He looked at her for a while, more thoughtful now than angry, settling slowly onto the foot of the bed. When he spoke, his voice was pensive. “Is that really how the world looks through your eyes? Actions have meaning, suffering has purpose. No one ever just does something awful because they feel like it.”
Qanath looked back at him and didn’t know what to say.
“If you want my opinion,” he continued, “it’s that life rarely makes so much sense. You say he was a great man and… maybe he was. For all I know, he came to that auction because he meant to set us free.” He fell silent, looking into his own past. Qanath wandered over to the armchair and sat down.
“You asked me once if he was like a father to me,” he said after a while. “It made me realize I wanted him to be. My father had just died, I think I would have accepted being owned by a foreigner if only we could have agreed on what that meant. We struck a deal that he would teach me, but only if he got to sleep with me, which made him useless as a surrogate-parent.
“Didn’t work out for Xar, either,” he continued, eyes on his hands. He turned the one about in the other, picking at his calluses with his nails. “I made that joke about him being a child molester, and technically he was, but he hated that I was a kid back when I was. What he really wanted was that I love him as a man and an equal, but he couldn’t wait for me to grow up or make up my own mind. You see predetermination, but I see two hapless people thrown together who really ought never to have met.”
She grimaced, looking out the window at the fading day as she wondered what to say. It wasn’t as though she disbelieved him; he must know better than she did. It was just hard for her to accept that it was all the result of random chance. When someone hit a perfect bullseye playing darts, it was only logical to assume they’d aimed.
She was conscious of his eyes on her face, and after a minute he said, “You’re genuinely really interested in this, aren’t you? Are you going to write a paper on me for the Collure?”
“No!” He raised his brows. “It doesn’t make much sense if I can’t tell the whole story, and I would never ask it of you.”
Havec’s eyes grew distant again. “Oh, I don’t know. Ask me in ten years. After all: Avat Havec, the foreigner so gorgeous desire for him drove the mighty Xar anKebbal mad and broke his will…”
“I’m not sure that’s exactly how I would put it.”
“If that isn’t how you put it, what makes you think I would let you write about it?”
She rolled her eyes. Havec chuckled, pleased with himself. It was a minute before she thought to ask, “It looks like we got back safe and sound. What now?”
He gave her a quizzical look. “We did my thing, I assumed it was time to do yours.”
Qanath stared at him, disarmed. Before she could find a response, someone knocked at the door. A soldier poked his head into the room when Havec called permission, face averted. “Forgive me, Avat, but two men rode into town yesterday, and they’ve been asking everyone about a man they won’t describe and a young woman who sounds like…”
“Me?” Qanath suggested. “They’re northerners?”
“Nah, Tabbi.”
She turned her eyes back onto her friend and found him watching her.
“Where can we find these fellows?” Havec asked.
“Barracks.” Perceiving their surprise, he added, “Seemed suspicious to us, so we detained them.”
He ducked back out the door, and they were left staring at each other. They had a pair of candidates, men who knew Qanath was headed this way in the company of a man they might have guessed existed but had never seen. Why they had followed her all this way, though…
As if he had heard her thoughts, Havec said, “Never know if we don’t ask.”
The Return of Hair-On-End and Smooth Guy
They made their way down the stairs into the common room, then back across the town square to the building they had just quit. There was a little eatery next door pumping sugar-scented steam into the frosty air, and you would think that the soldiers and detectives themselves made up most of its custom. Qanath couldn’t help but notice, though, that every table was occupied; there were even people sitting on the chairs that had been moved onto the patio for the warmer season that had yet to arrive. Based on the stir that went through the patrons when Havec went past, it wasn’t hard to guess why half the town had decided they needed a ginger cookie and a mug of someone else’s tea.
That felt natural to her; he was a hero and handsome, a rightful king in exile. What did not feel natural was a pair of men traveling hundreds of miles in pursuit of her. What could she possibly have that anyone might want?
They were expected in the barracks, and a woman leapt from her desk immediately to lead them into the back. They found the two in an office on the ground floor toward the rear, talking to a middle-aged woman whose face was vaguely familiar from earlier. They were sitting before her desk and there were no chains in evidence, but between the look on her face and the solider standing in one corner with his hand on the hilt of his sword, it was obvious an interrogation was taking place.
It was indeed the men they’d met briefly on the road, and Qanath was struck even more forcefully this time by how incredibly different they were. The one who did most of the talking had a few years on Havec, as well as a few inches, although his posture and the breadth of his shoulders made her think he had spent those years at a desk. He had an intelligent air, the refined speech of the well-educated, but there was a pair of metal shutters behind his eyes, guarding whatever lay within. He was bitterly angry about this situation, too, she could hear it in his voice even before they entered the room.
The other man was considerably smaller, with a winsome twist to his features and a gleam in his eye that might have been mischief or malice, it was hard to tell. What was most striking about him at that moment was his indifference to the fact that he had just been arrested for reasons the authorities were reluctant to articulate. He was staring at the wall when they arrived, and it was no studied pose adopted to convince someone he wasn’t afraid: his eyes had glazed over and he was tapping his fingers against his thumbs as if completely absorbed by whatever song was running through his head.
Their appearance put an end to the tableau. Everyone turned to face them when they stopped in the door, the first man twisting about to find out what was happening with a look of anger that made it clear it couldn’t be anything good. When his eyes lit on Qanath, all expression fell away, another layer of shutters slamming closed. If his attention was all on her, the younger man was looking at Havec, and you would have thought there wasn’t anyone else in the world. His mouth had opened slightly, eyes stretched wide, less an expression of lust than amazement. As if he had opened his dresser one morning and found a miniature galaxy spinning inside.
“Do you know these men?” the woman behind the desk asked, taking control.
“That would be stretching it,” Qanath replied. The man was still staring right at her, and she couldn’t look away. He was handsome in an understated way, his black hair shaggy as if it had been too long since he had it cut. His eyes were a muted green, she realized now; he had no obvious accent, but he must come from the west. There was something disdainful in his gaze as he watched her note these things, as if he already knew every one of the assumptions she had just formed and found them trite.
“What do you know about Senator Nembe Ameel?”
This astonishing question snapped the tension between them, and she put her full attention on the detective. “Huh?”
Foursquare before her on the desk lay the palm-sized leather folder every Tabbi carried at all times, from which a number of documents bearing official seals had been pulled. There was only one of them instead of two, but Qanath was preoccupied with other things and didn’t wonder why. The detective slipped a piece of paper from amongst the others, regarding it with distrust. It was larger, letter-sized, grubby and tattered unlike the carefully-preserved passport and certificate of residency; it looked to have been high-quality stationary before it was folded many times and stuffed in a pocket where it was carried around for weeks.
“He had this on him. Says he’s acting under the authority of Siva Nembe. He seems to think it means I don’t get to ask questions.”
These words might have been addressed to Qanath, but had obviously been meant for the stranger, who now turned around to meet the charge. “I served for five years in the Ayan Infantry, Tenth Brigade, Corps of Engineers. I would have thought—”
“That even after you quit, it gives you license to do dodgy shit like this?” Before he could respond, she continued, “Ah, well, and maybe it would have. But. You have walked into the midst of an active investigation,” she mimed her index and middle finger marching across her desk, “and I need to know what you know before I let you run free.”
Slowly, he said, “I don’t know how to answer that. So far as I know, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not aware of any criminal activity taking place anywhere nearby.”
“And do you think you might be ready now to tell me why you and your Senator are so interested in the Avatethura Master’s companion?”
That spun him around again, eyes going to Havec. The small man was looking at him, too, but he had been all along. If he had blinked, Qanath hadn’t seen it.
“You are the Avatethura Master? What happened to Xaritu anKebbal?”
