Page 17 of A Trade of Blood

“My briefing mentioned you had found the murder weapon,” I said.

“Yes,” said Seriv. “We found it in the room with the dead girl, and I packaged it up. I had no time to do much else with it, after the Armentas and the Buravs came trooping in…”

He fumbled about in a bag that had been tossed in the corner of the room, then took out a package wrapped in leather. He unfolded it to show me a bloodied, serrated knife, with a blade nearly a span long, and a plain, unmarked wooden handle. Its teeth were about an eighth of a smallspan apart.

My eyes fluttered in my head as I summoned up the memory of Zansay’s wounds. There was little doubt in my mind that this had been the knife that had harmed her.

“A flensing knife,” said Seriv.

“A what?”

“A flensing knife, for work in the flensing halls.” He wrapped it upand placed it back in his bag. “Where all the arts of butchery are put to thousands of cattle carcasses, to make flesh for the inner rings to dine upon. A dark thing that this was used upon the scion of a ranching house—true?”

—

Castus Armenta waslocked in the first cell in the passage. He sat in the corner, head bowed, back slumped. He was wearing an old linen shirt and breeches, and from the fit they must have once belonged to someone else, for Castus was practically swimming in their sleeves. I guessed his other clothes had been too bloodied.

He did not look up as I entered and sat on the bench opposite him. He was a young man, barely twenty, dark headed, well built, and quite tanned: I guessed he, like so many people of this land, had spent his days in the saddle tending to herds of urhosi cows. Yet there was a softness to his eyes, or perhaps his chin, as if despite his labors he’d left childhood behind so recently that he still bore some of its traces.

But there, behind his ear, and at the base of his neck: a coil of something dark and crusty. Dried blood—Zansay’s blood, to be sure.

“Castus Armenta?” I asked.

He blinked slowly but did not look atme.

“I am Signum Dinios Kol, of the Imperial Iudex. I’m given custody of your case. I am here to listen to your account of last night.”

The young man took a deep breath and sighed.

“Do you recall what happened, Castus?” I asked. “And can you account for your actions before and after the death of Zansay Burav?”

He said nothing.

“I’m tasked to get your account, Castus,” I said. “I must stay here until I get it.”

His eyelids fluttered, and he swallowed. Then, hoarsely, he said, “No.”

“No? No, as in…”

“No, I cannot account for my actions,” he said dully.

“Because you refuse? Or because you can’t remember?”

Silence.

“Or because you can find no explanation for them?” I suggested.

Another fluttering to his eyelids. “The…the last one.”

I watched him sitting there, slumped against the fretvine wall. He looked like a man who had had his spirit ripped from him, like a cook pulling the veins from a shrimp.

“Did you kill Zansay Burav, Castus?” I asked.

“You ask me plainly?”

“I do. Did you?”

A slight crinkling about his eyes. “I…I do not know.”