The Water Road (11 page)

Strefer took a deep breath to calm
her nerves and began walking slowly down the hallway. Each step on the marble
floor rang out more than she expected, drawing the attention of the Sentinel.
The nerves that were building inside her by that point were calmed greatly when
she finally saw his face. It was Yaron, one of her most reliable sources.
Strefer knew she would have to make the most of this stroke of luck.

When Yaron saw her, he moved
swiftly from his post to intercept her. “Strefer!” he yelled under his breath.
“What are you doing here?”

She stopped in the middle of the
hallway as he approached. “I could ask you the same thing,” she said in the
same hushed tones. “What’s going on?”

“Look, you really shouldn’t be
here,” Yaron said insistently. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

“I’m a reporter, Yaron. I do have
certain skills, you know,” she said, flashing a grin. “I talked my way past one
of your brothers down there at the bottom of the stairs. What are they all
doing here? What’s going on?”

“Strefer, really,” he said, putting
up his hands to block her way, “you need to get out of here right now.”

“Why? What’s so important that
there’s a line of Sentinels outside to keep anyone else from getting in? The
building is crawling with them, too. And none of them, not even you, will tell
me what’s going on. Come on, Yaron, tell me what’s happening.” The request lingered
for a moment while Yaron was thinking. Sensing that his resolve might be
wavering, Strefer pushed on. “I thought we had a relationship, you and me. An
understanding, at the very least. Have you ever gotten hurt because of
something you told me?”

“No, of course not,” he said,
almost as if he was ashamed.

“So why are you holding out on me
now? Whatever this is won’t be kept silent for long. You know that,” she said.
“I promise you our paper won’t print anything about this before the powers that
be decide to make it public, all right? I just want to get the information
first, so I can write the best story.” There was another pause while Yaron
considered her offer, long enough for Strefer to note the sign beside the door
that said “Office of the Clerk, Grand Council of the Triumvirate.” She jumped
in before Yaron could tell her no. “Besides, I’m already here, so I’ll have to
sneak my way out, right? What’s the harm?”

Yaron continued to stand there in
silence, trying to come up with an answer. He opened his mouth twice to begin
to say something, but nothing ever came out.

Strefer knew he was on her side
now. “So what’s behind the door, Yaron?”

Yaron sighed and hung his head in
defeat. “The clerk of the Grand Council, Alban,” he said. “He was murdered this
afternoon.”

“Wow,” Strefer muttered, truly
stunned. Next to the Grand Council members themselves, Alban was probably the
most important person in the city. “Where did it happen?”

“In there,” Yaron said, gesturing
over his shoulder at the door behind him. “In his office, after the Council
adjourned for the day.”

“What happened?”

Yaron shrugged. “Hard to tell right
now. It looks like he was beaten with a pikti. He used to be a Sentinel, you
know.”

“Right,” Strefer said, although she
had not known that bit of background. “Who would do such a thing?”

“Nobody knows,” Yaron said, turning
and walking back down the hallway towards the door. Strefer followed. “The
pikti was left behind. His assistant, some halfbreed girl, is missing. Maybe
she did it. Or maybe she saw something and ran off, scared. That’s why I’m down
here by myself. Everyone else is out looking for her.”

They reached the door. “So
everything’s been happening pretty quickly, huh?”

Yaron nodded.

“Does that mean that the body is…”

He cut her off. “No, Strefer, the
body has already been removed, if that’s what you’re after. But that’s
irrelevant, because I still can’t let you go back there, for any reason.”

“But if the body’s gone, there’s no
reason I couldn’t go in and take a look around, right?”

Yaron chuckled slightly at her
persistence. “It’s still a crime scene, Strefer. Between the initial rush of
activity and the search for this halfbreed, no one has really gone over it yet.
I have to keep it from being tampered with.”

“Who said anything about
tampering?” Strefer asked. “All I’m asking for is a couple of minutes in there
to look around and get a firm grasp of the scene for myself. Soak in a few
details. It will really make the story pop when I write it.”

“No,” Yaron said, trying to be firm
but not quite pulling it off. “This has already gone too far, Strefer. Now you
have to get out of here.”

Strefer sighed. “Look, you need me
to leave, right?”

Yaron nodded, fatigue in his eyes.

“But you’re the only person
guarding this doorway beyond which lays the crime scene, right?”

Another nod.

“So you can’t actually escort me
from the building, because that would mean leaving the door unguarded, right?”

“Yes, I suppose that is true, but…”
he began to say.

“So if I decided to stand here for
ten minutes more, or an hour, or the rest of the day, you can’t do anything
about it, can you?”

“Somebody else will be down here
before long, Strefer,” he said.

She ignored him and pressed on.
“However, if you agree to let me go back there and look at the scene for, let’s
say five minutes? Less than that, how about three minutes? After that, I’ll
leave quietly and without any need of an escort. I promise, Yaron, I won’t
touch a thing. And when I write an award-winning story with all the juicy
details I glean from in there, I’ll never mention your name.”

Yaron just stood there, defeated,
and said nothing.

“I’ll be gone before you know it,
Yaron. Trust me.”

“All right,” he said, exhaustion in
his voice. “Three minutes. And if anything is messed up or out of place or
missing, I will hunt you down myself. Understood?”

She nodded, then took a pad of
paper and a pen out of her pouch.

Yaron looked up and down the hall
before opening the door behind him. “It’s all the way in the back,” he told her,
and gestured for her to walk past. “Mind your step. Nobody’s cleaned up yet.”

~~~~~

Strefer stepped quickly through the
door as Yaron held it open. She took several steps into the room before she
heard it close behind her with a click. A long countertop, about shoulder high,
no doubt designed to maintain a polite separation between the governors and the
governed, greeted her. She scanned it quickly for some sort of door or portal
through which she could pass. There must be one, but it was not obvious,
probably also by design. She decided she did not have time to waste. She put
her pouch on top of the counter and, with a quick running jump, leapt over the
counter, landing firmly, if not gracefully, on the other side. She grabbed her
pouch and headed down the darkened corridor towards the back room.

Yaron was right that no one had yet
bothered to clean anything up. Strefer was hit by the smell of warm congealed
blood and dead tissue before she made it into the back room. It was something
she had experienced many times before, usually in the back alleys or dead-end
streets near the outskirts of Tolenor. The experience never got any easier,
although she had at least learned to cope with it. Still, the stench took her
by surprise because it was so out of place in the otherwise formal
surroundings. She walked down the corridor, noting how it was at once
overstuffed with records and meticulously organized. Whatever else he had been,
Alban was very good at his job.

Strefer paused when she reached the
doorway. The room was lit by the deep orange hues of late-afternoon sunlight,
which streamed in through a set of windowed doors that appeared to open onto
some sort of terrace. Only a few feet away was a pool of blood mixed with what
Strefer assumed was brain and bone, congealing together in a sticky red ooze.
The puddle had spread over the carped to make a ragged, uneven blotch.

Strefer stepped around the pool and
looked through another doorway to another room, into what appeared to be a library.
Nothing appeared odd about it, as if it had been untouched by the violence that
broke out next door. Turning her attention back to the office in which she
stood, she noted that nothing there looked particularly out of order, either.
The rug near the windows was neat and unmolested. Except for the blood soaked
into it, the rug by the door was the same. As she walked around the desk, by
the windows, she saw the bloody pikti lying on the floor, as if cast aside in
haste. There was another doorway, connected to a long corridor, but it was dark
and empty. Behind the desk was a high-backed chair that appeared to have been
pushed back in a hurry.

Strefer was drawn to the other
doorway and the long corridor beyond it. She stepped lightly down the darkened
passage, until she saw some light ahead of her. After a few more steps, she
walked out into a large, majestic, circular room. Even though she had never
seen it before, Strefer knew this was the chamber of the Grand Council. She
stood for a moment and drank in the splendor, but heard muffled voices in
discussion coming from somewhere high above. She retreated quickly into the
corridor and then back into the office.

In the office Strefer studied the
desk and the chair that sat behind it. In a room where nothing seemed out of
place, there was something odd about the arrangement. Strefer had to assume
that either Alban or his killer had been sitting there just before the murder.
It would make sense that it was Alban. It was his desk, after all, in his
office. But if he had been the one sitting there, why was he on the other side
of the desk when he was killed?

Perhaps it was the killer who was
sitting in that chair, discovered by Alban and surprised by it? She moved
closer and saw an open book on the top of the desk. In and of itself, a book on
the desk of the clerk was nothing unusual. The entire office was littered with
papers, books, and even scrolls. Here was just another among dozens. Yet this
one stood out.

Strefer walked around the desk,
careful not to disturb anything, and took a closer look. It was a notebook of
some kind, filled with carefully done handwriting and bound in red leather. The
book was sideways to her, so she did not bother to read what was written. She
looked up and saw the unlocked cabinet directly across from her.

It was a small cabinet with a glass
door that sat next to the desk. The door was open and a key protruded from the
lock at the base of the opening. Inside, there were a few small notebooks very
similar to the one sitting on the desk in front of her. It appeared that the
cabinet could hold one more book of that size.

Her eyes returned to the red
notebook on the table. It seemed certain that it was related to the murder in
some way. It was another in the short list of things that was upset in the
room. Had the killer read something in the book that caused him to murder Alban
then flee from the balcony? It made sense as a working theory, but Strefer
could not imagine what would motivate such an action. The answer was in the
book, she knew, and she had to find out what it was. Reading it here was out of
the question. Aside from the brief time she had, if Yaron came in and found her
reading something on the desk he would, at best, throw her out of the room and,
at worst, throw her in jail.

There was only one solution.
Strefer picked the book up off the desk, dog-eared one of the pages to mark the
spot where it was left open, slapped it shut, and stuffed it deep down in her
pouch. Thankfully, it fit neatly inside and did not call attention to its
presence. As long as Yaron did not know it was here, he would have no idea that
something was missing. There was a quick rush of nerves and a lump formed in
Strefer’s throat at the thought of the betrayal she was making. The act was
caricature for her profession, why so many held what she did in such low
regard. She told herself it was not personal. This was not just about getting a
big story. It was about breaking the biggest story in Tolenor’s history,
perhaps in the whole of the Triumvirate’s history. She was not going to let it
slip through her fingers.

She took a deep breath and turned
to walk out of the office. Walking carefully around the pool of blood over to
the doorway, she was startled to look up and see Yaron standing on the other
side of the counter, peering down the corridor. It was such a shock that her
knees nearly buckled and sent her tumbling back into the blood and brain on the
floor. “Dear gods, Yaron!” she said in a loud whisper . “You scared me half to
death.”

“Yes, well, be thankful that I
didn’t just come back here and grab you,” he said in a voice that was more
nervous than authoritative. “Your time is up.”

“Fine, fine,” she said, walking up
the corridor to the counter and vaulting over it. Yaron held out a hand to help
her down off the counter. “I’ve done all the sightseeing I need to do here,”
she said, giving his hand a squeeze. “Thanks again. You won’t regret it.”