perhaps. His hair was soaked and sticking to his forehead. His robe hung
heavily from his shoulders, sodden with the rain.
"Eiah-cha," he said. "Parit-cha sent me. He's at his workroom. He said
he has something and that you should come. Quickly."
She caught her breath, the first movements of excitement lighting her
nerves. The other times one or another of the physicians and healers and
herb women of the city had sent word, it had been with no sense of
urgency. A man ill one day was very likely to be ill the next as well.
This, then, was something different.
"What is it?" she asked.
The runner took an apologetic pose. Eiah waved it away and called for a
servant. She needed a thick robe. And a litter; she wasn't waiting for
the firekeeper. And now, she needed them now. The Emperor's daughter got
what she wanted, and she got it quickly. She and the boy were on the
streets in less than half a hand, the litter jouncing uncomfortably as
they were carried through the drizzle. The runner tried not to seem awed
at the palace servants' fear of Eiah. Eiah tried not to bite her
fingernails from anxiety. The streets slid by outside their shelter as
Eiah willed the litter bearers to go faster. When they reached Parit's
house, she strode through the courtyard gardens like a general going to war.
Without speaking, Parit ushered her to the back. It was the same room in
which she'd seen the last woman. Parit sent the runner away. There were
no servants. There was no one besides the two physicians and a body on
the wide slate table, covered by a thick canvas cloth soaked through
with blood.
"They brought her to me this morning," Parit said. "I called for you
immediately."
"Let me see," Eiah said.
Parit pulled back the cloth.
The woman was perhaps five summers older than Eiah herself, darkhaired
and thickly built. She was naked, and Eiah saw the wounds that covered
her body: belly, breasts, arms, legs. A hundred stab wounds. The woman's
skin was unnaturally pale. She'd bled to death. Eiah felt no revulsion,
no outrage. Her mind fell into the patterns she had cultivated all her
life. This was only death, only violence. This was where she was most at
home.
"Someone wasn't happy with her," Eiah said. "Was she a soft-quarter whore?"
Parit startled, his hands almost taking a pose of query. Eiah shrugged.
"That many knife wounds," she said, "aren't meant only to kill. Three or
four would suffice. And the spacing of them isn't what I've seen when
the killer had simply lost control. Someone was sending a message."
"She wasn't stabbed," Parit said. He took a cloth from his sleeve and
tossed it to her. Eiah turned back to the corpse, wiping the blood away
from a wound in the dead woman's side. The smear of gore thinned. The
nature of the wound became clear.
It was a mouth. Tiny rosebud lips, slack as sleep. Eiah told her hand to
move, but for a long moment her flesh refused her. Then, her breath
shallow, she cleaned another. And then another.
The woman was covered with babies' mouths. Eiah's fingertips traced the