Chapter Four

The serpents had been quiet for a whole day. Too quiet.

They soon made up for it.

Master, shrieked Ootapi in Konrad’s mind, in the very small hours of the morning. Konrad had been dreaming, splayed across his bed in sumptuous comfort. The serpent’s splintered-ice voice interrupted a vision of pleasant strangeness in which he and Nanda sat on the floor of his hut-on-stilts out in the Bones, filling bottles with coloured liquids.

He opened his eyes. What?!

Someone is dead! carolled the snake.

You arrive bearing joyous news, as always.

Ootapi beamed in his mind, as delighted as a child given a bag of sweets. Thank you, Master.

Eetapi and Ootapi had yet to fully grasp the intricacies of sarcasm. Konrad did not trouble himself to explain.

What are the circumstances of this death? Given Ootapi’s desperation for a nice murder case to keep Konrad occupied, he felt a faint hope that his faithful serpent may have encountered a natural death and enthusiastically exaggerated its significance. It was cold out there and warm in bed, and it could not be much past two in the morning.

Deaths! Ootapi proclaimed. Two! Out in the Bones.

Two people together might have come to grief out in the Bone Forest in heavy snow, but Konrad would certainly have to investigate. He heaved a great, reluctant sigh and threw off the blankets.

Butchered like pigs, added Ootapi.

All right, then. That is not something to sound so delighted about, Ootapi, Konrad tried, knowing it was futile.

There is so much blood! Eetapi chimed. Pretty red snow!

Bones! chirped Ootapi. Bones in the Bones!

Was it any wonder he was so often dejected, when such creatures were his regular companions? Konrad hurried to get dressed, trying unsuccessfully to ignore his ghost servants’ appalling glee.

I wonder, he mused as he retrieved his waxed great-coat, whether the Master would permit me to trade the two of you in for some less bloodthirsty alternatives?

There followed a ringing silence.

Bloodthirsty, Ootapi finally repeated in a thoughtful tone. Is that wrong?

Konrad made for the door. Never mind. We go! Keep up!

 

Eetapi had not exaggerated about the blood.

The serpents led Konrad through the north gate of Ekamet and into the snow-laden Bone Forest. The bodies were not very far in, barely two minutes from the gate. They were… in a poor state.

The first was a youngish man with pale hair, the second a woman perhaps twenty years older. Their garments hinted at a life of moderate prosperity. They had probably got down from the stagecoach moments before, Konrad judged, and were on their way into the city when they were attacked.

The young man’s head was half-severed, his neck split open by a sharp blade. Much of the blood that stained the surrounding snow was probably his. Both he and his companion had been stabbed repeatedly, bloodied wounds covering their torsos, limbs and even their faces.

Konrad looked at them for a long time, struggling with an uncharacteristic desire to turn away, let someone else deal with it. The two still, half-frozen bodies awoke unusual pity in him, and an even more unusual distaste. He thought he had grown used to such spectacles over the years.

He smothered such feelings with an effort, and forced himself to focus. The bodies had been there for some time, he judged, for they were severely frost-bitten and partially covered in snow. Probably a few hours, perhaps a little more. No sign remained of any other passersby; the snow had filled in any footprints their killer might have left, and Konrad saw nothing else of use or interest.

His favourite knife was tucked into his coat. He withdrew it and leant over the body nearest to him, the woman. It was his duty to take a bone of hers, usually a rib bone, with which he would mete out justice to her killer. He felt curiously reluctant to proceed. Those poor, battered folk had suffered enough such indignities, and besides… there was an odd, macabre peacefulness about their inert shapes, resting among the softly falling snow. The Bone Forest was silent, eerily so, all sound muffled by the snow, and Konrad felt that to introduce more violence to the scene would be to somehow defile it.

Such strange, twisted thoughts. He shook them off and bent to his task, setting the knife to the woman’s torso.

Master.

Konrad jumped, Ootapi’s voice slicing through the silence like a whipcrack. What?

There is a person.

Sweet Malykt, another body? Konrad did not feel he could face another such torn-up carcass. Where? he replied and straightened up, feeling about three centuries old.

He felt a wordless summons beckoning away to his right. He trudged that way, knife in hand, trying to steel himself for another horrific scene.

It is alive, Eetapi elaborated.

It was indeed. Konrad stopped in shock, for partially concealed behind a thin, pallid tree was a living woman dressed in a long black coat, her dark red hair wind-tossed and crusted with snow. She ought not to have been so difficult to spot, for she was almost as bloodied as the two lifeless corpses he had left behind. He instantly concluded she must be injured, and hastened forward. But no. She sat upon a fallen tree trunk, and her posture was not that of a wounded person in pain. She looked frozen, not just with cold but with shock. Her face was blank, her eyes staring at nothing.

Konrad approached cautiously. ‘Hello?’

The woman did not reply. Nor did she move, or blink, and he began to wonder if she might not be dead after all.

Her heart beats, Eetapi whispered.

Konrad took note of the quantity of blood upon her clothing, and her hands, and his sense of foreboding grew.

He touched her hand, very gently. ‘Hello?’ he repeated. ‘We are here to help.’

Her eyes moved, focused slowly upon his face. It took her some time to realise that a stranger stood before her. When the fact registered with her, she shot upright, shoving Konrad away with startling violence. Her frozen body did not respond well to the sudden movement, and she almost fell into the snow.

‘Stay away!’ She tried to shriek the words but they emerged from her frozen throat as a cracked whisper. She coughed, hard, stumbling backwards in a desperate attempt to put more distance between herself and Konrad.

He held up his hands, stood motionless. ‘I will not harm you.’

But she shook her head, so violently her hair sent up a spray of snow. ‘Shall I not harm you? You cannot be certain I shall not, and neither can I.’

Konrad did not move. ‘Tell me what tortures you.’

She covered her face with hands bleached stark-white by the cold. ‘Have you seen — did you see—’

‘The bodies,’ Konrad supplied, when she did not seem able to finish the sentence. ‘Yes.’

‘I saw them,’ she gasped. ‘I saw them at my own feet. And my coat, my shoes…’ She kept her face averted from the garments in question, unwilling, perhaps, to face again the quantity of blood that stained them.

‘You do not remember committing any violence?’

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘They were my travelling companions. We had never before met, but we rode here together upon the stage, and talked a little along the way. I remember getting down, and agreeing to walk into Ekamet together. And then…’ Her voice failed, and she covered her eyes. ‘Then they were dead, and I was standing over them like this, and I knew that somehow I had done that to them.’

Konrad stood in a state of such wretchedness, he hardly knew how to act. The evidence was as clear to him as it was to her. Duty compelled him to extract a bone from each of the two victims and employ them in killing the distraught woman before him. The Malykt’s requirements were clear cut. He had no proof of her innocence, plenty of her guilt, and only an emerging pattern of similarly strange occurrences upon which to base his utter refusal to destroy her.

Refuse he did. He could no more slay her under such circumstances than he could kill Dubin. Kovalev’s bone he had dutifully taken, and it now lay wrapped in cloth in one of his pockets, ready for use. But he could not use it until he had determined the full truth of Dubin’s crime, and he could not kill this poor woman either.

Master, hissed Ootapi. You hesitate.

I am the judge here! he shot back, swift and vicious. You assist me. You decide nothing for me.

He felt Ootapi’s displeasure, but he ignored it.

‘What is your name?’ he said to the woman, still wary of approach.

‘Arina.’ She whispered the word, swallowed, and fell silent without offering a family name.

It was enough for the present. ‘Arina,’ he repeated. ‘Please, calm yourself. I will help you.’

She blinked at him, confused. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Konrad.’ He did not hazard the rest. He felt a brief, fervent gratitude that she had not witnessed him wresting bones from the bodies of her slain travelling companions. ‘Will you come with me?’

‘The police will come. I must remain.’

Konrad had no intention of permitting her to remain. For one thing, she would freeze to death. Her lips were already tinted blue, and she no longer had the energy to shiver. She was visibly weakening.

For another, he could not bear to see a third soul condemned to the confinement of Nuritov’s cells. This matter was under his jurisdiction now; if the police were inclined to resent his decision or his interference, let them resent. He did not care.

‘Come with me,’ he repeated. ‘I will see things set to rights.’

To his relief, she followed. She could barely walk, and he was obliged to support her every step. ‘What have I done?’ she whispered, and she would have wept, had she tears left.

‘Nothing,’ said Konrad, and he believed it to be the truth. ‘You have done nothing.’

 

He took Arina to Nanda’s house, certain she would receive a welcome there, and all the care she so urgently required. His faith was not disappointed. Nanda was appalled by the story, and eager to assist one thrust into the same nightmarish condition as Dubin. Arina was swiftly plied with every source of warmth Nanda could muster, and fed, and comforted, and Konrad left the house feeling more at peace about her.

He returned immediately to the site just beyond the gates. He still had to collect a bone from each victim, which he did with as much dispatch and efficiency as possible, keeping his mind averted from the task. Then he applied himself to a full examination of the scene.

Arina had spent some hours with the two victims prior to the crime. That fact struck him as significant. Why had she not killed them in the stagecoach? She had not mentioned whether there were other passengers; perhaps there had not been an opportunity. But a theory was taking shape in his mind, and the circumstance coincided with it.

The three crimes had been committed in similar ways, and with similar weapons. Swords and knives, all vanished. Stabbing, and decapitation — or attempted decapitation, in Sokol’s case. By implication, one person was behind all three events; one person with a fondness for blades. Alternatively, two people: one with a preference for swords and decapitation, one who preferred to stab and rend with a knife.

How this person, or persons, had come to dominate Sokol, Dubin and Arina into committing the crimes (and contrived to spirit away the blades afterwards) remained in question, but Konrad was more interested in the why. All murderers wanted to cover their tracks, but this approach was cumbersome in the extreme, and had to be far more difficult to accomplish than many another method of distancing themselves from the scene. If he could learn or guess at the why, Konrad felt he would soon understand the whole.

He bethought himself of one or two questions that remained unanswered. What had Radinka Nartovich seen? Of the four victims, she was the only one who remained alive to give her version of the story.

Konrad resolved upon seeing her as soon as possible.