Page 8 of The Tainted Cup

I took that as a no, they had not shut any doors or windows, and continuedon.

—

EVENTUALLY I RANout of servant girls, so I went hard at the cook, asking her about the blood in the kitchen. She was most unimpressed.

“Why doyouthink there might be blood in the kitchen?” she demanded.

“Did you cut yourself?” I asked.

“No. Of course not. I am too old, and too good. If you found blood, I am sure it’s from the larfish I cooked for Blas’s breakfast—not that he ever got to eat it.”

“Larfish?” I asked. I pulled a face. “For breakfast?”

“It’s what he likes,” she said. “It’s hard to get, out close to the walls, where he works.” She leaned closer. “If you ask me, he picked up something out there, at the sea walls. Some parasite or another. I mean—think of what the sea walls keepout. Sanctum knows what kind of strange things they bring in with them!”

“They don’t get in, ma’am,” I said. “That’s the point of the sea walls.”

“But they had a breach years ago,” she said, delighted to discuss such grotesqueries. “One got in and wrecked a city south of here, before the Legion brought it down. The trees there bloom now, though they never bloomed before. They weren’t trees thatcouldgrow blooms before.”

“If we could get back to the circumstances of last night, ma’am…”

“Circumstances!” she scoffed. “The man caught contagion. It’s as simple as that.”

I pressed her harder, but she gave me nothing more of interest, and I let hergo.

—

THE GROUNDSKEEPER NEXT.Fellow’s name was Uxos, and he was apparently more than just a groundskeeper, performing odd jobs about the house, fixing up walls or fernpaper doors. A most timid man, perhaps too old to still be groundskeeper. He seemed terrified at the idea of trying to fix the damage the trees had done to the house.

“I don’t even know what kind of tree it is,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

“It had a bloom, you know,” I said. “A little white one.” I described it to him—the inner petals purple and yellow, the sweet and sickly aroma. He just shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s not a flower I know. Not a tree I know. I don’t know.”

I asked him about the kirpis shroom, and he said the same thing as the servant girl: too much water kills them. But how this one had died, he didn’t know.

“Someone probably overwatered it,” he said. “Dumped a drink in it. It’s expensive, but it happens. They’re very hard to care for. It’s a complex process, cooling the air. They make black fruit in their roots you have to clean out…”

Finally I asked him about his oven, and the ashes of the fire out there in the hut.

“I use the fire to clean my tools,” Uxos said. “Some plants are very delicate. Can’t get fungus from one to the other. So I put them in the fire to clean them.”

“Don’t they have washes for that?” I said. “Soaps and such for your tools?”

“They’re expensive. Fire is cheaper.”

“The Hazas don’t seem like people who care much about price.”

“They care,” he said, “ifpeopleget expensive. Then the people go. I try very hard not to be expensive. I don’t want to go.”

A worm of worry in his eye. Too old to be groundskeeper by half, I guessed, and he knew it. I pressed him for more, but he had nothing more to give, and I let himgo.

—

LAST WAS THEhousekeeper—a Madam Gennadios, apparently the boss of the whole place when the Hazas themselves weren’t around. An older woman with a lined, heavily painted face. She wore bright green robes of a very expensive make, soft and shimmering—Sazi silk, from the inner rings of the Empire. She paused when she walked in, looked me over with a cold, shrewd eye, then sat down, her posture immaculate—knees together at an angle, hands in her lap, shoulders high and tight—and stared resolutely into the corner.

“Something wrong, ma’am?” I asked.