At approximately eight thirty that evening I received a telephone call requesting that I come to the city morgue on Cressy Street to identify a dead body that had been found floating in the Twisel. My friend Kudshayn, a visiting Draconean scholar, insisted on accompanying me—first because he was worried for my safety, because Mr. Mornett had gone missing, and second because we both immediately leapt to the possibility that the body in question was Mr. Mornett’s. We took a private cab to the morgue, but did not arrive there until nearly nine thirty, because we had difficulty finding a cab driver willing to take on a Draconean as a passenger.
Constable Corran was waiting for me at the morgue. Before we went in, he cautioned me, because I have never seen a dead body before. “He was in the river for some hours before anyone found him,” the constable said, “and that has some effects. But the doctor will only pull back the sheet from his face, where there are no marks of violence. Only if you need to see more will you have to look at anything worse.”
My queasiness was not because of the prospect of seeing a body, though. It was because I feared I had gotten Aaron Mornett killed. I do not quite remember what I said, but it was along the lines of, “If I cannot recognize him from his face, then pulling back the sheet more will not help, because I never saw any other part of him”—which is not strictly true; I think I could recognize his hands. But that, I think, was not what Constable Corran had in mind.
Then he took me and Kudshayn in to see the body. The doctor waited until I said I was ready, then drew the sheet down.
I got very faint—but again, not because of the body itself. Kudshayn supported me, and I heard him tell the doctor and the constable, “That is not Aaron Mornett.”
“No,” I said, still holding on to Kudshayn. “It’s Zachary Hallman.”
Even with his face cold and blue, I knew him. And it’s terrible to admit this, but I’d gone faint with relief—because I’d been bracing myself so hard for someone else. And while I would have preferred to see Hallman stand trial for his bigotry and his crimes, I can’t say I shed a tear to see him on that slab.
Constable Corran knew about Hallman from my testimony earlier that day. He took me into a separate room and questioned me some more, along with Kudshayn, about the last time we had seen Hallman (not since the riot at Alterbury) and our conviction that he was involved with the bombing of the Tomphries annex. When he asked how Hallman might have wound up shot and in the river, I was still so dizzy with shock and relief that I said exactly what I was thinking: “If Mrs. Kefford hired him for the bombing, I bet she was worried that it would be traced back to her.”
That made Corran stop writing and stare at me. “You think the wife of the Dissenting Speaker shot him?”
“Not herself, no,” I said, feeling very cold inside. “But she might have asked someone else to . . . take care of him.”
Corran put his pen down. “Miss Camherst,” he said, quiet and firm. “Please consider what you are doing. I recognize that you have many suspicions—and you may be correct. But without any proof, you’re putting yourself very much at risk for a lawsuit from Mrs. Kefford later on. Any accusation against her could be considered defamation of her husband as well.”
He was right, of course. But all I could think was that Hallman was dead and Aaron was missing; would he be the next one found in the river? For all my problems with the man, I didn’t want him to die. “Then don’t write it down,” I said furiously, standing up. “But don’t you dare leave her out of your investigation just because you’re afraid. There’s more at stake here than one murder, or even two; the future of the Draconean people may depend, not just on our finding out the truth, but proving it.”
Then I stormed out. Which wasn’t smart, for a whole host of reasons: I didn’t look where I was going, so I wound up heading the wrong direction for catching another cab, and I managed to set off a coughing fit to boot. I fetched up against the low stone wall along the bank of the Twisel and stayed there for a while, doing my best to hack up a lung. Kudshayn followed me and stood with one of his wings sheltering my back, offering silent comfort.
When I could finally speak again, I said, “I have to find him.”
Kudshayn knew whom I meant. He said, “Perhaps he fled before they came—whoever they were. Is there anywhere he might have gone?”
“He grew up in Yarstow,” I said. “But he hated it there; I can’t imagine he’d go back, even to hide.” Was there anywhere else? I stared into the Twisel, trying not to imagine his body floating cold and limp in its waters.
And then it came to me: the Twisel.
No one else, I think, could have figured it out. The worst thing about Aaron Mornett is that he and I are, in some senses, perfectly matched: we share the same knowledge, the same passions, at least up to a point. And so that paper he had left in his hotel room was a love poem, as I had assumed . . . but it was also a clue.
“The Twisel,” I said to Kudshayn, staring fixedly at the water—but for different reasons now. “Its name is an Old Scirling word for ‘forked’ or ‘twinned.’ On the banks of the twinned river, her treasure-house lies . . .”
Kudshayn was understandably confused. “What treasure-house?”
I whirled to face him. “Some place Aaron wanted me to know about. The poem I mentioned to you, the one he wrote—it’s a message to me. One no one else would recognize, because they would need to know I’m Beliluštar, that ‘wings that span the sky of day’ is one of her epithets—” I stopped dead. “They would need to know the epic. Gold, emerald, lapis, jet—”
“The colours of the four siblings,” Kudshayn said. His wings flicked with sudden life. “Is he telling you where the missing tablets are hidden?”
“Maybe. Yes? I don’t know.” It was incomprehensible to me that he might give up that information, after everything that had happened. But why else allude to them in such a fashion? “The question is, where is he sending me? The Twisel is the longest river in Scirland.”
“He would not go that far,” Kudshayn said. “Somewhere in the city.”
That was still a great deal of riverbank to search. “The rest of the poem,” I said. Closing my eyes, I made myself breathe slowly and carefully, suppressing the coughs that wanted to rise. I needed to remember, not start hacking again. I recited the poem for Kudshayn, one line at a time, then opened my eyes to see what he thought.
“The heights over the depths,” he said immediately. “The Crown of the Abyss?”
If the tone of the poem had been less intimate, I might have wondered if Aaron was telling me to go to hell. “The gate of bone. Bone, bound with skin—that is the gate through which the sisters entered the underworld, and Ektabr when he was in female guise. Some place only for women? No.” I dismissed that with a cut of my hand. “He would not have been able to hide them there.”
“The gate cannot bar your way,” Kudshayn reminded me. “And then the poem changes the image, saying the road of bone will form your path.”
“Some street named for a bone?” I said dubiously. “Skull Street, Femur Street, Clavicle Street . . .” It all sounded very gruesome and unlikely. But not for nothing do I have a natural historian for a grandmother—and at the thought of her, it all clicked into place. The bone she broke during the disaster that brought her to Kudshayn’s people. “Fibula Street!” (Named for the style of brooch, not the leg bone, but such is poetic license.)