CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN - SLEIGHT OF HAND

"So... espionage. Do elaborate."

Tanner started turning pages, just to get some nervous energy out. Lyur had unnerved her more than she wanted to admit. In the inn, when she'd first arrived, he'd seemed... not terrifically odd, just slightly noticeable. Odd pattern of speech, interesting voice, the air of someone who was self-possessed and emanated a kind of... unconscious uniqueness from himself, the sort of person who knew who he was, what he was, and where he was - and as a consequence, even if she knew people like him in the past, in terms of individual features, all of those features somehow felt brand new when applied to him. He existed without the need to provide citations for his personality. Tanner couldn't quite say she aspired to that - everything had to be framed, understood, rationalised and compressed. She had no qualms about being a thing created by the perceptions of others. Indeed, to her, that was the only way to live, no matter what the surrealists said. A human in a void was an animal, a human in a crowd was a human. For her, being was a matter of two hands clapping. Being aloof of others was tantamount to severing one of those hands, and wondering why no sound was coming out.

Lyur seemed adamant to disprove that. He'd fit in well with the surrealists. They'd adore his unreflective individuality.

...but he'd seemed normal in the inn. Completely normal. Especially after all the madness of the journey out here. And now... now, he was talking about crow-winds, cannibal countryside, all that business, and his dark eyes made her skin crawl, even hours later. How many other people were like that? Striding around, normal as can be, but underneath... underneath there was something else? If she hadn't noticed with Lyur, who was hardly subtle... how many others had she missed? Did Sister Halima have bizarre habits and thoughts? Did Brother Olgi? Did Eygi? Algi definitely did. But Eygi? What about strangers in the street, how many...

Had to stop being so paranoid. Knew what paranoia smelled like - gunpowder, sweat, metal, dust - and didn't want that to start pulsing out of her skin like some sort of musk.

The paranoid musk.

Oh, gods, was she one of the freaks that people didn't recognise as freaks until it was too late? She thought an awful lot about some awfully odd things, was... no, no, she was gigantic, her freakishness was entirely anticipated by everyone around her. Not that she'd act freakish, but if she did, she doubted anyone would be especially surprised. Unlike Lyur, who could pass himself off as normal, until he chose to talk about crow-winds. She wore her freakishness on her sleeve. And her back. And her legs. And her face.

Hooray for that.

Anyway.

"I think we're being tricked. Or, someone's trying to trick us. I mean... I go out to find Dyen. He sweats, he looks close to confessing, then he makes a break for it and gets away. Once he gets back, he immediately talks, and tells a story about the company bosses hiring bouncers to take care of dirty work. Then, he immediately vanishes from a windowless, locked room, implying that he was right, and his old employers had come along to take care of him - and in such a way that implies they're clever, powerful, know this place inside and out. Then, I find Lyur today, and he fills in the rest, explaining that the bosses had a grudge against the governor, a major grudge, given that his policies were cutting into their profits. His sources are dead now, obviously. But there's some data to back it up in the ledgers - deviations between stages of processing for a whole range of goods, like something's being lost along the way. Could be stockpiling for something. Imagine if the governor was killed by these businessmen, and they'd spent a while preparing for this by subverting the bouncers, and stockpiling goods to give them a leg up once he was gone. For all we know, maybe they're stockpiling food in huge quantities, and now the governor's dead, the cold-houses are all about to fail and we'll have to buy our food from them at outrageous prices. They make a killing, and come spring, they'll basically own the colony."

She took a deep breath.

"I don't believe it."

Marana tilted her head to one side, slightly cloudy eyes focusing intently on Tanner. Looked ghastly. Looked... no, she looked stripy. Now she was sitting down in a warm room after being out in the cold, her face was flushing, and alcohol kept it flushed as a rule, but... there were little strings of paleness. The smoke had touched her there. Irritated the skin. Maybe done something to it. But it wasn't flushing like the rest, and it made her look... infested with something. An exotic, endangered animal, one of those near-luminous creatures that advertised its toxicity and hoped the predators paid attention. Full of well-aged tannin-stained toxins, toxins the fruit of human genius, and toxins grown in the deep places of the earth, crushed beneath rivers of raw contamination, crackling like champagne.

Tanner felt a twitch of reticence. How damaged was she? She was in her forties, heavily abused alcohol currently, and in her youth had done... quite a few more potent substances, and then she'd been poisoned at point-blank range by quite a degree of smoke... Tanner was larger than her, younger than her, healthier than her, and had received a much, much smaller dose. And she'd vomited a few times, her throat was flayed, her stomach continued to churn, and the world had... a faint halo around it, like she'd been underwater for too long. Even now, she couldn't keep this tea down forever, knew it'd be wriggling in her stomach like a living fish soon enough. And she'd been much more mildly affected.

Staring into those slightly cloudy eyes, she wondered how much that smoke had really affected her, and whether she really ought to be out of bed.

No, power on. Power on.

Marana spoke, her voice hoarse.

"I'm not so sure I agree. But please. Continue, darling."

A blink.

Alright.

"Well... I think it's just someone trying to pin the blame on someone else. The only solid piece of evidence is the disappearance of goods, but that's just... numbers on a page. Could mean a fair amount, not necessarily a plot to kill the governor. And it doesn't factor in Tyer, Lam, Tom-Tom, or really why people were getting attacked by the bouncers in the first place. There are other details, too... but here's the thing."

She leaned forwards.

"The problem is, I can't investigate this openly. No-one can. I don't know how many people are involved, but I feel like the most successful moves I've made were those done abruptly. Chasing Tyer when I could've stayed put meant that I could actually see him dying, otherwise I'm certain he would've... maybe vanished and been found in the spring thaw, frozen to death, or he would've been arranged to look like he'd actually been fighting Lyur, rather than just collapsing in front of him and getting beaten to death. And chasing Dyen after silent research meant that I actually found him, and... I honestly think that if I'd delayed, or asked for more help, then I'd never have found him in the first place. Instead, he made himself too obvious, and had to end up getting caught, giving a confession..."

"And you think that was all planned."

"I think... parts of it were. I mean, too much doesn't fit. But if I investigate openly, I know I won't get anywhere. I need to stay here, I need time. Time, and reading."

Marana stared at her. Stared for a good few moments. The snow was coming down heavily now - she'd just missed getting caught in it. The bare shelves of the room seemed strangely hostile, Tanner thought. Like empty wooden mouths, dark and with teeth fashioned from dust, the long, straight, pencil-thin lines between ledgers where dust was permitted to settle. By all rights, the governor's office would be a safer place to meet. But... somehow, it felt right to do it in a place surrounded by as much paper as possible. To demonstrate the absolute mass of information available to Tanner, and... Tanner remembered Canima. How he talked about bureaucracy. How you just dissected people into paper, unbuilt them to the finest possible level, and when the time came, you could build them back up again. Dyen had been a sweaty mess, his confession had been passionate, his terror utterly believable. Lyur resisted her attempts to understand him in general. And so on. And so forth. People were difficult, people were... she didn't pretend to be good at understanding them. The Canima method seemed more appropriate, more... tailored for her way of doing things.

And the idea of trudging through the snow, step upon step upon step, each step only accomplishing a tiny span of distance and nothing else, moving from site to site while the enemy was always ahead of her...

When the enemy was faster than her, maybe the right option was to stay very, very still, avoid wasting energy, and search for a shorter route, a better route, before sprinting down it faster than the enemy could predict.

Finally, Marana spoke.

"Do you want to know what I think?"

"Of course."

"I think that, yes, maybe there's an element of deception. But... in my cockles of my heart of hearts, I think those confessions have more truth to them than you want to admit."

A single blink was her gesture for Marana to continue - the woman gulped a little tea to soothe her ragged throat, much worse than Tanner's, and red as liver.

"In Krodaw, there was a similar situation. Quite a similar one indeed. See, colonies are... you're in a tiny, trapped bubble, suspended in a place which doesn't want you, never wanted you, and at any moment, might destroy you. The more foreign the person, the easier they are to brutalise and dehumanise - Mahar and Jovan produced people completely foreign to Krodaw's country, and we received the worse fates for that reason. We weren't even human, in the eyes of the Sleepless. This is a place where cities died to mutants, you think normal human standards hold up under those circumstances? And when you remove all certainties, when you make it clear that all of this is just a waiting game, you get one urge coming out. Greed. People want whatever they can get, and then they want to run. Krodaw's fallen, and do you think anyone who profited from that thinks about it? No, of course not. Krodaw's gone, might as well have ceased to exist. And up here... if this colony fell, the snow would cover the buildings, the spring would melt it and the water would make the wood rot, and soon enoguh there'd be nothing left here but some crumbling foundations. And then, not even that."

Yan-Lam spoke quietly.

"Father said water could get everywhere. And once it did, it froze, and expanded. Like a bullet inside a body."

"A terribly grim comparison, but yes. Quite right. People are more short-sighted than you want to admit, Tanner. I truly, truly believe that if the people in charge thought they could profit from this place, at the expense of destroying it, they would. They know this place won't last, in their heart of hearts they can't imagine being anything but tourists. And as tourists, they'll litter, they'll behave like brutes, they'll harass the waitresses, they'll have innumerable torrid affairs, and then they'll go home and be normal people once more, in a place where consequences exist. It happened in Krodaw. Never killed a governor, but... they sold our soldiers bad weapons, overcharged for repairs, would ship in ammunition in huge crates, unpack them outside the city, put them in multiple smaller crates, then charge the governor the same. On paper, he was getting more supply. In reality, he was being bled until the vein ran dry and the leeches could drop off. There's a man now in Mahar, sits in a gentleman's club eating venison every other night and swelling to the size of a balloon, drinking wines you couldn't imagine buying on such a regular basis. Do you want to know what he did? He sold tickets out of Krodaw. He saw the writing on the wall, and through proxies, bought most of the tickets on the last trains. Sold them at grotesque prices. The city was falling apart at that point - my father wanted to hang him, gut him before a crowd, then fling blood-stained tickets to the crowds below. Didn't manage it."

Crow-wind. Miasma carrying a lack of reserve, of pity, of interest in the lives of others. Something that inspired pure and utter savagery. They used to say that bad air carried diseases, based on the fact that contamination very much was carried by air. Maybe if you killed enough mutants and men in the same country, broke enough cultures down to dust and drove people to the absolute limits of hunger and desperation... maybe that could enter the air, too. They said hysteria could, that it could go airborne and whip people into a frenzy. Some Fidelizhi gods could be invoked by the inhalation of certain smokes. And Tanner had smelled paranoia in an abandoned armoury. Why shouldn't savagery be the same?

She looked dimly out of one of the windows in the waiting room... saw the dim shadows of the walls, with their spread-eagle wall-gods looking off into the distance. Faces invisible in the dark and the snow... all save their eyes, which were so packed with unmelting ice that they shone like false stars, catching the light of a nearly invisible moon.

"...I don't agree with you. I think the evidence doesn't add up."

"Hm."

Tanner paused... and reached for something. Something she was keeping close to herself. Not letting out of sight. A piece of evidence. A brown paper bag, containing a luxurious scarf. The governor's scarf. Yan-Lam stared at the thing, clearly remembering it.

"Yan-Lam, did the governor ask you to have this cleaned?"

"He did."

"And when was it finished?"

"The day before he... died."

"It was inside his wardrobe. Was there any chance he would've missed it?"

"No, he accepted it, was fully aware. I believe he was simply... busy, and didn't take it out to hang up."

"Did he keep any other scarfs in that room?"

"One. A more plain one he used when the elaborate one was being tended to, or he was going somewhere more rough and tumble."

"If he was going somewhere... 'rough and tumble', did he tend to dress differently in other respects?"

"Many, miss. He had a few suits he wore for those occasions, generally thicker and cheaper. He wore sturdier shoes, the sort he wore in the army. Generally, he wore thick wool ties, good enough to look presentable, but not so... lavish. His coat was also generally rougher."

"So, if I told you that the governor was found wearing a good coat, a good suit, a silk tie - currently being decontaminated - and ordinary shoes... but his simple, rough-and-tumble scarf, despite the fancier one being completely available, would you find that odd?"

"Very odd, honoured judge. Very odd."

A pause.

"Unnatural, even. If I may be so bold, miss."

"Quite."

Marana blinked.

"A scarf? That's... well..."

"It's not the only piece of evidence. But something's not right, and I think... I think that trying to just direct me towards one narrative is an attempt to stop me looking at the smaller pieces of evidence, to stop investigating some of these angles. So... now, this is uncomfortable for me to ask, and I want you to wait until you feel up for it, but I want... if you can, could you..."

She paused, swallowing. Courage failing a little. Marana took over.

"You want me to go and 'infiltrate' the higher ups. I know how they work, I've operated with people like them in the past, and I've always handled this sort of thing. You want me to make it seem like we're just doing what we've always done, and your interest has switched to the higher-ups, rather than anything more sensitive."

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"I need time. I just need time. I feel like I'm onto something, the discrepancies are adding up, the problems are getting more intense. I don't know what the full picture is, but when I step back and stare at all the unconnected facts, I feel as though... something is there, something connecting them all, and this is just an attempt to invent a pattern for me. It's plausible. All of this is plausible. The higher-ups have every reason to dislike the governor, are basically unknowns to me in terms of personality, and have every ability to just pay off anyone they want. Say, a pair of soldiers guarding a cell."

Marana grimaced, uncomfortable.

"Quite."

"But... I just..."

She paused, letting out a strangled breath from her half-flayed throat.

"...they tried to kill us. They hung a man, were involved in multiple more deaths, and based on these records, have been doing the same thing for years, quietly removing people, intimidating them, getting them out of the way, and I don't know why. But if I have time, I can keep analysing. If I get bogged down in interrogations and interviews and long conversations I don't understand and learn nothing from, all that'll happen is one day I'll wake up, poison gas around me, dying as ignorant as I was when I started this investigation."

She coughed, hacking up... well, anyway. She swallowed the little piece of blood back down, her handkerchief currently misplaced. Her mouth tasted of iron, her throat felt raw and uncomfortable, her stomach moved in ways she didn't think stomachs were meant to. Her skin felt tight, like it was shrinking away from even the memory of the poison, and... if she stared at the tips of her fingers for a moment, she could see tiny, tiny air bubbles, just underneath the skin. Like a whole layer just wanted to shed itself and start clean, purge anything that lingered. Gas - got everywhere. Lungs, throat, internals, skin, hair, eyes... lucky she hadn't died. Lucky Marana hadn't.

Though she didn't look too far from it. For a while, the two coughed together, both of them clearing out contaminated throats, while Yan-Lam twittered around nervously, clearly wondering what she could do, if more tea would do, if leaving would be rude, if...

Marana rasped.

"I'll do it."

"...I don't want you to do anything... reckless."

"If I die, I was the canary in the mine, and you should tear them apart with everything you have."

A pause.

"...or you were right, and they were just trying to make their story more believable."

Tanner blinked. Saw the way her skin seemed to hang slightly off, the tiny beads of sweat that followed her hairline even in this cold weather, the pink in her cheeks that could be confused for health at a distance... a spasm in her stomach.

"This is a bad idea. This is a very bad idea. You're quite right. There's no way for you to... do this safely, and-"

"And there's no way of being safe. Listen, we'll arrange a system, you and I. A system to make sure that, even in the event of my death, I can still leave you a few last pieces of information. Time was, we used to send infiltrators into the Sleepless, before they really degenerated - plenty of ways to transmit information beyond the grave, my darling. Pl-enty of ways."

"Marana…"

"The way I see it, there's a choice. Either we all remain completely paralysed, and do nothing, learn nothing, and eventually our impassive nature inspires violent action by whoever tried to kill us... what, a few days ago? You look fabulous, incidentally, near-death suits you, ought to try it more often. Or, we take a few risks... like desperate people would do, really. I'll head off, sickly, pale, near-death, but deeply charming nonetheless, and make feeble attempts at information gathering. I'll be subtle and unsubtle, I'll poke and prod and people will learn to stay away from me. I'll talk about art, you see if I don't."

She smiled.

"I don't honestly think I'll find anything with them - even if I think you're wrong. It's too obvious a move, I'm too connected with you, as agents go I'm as poor as a pigeon. But..."

A pause.

"But it might work. Might."

Tanner wasn't sure. Not now. Seeing the pale, striped face, the sallowness of the woman... the plan had been to wait for much longer, let her recover, gain strength. That being said... hold on. An idea. She was basically isolated in this mansion, wasn't she? And the only people she interacted with was... Yan-Lam, really. The soldiers stayed downstairs, no-one else approached her, sometimes Sersa Bayai came in to give her something... if she locked herself down completely, devoted herself to her files without relenting for a moment, and almost deliberately sickened herself... she could almost see a narrative. She was long-since accustomed to playing the roles people made for her, now... the role of the paranoid, sickly giantess, terrified of the world, panicked, embarking on silly, half-thought-through missions involving one of the only people she trusted, while refusing to see anyone else beyond a narrow inner circle... well, if there was a Fidelizhi god of paranoia, then she'd probably be inviting it onto her back at that point, inviting it to stay. Forget digging fingers into her shoulders, that thing would be looping around her spine.

It might work.

She was already sick. Weakened. Just had to... never give the appearance of recovery.

"...you might want to use Fyeln. I don't want to drag people in, but... well, presumably people are watching him, maybe you could feed him information, make it clear that you're weak, I'm a paranoid wreck, this is all going terribly and you have no idea what's going on..."

Marana suddenly stiffened. Coughed.

"I'd rather not."

"...I don't want to bring other people in either, but-"

"No, really. I'd rather not."

Well. Fair. He did give her a nosegay while she was in the infirmary, presumably that meant there was some sort of genuine feeling, and... even if it wasn't necessarily reciprocated, making that story convincing would demand the appearance of reciprocation. And maybe Marana didn't want to commit so thoroughly to a relationship established for the sake of information gathering. Oddly, she found herself wanting to see Fyeln. Not to meet him, just see him from a distance, have him pointed out. As it was, he was just an odd black pond from which emerged information and sordid details, without reference to anything else.

Anyway.

"Alright. Quite alright. So..."

She paused.

It was... big, asking her for something like this. But she needed time. Needed the other side anaesthetised, fed with whatever they ate until they were fit to burst, and could only slump backwards. The piles of ledgers... she had to go through the lists of the dead, and cross-reference appropriately. Had to chart every departure due to cold weather, every exile, every death, every accident that prompted a swift move back home, everything, then see the consequences. This had been going on for years, she wouldn't just find the golden example with a single night of searching, she needed something solid. Years of work, they would've left behind at least one messy incident, something maybe a little less than Tyer and the governor, but something. She wanted to rant at Marana. Tell them whatever they want to hear, tell them I'm a mad old cow, tell them you're an even madder old cow, tell them we're terrified and confused and chasing our tails in circles until we fall down and throw up, tell them I'm losing weight because I refuse to eat, tell them any damn thing, tell them they've won, and I'm just rotting away in this place.'

'I need time.'

But she didn't. She couldn't. She was already doubting her own motives, her own actions. If she ranted and raged, then she was going as mad as she was pretending to be. Pretending. She'd pretended to be a judge for eight years, and that role had seeped into her pores, locked in so tightly there was no telling what lay underneath, where it began and 'she' ended. Pretending was a way of life.

Not sure if that made it wiser or foolisher to pursue this option.

Marana stayed for a while. They drank tea. Talked quietly about schemes and plots, about signals and arranged meetings, about how they were going to make an attempt to keep Marana safe, how she was going to make her introductions... she was fully capable of the social side of things, Tanner was just confirming methods for her own satisfaction. She offered nothing - this wasn't her field. No-one else was to know. No-one. Not Sersa Bayai. Not Mr. Canima. Only herself, Yan-Lam, and Marana. Yan-Lam was included because Tanner was using her as an assistant, and... well, if you showed trust, you received trust. And Tanner deeply wanted Yan-Lam to trust her. Made her feel like she was doing her job correctly.

The night rolled on.

And when morning came... Marana was passed out in her chair, snoring lightly, resting herself for the hard work ahead...

And Tanner and Yan-Lam poured themselves cups of coffee, and got to work.

* * *

With two pairs of eyes, and an increasing fluency with the organisation system, Tanner found the work faster than ever before. They ran down the migration ledger, what remained of it, and noted down every single departure. Crossed out people who'd returned at a later date, having been on business trips or had accompanied trading missions. With this final list of departures, they began to cross-reference with the rent income ledger to determine addresses, noting where each and every one had lived. They noted nationality - most of the departures seemed to be Fidelizhi, based on the names. The arrivals had more Fidelizhi, though, to make up for the difference. Pins were stuck into maps, and gradually an array of departures came up... and already, a pattern was being noted. Some houses seemed to be trouble spots. Some would have a single resident for years and years, practically into the present day... others would go through three, five, more people in that span of time, represented by a bristling briar of gleaming pins.

She traced this changeovers.

One house. Built during the wave of construction that the governor arranged during the first few years in power, focusing upon his new model of social engineering conveyed via infrastructure. Designed to prevent meetings, to funnel activity towards regulated areas, and distributed to colonists with the intention of weaving Fidelizhi and local into a harmonious tapestry, rather than just having a thin film of Fidelizhi oil on a boundless ocean of locality. This house, one among many, was occupied by a Fidelizhi man called Mundol. Simple enough history, no records of criminality upon arrival. Would leave the colony barely a year after arrival, claiming profound discontent with the weather. Vanishing from the records. However. If probing deeper, then evidence began to emerge, and swiftly, of other factors being implicated. At the time of his departure, a bouncer named Jyuna was abruptly rotated out of the pool, sent into another area of the colony. Reviewing the criminal file she'd already been assembling since she started investigating the corruption of the bouncers, she found that this fellow was involved in a bit of rough-housing, being a key witness in seventeen cases of violent public drunkenness within a few months - seventeen, but only three drunks were convicted of another crime during their time in the colony. Of the remaining fourteen... one ended up dead a year later, after a fishing trip went wrong and he plunged through the ice. Thirteen left the colony for an assortment of reasons. All but two were Fidelizhi.

The house's next owner was a man called Law-Nat. A local. And then his cat had been crushed, he'd been in several fights with a man called Dyen, and left the colony afterwards. She knew his name well. Then, another Fidelizhi citizen, remaining for six months before being badly injured during an accident in the city, an accident... where the overseer in charge was a man called Jyuna. The bouncer who'd maybe helped drive out fourteen people from the colony. Alas, Jyuna was gone, exiled after assaulting another man with intent to kill. Sent away, and incapable of being interrogated. If someone had been paying him... they'd gotten rid of fourteen people when he was a bouncer, an unknown number as an overseer, and then had to lose him. Fourteen vs. one. Fair trade, if you wanted to get rid of people.

The house kept changing hands. Local. Fidelizi. Various people. And then... falling into the hands of a young fellow by the name of Nan-Lac, a local who'd been there ever since. And if she charted the other houses... the process only became more obvious. People were being driven out. This would happen several times, and then the house would stop. Settle with a single person. And when she tallied up the numbers... roughly 80% of the time, it wound up with a local. She quietly noted down all the final owners, including the Fidelizhi, underlined in red ink. Her eyes ached. Her fingers begged for a rest. Yan-Lam was yawning openly, barely remembering to cover her mouth most of the time.

But they were getting somewhere.

Oh, yes they were.

Yan-Lam jerked up, awake all of a sudden, as Tanner leaned forward and asked her a question. Marana was gone by now. The two were quite alone. The fire was burning lower, the morning sun was rising, the snow was gleaming, and Tanner had no mind for anything but her papers.

"Tell me about Rekidan culture."

Yan-Lam blinked. Tanner smiled faintly.

"I mean, if we're working together, I think... I don't know, maybe I can just be blunt. Tell me about it. I know about the cages. What else?"

"...father didn't talk to me very much about Rekidan culture."

"Didn't he?"

"No. No, not at all. He liked the cages, he'd always known how to make them, taught by... mother. But the rest, he was happy to never talk about. His father didn't teach him, on account of being dead before he was born, and... I don't think he was overly interested."

"Was anyone else?"

"...not particularly."

Tanner blinked. Yan-Lam looked around, swallowed, clearly fought down the urge to just keep her trap shut like usual, like she'd done when Tanner had first interviewed her.

"Erlize never liked it when we were... vocal about our beliefs. I think... well, I think they didn't like the idea that we were setting ourselves up to stay. Festivals were forbidden, shantytown was too crowded anyway. No temples. No priests. No large public assemblies. If we tried, the Erlize knew about it before we could accomplish anything, and the soldiers or police would disperse us."

The embryonic, clumsy version of the governor's social engineering. Less generous, more unyielding. Probably easier to refine it when you had a colony composed of only two kinds of people, admittedly, rather than the tangled stew of the shantytown. She noted none of this - wanted to, but paranoia demanded she keep things in her head for now, to stop the enemy breaking in and finding out that she was... still pursuing a very dangerous angle indeed.

Hm.

Yan-Lam clearly wanted to stop there.

She was used to interviews. And knew when to stop talking. To stop elaborating. A stone wall against questioning - give up nothing unless it was extracted with tweezers.

But... well.

Evidently Tanner had earned a little trust.

"...but Rekidans... you talk to others, and they were always talking about getting back home. No-one wanted to stay in Fidelizh. Even if you got out of the shantytown, into the city, you were still... questioned. I had papers I had to bring to a checkpoint whenever I wanted to go to work in the city, I had to be back before dark... strict regulation. Head out the colonies, it was better, but... no-one wanted to do that. People wanted to go back home. They told stories about it to their children, and then their grandchildren. It became a point of pride to not leave the shantytown, because it was ours, and it was bad. And as long as it was bad, we would want to leave, and that was for the best. So you put up with the interviews, the checkpoints, the criminals, the squalor, all of it."

A pause.

"But... father was never like that with me. I thought it was because he was born too late, maybe didn't remember Rekida well... but the others were the same way. They didn't talk about home. Then the older people died - stress of the exodus, stress of the shantytown, and they were old - and that was it."

Tanner hummed.

"Chain severed."

"Yes, miss. Grandparents didn't teach our parents, parents can't teach us."

"Surely there was... something. I mean... alright. The cast-iron decorations on the walls. What about those?"

Yan-Lam squirmed a little.

"Those... I... well... I don't... really know. I think they're just... things. I mean, I mean, some things get shared around in the shantytown, or muddled a bit. Father made those cages, and he made them for lots of people - Rekidans and others. By the time I was born, everyone on my street had those cages. Cast-iron was the same. People sold them for cigarettes sometimes, and suddenly everyone had one. They're pretty."

"They're more than pretty, they do actually have a function. And... well, did you know many other Rekidans?"

"Not many, miss. Spent most of my day in the city, working. Shantytown was quiet. Erlize didn't like us clustering up in neighbourhoods - the Rekidan neighbourhood, the Yanmayan neighbourhood, the Nalseri neighbourhood, the Skerndisti neighbourhood, that was never meant to happen... didn't like festivals, temples, priests, big meetings, anything like that. Our house had a window made by a Skerndisti, actually. Stained the way they used to do it, back home. Beautiful in the evening light. Could barely tell the man who made it was Skerndisti, though. Spoke like us, talked like us, worked like us, lived like us. If he didn't say, we'd never know."

Tanner hummed. Thought. Marana, barely a few days ago, had said that... 'shove enough people together, and the most important parts of culture become the visible ones. Accents, incomprehensible slang, art, clothing...' Something real, anchored in aesthetic reality, highly visible, easy to display. Cast-iron carvings, cages from ceiling, stained glass windows... the Erlize had clearly done their best to suppress things. Tanner didn't want to leap to conclusions. But she felt...

She felt like she had to keep investigating. Assumptions were fine when the issues were small, when it just provided a little bit of... scaffolding to hold a chain of thought together, before she could replace them with a stronger piece of evidence or logic. But for big issues, for conclusions, one might as well rely on gutting a chicken and examining the texture of its entrails. Marana had fallen into that trap, clearly. Assumed that at the end of the day, the old enemy in Krodaw would be the enemy everywhere. The people who had no mind for humans, and just wanted to get as rich as humanly possible, no eye on any timespan longer than their own lifetime, no eye on any priority higher than their own self-interest. She assumed the grand enemy, and doubtless would be able to stitch evidence together convincingly enough, but she'd need to ignore some inconvenient points. The other side wanted Tanner to do that, too. Start with a story, find evidence to support it, rather than arranging the evidence and letting the story emerge naturally, as was taught in the inner temple. If you started with a story, you were just an author.

And authors, according to Sister Halima, were people who saw a hundred people smashing their heads into a wall, ninety nine people died, and one person staggered away, then they promptly hail this man as King Hard-Head, anoint his cranium with oils, and then start slamming their own heads into the wall, assuming that they too may follow in the ways of King Hard-Head, who was currently drooling due to intense brain damage.

Tanner hadn't really understood the message, but she got the idea that authors were bad news.

Anyway.

"I see. It's... so, when you arrived here, everyone was behaving just as they did in the shantytown."

"Yes, miss. Exactly like in the shantytown. Same way of behaving. Same... well, it's the pockets. You keep your hands close to your pockets in the shantytown, usually keep a few coins or something in the visible pockets - pickpockets might take them, but if they think you're hiding something, they might get violent. Same accent, too."

A weak smile.

"Just like home. Even leaving the town to go and work in a big Fidelizhi house, just like old times."

Except for the part where she went back home every evening and saw her father again.

"Hm."

She reviewed her notes again. The map with pins. Targeted harassment of certain properties until they fell into the hands of locals (roughly 80% of the time). Bouncers working to assist this, occasionally killing/covering up, occasionally just harassing until the person left voluntarily. Presumably were able to do this without the harassment target complaining at all. Then again, if they did, it was an issue with the bouncers, and based on the list she had, the governor would just rotate out the problematic individual and switch someone else in ahead of schedule. Reported directly to him, maybe the complaints process was similar. And afterwards... she started to draw out the employment ledgers, and Yan-Lam's face fell. She remembered how awful these things were, how many they were, how it was so hard to find anything in them.

"We need to chart their employment histories. What they did beforehand, what they did afterwards, and who they worked for throughout. Start off with the companies associated with city clearance, then we can move on to the rest."

A pause.

Hm... oh. Hold on. Beldol and Tyer. Two lovers, one Fidelizhi, one local. Always on different shifts in the city, always. Then, an abrupt transfer to the cold-houses, practically without any consultation of Beldol. Needed to check the procedures for that, definitely needed to check the procedures for transferring from one company to, basically, being in the employ of the governor. But overseers. Dyen had gone from being a bouncer to being a foreman/overseer out in the smeltery. And from her research here, one man called Jyuna had gone from working as a bouncer to working as a city overseer. And had been implicated, potentially, in an injury that cleared out yet another resident of a contested house. And of course... Lyur. Himself implicated in the death of a man called Mr. Krandol in the city, by getting him drunk, and injuring his legs, making him fail to notice/escape from a collapsing ceiling. And checking his medical records... who had been the overseer in charge, who'd given a little old report? Didn't mention, but it did mention exactly when it happened, and the list of his personal effects included some crushed equipment, with markings designating it for a particular team, and if she looked through the employment ledgers, then cross-referenced to her bouncer list...

Oh-ho.

Intoxicated because of a bouncer. Injured because of a bouncer.

Sent into the city, and dying while working on a team overseen by a former bouncer.

She smiled very, very faintly.

"...and I've connected Tyer to all of this. Possibly, possibly, he was involved in another... one of their accidents."

She paused.

"After this, we're looking into cold-houses."

Another pause.

"...and can you tell me something - did anyone come up here with you and your father? Anyone else local? Not just local, but with a double-barrelled name, patronymic and everything?"

Yan-Lam blinked.

"Well..."

She hummed thoughtfully.

"...I suppose one man came up just after us, he used to babysit me when I was young and father was working..."

"What's his name?"

"Tal-Sar."

"Does he still live here?"

"To my knowledge, yes. Haven't seen him in a long time, though. Think he's a trapper, or a hunter... out of the colony most of the time on account of that business."

She leaned closer.

"I'd be wary around him, miss. Father said... well... he's nice, I thought he was nice, but..."

Her voice dropped.

"He's a bit odd."

Tanner liked that.

Tanner liked that a lot.

Odder the better.

Too many people in this colony were normal, and then turned around to get involved in something horrific. Dyen, Jyuna, Lyur, Myunhen, all those bouncers, all of them seemed normal, seemed average...

And then they changed. Or, rather, were more honest.

Quite liked the idea of meeting someone with his oddness worn on his sleeve.

Might make him easier to judge.

Tanner's smile broadened.

Oh, she still had a sense of humour. Atrophied, but there was still something there!