Page 8 of A Drop of Corruption

I squatted and placed my shootstraw pipe on the floor. It teetered for a moment, then decisively rolled to the left.

“We tilt, yes,” said Malo. “As many buildings in Old Town do. The Imperial Engineers have sworn this building should not fall over anytime soon, but it is worse the higher we go.”

I debated how to proceed. “Who else has been in here so far?” I asked.

“Lots of folk,” said Malo. “Sujedo’s guards. Me and the other Apoth wardens. We confirmed nothing was removed from the rooms. We placed everything we found on the table.”

I put my pipe back in my mouth, suppressing a cringe. Though she surely thought that made my job easier, she was quite wrong.

“Are any of the Treasury delegation members present?” I asked.

“I had instructed them to make themselves available, but apparently they’re busy today. Meeting with the king, you see,” she said with a false awe. “Or, more likely, his many courtly busybodies.”

“Who is lodged on either side of this room?”

“The room to the west is empty. But the room to the east is occupied by Sujedo’s colleague Immunis Valik.”

“Who heard…?”

“Nothing.”

“And the guard outside never saw anyone leave Sujedo’s rooms?”

“Except for maids and servants, no.”

I sucked my teeth for a moment, thinking. I slid my vial from my engraver’s satchel, sniffed it, then stepped inside the room.

First I reviewed the bed, studying the crinkle and bend of the sheets, and the way the fern pillows were piled atop one another.

“The topsheet’s gone,” I said.

“We took it to extract the blood upon it,” explained Malo. “For we’d also found a dribbling of piss in the chamber pot. We distilled the scents of both and found they came from the same man—and, when we found Sujedo’s corpse, we matched it to him. It is his blood, and his piss.”

“And you found no other sign of an intruder? No hair, nor blot of different blood?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Frowning, I moved on.

There was a large table set against one wall, and, as Malo had said, it was piled high with all the items they’d apparently discovered during their search. I grimaced as I approached it. Moving everything from its location made estimating its value to the investigation much more difficult: a knife found hidden behind a pillow is much more interesting than one packed away in a bag. But there was little to be gained from criticizing the work of the locals.

“We have reviewed these as well,” said Malo. “The clothes have a strong smell of citrus and mold. It made figuring out all the scents in here far trickier. I assumed the killer used it to cover their deeds.”

I bent low and sniffed. She was right: there was a bright flash of lime, followed by the unpleasant aroma of rotting wood. Curious.

I sniffed my vial again and reviewed Sujedo’s items one by one. A small mai-lantern; three Treasury uniforms, two standard white, one dress gray; a box of ceremonial heralds, along with cuff fasteners and other jewelry; three belts—two brown, one black; a bag of ashpens; a bag of coins, totaling sixty-three talints and four coppers; and an extensive bag of tinctures and vials of powders, mostly for managing pains of the head. Which made sense: like many in the Treasury, Sujedo had been an axiom—a person cognitively enhanced to be preternaturally talented at calculation—yet such an augmentation came with side effects, often leading to a truncated life span. As my own memory was significantly augmented, I knew this well.

I looked at all this for a long while, engraving each item in my memories. Then my eye fell on the final item on the table: a small rectangular piece of what appeared to be bare iron. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. It was heavy, smooth, and cold.

“Don’t know what that is,” said Malo. “We found it on the floor. Looks like simply a plug of iron.”

I studied it. It was about the length of my finger and seemed wholly unremarkable. Yet it was smooth and unmarred, as if it had been fashioned to be this shape and size. It bothered me.

“Where did you find it?” I asked.

She pointed to the wall with the windows. “Over there.”

I put the piece of iron in my pocket, then went to the wall and studied the floor, then the windows. I’d thought the iron might be a bit of broken component from the window but found nothing: all the shutters were both whole and securely fastened shut, using an iron sliding lock. The locks slid back and forth easily enough, but once they’d been fastened, the window didn’t jostle. Though the rest of the building leaned and leaked, the windows held fast.