The Devil's Concubine (The Devil of Ponong series #1) (13 page)

“So their mortal enemies could live among
them, and the Thampurians would pretend they didn’t see? No wonder why I have
so few informants on this side of town.”

“But it makes breaking into his apartment a
lot easier.” Kyam brandished his lock picks.

“Why don’t we try the simple, obvious answer
first, as that old thief Grandfather Zul would advise?”

When she knocked, the door creaked open under
the gentle force of her fist. The coppery smell of blood and the sickening
stench of rotting meat made her gag.

Kyam pushed in front of her.

A narrow staircase led from the foyer up to
the second story of the apartment. Kyam gestured for QuiTai to follow him down
the hallway of the first floor as he moved forward.

A swarm of flies buzzed angrily around a
jellylantern sconce.

The smell grew stronger as they came to the
end of the hallway, which widened into a room furnished with divans and soft
chairs. Daylight streaming through the carved window screens made shell
patterns on the rug covering the dark wood floor.

QuiTai pulled her scarf over her nose as they
moved to the kitchen.

Flies zigzagged through the air. A Thampurian
man with broad, muscled shoulders lay face down in thick, syrupy blood.

A wide smear of blood was near the blood
puddle. It looked to QuiTai as if something had been dragged through it.
Nothing around the body looked as if it had been moved.

Kyam rolled the corpse over. The throat wasn’t
the only part of the body torn open. “Werewolf?” he said.

QuiTai didn’t mind Kyam’s shorthand speech.
She planned to open her mouth as little as possible too, or the taste of death
would coat her tongue. She pointed to the cuts in man’s thighs and arms. “Cut,
not bitten.” Werewolves ate the stomach and entrails first, all of which were
intact on the corpse.

Kyam nodded to a knife on the sideboard then
found a towel to lift it with. “Blood on the blade, but the handle is clean. I
doubt they’ll find fingerprints.” He set it down almost exactly where he found
it.

QuiTai’s gaze jumped, taking in glimpses of
the carnage without the details. Her thoughts were in similar disarray. She saw
that near the corpse, blood spray peppered the lower cabinets to either side of
a clean space. Flies walked across congealed stew in a pot. A lone clean bowl
sat on the counter by the cooking fire…

She took a steadying breath and forced
herself to methodically look at the floor inch by inch. Her mind grabbed onto
the sense of order.

She knew she wasn’t looking at a werewolf
kill. It was possible a Ponongese killer had mutilated the victim’s throat to
hide fang marks, but the spray of blood on the cabinets didn’t fit that theory.
That narrowed the list of suspects to Thampurians and Ravidians.

Her eyes were drawn to the body on the floor.
She squatted and forced herself to take her time looking over the rest of the
evidence. The answer was there.

A path of blood drops led from the body to
the window. Three distinct circular spots of blood about three feet apart
formed a line parallel to the blood drops.

The sequence of events began to fall into
place for her.

“There, there, and there,” she pointed to the
three drops.

It wasn’t a vision, but everything she saw
fit the picture that formed in her mind.

“From his throat?” Kyam asked.

She shook her head. Her fingers fanned out
along the line of the spray on the cabinets then swung over to the dots to show
that they weren’t the same trajectory. Then she pointed to the steady track of
blood drops from the separate smear on the floor to the window.

Kyam lifted his hands as if he saw but didn’t
know what to make of it.

The stink made QuiTai’s head spin. The flavor
of old blood clung to the back of her tongue. “Seen enough?”

~ ~ ~

They hurried away from the harbor master’s apartment, gasping
the clean, ocean-scented air. They slowed after a minute, and then QuiTai
decided that the building with the number eight painted above the doors was a
lucky spot, so she sat on the front stoop. Kyam groaned as he sat next to her.
His shoulders rubbed against hers. She moved over a bit.

“That was the harbor
master, yes? I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him,” she said. The werewolves
handled that side of the Devil’s business. Her nose wrinkled. The harbor master’s
replacement would doubtless be as corrupt as his predecessor, but if he wasn’t
it could cause problems. Petrof needed to know about the situation.

“That was him,” Kyam said.

“Just making sure. He was fit enough to
captain a skiff.”

They sat in silence for a while. She sniffed
her clothes and the scarf. They smelled of bruised leaves and churned earth; the
scent of death hadn’t had time to work its way into the fibers. The sarong and
blouse she didn’t care about, but she would have been sad to part with the
scarf. She ran the silk through her fingers. Not only was it the highest
quality, but it would, indeed, match most of the colors she usually wore. How
flattering that Kyam paid attention to such things. Maybe he truly had an
artist’s eye.

She looked up and surprised him studying her
with a hint of a smile.

If she was going to talk to PhaNyan and
LiHoun, she had to convince Kyam that they needed to go to town square for some
reason. She pretended to him that all their misdirection and sleight of hand
was narcissistic, that no one cared what they did, but she knew that Petrof had
her watched. And she knew that she was in a race against Kyam and the colonial
government to reach the Ravidians first.

And the Devil. She mustn’t forget the Devil.
Who had said that? Kyam had.

She was in a race against Petrof too.

Where had that idea come from? Surely she
meant to think that it she was in this race
for
Petrof. She was supposed to be rededicating herself to him, and proving her
loyalty. Yet there it was, that unbidden thought with its ring of truth. So for
now, she had to keep everyone looking the wrong direction while she... well,
she wasn’t sure what she’d do yet, but she believed the answer would present
itself soon. There were hazy details to her vision of the future, like exactly
how the Ravidians planned to use the sea wasps. She knew how she’d use them, and
that was all that mattered.

The Ravidian’s plan was quite elegant, she
mused, and executed with precision she admired. But they shouldn’t have
killed the harbor master. The greedy bastard had probably blackmailed
them, but they should have paid him anyway. How else would they get
supplies? From the harbor master’s brother? That’s where her admiration dimmed;
everyone knew that you couldn’t trust an addict, ever. No doubt the Ravidian
killer found that out the hard way, after murdering the harbor master and
returning to the harbor only to find the brother lost in vapor. QuiTai could
picture the Ravidian’s panic. And then he would need to avoid being seen by the
soldiers on the fortress’ ramparts. Perhaps he had waited on the skiff for
nightfall, as QuiTai had.

And then what? One man could manage to sail a
skiff alone, but why steal such a large boat when so many small, one-man fishing
boats were within arm’s reach? She’d have to ask the fishermen if any
boats were missing. No Ponongese would report such a theft to the Thampurians, who
would simply pick another Ponongese to blame and kill him; but they would tell
her. Then they’d expect her to bring it back. Information always had a price.
Her nose wrinkled. Maybe this time she’d skip the verification and simply trust
her vision. This was no time to go hunting for an errant fishing boat.

“Oh, no,” Kyam said. “You’re thinking again.”

“Let’s go get your farwriter. Someone is
trying to kill us. I know that you want more proof, but honestly, what if we
are
killed? Then the Ravidians get away
with everything. Your superiors don’t even know that anything is wrong. Send a
preliminary report.”

Kyam sat forward and watched the empty road
as if he expected someone to come along at any moment. “What should I say? You
started to tell me something before the funicular cable got cut. What do you
know?”

“Someone tried to make it look as if the
harbor master was killed by werewolves. You certainly wanted to believe it.”

“No, at that point we were talking about
medusozoa, not werewolves.”

It would ruin everything if he started asking
the right questions, because she sensed he’d know if she lied to him. Sticking
to the truth would be safer. But she needed more time.

“Do you want a lecture about colonial
economics, Mister Zul, or do you want to know why this murder proves that you’re
on the right track?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “It doesn’t take long
in this town for someone to sit down and regale you with the story of the time
the werewolves rampaged through Levapur. You know how we love our stories. I’m
sure someone related it to the Ravidians within days of their arrival. But of
course, they didn’t pay attention to some of the important details.”

“Such as?”

“Normally, the werewolves head for the inland
valleys when they shift. After all, they don’t want anyone to bring them to
trial in case they attack a Thampurian instead of a boar.”

“Don’t you worry about them attacking
Ponongese in the inland villages or on the plantation terraces?”

“They won’t.”

“You sound awfully confident about that.”

“May I continue? Good. A couple months after
they came to Ponong, some of the werewolves came across the Jupoli Gorge Bridge
and into town. But only the fringes of Levapur, you understand. It’s not as if
they were running wild in the marketplace. They were after food. When they’re
in their animal states, they don’t think like people. The destruction wasn’t
deliberate.”

“You’re making excuses for them.”

“No. I’m explaining why that time, when we
knew it was the werewolves, is different from this time, when we’re being led
rather sloppily to believe it’s the werewolves again.”

“You parse words like a Thampurian merchant
measures silk. As I said before, the legal profession lost a great mind when
you took to the stage.”

“And the stage lost a comedian when you took
up painting. Be careful, or I might take up the law in the third act.”

Kyam cupped a hand over his ear. “Did you
hear that? Judges from here to the continent shrieking in terror.”

She chose to take that as a compliment.

“Explain why you’re so convinced that the
werewolves aren’t involved. Facts that prove it, not simply your opinion this
time, if you please,” he said.

If only they could stay away from topics that
cut deep. QuiTai took a deep breath and hoped her mastery over her voice hid
the quiver of emotion that rose in her chest. “As I was saying before, the
night of the full moon massacre, several werewolves came into town. At the
first apartment building on the fringes of town, they attacked a group of
neighbors sitting out on their veranda. It was horrible, horrible carnage.
Children, adults, elders. The wolves gorged. Nine people almost entirely
devoured. Fact.”

She was proud of how steady her voice
sounded. Talking about that massacre always reopened a wound that would never
heal properly. The trick was to keep it distant, as if it were something she’d
heard about long ago and half forgotten.

She went on, “So you understand why it couldn’t
have been a werewolf that killed the harbor master? The wolves kill at their
first opportunity. The harbor master’s house is much too far from their den for
that. And they don’t carve steaks.” She held up her hands and wriggled her
fingers. “No hands, just paws. They tear off chunks off the body as they eat. Again,
fact. Not opinion. And I’m sure that you noticed that the body and the
apartment were a fairly tidy murder scene. Believe me, werewolves aren’t neat,
even in their human form.”

“You need to keep better company.” Kyam mulled
over her words for a while. “What about a werewolf when he’s human?”

“Then they’re common murderers. No excuses.
They know right from wrong in the human definition of morality.”

He scoffed. “I haven’t seen much evidence of
that.”

“If they were mad killers while in their
human forms, they wouldn’t go to the trouble to strangle their victims rather
than rip out their throats. Madmen don’t think about hiding their crimes.”

“Strangle. I find it interesting that you
know that but don’t – sorry. You were saying?”

Concentrating on the current murder helped
her push the past back where it belonged. The challenge electrified her brain.
While she knew it was morbid to dwell on the harbor master’s body, and even
worse to enjoy the challenge, the murder scene presented an interesting tableau
of facts. She was eager to share them with someone who could appreciate her
observations rather than obsess on the death.

She hugged her knees. “There’s more. Want to
hear it?”

He leaned on his elbow and stretched his long
legs down the steps. “Yes. Amaze me.”