City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(17)
Which leaves the question—what were they looking for? The message in Pangyui’s tie? She isn’t yet sure, but more and more, Shara doubts if Pangyui was murdered simply for committing heresy in Bulikov.
Assume nothing, Shara reminds herself. You do not know until you know.
“All right,” says Shara. “Where?”
Sigrud sniffs again, shuffles through the paper to the desk, and uses his foot to clear away the floor on the side of the desk opposite from where the professor would normally work. A large, dark stain still lies on the stone floor. She has to get very near before she catches the coppery smell of old blood.
“So he wasn’t at his desk,” says Shara.
“I doubt it, yes.”
She wishes she knew where he lay when they found him, what was next to him, what was on his person. … There were notes in the police report, of course, but the police report did not mention Pangyui’s shredded clothing at all, so it’s not exactly trustworthy. She supposes she’ll have to work with what she has.
“If you could fetch me a bag for this paper, please,” she says softly.
Sigrud nods and stalks off down the hallway.
Shara surveys the room. She walks forward gingerly, and stoops and picks up a scrap of paper:
… but the contention is that the Kaj’s history as an unusually entitled Saypuri does not undermine his actions. His father was a collaborator with the Continent, yes, and we know nothing of his mother. We know the Kaj was a scholar and something of a scientist, performing experiments in his home, and though he did not lose any of his own in the massacre, he …
She picks up another.
… one wonders what the chamber of Olvos was used for in the original university, for it is suggested she disapproved of the actions of the Continent, and indeed the other Divinities. Considered a Divinity of hope, light, and resilience, Olvos’s withdrawal from the world in 775 at the onset of the Continental Golden Age was considered a great tragedy. Exactly why she withdrew was hotly debated: some texts surfaced claiming Olvos predicted nothing but woe for the path the other Divinities had chosen, yet many of these texts were quickly destroyed, probably by the other Divinities …
And another:
… by all indications, the Kaj’s time on Continental shores was spent very sparsely before he died of an infection in 1646. He slept, ate, and lived alone, and only spoke to give orders. Sagresha, his lieutenant, records in her letters, “It was as if he was so disappointed in the homelands of those who had conquered and ruled over his people for so long that it wounded him. Though he never said so, I could hear him thinking it: ‘Should not the land of the gods be fit for gods?’ ” Though of course the Kaj could not know that he was almost directly responsible for the devastation of the Continent, for it was the Kaj’s successful assassination of the Divinity Taalhavras that brought about the Blink …
Shara recognizes a lot of this as Efrem’s older writings, already published. He must have brought his old volumes here, and the police shredded them during their “search.” Perhaps they enjoyed destroying so much celebrated Saypuri writing, she thinks. That is, if it was really the police who did this.
Her eye catches a bulky form in the corner. Upon examination, it is a dense, impressive safe, and what’s more its door is ajar. She inspects the lock, which is terribly complicated: Shara is not a skilled lockpick, but she’s met a few in her time, and she knows they’d blanch at this. Yet the lock shows no sign of damage, nor does the door or the rest of the safe, nor is there any scrap or sign of what the safe once held.
As she sits back to think, she notices one corner of paper jutting up from the wreckage that is starkly different: it is not a page from an academic publication, but an official form with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seal in the upper left corner, and in the upper right, the seal of the polis governor’s office.
She fishes it out. It’s a request form filled out by Efrem. Exactly what it is requesting is hard to tell: the request itself is reduced down to a code, ACCWHS14-347. Efrem has signed the bottom, but there’s another signature needed, and underneath the blank are the words: turyin mulaghesh, polis governor, bulikov.
“Found something?” says Sigrud’s voice from the door.
“I’m not sure yet,” says Shara.
As they bag up all the material, Shara finds that this is not the only document of the polis governor’s that’s found its way into Efrem’s possession: among the scraps of paper is a hefty number of entry permission stubs, probably handed to him by a guard when he was approved to enter … somewhere.
Shara counts them when they’re done: there are a total of nineteen permission stubs here in the office. Shara knows Efrem probably didn’t keep them intentionally: they’d likely be worthless once his visit was over. He must have just emptied his pockets once he came back to his office.
Shara glances back at the safe in the corner. And perhaps he brought back more than ticket stubs.
Nidayin and Pitry both stumble in looking quite harassed. Nidayin holds a long, smudged piece of paper in his hands. “Well,” he says. “We’ve finished. We have a sum of sixty-three names, and we’ve recorded their departments, tenure, relation to the professor, and—”
“Good work,” says Shara. “Sigrud, if you could please add that to our collection. I believe we’ve done what we need to here. We’ll be back to the embassy now. And then, Pitry, you will probably need to fill up the car again. I believe a short excursion beyond Bulikov is in order.”