The parents shook their heads. ‘She never said, not specifically.’
He made a note anyway. ‘If she was scared of going out at night, what was she doing by the river? A lover, perhaps?’
The fetid riverside would be a strange choice for a romantic encounter, but perhaps a fisher or trader had caught her eye. A lovestruck girl might have thought it a chance to sin in the open without being caught, and family often elected to be naive when children grew up.
The couple’s eyes met, but the mother spoke first. ‘No one that we know of. We didn’t even hear her go out.’
His lips thinned. More intangible testimony instead of evidence.
‘Perhaps you should have also urged her more strongly to be cautious.’ Ilan reached beneath his vestment cloak. ‘A memento to burn, if you like.’
He placed one of the girl’s blonde braids on the table, where it lay curled and frayed like a strip of pelt, and averted his gaze as the woman broke into gasping sobs.
The father stared down at the twined hair, skin as ashen as the salt white in his beard.
‘Why isn’t the Church doing more?’ he asked, voice grave and flat. ‘We’ve been terrorised for weeks, and the Prelate hasn’t said a blasted thing.’
Ilan tilted his head. ‘Excuse me?’
The fear was gone from the man’s eyes, replaced by a cavernous anger as he half-rose, fingertips pressing into the table.
‘You relish punishing those who sin, but what are you doing to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place? If prayerwas going to work, the city would be free already. Say what you want about the Izir, but at least he’s on the streets and not hiding in the cathedral. He’s offering what comfort he can.’
‘Karlos!’ The man’s wife pressed her palms on the table and bowed her head until it nearly touched the surface.
It had been a long time since Ilan had seen quite that much deference.
Then again, these people were from Saika, for all they currently lived across the river in a district that had once been linked to Siofolk. He didn’t know when this family had left the northern territory, but if they’d seen his arrival they would know his background. They may have seen him in clothing far more decorated than what he now wore, or known his family. Perhaps owed his father.
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, but it was a poor impulse. A servant of the Church had one home, and it was the one currently being threatened.
‘And what would you have me do?’ Ilan’s lip curled. ‘I have the census of everyone in the city. Would you like me to call them in, one by one, and pull out their fingernails until I get a confession?’
They’d already tested the population against the glass, a production of weeks and disruption. They’d found all manner of minor blasphemies and a few horrors, but nothing close to this level of sin.
‘If that’s what it takes.’
The man’s chin was set. Grief had snatched the colour from his world, rendered it black and white, illuminated only with flashes of pain. He’d seen it in the Church, among those who thought taking vows after tragedy would bring some meaning to their loss. He’d seen it in his own home, with two siblings delivered before he’d turned fifteen and his mother reduced to a ghost herself for years.
But there was a reason Justice and Knowledge were equal among the virtues. Ilan himself had considered putting more pressure on the interrogations, and just as quickly dismissed it. He wasn’t going to scar a city of the devout in the hope some rumour of smoke turned out to be fire. The Izir was making enough people question the Church as it was; any more and it would spill over into outright anger at the Faith.
He’d been raised on politics and stories of what happened when the hungry turned hateful against those guiding them. In the dark years between the Severing and the Union, the territories had been in constant fear-stoked uprising, and trust had only slowly been rebuilt in the three hundred years since they’d come to a sort of order. Managing a population for their own good was delicate work.
But this man didn’t need to know that. Ilan let teeth show with his smile.
‘Then why don’t I start with you?’ Let the man look his call to violence in the mirror. By the way his lip curled, he found the reflection sickening.
‘My daughter is dead. You can’t think I killed her.’ He was standing upright now, backing up to put a cowardly step of space between himself and the inquisitor.
‘You would be surprised. But I don’t think these murders are a family matter.’
The older man leaned back and stared at the ceiling, retreating into the shroud of impotent anger, and his wife saw Ilan out with a bowed head and breathy prayers to their shared saint.
When he shut the door, he paused to place his hand on it and say a prayer of solace, one he’d learned from his own mother in the endless nights of deep winter. These people would need strength.
Murders happened in Silgard, but never in such isolation. There was always a thread – jealousy or anger, or greed, and hewasn’t lying when he said it was kin killing kin more often than not. The only connection here was spilled blood, the writing on the bodies, and the way the killer never surfaced.
Thoughts he had tried to suppress leaked to the surface like smoke finding hairsbreadth cracks in a sealed door.
