When I finally packed up, dripping and drained, it felt doubtful I’d achieved much.
* * *
A quick visit to the bathhouse on the way home masked my morning efforts externally, but they had cost me. Even making tea felt like too much. I settled at the main table, surrounded by weeks of accumulated piles of paper, and tried to distract myself from physical exhaustion by reading.
I sifted through various complaints sent to Tain, most of which seemed to be increasingly hysterical accusations. Though word had quickly spread that the attackers had a religious motivation, there was an underlying assumption that the rebellion had at least been funded if not actively encouraged by some foreign power; accordingly, any sign of what was deemed “suspicious” behavior from any poor soul with the wrong name or outfit or skin color was reported as if it were high intelligence. And while the majority was nonsense, we couldn’t afford to let real information slip through unnoticed. The Darfri were being aided by someone outside the country. Not only were supplies still arriving from multiple directions, but our watchers had seen signs of military leadership from people who did not appear to be Sjon; people garbed differently, mounted on graspads and moving through the camp like inspectors. Given the risk to the city of betrayal from the inside, the Council had made subtle, quiet restrictions on how wall defense allocations were to be made, limiting the numbers of foreigners who could be set to a particular task or given particular responsibilities. It was easy to see potential enemies or traitors. What had once been harmless, decorative expressions of our diverse city—different colors and clothes and the sounds of different languages and accents—had become something to mistrust.
The letters blurred together to my tired eyes. Suspicions and worries and risks … these names and numbers didn’t bring us any closer to understanding what was happening, let alone solving it.
I turned to another pile. Jov and I had likewise had no further luck in our investigations into the poisoning. Without the missing piece of the puzzle—what precisely was motivating the rebellion—we couldn’t know who was involved or how—even if—it was connected to Etan’s and the Chancellor’s deaths. The other side of the table was piled with bound rolls I’d collected from the Guildhalls. In them I hoped to find names of successful, even influential, people in the city who were Darfri. Out on the estates, people named their children in the old style, with the prefixes An- and Il-, so looking for those styles of names in the rolls should at least tell me who might have been raised Darfri. Despite our requests at every sector, few believers had come forward to help, and none had expressed insight into any religious cause for an uprising. I understood ordinary folk might be reluctant or fearful to come forward in the current atmosphere, but perhaps if we quietly approached prominent members of the Darfri community, we could learn something useful.
But to no avail.
“There’s nothing in here,” I said to my brother when he eventually came home in the late afternoon. My words distracted him from scrutinizing me. I had propped myself with pillows to help me sit straight but I couldn’t mask my pallor. I pointed at the page in front of me and he frowned down at it.
“Nothing where?”
I turned another page, gesturing at the list of names and profiles. “Look at these names.”
His eyes tracked the paper, taking in the Performers’ Guild sigil marking the top corner of the page, listing names, joining dates, and short profiles of members. He blinked, staring blankly at the neat text. “I don’t see—”
“Where are the Darfri?”
I gestured to the rolls spread out before us. Page after page of names and profiles, but no Darfri prefixes on any of them. Jov sat, rubbing his head, his frown deepening as he understood.
“It’s the same for all of them.”
“But there have to be some. People move from the estates to the city, surely? And while some of them probably take servant or un-Guilded jobs, they can’t all be doing that.”
“Presumably,” I said. “But if so, they’re dropping their full names when they do.”
He frowned. “Can we cross-check from school rolls from the estates, and look for names of the highest-achieving students? Then we can find them, prefixes or not, on the Guild rolls.”
I shook my head. “That’s what I thought, too. But I asked Budua for the school records from the estates and she said they haven’t been collected for decades.”
“Doesn’t your Guild have any supervision over the local schools, then? How—” My sharp cough cut Jov off. He winced and put a hand on my shoulder; I shrugged it off. “It looks like the Guild used to, but hasn’t been interacting much with them in years.”
Before I could say anything further, a knock made us jump. Tain’s messenger, Erel, waited there. “The Chancellor called for you, Credo Jovan,” the boy said. “He wants you at the Manor.”
* * *
The original Silastian school was in the upper city, a beautiful old building not far from our apartments. For the last half a century now, Silastian youths had studied in the lower city, in not one building but many. The school complex was an entire section of the city. It felt like returning to the past to walk that passage across Trickster’s Bridge and toward the administrative tower, the tallest building in the school. I could have found it blindfolded.
Though I couldn’t have articulated why, I’d found the Scribe-Guilder evasive when I asked her about the records. Perhaps Budua had just been defensive about having limited control over the nation’s education, but though Tain didn’t want to hear about it, and there had been no attempts on his life, Jov and I still remained on alert for a traitor on the Council.
I descended the narrow staircase into the bowels of the administrative building, the rhythmic taps of my footsteps echoing around me like a drumbeat. The air felt cool on my cheeks, still and lifeless, and the light from my small oil lamp struggled to part the thick cloak of darkness.
The door to the records room was locked, but of all the things I’d struggled with in my Tashi’s training, lock-picking had not been one of them. I made short work of it, the mechanism moving into place with a satisfying snick. High-ceilinged and cavernous, the room loomed around me, silent and austere with its rows and towers of metal shelves and cabinets. I walked its length, drawing my light across the neat, etched labels, searching for some references to schools outside Silasta. There were multiple cabinets marked for Moncasta, Telasa, and West Dortal, and when I searched through them I found not just rolls but extensive correspondence between teachers, reports on performance, and even work samples and recommendations from the school administrators. Meticulous records of students who had passed every course run at the school. All ranges of subjects—academic, physical, specialist. But of Sjona’s broader regions: nothing. No cabinets, no files, no sign of any Darfri-style family names.
I finally found reference to estate schools in the poorly labeled files and cabinets at the back of the room. Poorer quality materials, with faded lettering, and only very roughly organized into regions, but better than nothing. There was nowhere to sit and read, so I squatted on the cold stone floor, much to the protest of my knees and back.
By the time the oil in the lamp ran low, I couldn’t feel anything much below my waist, and a heavy sensation filled my chest like I’d breathed in the wrong kind of air. Some of these papers were a hundred years old, and the quality of the information recorded dramatically diminished by the time I’d reached the “newest,” which was still over forty years old. Over time, the city’s interest in the estate schools had clearly faded, leaving us with the frustrating modern state. I couldn’t tell from this what condition estate schools were in, or what they were teaching. I had no way to track their students. But I found the idea that the Council had let stewards of the Families determine the standard of services provided to their residents deeply troubling.