

  Where’s a big strong rat when you need one? he thought, wary to speak aloud again. Though, if any unscrupulous types were within, he’d already made himself quite known. Acknowledging that fact, he said aloud, “I’ve got a sword, a big one. Anybody in here?”

  On the off chance the threat wouldn’t work, Riken retreated to the staircase. He spun down it, crossed the hallway, descended the next one, and headed for the doorway. In the relative safety of the sunlight, he stopped short. His eyes went to the lighted crack of the door down the hall.

  Cursing his curiosity, he braved the hallway once again.

  He wasn’t very strong, but neither was the door. It burst open on a third kick, and a lone candle, melted almost to nothing, cast an orange glow on Anastasia’s naked body. She lay at the foot of a four-poster bed, one bloody arm covering her face.

  Riken dropped to his knees and slipped his arm under her neck. Her head flopped sickeningly as he lifted her torso off the floor. Her dead eyes were wide, as if her last moments had been terrifying.

  Blood from her neck trickled onto his arm. Riken fought the urge to be sick.

  “Seven Layers,” he whispered, cradling her. “What happened to you, baby girl?”

  Chapter Six

  “Why were you on the premises, Mon Snowtear?”

  “Business.”

  “What business?”

  “My own,” Riken said.

  After leaving Anastasia’s lifeless body in search of aid, Riken, covered in blood, had flagged down a member of the palace guard on patrol. Half an hour later, he’d been escorted to a lower room in Kara Alazel’s palace and was presently enjoying a rousing discourse with the chief of the Palace Inquiry.

  “Care to enlighten me as to the specifics?” the Head Inquirer asked.

  Brenton Alliton was a tall man, broad shouldered, with a slender mustache stretching down the sides of his mouth. Dressed in the grey and white striped uniform of the Inquiry, he spoke with a gruff air of authority that presumably succeeded in cowering most caught on the brunt end of it. Riken wasn’t some lowly peasant caught pilfering trinkets from the booths on Traders Row. He wasn’t impressed.

  “I went there to ask her a few questions,” he said

  “Pertaining to what exactly?”

  “A missing girl.”

  “Gregor Ullimar’s daughter?”

  “Exactly,” Riken said, not at all surprised the Inquiry knew of Sage’s disappearance; Gregor Ullimar was a wealthy and powerful man in Winter Moon. He’d probably descended upon the Palace Inquiry as if he owned it the moment he’d found his daughter unaccounted for.

  “You think you can do our job better than we ourselves?”

  “Aye.”

  “That so?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t care for your attitude, Mon Snowtear,” Alliton said, placing his palms on the table separating them, leaning in so close Riken smelled the perfume wafting off the man’s undershirt.

  “A commonplace sentiment,” Riken said.

  “Don’t much care for you either.”

  “But then, you never have, Inquirer.”

  This wasn’t the first time the two had butted heads.
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  Just two cycles back, Riken had found himself in a similar predicament in this very interrogation room. A farmer named Othol Wight had hired him for a job. Othol’s daughter had run off with one of the boys working the farmer’s cornfields, a kid named Justen Tay. At least that’s what Othol had thought at the time. It turned out that the young woman had been assaulted by a pair of her father’s farmhands, neither of whom were Justen.

  The girl, Deidra, had stolen away with young Mon Tay for a late evening romp in her father’s hayfield, same as they’d done every other night for the previous month. Maybe feeling left out, or more likely just being born miserable bastards, a couple of Mon Tay’s farmhands followed the pair of lovebirds. Toting a jug of whiskey they’d stolen from the main house, Hayden Stone and Jesper Lyte knocked poor Justen out in the middle of his adolescent transgression, then dragged him and Deidra into the mountains. When Justen awoke and found them having their way with his love, he tried to fend them off, ending up with a hole the size of an apple in his forehead.

  For the rest of the night and the better part of the next day, the two men repeatedly violated Deidra, breaking only so long as it took to resume their dwindling avidity. When the late evening sun deteriorated, mercifully, so did Hayden and Jesper. Both men, unconscious from the whiskey, britches still strewn around their ankles, were splayed out on the patchy bed of grass beneath the coppice they’d confined her to when Deidra roused and broke her father’s whiskey jug over a large boulder. Hayden didn’t wake when the girl dragged a slim piece of the broken jug across his cohort’s neck, not even when she did the same to him.

  Riken had spent the majority of the day asking around the farmstead about her. After interrogating thirty farmhands and two milkmaids, he’d finally coaxed the desired information from one of the comely lasses. Seemed she was quite averse to her boss finding out she’d once supported herself as a lady of Kiln’s Heat, a brothel Riken had spent a few happy nights in during her time of employment. Red-faced and cursing his mother for a whore, she gave up Deidra and Justen’s little fling, as well as their rendezvous spot in the hayfield. From there, it had just been a matter of following the tracks.

  Riken found the girl that evening, crying over her bludgeoned lover’s body. The next morn, he was once again seated across from a grumpy Brenton Alliton, who didn’t exactly buy that the two men had killed each other fighting over their prize. But with no proof to the contrary, the Head Inquisitor had little choice but to let both Deidra and Riken free.

  Riken and Alliton hadn’t exactly been friends since.

  “Why’d you kill the girl?” Alliton asked casually.

  “She had a sixth toe on her left foot,” Riken said, absently flicking at a strand of his hair.

  Alliton narrowed his eyes and folded his arms over his wide chest, patient, as if he had all day.

  “I found out…you know, afterward…she was my long-lost half-sister,” Riken said. “You would’ve reacted different?”

  “Snowtear.”

  “Truly, does that ever work?”

  Alliton shrugged. “You’d be surprised what people will just spit out.”

  “Nay, I wouldn’t,” Riken said, brushing the strand of hair behind his ear. “Do you have any real questions for me, or am I just going to get cocked around for another hour? I just want to know so I can make plans accordingly.”

  “How do you know it’s been an hour?”

  Riken tapped his finger on his temple. “Internal sundial. Should think about getting yourself one. Very handy when you’re being detained unlawfully in some dank pit.”

  Alliton pushed off the table, paced about the small room. Riken took the short reprieve to familiarize himself with his surroundings. It didn’t take long. The interrogation room was no more than ten feet by ten with four bare, stone walls. Besides the wood table and two chairs, the only other ornamentation was the candelabra above his head. In this lower level of the palace, which acted as the Inquiry’s headquarters, there were many such rooms, as well as a few holding cells and a barracks for the men.

  “Did you know her?” Alliton finally asked, still pacing.

  “Her being Anastasia?”

  The man gave Riken a perturbed look.

  “Aye,” Riken said. “I’d met her once, at the Ullimar house.”

  “No other dealings with her?”

  “Anastasia? Nay, that’s where the only having met her once comes in.”

  “What did you go down to ask her?”

  “The secret to eternal life. Sadly, she didn’t know.”

  The Head Inquirer kept him for at least another hour, more out of spite than anything else, Riken figured. Through all of the man’s leading questions, Riken gave him as little as possible without making himself look guilty. He knew they weren’t seriously considering him as a suspect, just wanting to jerk him around a bit. When Alliton had finally had his fill, he informed Riken that he’d be speaking with him again real soon.

  “Grand,” Riken said as a nameless inquirer with a fat paunch escorted him out. “Maybe we can swap recipes next time. I hear your Cherries Delight is to fucking die for.”

  “Get this little goat’s ass out of my sight,” Alliton said as the door swung shut.

  The Ullimars took the news of Anastasia’s death better than he’d figured. They managed to feign deep concern for all of two minutes before leaping into a tirade of questions as to what this might have to do with their daughter. Who could blame them? Anastasia was but a humble servant who’d diligently cooked their daily feasts for a mere two cycles. How could she ever hope to compare to an actual person?

  After expertly assuaging their fears, assuring them this wasn’t an ill omen for Sage, and watching Marr Ullimar consume a full bottle of dewberry wine, Riken left disgusted.

  In company of a light evening drizzle, he walked purposefully slow back to his modest room on Morning Gale Row. He needed time to think, to let the events of the dreadful day sink in, perhaps take on some kind of meaning.

  The first thing he wanted to know? Who’d paid for Anastasia’s fancy townhouse? She couldn’t possibly have afforded it on what was surely a meager salary. Someone, no doubt a boyfriend of sorts, had fitted the bill.

  Secondly, he highly doubted that the murder of the only person who’d been of any help in his investigation so far was a coincidence. It could have been a crime of passion, even a burglary gone awry, but not likely. Nothing had been taken from the house that he could tell. There hadn’t been much too take.

  He’d changed clothes after leaving the palace, but he felt as if he could still smell her blood on his flesh. A nice long bath would do him good. Perhaps an exceptionally well-endowed, young fawn to help with the job, too. Wistfully, Riken rejected the second notion. His rule: no whores while on a job. Like excesses of drink, they had a habit of clouding his mind. Finding Sage Ullimar required his full attention.

  Almost to the safe seclusion of his room above Morning Gale’s local bakery, a nagging thought invaded Riken’s already belabored mind. With a curse and a slump of the shoulders, he changed his course, set for Uther’s. It might prove unfounded, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Jatta Marllig would be a lot safer with the gentle giant watching over her.

  Uther wasn’t entirely unpleased with the prospect. Conditioned by cycles of doing the same for his mooching sisters, he had a thing for helping damsels in distress. The favor only put Riken out an extra five kyn.

  His burden somewhat lessened, Riken finally made his way back to his room.

  The delicately sweet smell of baking bread greeted his nostrils as he ascended the attached staircase to his door. He lingered midway up to savor the ambrosial scent, and was momentarily carried away. How he loved that smell.

  A low whine pulled him back.

  “Well met, Bess,” he said to a scruffy black and white mutt at the foot of the stairs.

  The dog barked at him and wiggled her tail.

  “Renny out late tonight?” Riken asked
.

  Bess and Renny, her mate, lived beneath Riken in the bakery with their owner Gilthorn Rath. Riken often slipped a few extra slices of meat into his pocket after a meal to bring home to the two mutts, though he knew it irritated Mon Rath.

  “Nothing tonight, I’m afraid, girl,” he said, patting his pockets. The dog tilted her head and whined. “My apologies. See me tomorrow night.”

  Bess yelped at him, then disappeared around the corner. Riken shrugged and went inside.

  The coals in his fireplace had just enough spark left to light a candle. He put another couple logs on the decrepit fire, then stripped out of his damp clothes, leaving them in a trail behind him. He paid Mon Rath an extra three kyn a week to keep him in fresh water. He fetched the buckets and hung them on a rod over the fire. Sufficiently hot, he lugged them one at a time to the tin tub in the corner of the room.

  The practically scolding water lovingly accepted his weary flesh. He submerged himself in a slow slide, hoping the gloomy day would wash away with the rest of the grime.

  It didn’t.

  His mind forced images of Anastasia’s dead, naked body forth. He saw the blood dripping from her neck, falling onto him. And her pretty face. How full of life it must have once been, now blank, cold, only the terrified eyes registering expression.

  Could she truly have died for the morsel of information she’d hesitated to give him? Riken wished he could say nay, but he’d seen too much superfluous bloodshed in his life. Death rarely needed a reason for being.

  With visions of the murdered servant girl taunting him, he vowed to find the responsible party. The Ullimars had barely conveyed even momentary concern for her. She had no family that anyone knew of. It seemed as if the world was unprepared to miss one little unimportant peasant. The world, maybe, not Riken Snowtear. When he discovered the person who’d so callously discarded of Anastasia Vela, they’d find themselves in a whole new breed of hurt than anything even their most tortured nightmares had ever conjured.

  Anastasia imposed upon his dream briefly. The blood streaking her golden curls gave them a strawberry tint. She said nothing, only stared at him with those wide, fearful eyes. She walked slow, methodical, following him wherever he went. He tried to run, and though her speed never increased, whenever he chanced a look over his shoulder, she was always right there, waiting, those eyes locked on him, accusing.