Fairs' Point (19 page)

“
I know,” Rathe said, “and I’ll have to get her to identify the body, I can’t swear to him, and Fanier won’t take goods as evidence.” He shook his head. “Will you take her the word, Philip? I don’t imagine you’ll be sorry to miss the deadhouse.”

“
I can’t say I will,” Eslingen admitted. A clock was striking six somewhere in the distance, and he sighed. “They’ll be up already with the dogs. I’ll go straightaway.”

“
Thank you,” Rathe said, and squeezed his shoulder.

Eslingen nodded back, unreasonably pleased, and made his way out into the rising dawn.

Even the alchemists were subdued at this hour. Rathe rode to the deadhouse with the body, sitting on the tongue behind the sleepy-looking journeyman. The wagon left him at the main door, and he tugged the bell rope without great expectation. To his relief, a light blossomed behind the shutters, and a few moments later a girl in an apprentice’s smock pulled back the heavy door.

“Might have known it would be you,” she said, and Rathe lifted an eyebrow.

“
And a good morning to you, too, mistress.”

She shrugged, unabashed.
“They said we were getting a drownie, but it belonged to the points, so, yeah. Fanier’s here already, if you want him.”

“
Thanks,” Rathe said, and let himself be led through the stone-floored halls to one of the workrooms at the back of the building. Like everywhere in the deadhouse, it was scrupulously clean, and slightly cold, and the air smelled of nothing, not even the herbs that hung ready in bundles on the wall. As promised, Fanier was there already, a barrel-chested man in a riverman’s jersey and wide-legged breeches, brass-framed spectacles caught in the wild tangle of his graying hair. The body lay behind him on another stone table, and a pair of journeymen were laying out the instruments for Fanier’s examination. Seeing Rathe, one slapped the other on the shoulder, and held his out his hand in the universal “pay-me” gesture. Rather sighed, and Fanier shook his head.

“
I had more sense than to bet, thank you. I knew this one would be yours.”

“
His year-round residence was in Dreams,” Rathe said, “and we had a request from his employer and his landlady. So, yes, he’s mine.”

Fanier nodded, but his eyes were on the hovering apprentice.
“You. Have you sat on a drownie before?”

The girl shook her head.
“Have to start sometime.”

Fanier sighed.
“Well, this one’s not as bad as some. Stay over there, and don’t get in the way. Nico, can you put a name to him for me?”

“
Not officially,” Rathe said. “Sorry. I never met the man. But we’re missing one Poirel, and that’s the name on his tablets.”

“
Age and profession?” Fanier turned to the body, now naked on the slab, and Rathe looked away.

“
Between forty-five and fifty, I’d guess. He was a boxholder for Maewes DeVoss.”

Fanier plucked his glasses from the thicket of his hair and perched them on his nose.
“Nothing contradictory there. What’s his full name?”

“
Jan Poirel.”

Fanier made a gesture, and frowned.
“Go by any other names?”

Rathe reached for his own purse, brought out his own tablets.
“Also Poirel Asignane, but I’m told he mostly went by just Poirel.”

“
Huh.” Fanier performed another series of gestures, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Well, that fits. Who should we tap for the formal identification?”

“
DeVoss,” Rathe said. “I’ve sent Philip to let her know.”

“
Make a note,” Fanier said, and one of the journeymen scrambled to obey. Fanier walked slowly around the table, considering the body from all angles. The air was suddenly damp, as though a breath of river fog had rolled through the room. “I’ll make sure of course, but I’d say he was dead before he hit the water.”

Rathe slanted a glance in his direction, saw him prying open the swollen mouth, and looked hastily away again.

“He’s been in the water at least five days, more likely six or seven,” Fanier said. “Looks like his right leg caught on something and that held the body down for a few days before there was enough change to pull him loose. But he definitely didn’t drown. There’s not a drop of water in his lungs.”

“
So what did kill him?” Rathe kept his eyes determinedly on the nearest flagstone.

“
Did you notice this hole in his chest?”

“
I did, in point of fact.”

“
That’s the fatal injury.” Fanier held out his hand, and one of the journeymen gave him what looked like a long pair of tongs. Rathe flinched as the alchemist inserted that into the wound, spreading the flesh with a soft, nasty sound, then reached for a second set to probe the sodden flesh. For just an instant there was a stink of spoiled meat, and then Fanier gave an exclamation.

“
Well, that’s—unexpected.”

He turned away from the table, holding a blackened piece of metal in the tongs.

“That’s what killed him, though how it got there…” He set the piece in a plain white-ware dish, and Rathe came over to examine it cautiously. It was roughly triangular, and blackened as though it had been through a fire: the point of a knife, maybe, he thought, then realized that there were markings beneath the black, blurred but familiar.

“
It almost looks like coin.”

Fanier made a gesture, and the bit of metal rattled in the dish.
“It’s silver, all right.”

“
Part of a pillar, maybe?” Rathe turned it over gingerly, but the other side was no clearer.

The apprentice, who had crept closer without his noticing, gave a little bounce.
“Please, sir—”

Fanier put his glasses on top of his head again.
“Yes, Kijten?”

“
Please, sir, it’s a cut pillar, from a Mercandry bank. They cut them on the diagonal there.”

Rathe looked curiously at her, and Fanier sighed.

“Kijten’s mother’s a banker herself.”

Rathe nodded. The stars that made one an alchemist were rare enough to begin with, and the conjunctions that brought one to the dead were even rarer, rare enough and odd enough that even a northriver banker would happily send such a daughter to a life where she would fit.
“So he was killed with a coin?”

“
Half a coin,” Fanier said. He turned it himself, shaking his head. “Not that the corners are all that sharp. But, yeah. That’s what killed him.”

“
Lovely,” Rathe said. “How, in Tyrseis’s name?”

Fanier turned back to the body, probing the chest wound again.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was shot with it.”

“
Which would explain the blackening,” Rathe said. “But you’re saying not?“

“
Well, first of all, I’d expect coin silver to distort if it was fired from a lock,” Fanier said. He was probing the other wounds now, and Rathe averted his gaze. “Well, maybe not if it was a sailor’s blunderbuss—I’ve seen them loaded with all manner of scrap—but then you’d expect more shot wounds. Which I’m not finding.” He glanced past Rathe again, fixing Kijten with his stare. “What else might cause silver to blacken like this?”

“
Alchemical changes in the body itself,” the girl answered promptly. “Either natural changes after death or poison, though I wouldn’t think poison would be a factor here? But either one will tarnish silver.”

Fanier nodded.
“Do you know the test for that?”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
Then do it.”

Kijten bounced again, but steadied quickly. She set her feet shoulder-width apart and carefully sketched a shape in the air above the coin. There was an answering flash of light, and she looked up with a grin.
“That’s confirmation.”

“
So it is,” Fanier said, and nodded to Rathe. “Though I’d say decomposition rather than poison. Mind you, that doesn’t rule out that it was fired from some sort of firelock, but it makes it seem less likely.”

“
Can you prove it one way or the other?” Rathe asked.

“
Poison or decomposition, yes, with a few more tests. But whether or not a lock was involved—I doubt it. He’s been in the water too long. All the indicators are going to be lost among the larger changes in the general changes in the body. They’re fairly subtle.” Fanier shrugged. “It’s possible something will turn up, but I wouldn’t expect it.”

Rathe nodded.
“There’s no chance he was killed by something else, and a coin put into the wound?”

Fanier raised his eyebrows.
“You have an active imagination.”

“
Tell me it’s never happened.”

“
Well, true.” Fanier considered the body again. “All right, I’ll do what I can to tease that out, but he was a long time in the water. That’s the overriding affinity, it blurs everything.”

“
Right.” Rathe rubbed his forehead, considering his next move. At least he could rely on Eslingen to bring the bad news to DeVoss, and that left him free to—what? Spend the rest of the day talking to people along the riverside in Manufactory Point, and at Point of Graves, with a stop at Dreams first to let Trijn know what was happening, and to borrow Sohier to help with the interviews, if she was available. He suppressed a groan. “I’ll look forward to your report.”

“
I’ll send to Dreams if anything unexpected turns up,” Fanier said. “But I think you’ve got pretty much all I’m going to find.”

“
It’s a start,” Rathe said, with an optimism he didn’t entirely feel, and let himself out into the hall.

The sun had risen by the time Eslingen reached the New Fair, the heavy golden light pouring between the buildings on the east side of the fairground to burnish the remnants of the night’s fog that still clung to the lower ground. The dogs were barking as loudly as ever, and journeymen trainers and the occasional boxholder dashed back and forth with laden buckets while apprentices and the majority of the boxholders toiled at the main pump, hauling water and washing out the emptied food buckets. Eslingen found a spot by the training tracks that was out of the traffic and rested his elbows on the fence, grateful for the golden light. It felt good on his skin after the river damp, and he tilted his his head back to let it fall full on his face. He would have to find DeVoss soon enough, as soon as she was done with the morning’s feeding, but he might as well take a moment to restore himself before he went looking.

It was DeVoss who found him before the feeding was finished, and came stamping across the hard-beaten earth with her skirts still kilted to the knee beneath her working apron.

“Eslingen—” She stopped as she saw his face, her own expression changing. “News?”

“
I’m sorry,” Eslingen said. He’d done this before, broken the news to friends and kin, but nothing made it easier. “The pontoises found Poirel.”

“
Oh, Demis.” DeVoss closed her eyes. “Dead?”

“
Yes. I’m sorry,” he said again.

DeVoss swore under her breath.
“What happened to him, do they know?”

“
Not yet.” Eslingen chose the details carefully, but from the look on her face she’s guessed most of it already. “He’d been in the river some days when they found him.”