The Third Claw of God (38 page)

The two men started talking at the same time. Brown said, “This is…” Wethers said, “I don’t…”

Philip Bettelhine shut them both him with a single shouted, “QUIET!”

Both men stopped in mid-syllable.

I couldn’t tell whether it was his authority or their internal governors, but either way it worked. They both seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Volumes of hatred still burned on their faces, but they would cooperate with everything that came after this. They had no choice. Dina Pearlman smirked. Pride in her work? Or the mere pleasure that a woman like her would naturally feel at the sight of her superiors being humiliated?

I waited for the silence to accumulate a weight all its own, and continued. “Either one of you might have been moved to drastic measures. Either one of you could have set these events into motion.

“And not incidentally,” I said, raising my voice, “either one of you would have been able to provide the final ingredients you needed: the Claws of God, and the Fire Snake. We found out in the course of this investigation that just a few short years ago the corporation was trying to reverse-engineer the Claws, for use as a long-range orbital weapon…”

Dejah covered her eyes with her hand. “I wish that didn’t come as a surprise, with these people.”

I grinned at her. “Yes. The very idea is revolting. But that’s beside the point. The very fact that such a project took place suggests that the corporation had working Claws on hand or the capability to construct prototypes for testing, somewhere in one of its many research facilities. It doesn’t matter whether they were actual antiques or modern-day prototypes. The same follows for the Fire Snake, which would also be of immense interest to a munitions manufacturer raiding old technologies for ideas. But in the case of both weapons, would the corporation dispose of the models on hand or just put them on a shelf somewhere? What do you think?”

“I vote for shelf,” Dejah said. “No reason to waste a potentially valuable resource.”

“Exactly. And either way, one of you,” I said, indicating Brown and Wethers, “hit upon the idea of using them in this business. So you obtained them. Nobody would have said no to either one of you. After all, anybody trusted with the responsibility to keep an eye on such dangerous objects would have been conditioned to allow authorized personnel access. And who could possibly be more authorized?

“Were we not in our current situation, were we able to contact the surface and track down the facility where the Claws of God and the Fire Snake were stored, we could leave it at that. After all, it would be an easy matter to determine which one of you demanded access.

“We would also be able to determine which one of you used your influence to summon Hans Bettelhine just before the Royal Carriage left Anchor Point and thus ensure that he would not be aboard to be threatened by these events.

“Alas, we’re cut off from the outside world and can’t ask those questions now. But we will be able to do so, when building our case against you later.

“Either way, the prospect of a long elevator ride with everybody who worries you—Jason, Jelaine, Dejah, the Khaajiir, and me—presented your last, best opportunity to find us all together in the same place, and isolated from the power structure you were protecting. You couldn’t wait until we reached Xana. You had to determine what we wanted, and if necessary neutralize us before we got there. Hence the importance of arranging for the emergency stop, the communications shutdown, and whatever false intelligence is keeping the security forces from rescuing us. Hence your failure, in all of these hours since the Khaajiir’s death, to kill again. It’s not just that everybody’s been keeping an eye on one another. It’s the fact that questions are being asked, and you want answers just as much as we do. Had I not insisted on starting our own investigation, you would have made the same suggestion yourself.”

My next words emerged as gentler than I’d expected them to be, gentler by far than anything I’d said so far. I spoke to the people behind the rigid faces, the souls in cages driven to their crimes. “I feel sorry for you, really. In a way, you’re not responsible for what you’ve done. Driven by a loyalty that’s been imposed on you, you’ve served the Bettelhines as best you could, the only way you could, given your suspicions of an internal conspiracy that must have left you agonizing over who to trust.

“But you still murdered the Khaajiir.

“And you’re still a threat to the rest of us.

“And since we cannot determine your identity by communicating with Xana and determining which one of you obtained the Claws and gave the necessary orders, we might have been left with nothing and been stuck here until the air or food ran out.”

I took a deep breath.

“But fortunately we’ve been handed a little help.

“The Khaajiir himself told us who you are.”

That caused a commotion among everybody except the Porrinyards and Bettelhines, who knew where I was going: gasps of astonishment, frenzied conversation among those desperate to remember what the Khaajiir might have said and when he might have said it.

I gestured for silence and got it.

“This is what you need to keep in mind about the Khaajiir. He was a Bocaian, representative of a species that possesses little if any talent for the acquisition of new languages past adolescence. To counteract that limitation he used his staff as a personal translation system, without which he would have been unable to communicate with others.

“We also know something odd about him that flies in the face of this central fact: he admitted to a penchant for multilingual wordplay. When we met he regaled me with a secondary meaning of my name, Cort , and with additional interpretations of the namesOscin andSkye . He had additional information about the derivation ofPorrinyard . In fact, he embraced his title, Khaajiir, a K’cenhowten construction, because of its coincidental similarities to his Bocaian name. We know he regaled Mr. Mendez with similar information. I’m sure he did the same to the rest of you. Am I correct?”

Paakth-Doy raised her hand. “When I served him on the way up, he told me about an extinct beast of burden known as the Paarkth by the ancient Riirgaans who domesticated it. Not quite my name, Paakth. But similar.”

Jason said, “And he was fond of telling me stories about an ancient mythological hero with my name. An Earthman, known for journeying.”

There was a hubbub. Colette had been told of another antiquated word,coquette . Jelaine had been apprised of certain words similar to Bettelhine among races I had never heard of. Oscin had been treated to a discourse on witty derivations of the planetary name Xana. I had known of none of these, but I wasn’t surprised at all. They all fit the childlike delight the monolingual Khaajiir felt for the infinite possibilities of cross-cultural vocabulary.

I waited for the moment of mass discovery to die down, then said, “Off-the-cuff observations like these did a lot to further the man’s erudite reputation, but a moment’s consideration will confirm thatthey likely had nothing to do with him . Hecheated .”

Dejah got it first. “His staff.”

“That’s correct,” I said. “He was able to use the databases of extinct and extant languages in its translation program and construct wordplay at a moment’s notice.

“He fell into the habit because he enjoyed it, because it impressed people, and—in my case, and who knows how many others—because it aided small talk and helped to defuse hostile situations. Look at me. I hated him before he pulled that Cort/Court comparison. Afterward I wrote him off as chatty and harmless.”

“Don’t forget boring,” Dina said. “And what does any of that have to do with anything?”

I nodded at Skye, who immediately turned around and crossed to the easy chair still bearing the Khaajiir’s corpse. It was on a swivel, and as she turned it on its base many of those gathered here all gasped at the further deterioration of the corpse, which remained in the same essential position but had slumped still farther into the cushions as its internal structures drained away. As far as I could tell, he had been a friendly and well-meaning sentient, with animus toward none. But now he was just meat. Neither Brown nor Wethers had made a sound. When I turned to them they were both stone-faced and waiting for the point.

“It’s a hideous death,” I said. “But not as painful a death as it appears. I’ve been told tonight that the Claw of God offers a small mercy all its own, in that it fries the pain receptors and thus leaves its victims largely unaware of the changes taking place inside them. The Khaajiir could have been sitting in this chair for several minutes, melting on the inside and growing steadily weaker as the hemorrhage continued. Because the seat cushion soaked up much of the blood, and the armrests prevented any from leaking out at his sides, the rest of us missed what was happening until it was too late. The Khaajiir, who felt no pain, almost missed it himself. But I noted this at the time. Skye?”

Skye raised the Khaajiir’s left arm by the wrist, revealing a palm stained black with dried gore.

“And this.”

She pointed to the tiny little bloodstain at the tip of the Khaajiir’s nose.

“Now put him back the way we found him.”

She placed his left hand back on the armrest, positioning the palm on the stain it had left. Oscin, who had the Khaajiir’s staff, took it back to the chair and slipped it back where we had found it, resting across both armrests with his arms on top.

Dejah got it first. “Oh, Juje. Heknew .”

“That’s right,” I told the others. “The placement of the bloodstains leaves no room for doubt.

“Think back to the first few moments after the emergency stop. We’re all running around dealing with our own concerns, including several serious injuries, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Jason and Jelaine escort the Khaajiir, the frailest and most vulnerable guest, to this chair, ascertaining that he’s all right before abandoning him to deal with other pressing injuries. Several others among us, including Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers, also stop by the Khaajiir’s chair to check up on him. The application of the Claw of God may take place at any point during this interval. The Khaajiir may even feel a slight charge at the moment of contact, but he thinks nothing of it.

“Long minutes pass. The rest of us ignore the Khaajiir because we have other things to worry about. The Khaajiir starts feeling weak. But he’s fragile and old and no doubt attributes what he’s feeling to the shock he’s experienced.

“But then something happens.

“Either because he feels the wetness pooling underneath him and suspects what has happened, or just from random happenstance, he drops his left hand to his side, into the blood pooling around him.

“Golly. What’s this?

“He pulls his hand out of the muck and finds it covered with blood.

“He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He lifts his hand all the way to his nose, perhaps because he wants a closer look and perhaps because he’s begun to identify the smell we’ve all sensed by this time as coming from him. The act leaves a tiny bloodstain on the tip of his nose.

“Remember again who he is. He’s an expert on the K’cenhowten reign of terror. He knows that a Claw of God, a weapon from the society he wrote about, turned up in an attack on me earlier in the day. It must occur to him at once that yet another Claw of God has been used on him in the last few minutes. What’s more, he remains coherent enough to backtrack and realize just which one of us did this terrible thing.

“But he’s dying. He knows he’s dying. He feels himself losing consciousness. He can barely hold his head up even now. He certainly can’t raise his voice and shout out the name of the guilty party. And he may have only seconds to tell us what he knows.

“He can use his fingernails to scratch a message into the weave of the armrest.

“But time is fleeting. It will probably take more time and strength than he has to scratch out a complete word, especially if he uses the ornate Bocaian alphabet, which is likely the only written language he knows. Not that it matters. How can he have the time to scratch the complete name of a human being while using all those frills and flourishes?

“But he’s fortunate, our ailing Khaajiir. Because he’s clever and he has his staff, the tool that has allowed him such hearty play at the game of words. He has his right hand on the interface and barely has to stir at all to think the name of his murderer, hoping to be provided with a translation he can use.

“I don’t know how many possibilities it gave him in the next second or two. From his ease at using the translation system to impress people, there may have been several, including a number that may have been too hard to transcribe.

“But he was provided with at least one he could use.

“And so his last act before he lost consciousness was to draw three crude zigzags, side by side.”

The Porrinyards indicated the three claw marks the Khaajiir had made in his dying moments, miming the zigzag pattern with their hands.

I faced Brown and Wethers. “We know it was the last thing he did. As I noted at the time, one of the fibers he ripped from the armrest was still stuck under one of the fingernails he used.”

Oscin pointed to the fingertip in question.

“He must have died seconds later,” I said.

The Porrinyards left the corpse behind, with its bloody walking stick, and returned to their previous positions at either side of me, waiting.

Farley Pearlman was reaching into his jacket to scratch his ribs. “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t feel too inadequate,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have had a clue unless you knew the specific language the Khaajiir was referencing. I had to consult the staff myself, to compare the many possible explanations for those three zigzags with their potential interpretations in other languages.

“I didn’t get anywhere until after I realized that the message might have been meant for me, the one person here with a background in crime investigation…and remembered that when we’d spoken, he’d referenced an extinct human tongue known as English. Would it not make sense to concentrate on meanings I could access via that dialect?