Page 126 of A Drop of Corruption

“He heard us coming,” said the woman. “Tried to step back in and pretend all was aright.”

The man: “But he tried to hide something. Something he held in his hand, which he placed in his pocket.”

“A flash of metal,” said the woman. “Small and delicate, and bright. A knife, or so I thought.”

“We did not ask upon it,” said the man. “For he seemed on the border of a rage. We averted our eyes, apologized, and returned to our works.”

“The days after this were frozen and fraught,” tapped the woman. “To him, it had been a secret thing. And to have it known was a great harm.”

“And then,” tapped the man.

“And then…” The female augur’s eyes trailed up the walls to stare at the ceiling. “The accident. And the nature of this accident, it…it…”

They fell silent: the first time they had been inarticulate, I noticed.

The male augur leaned forward, peering into my eyes, his fingers tapping frantically on his board as Ghrelin spoke: “We thought it was anintentionalmistake. Like a man setting a trap for himself, a noose hanging just so, and then allowing himself to proceed through his day, claiming to be unaware that he walked through his last moments of his own devising.”

The woman, harshly: “No! An accident. That was what itwas.He was degrading. Decaying. It isourfault that it happened. We should have done more to stop it.”

The man: “But we did. We did warn our superiors. They spoke to Pyktis. And he convinced them that nothing was wrong.”

The woman: “Yet he could be convincing! This we know! Even as he was filled with despair, he…”

The man glanced at her, then looked to me and tapped out: “A mancan be many things. Despairing yet confident. Mad yet persuasive. And he could have loved us, while…while still planning his death.”

The woman tapped out a sharp “No.”

A tormented silence fell over them.

I sat forward, sensing something lurking in his comments. I asked, “Why do you say he loved you in doing such a thing?”

The man, hesitantly: “Because it should have beenuswho approached the marrow with him that day. We who tried to help bind it with him, to bathe it in nutrients so it could sleep and persist, for we were of his polytia. Yet he asked to be accompanied by others that day. At the time, we thought it a slight, but…” He trailed off.

I said, “But now you think he was sparing you death.”

The man bowed his head and tapped: “Could that be love? Could a thing capable of that also love? I do not know. And now, here you are, Iudex, with a coldness to your eye, and I wonder…”

I studied them both, taking in the mournful looks on their faces. Yet my mind strayed back to what they’d said of Pyktis’s supposed thoughts of suicide, when they’d found him standing in the window of the tower, and I recalled their first statements to me, bold and proud:This we knew. This was known.

They have already found the truth,I thought.

I imagined Pyktis, a figure standing in the window in this strange place, and then I recalled a moment with Malo, from the very start of this investigation.

Plucking a man from such a high room,she’d said,with the windows locked and all, and no one saw nor heard a thing…I cannot ken it.

Another window, another vanishing.

I said, “But you returned to the window, in the tower. And you found out that he hadn’t been planning to jump. You found he’d been climbingoutof it, didn’t you?”

The sorrow vanished from the augurs’ faces. They gazed at me, fascinated and slightly outraged.

The woman’s fingers turned into a blur, and she tapped: “How was this known? How did you come to know this?”

Then the man: “Yes. How?”

I said nothing.

The woman shuddered, her lips tight. “How awful you are. We are like wanderers in a desert, begging for water, and you give us only sand.”