Chapter Three — The Telvir House

The message came at the dawn-bell.

Veros had slept three hours. He had not meant to sleep. He had sat down at the common-room window to watch the street and had not moved for a long time. When the candle finished and the room went cold, sleep took him where he sat. He woke stiff. His left hand was slower than it had been the day before. He knew what that meant and did not yet feel the need to count the cost.

The dawn-bell had rung twice by the time the knock came. Not a knock. A slip of paper under the door, delivered by a runner’s footfall that was gone before Veros reached the hall. He knelt carefully. He picked up the paper. He read.

Hanno had written in the compressed shorthand the two of them had agreed on twenty years ago — notation that looked like a laundering receipt to any eye that did not know. The shorthand said four things.

The investigator was named Maren Telvir. Telvir house, Lower City side of the Middle tier, rising on old-case work. She had been to the Rellyn house site, which was no longer a Rellyn house and had not been for twenty years. She had read the Compact-court archives from the year of the killing. She had asked, specifically and more than once, whether the youngest Rellyn son had died that night or had been the killer.

Veros read the paper a second time. He folded it. He set it on the table.

Ten to fifteen days. That was the estimate he built in his head from what Hanno had given him. Maren Telvir was asking the correct question now — and the correct question, pursued by a competent investigator with the Academy’s records at her disposal, would reach the answer in ten to fifteen days. The estimate could shorten if she was faster than Hanno’s report suggested. It could lengthen if she crossed a witness with a reason to mislead her. There were no such witnesses. Everyone who had been close enough to know was dead.

Except him. And Irela. And she did not know.

——— ◇ ———

The four options arranged themselves without his asking them to.

Run with Irela. He could have her packed and out of Karath by the dusk-bell. He had the money. He had the documents she would need. A small atoll in the outer chains, a changed name, a different apprenticeship, twenty more years of a quiet life. The problem with the option was Irela herself. She had lived in Karath since she was an infant. She had friends, a master, an examination she had been working toward for three years. He could not take all of that from her without telling her why. And if he told her why, he would have to tell her the rest.

Kill Maren Telvir. He could find her by the turn-bell and be done with her by evening. She was Compact-licensed, which meant her death would be investigated, but she was young, and unfamiliar deaths of young professionals with contested clients could be arranged to look like other things. The problem with the option was that the Telvir house would continue. They would assign another investigator. The work was begun; the work would finish. And he had not killed anyone in twenty years. He did not want to find out whether he still could.

Kill Ishmen Tannath. End the contract at its source. If the man who was paying died, the Telvir house would stop investigating — there would be no client to pay them. The problem was that Orvos Tannath was also paying, and Orvos was dying but not dead, and killing Ishmen would give Orvos a reason to pay more and harder. The problem was also that he had not killed anyone in twenty years.

Tell Irela. Tell her everything. Let her choose what to do with the truth. Give her the years he had taken from her by not telling her for twenty years. The problem with the option was that telling her did not end the investigation. She would still be a Rellyn heir. The Tannaths would still want her silenced. Telling her gave her the truth but did not give her safety — and a man who owed her safety above all else could not trade her safety for the easing of his own conscience.

He sat with the four options for a long time.

——— ◇ ———

He remembered the night in one image. He had been taught, years ago by a man whose name he did not now speak, to carry his memories as images rather than as stories. Stories grew distortions across decades. Images held.

The image was the nursery lamp. It had been left burning when whoever had been with the baby last had gone downstairs to the meal that killed them. The baby had slept through the meal, through what followed the meal, through Veros coming up the stairs in a face he had worn for three weeks. He had stopped in the doorway of the nursery. He had not intended to stop — he had intended to walk past, finish the count of the dead in the upper rooms, and leave the way he had come. The lamp had been burning. The baby had been asleep. He had looked at her for the span of three breaths.

Then he had taken her, and twenty years of the life he was now living had begun in the next instant, in a stairway in a dead house, with a sleeping infant against the chest of the man who had just murdered her family.

That was the image. It was not a story he could tell himself. It was a thing he could only see.

——— ◇ ———

The image told him what the four options had not.

He had acted that night without understanding what House Tannath wanted from House Rellyn beyond the killing itself. He had been told a contract. He had fulfilled a contract. He had not asked what came after. The baby in the nursery had not been on the contract. He had not thought about her because he had not thought about what lay beyond the work he had been asked to do.

What did the Tannaths want with her now? He did not know. He could not act without knowing.

A fifth option, then. Not an option — a prerequisite.

See Ishmen Tannath. Understand what the Tannaths were after.

Then the four options would resolve themselves into one.

Seeing Ishmen Tannath meant wearing a face to get an audience. Wearing a face meant paying the cost. Paying the cost meant that the budget he had left — the one he had not yet counted, the one he had not looked at in twenty years — was about to start being spent again. He did not know the size of the budget. He had not measured it because measuring it would have meant admitting it was finite, and he had spent the last twenty years pretending it was not.

He pulled the paper toward himself and wrote his own shorthand note back to Hanno. Two lines. He would need three names by the end of the day. Merchant-houses with recent business before the Tannaths. Someone whose face he could wear into the Tannath compound without attracting the watch.

He folded the paper. He set it aside. The runner would come before the noon-bell and the paper would go out the way it had come in.

——— ◇ ———

Irela was stirring in the next room.

He heard her sit up on the long bench. He heard her stand and move toward the kitchen.

He had ten days, possibly fifteen. He had not yet decided what he would tell her, or when. He had decided that he would tell her before Maren Telvir did. That was the one thing he would not permit. Whatever else happened, she would not learn her own history from an investigator.

He stood from the window. His knee gave him its full complaint this morning. He acknowledged it and crossed the room.

She was at the kitchen counter with two cups. She handed him one. She looked at his face for a moment longer than she usually did, and he saw her decide not to ask.

“I’m going out this morning,” he said. “I may be out late.”

“All right.”

“If I am not home by the dusk-bell, go to Hanno’s. Do not wait for me.”

She looked at him. She did not answer at once.

“I will be home by the dusk-bell,” she said.

“If I am not.”

“All right.”

He closed the door behind him with the careful pressure that did not wake the hinges.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER THREE.