The mother murmured a prayer, a balm for grief, but the words were slow in her mouth. The father’s eyes were still wary.
Ilan leaned forward, pressure with nowhere for them to run. “I need to know if you saw anything suspicious in the days before her death. Was she meeting anyone new? Mention being followed, or seeing anything strange?”
The woman gave a little shake of her head, the man rubbing at his knuckles.
Ilan narrowed his eyes. “Think carefully.”
The two sat silent, breath heavy. That was fine. He’d set the temperature to one he was well used to, he could sit here as long as it took for them to boil and crack.
The father leaned forward first.
“She—“
“Karlos.“ His wife grabbed his sleeve.
Ilan raised an eyebrow. “If there’s something I should know, say it. She’s dead. There’s nothing that can stain her now. All we can do is try to give her justice.”
The mother’s hand dropped back to her lap. Her husband continued.
“Lili had come to resent going to service.” He spoke slowly and with struggle, as if the words were being fished from his throat. “She was going to see the Izir. I worried for her soul, whether she’d even be allowed to stay in the city.”
The Izir. Just one more wretched thing in the middle of an already wretched business. “Why was she visiting him?” It didn’t reflect well on her, worse on them for letting her stray. “Was she ill? Or perhaps...other interests?” She would hardly have been the first to lust after the angel.
The man’s eyebrows drew together. “It began after that first man was found dead. She couldn’t sleep for worry and nightmares, she was always a sensitive girl.” Now his words were tripping over themselves in eagerness to be done talking. “She said his prayers and tonics helped, stopped her from pacing all night at least. But I don’t think she believed his heresies—she was just desperate. She’d even talked about joining the church, so it doesn’t make sense. She couldn’t have believed him.” The man’s voice rose with every anguished word.
“What sort of nightmares?” Ilan asked. They’d been careful not to let word of the marks on the bodies slip to the public. Acolytes, however, were young and gossip-prone.
The parents shook their heads. “She never said, not specifically.”
He made a note anyway. “If she was scared of going out at night, what was she doing by the river? A lover, perhaps?” The fetid riverside would be a strange choice for a romantic encounter, but perhaps a fisher or trader had caught her eye. A lovestruck girl might have thought it a chance to sin in the open without being caught, and family often elected to be naive when children grew up.
The couple’s eyes met, but the mother spoke first. “No one that we know of. We didn’t even hear her go out.”
His lips thinned. More intangible testimony instead of evidence. “Perhaps you should have also urged her more strongly to be cautious.” Ilan reached beneath his vestment cloak. “A memento to burn, if you like.”
He placed one of the girl’s blonde braids on the table, where it lay curled and frayed like a strip of pelt, and averted his gaze as the woman broke into gasping sobs.
The father stared down at the twined hair, skin as ashen as the salt white in his beard.
“Why isn’t the church doing more?” he asked, voice grave and flat. “We’ve been terrorized for weeks, and the Prelate hasn’t said a blasted thing.”
Ilan tilted his head. “Excuse me?”
The fear was gone from the man’s eyes, replaced by a cavernous anger as he half-rose, fingertips pressing into the table. “You relish punishing those who sin, but what are you doing to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place? If prayer was going to work the city would be free already. Say what you want about the Izir, but at least he’s on the streets and not hiding in the cathedral. He’s offering what comfort he can.”
“Karlos!” The man’s wife pressed her palms on the table and bowed her head until it nearly touched the surface.
It had been a long time since Ilan had seen quite that much deference.
Then again, these people were from Saika. They may have seen him in uniforms far more decorated than the one he now wore.
“And what would you have me do?” Ilan’s lip curled. “I have the census of everyone in the city. Would you like me to call them in, one by one, and pull out their fingernails until I get a confession?” They’d already tested the population against the glass, found all manner of minor blasphemies and a few horrors, but nothing close to this level of sin.
“If that’s what it takes.” The man’s chin was set. Grief had snatched the color from his world, rendered it black and white, illuminated only with flashes of pain. He’d seen it in the church, among those who thought taking vows after tragedy would bring some meaning to their loss. He’d seen it in his own home, with two siblings delivered before he’d turned fifteen and his mother reduced to a ghost herself for years.
But there was a reason justice and knowledge were equal among the virtues. Ilan himself had considered putting more pressure on the interrogations, and just as quickly dismissed it. He wasn’t going to scar a city of the devout in the hope some rumor of smoke turned out to be fire. The Izir was making enough people question the church as it was; any more and it would spill over into outright anger at the faith.
He’d been raised on politics and stories of what happened when the hungry turned hateful against those guiding them. In the dark years between the Severing and the Union, the territories had been in constant fear-stoked uprising, and trust had only slowly been rebuilt in the three hundred years since they’d come to a sort of order. Managing a population for their own good was delicate work.
But this man didn’t need to know that. Ilan let teeth show with his smile. “Then why don’t I start with you?” Let the man look his call to violence in the mirror. By the way his lip curled, he found the reflection sickening.
“My daughter is dead. You can’t think I killed her.” He was standing upright now, backing up to put a cowardly step of space between himself and the inquisitor.
“You would be surprised. But I don’t think these murders are a family matter.”
The older man leaned back and stared at the ceiling, retreating into the shroud of impotent anger, and his wife saw Ilan out with a bowed head and breathy prayers to their shared saint.
When he shut the door, he paused to place his hand on it and say a prayer of solace, one he’d learned from his own mother in the endless nights of deep winter. These people would need strength.
Murders happened in Silgard, but never in such isolation. There was always a thread- jealousy, or anger, or greed, and he wasn’t lying when he said it was kin killing kin more often than not. The only connection here was spilled blood, the writing on the bodies, and the way the killer never surfaced.
Thoughts he had tried to suppress leaked to the surface like smoke finding hairsbreadth cracks in a sealed door.
Ilan would have bet his own soul that there could never be a demon in Silgard. The city was warded, the people striving for good, and creatures of Shadow required invitation.
But this was the city of miracles, and not everything miraculous was good.
