Work Text:
Iudex signum Jarik Oprenda was on his way to pick up his order of books from the delivery depot. The cart train had come and gone, and he was sure his books had been delivered.
His lingua herald clattered against the adjacent bars of his post as investigator, and he looked up to see three Apoths in red. One of them he knew. She had assisted him on his most recent investigation, and helped him find the source who had deliberately spread contagion in a reagents manufactuary.
That had been a restful sort of case, as Jarik's work went. A culprit, one he felt confident was truly the responsible party, and easily proven. Not someone too important, who might have made trouble when caught, but not someone Jarik felt any sympathy for, either. Very few cases were so simple. His next one, when it was assigned, almost certainly would not be.
"Would you like to accompany me, Captain?" Jarik asked her. "An order of books has arrived for me at the cart train depot."
"I only wish I could," Captain Etris said. "But we are on an urgent errand." She gestured to the signum and the princeps who accompanied her. "And I must apologize, but we are interrupting your errand. Your books will need to wait."
She used "urgent" rather than "vital" because she was an Apoth, to whom "vital" had other, more salient referents. She used "urgent" rather than "imperative" because it was not exactly the Empire, as such, whose priorities she was most acutely aware of. And "errand" rather than "assignment" or "orders" because she was working on behalf of another. Jarik thought he knew who. "What need has Commander Vall of me now?"
"You are an Iudex investigator, and a lingua, and," she gestured at him, as if to say "you are who you are" in a way that perhaps only a lingua would understand.
"Very well." He hoped the depot would keep the books dry and safe. This was unlikely to be a quick sort of interruption.
...
Omara Mishta was a distant relation of the important gentryfolk family, but the Mishta clan was well known to keep a proprietary eye on even their remote kin. She had unknown suffusions at a comparatively advanced age, and began a second career of sorts as a writer of popular stories. These were classified as fantastical, since they were set in a world very distinctly not the real one, but they were not especially full of strangeness or magic. Instead, they had a sort of speculative technological bent, imagining a world where machines had been refined into doing most of the work, leaving the human citizens to the usual sorts of things people got up to when they had little to productively occupy themselves: crime, gossip, and bureaucracy.
Into this world she put a sort of Sublime without suffusion. Her imaginary world in fact had no leviathans, and therefore no grafts or suffusions; their medical treatments were mostly mechanistic as well, so if a person's eyesight were bad, instead of a simple graft they would wear a device upon their face with lenses made in a big machine to the precise degree of their needed correction. They had little palm-sized devices that communicated with one another, allowing them to send a written message or speak to or even see anyone else in the world by entering the number that identified the other person's device.
It was all impossible, of course, but it hung together so well that when readers immersed themselves in the world, it seemed more real than the one around them for the time of reading. Her main character had some of the gifts of the engraver, some of the lingua, and some of the axiom; he was also rather charming, though not beyond the typical unaugmented human manner. He was a sort of independent Iudex investigator. And the nation he was from did not have an Emperor, but chose a new leader every few years in what seemed to be a poll of every adult citizen as to their preferred choice.
What would her hero, this Benoit Blanc, think of the Empire?
That was exactly what the four Apoths, Commander Vall, Captain Etris, Princeps Tula and Signum Gokuf, were about to find out. As well as whether he would, as they expected and hoped, be able to put his skills to work to figure out why his creator had abducted her very important cousin, where she had taken him, and how to get him back safely to his influential and very worried family.
...
Benoit Blanc stared in disbelief at the four people in red costumes seated with him around the table. He wasn't sure where he was, only that it was a room with walls made of tightly twined together stems of an unfamiliar plant, with a table that was covered in a thick, parchment-like paper. Two of the people were Tala and two were Rathras, and he wasn't sure how he even knew those terms for their races. There weren't any of those where he was from, he knew that much. Their skin was oddly grey, and he thought he knew why, but he could not remember.
Rather than let that frustrate him, Benoit drummed his fingers on the table, listening to the sound they made and seeing if he could tell by that sound what the table was made of, under the paper. Metal, maybe, he thought, by the echoes of the light impacts, though the vine walls were quite good at absorbing sound. "Start from the beginning," he said once he had quieted his mind with that exercise. "You've hired me, now you need to stop keeping secrets if you want me to be able to help." People always tried to tell him only part of what they needed. But he was good at getting the rest out of them, if only because he was good at getting them to trust him. He earned that trust by doing what they'd hired him for.
"Yes, that's right, we hired you. From your world. To come to ours, because we need you to find Pathri Mishta. We think his cousin Omara abducted him, and she was your -" said the taller of the two women, the one with short curls. She was the only one of the four with any hair at all.
The bald woman with the flowers tattooed on her skull interrupted. "She closely followed your career," she said. Now that was interesting. What had the bald woman not wanted the other one to tell him? Benoit would have to find that out. "Omara knew everything about you. So we thought you'd probably be the ideal person to find out everything we needed to know about her."
It wasn't that she was lying. It was that she was trying to mislead him with the truth. Benoit was used to that. "What makes you think Omara was the one who kidnapped Pathri?" he asked.
The broader, darker man with his hood up answered this time. "She disappeared at the same time as he did, and had invited him to dinner. The last his servants saw of them was when they left him at the meeting house where she had arranged to have their meal brought."
"This meeting house," Benoit said, "you no doubt investigated? Questioned the staff and the proprietor as to what occurred in their meeting, their dinner together?"
...
They recounted to Benoit what they had learned when they investigated. They'd got testimony about the contents of the conversation between Omara and Pathri from the shift manager of the meeting house, and from two cleaners who had been cleaning adjacent rooms during the conversation and overheard parts of it. They'd also got some impressions from the porter who delivered the food, of Omara before Pathri arrived.
Benoit found it all adding up in his mind to a conversation he could comprehensively imagine. He knew the words weren't exact, and maybe he'd got some part of it wrong, but he felt confident the gist was correct. Yet he couldn't communicate that gist; it was only a feeling in his mind, one he could only elaborate by giving an entire recreation of the interaction.
Like so:
Pathri arrives. He looks first at the food, then at his cousin, already seated at the table, the food in covered dishes, plates laid out one in front of her, one near the other chair which is clearly for him. He puts his hand on the back of that chair and speaks. "You look like you have been sleeping in your office, Omara."
"And? It's no less comfortable than my bedroom. Sit down, the food will get cold."
"It's gauche to have the food delivered before your guest arrives," Pathri says as he sits.
Omara shrugs. "I was hungry." She uncovers the food as he watches. The last one, she pulls toward herself and starts to serve some of it onto her plate.
"So. My favorite foods, is it?" He reaches for the dish closest to him and takes half. "You must want something."
"Maybe I just want to spend time with you. Catch up."
"No, that can't be it. Ooh, maybe it's research. You're going to write me as the victim next time."
"You'd make a terrible victim. You're too ordinary."
"No, I'm not." He eats, she eats, they're quiet for some time, in Benoit's imagination. Then he says, "Well, maybe I am a little boring."
"You're not boring, Pathri. You're fun at parties, but there's nothing about you that would make my readers love you, or hate you, enough to make you worth killing off. Death has to mean something in a story."
"I could be the second victim, to up the stakes, make the hero feel like he's in danger?"
Omara is amused by this, Benoit thinks. "Are you trying to get me to write you dead?"
"Better that than you writing me as a killer," and he laughs. But Benoit has the feeling that he means it more sincerely than he wants to let on. "Mother says all your books are about the family. I feel left out."
"They're not, though. They're about gentryfolk of the Empire, but no one specific."
Pathri shrugs. "Rich people, dead people, dead rich people who deserved it -- every time."
"There's worse than our family that fit that description."
"And you still haven't said why we're having dinner."
Then there is a part where Benoit doesn't know what they say. The testimony didn't cover the full stretch of time; there had been a long break between the witness who heard the beginning of their conversation, and the one who heard the end of it.
"Did you know he was going to do that before he did?" This is the second half of something longer. Benoit isn't sure what the beginning might have been, but it is a family member Omara is referring to in this question she asks Pathri. Either the head of the family, or one of his closest delegates.
"Obviously. I helped him with the plans. Why do you care?"
"Your aunt Todife sent me a letter, saying she thought he was going to send her to the outer cantons."
"And he did."
"Yes, and she said that someone wanted her dead. And she died out there."
"Writing about a great investigator doesn't mean you are one, Omara. This isn't a murder plot you can unravel. The outer cantons are dangerous, and people die sometimes."
"Which is a great cover for a killer, isn't it."
And then they went quiet, the cleaner had told the Apoths, and not said anything loud enough to hear in the next room until they left together. Most of the food had been eaten, but they had left some scraps.
...
"Did you do any analysis on the food the two of them left behind?" Benoit asked the Apoths.
"No poison," said the bald woman.
Benoit nodded. "Any drugs or unusual bacteria?" They seemed unexpectedly dumbfounded by this question, especially the two women. The one with curls opened her mouth in a circle like a doughnut. The other twisted hers like a pretzel. Benoit thought he must be craving normal food -- the meal he had been served here had been strange with unpleasant flavors. He wanted coffee and croissants.
"I think he means grafts and contagions," the man with the hood said to the others.
"Oh, right. Yes, of course, we did the usual tests," said the other man.
"With an expensive array of plants and insects bred specifically to detect those grafts and contagions," the bald woman added. "A waste, because there was nothing in the food that didn't belong there."
"Did you check their medical records for any allergies or unusual reactions to any of the ingredients?" The Apoths seemed even more confused by that than they had been by "drugs or bacteria."
After glancing side to side at the others, the woman with curls answered. "Pathri is gentryfolk. We can't just," she paused. "We asked the family about his health and they referred us to those who had given him suffusions and grafts. There was nothing we found relevant. As Apoths, that sort of thing would have meant we wouldn't have needed you in the first place."
Benoit wasn't as sure of that as they seemed to be.
In fact, slowly, his conviction grew that they were entirely wrong.
No, not entirely. They were right about their premise that Omara had been the culprit. But she hadn't intended anything as blatant as kidnapping, and certainly not murder.
"Have you considered that this Omara is not an especially stupid woman, and that she invents clever mysteries as a regular practice?" Benoit asked them. "Does this not bring it to your thoughts that if she intended harm to her cousin, she would not have arranged things so that she was the last person to have seen him before that harm came to pass?"
Three out of the four of them nodded slowly. "So, you're saying," said the fourth.
"That Pathri is very likely to show up, soon, unharmed," Benoit said gently. "Which is not to say that you have overreacted. On the contrary, I think you were right that Omara planned this and for a reason."
"But," said the woman with curls, and then didn't say any more.
"Did you question the food deliveryman, the porter," Benoit asked, "about his other deliveries on the same day?"
"No," said the man in the hood. "We had no idea that would be at all relevant."
"Unfortunate," said Benoit.
"We can bring him here for you to question, if you like," the bald woman offered.
"Yes, please," Benoit said, though he strongly suspected they would not be able to find the man to bring him in.
...
After another long while with very little to do, except pick at the unsatisfactory food, and think longingly of shrimp in remoulade, whiskey sours, and beignets with the perfect dusting of powdered sugar, Benoit Blanc paced restlessly back and forth in the room and, as he reached each wall, puzzled a bit over its construction, or lack thereof. It appeared to have been grown in place, complete with outgrowths on which the absolutely organic looking light fixtures could be fastened, and that was simply not possible. Fretvine, a strange part of his own thoughts whispered, and it whispered that word in six different languages, none of which Benoit was at all aware of ever having learned, or even heard of.
But that was a puzzle for later, he thought, pushing it aside. First he must figure out what Omara would do, depending on the answer she obtained to the question she had clearly been going to ask her cousin. And not take his word over a meal for, either.
She had drugged him, and with something that she knew the local authorities would not test for. Something harmless, and useful to her needs, that would loosen him up and allow her to get the answers she wanted. It had to be contingent on her being a blood relative, he thought. It had to be, but his very conviction on that point seemed out of place.
"This case is a bon-bon," Benoit said out loud to himself, or to whoever the Apoths had set to listen to him and report. He didn't mind, they were the clients after all. "Small and sweet, but with layers, one inside the other. And the one on the very inside is spiked with something."
The outer layer was melting in the metaphorical mouth of his understanding. She had put something in his food, some kind of, what had the Apoths called it? Graft or confusion? One of those, and it had made him susceptible to mistaking one blood relative for another. Then she had taken him, under that influence, to a place where she could pretend to be his mother, maybe, or his sister, and get him to tell her what happened to that dear Aunt Todife.
Then, depending on whether he admitted some kind of complicity, or really didn't know, or did know but not until after it had been too late, she would do something. But not anything bad to her cousin, at least not until she had arranged herself a proper alibi and framed someone else for whatever it would be, or made it look like an accident. People like her always thought they were so, so clever, and Benoit found it amusing but also incredibly annoying. It could be both at once. Philip never understood that, but it absolutely could.
So he had that much. He explained it out loud, confident that the Apoths had some way of listening and recording. And if they didn't, well, it wouldn't be that much extra trouble to just explain it over again when they returned.
And then inside, the inner shell of the bonbon began to melt, and Benoit thought, such a thing is impossible, there is no way I could know the existence of a drug like that, or that it not only existed but also was not known to the Apoths. No, I read about it in a book I ordered from the inner Empire only a few months ago, and how did I do that when a few months ago I hadn't ever even heard of the Inner Empire?
I don't know how I got here, he realized. He felt very drunk, and had to sit down. The room seemed to spin around him, at first slowly, then faster. He began to remember a life that wasn't Benoit Blanc's, but was instead that of an investigator for the Iudex.
...
I am canceling my order for Omara Mishta's books and selling the one I already have, thought Jarik Oprenda when he woke the next morning with the worst hangover of his entire life, even worse than the ones from his early twenties after an entire night in a sotbar. I never want to read the name "Benoit Blanc" again for the rest of my life.