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There was another brief exchange of foreign words before Prism spoke again to Cythen. 'The shape-changer is known to us - as we are known to him. It is a serious charge you and he bring before us. This woman, your sister, was not our victim. You, of course, do not know us well enough to know that we speak the truth in this; you will have to trust us that this is so.'
Cythen opened her mouth to protest, but the woman waved her back to silence.
'I have not doubted the truth of your words,' Prism warned. 'Do not be so foolish as to doubt mine. We will study this matter closely. The dead woman will be avenged. You will be remembered. Go now, with Bey, the Mother of us all.'
'If it wasn't you, then who was it?' Cythen demanded, though the women were already melting back into the shadows. 'It couldn't have been one of us. None of us has the venom, or knows of the Harka Bey ...'
They continued to vanish, as silently and mysteriously as they had arrived. Prism lingered the longest; then she, too, vanished and Cythen was left to wonder if the alien women had been there at all.
Still full of the delayed effects of her terror, Cythen clambered loudly over the wall. The Maze was still black as ink, but now it was silent, caught in the brief moment between the activities of night and those of the day. Her soft footfalls echoed and she pulled the dark cloak high around her face, until the Maze was behind her and she was in the Street of Red Lanterns, where a few patrons still lingered in the doorways, shielding their faces from her eyes. The great lamps were out above the door of the Aphrodisia House. Myrtis and her courtesans would not rise until the sun beat on the rooftops at noon. But her staff, the ones who were invisible at night, were working in the kitchens and took Cythen's hastily scribbled, disappointed message, promising that it would be delivered as soon as Madame had breakfasted. Then, weary and yawning, Cythen slipped back into the garrison barracks where Walegrin, in deference to her sex, had allotted her a private, bolted chamber.
She slept well into the day watch, entering the mess hall when it was deserted. The gelid remains of breakfast remained on the sideboard, ignored by the endemic vermin. It would taste worse than it looked, though Cythen was long past the luxury of tasting the food she ate: one ate what was available or one starved. She filled her bowl and sat alone by the hearth.
Bekin's death was still unexplained and unavenged and that weighed more heavily upon her than the greasy porridge. For more years than she cared to remember, her only pride had been that she had somehow managed to care for Bekin. Now that was gone and she stood emotionally naked to her guilts and unbidden memories. If the Harka Bey had not appeared, she might still have blamed them but, despite their barbaric coldness, or perhaps because of it, she believed what they had said. The warmth of tears rose within her as her brooding was broken by the sound of a chair scraping along the floor in the watchroom above her. Rather than succumb to the waiting tears, she went to confront Walegrin.
The straw-blond man didn't notice as she opened the door. He was absorbed in his square of parchment and the cramped rows of figures he had made upon it. With one hand on the door, Cythen hesitated. She didn't like Walegrin; no one really did, except maybe Thrusher - and he was almost as strange. The garrison's officer repelled compassion and friendship alike and hid his emotions so thoroughly that none could find them. Still, Walegrin managed to provide leadership and direction when it was needed - and he reminded Cythen of no one else in her troubled past.
'You missed curfew,' he greeted her after she closed the door, not looking up from his figures. His hands were filthy with cheap ink, the only kind available in Sanctuary. But the numbers themselves, Cythen saw as she moved closer, were clear and orderly. He could read and write as well as swing a sword; in fact, he had education and experience equal to her own, and at times her feelings for him threatened to take wild leaps beyond friendship or respect. Then she would remind herself that it was only loneliness that she was feeling and the remembering of things best left forgotten.
'I left word for you,' she stated without apology.
He kicked a stool towards her. 'Did you find what you were looking for?'
She shook her head and sat on the stool. 'No, but I found them all right. Beysib, and from the palace, by the look of them.' She shook her head again, this time recalling the strange faces of the two women she had seen. 'They sneaked up on me; I couldn't see how many there were. One came after me with a pair of those long-hiked swords of theirs. She spun them so fast I couldn't see them any more. Fighting with them's like walking into the mouth of a dragon.'
'But you fought and survived?' A faint trace of a smile creased Walegrin's face. He set his quill aside.
'She said they were testing me - but that's because she couldn't kill me like she'd pla
'Then she should be fairly easy to identify if she's the one who killed your sister.'
Cythen froze on the stool, searching the past few days, the past few months for any slip of the tongue when she might have let him know what Bekin was to her; that she pursued the killer of a Red Lanterns courtesan out of anything more than outrage or simple compassion.
'Molin told me,' Walegrin explained. 'He was looking for a pattern.'
'Molin Torchholder? Why in the name of a hundred stinking little gods should Vashanka's torch know anything about me or my sister?' The anxiety and guilt transformed themselves into anger; Cythen's rich voice filled the room.
'When Myrtis asks Lythande and Lythande asks Enas Yorl and they ask for a specific person to escort the corpse from pillar to post then, yes - somehow Molin Torchholder hears about it and gets his answers.'
'And you're his errand boy? His messenger?' She had touched a sore point between them in her anger, and by the darkening of his face she knew to regret it. Back in the first days of chaos after the Beysib fleet heaved over the horizon, Molin Torchholder had been everywhere. The archetypical bureaucrat had kept his beleaguered temple open for business; his Prince well-advised, the Beysib amused and, ultimately, Walegrin and his band employed in the service of the city. In return, Walegrin had begun to hand back a portion of the garrison's wages for Molin's speculations. It was not such a bad partnership. Walegrin's duties kept him apprised of the merchant's activity anyway, and Molin seldom lost money. But for Cythen, whose family, when she'd had a family, had been rich in land, not gold, the rabid pursuit of more gold than you needed was degrading. And, though she would never admit it directly, she did not want Walegrin degraded.
'He told me,' Walegrin replied after an uncomfortable silence, his voice carefully even, 'because you are still part of this garrison and if something is going to make you act rashly he would want me to know about it. Bekin's death isn't the only one that's got us edgy. Each night since she died at least two Beysib have been found dead, mutilated, and the lord-high muckety-mucks are thinking about showing some muscle around here. We're all under close watch.'