City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(11)

She touches the lapels of his coat. They have been shredded like ribbons. “What happened to his clothes?”

Pitry, Sigrud, and the vault guard lean in to look. “Sorry?” asks the vault guard. Since the embassy has no funerary facilities, the mortal coil of Dr. Efrem Pangyui has been stored in the embassy vault on a cot, like a precious heirloom waiting for the red tape to clear so it can return home. Which it is, a bit, thinks Shara.

“Look at his clothes,” she says. “All the seams and cuffs have been slit. Even the pant cuffs. Everything.”

“So?”

“Did you receive the body in this state?”

The guard favors the body with a leery eye. “Well, we didn’t do that.”

“So would you say it was the Bulikov police?”

“I guess? I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t quite know.”

Shara is still. She has seen this before, of course, and even performed this procedure herself, once or twice—the more clothing one wears, with more pockets and linings and cuffs, the more places to hide highly sensitive material.

Which begs the question, she thinks, why would anyone think a historian on a diplomatic mission would have something to hide?

“You can go,” she says.

“What?”

“You can leave us.”

“Well … You’re in the vault, ma’am. I can’t just leave you in the—”

Shara looks up at him. Perhaps it is the fatigue from the trip or the grief now trickling into her face, or perhaps it is the generations of command reverberating through her bloodline, but the guard coughs, scratches his head, and finds something to busy himself in the hall.

Pitry moves to follow, but she says, “No, Pitry—not you. Please stay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’d like to have some embassy input, however limited.” She looks to Sigrud. “What do you think?”

Sigrud bends over the tiny body. He examines the skull quite carefully, like a painter trying to identify a forgery. To Pitry’s evident disgust, he lifts one flap of skin and examines the indentations on the bone underneath. “Tool,” he says. “Wrench, probably. Something with teeth.”

“You’re sure?”

He nods.

“So nothing useful there?”

He shrugs. Maybe—maybe not. “Was first hit on the front.” He points to just above what was once the professor’s left eyebrow. “The marks are deep there. Others … not so deep.”

Any tool, thinks Shara. Any weapon. Anybody could have done this.

Shara keeps looking at the body. She tells herself for the second time this night, Ignore the ornamentations. But it is the ruined visage of her hero, his hands and neck and shirt and tie—can she dismiss all these familiar sights as mere ornamentation?

Wait a minute. A tie?

“Pitry—did you see the professor much during his time here?” she asks.

“I saw him, yes, but we weren’t friends.”

“Then you don’t remember,” she asks softly, “if he developed the habit of wearing a tie?”

“A tie? I don’t know, ma’am.”

Shara reaches over and plucks up the tie. It is striped, red and creamy white, made of exquisite silk. A northern affectation, and a recent one. “The Efrem Pangyui I knew,” she says, “always preferred scarves. It’s a very academic look, I understand—scarves, usually orange or pink or red. School colors. But one thing I don’t ever recall him wearing is a tie. Do you know much about ties, Pitry?”

“A little, I suppose. They’re common here.”

“Yes. And not at all at home. And wouldn’t you say that this tie is of an unusually fine make?” She turns it over to show him. “Very fine, and very … thin?”

“Ahm. Yes?”

Without taking her eyes off the tie, she holds an open hand out to Sigrud. “Knife, please.”

Instantly there is a tiny fragment of glittering metal—a scalpel of some kind—in the big man’s hand. He hands it to Shara. She pushes her glasses up on her nose and leans in low over his body. The faint smell of putrefaction comes leaking up out of his shirt. She tries to ignore it—another unpleasant ornamentation.

She looks closely at the white silk. No, he wouldn’t do it with white, she thinks. It’d be too noticeable. …

She spots a line of incredibly fine red threads going against the grain. She nicks each one with the scalpel. The threads form a little window to the inside of the tie, which she sees is like a pocket.

There is a strip of white cloth inside. Not the cloth of the tie—something else. She slides it out and holds it up to the light.

There are writings on one side of the white cloth done in charcoal—a code of some kind.

“They would have never thought to look in the tie,” she says softly. “Not if it was an especially nice tie. They wouldn’t have expected that from a Saypuri, would they? And he would have known that.”

Pitry stares at the gutted tie. “Wherever did he learn a trick like that?”

Shara hands the scalpel back to Sigrud. “That,” she says, “is a very good question.”

*

Dawn light crawls through her office window, creeping across the bare desk and the rug, which is riddled with indentations from the furniture she had them remove. She goes to the window. It is so strange: the city walls should prevent any light from entering the city unless the sun is directly above, yet she can see the sun cresting the horizon, though it is rendered somewhat foggy by the strange transparency of the walls …