“Exactly,” Jason told him. “And that’s what Father would want.”
The tenor of the room changed with those words. It was still thick with fear over our situation, shock over the death of the Khaajiir, and uncertainty over which one of us had turned the evening into an exercise in murder…but there was something else now: wonder. It was most visible in the eyes of the Pearlmans, who for the most of the evening could not have considered me anything more but some low-prestige offworld bureaucrat, and had now seen me not only seize control of the crisis but also get declared the personal project of Hans Bettelhine himself. They didn’t know whether to bow to me or run from me.
In Dejah Shapiro’s case it seemed more like fascination. She could not have expected a moment like this in my future the last time we’d met, and now that she’d witnessed one here she just fingered her chin, titled her head, and contemplated me as if hoping furious thought would bring me into the proper focus.
I remained on the wrong foot with Monday Brown. He looked like he was irritated by my very existence. Philip looked like he wanted to hit me. And I could not read Vernon Weathers at all.
I had no idea what I could have done in my life to merit loyalty from Bettelhines. Any Bettelhines. If indeed loyalty was what this was.
But if it gave me an advantage, right now, this was not the proper moment to question it.
Or as one of my teachers once said: When you’re in over your head, swim.
“Good,” I said. “Now that we’ve got that settled, I think there are two things we need to do. First, we need to confirm that nobody here’s hiding another Claw of God, or weapon of similar lethality, on his person. Oscin will stay here while you divest yourselves of everything you’re carrying, while Skye and I take the time to examine the Khaajiir’s body. Have you decided who gets to monitor us while we work?”
All eyes turned to the stewards, Arturo, Colette, Loyal Jeck, and Paakth-Doy.
The truth, as I’d known when I’d gone through the motions of allowing the Bettelhines to choose between those four, was that only two seemed safe to allow near the investigation: Jeck and Paakth-Doy, the only ones I couldn’t personally place within a meter of the Khaajiir at any point during the night.
In the end, it was Jason who made the choice I’d wanted them to make. “Doy?”
Paakth-Doy glanced at her co-workers, then stepped forward, with a shyness I hadn’t seen from her before.
“It will be my honor,” she said.
The sounds of protest and offended dignity from the crowd over by the bar provided steady background music as Skye, Paakth-Doy, and I stood before the plush easy chair and regarded the wreckage of a sentient being.
The Khaajiir sat with his feet planted on the floor, and the rest of him swallowed by a chair that would have engulfed a being twice his girth. The chair was so large that his spine failed to rest flush against the backrest, but rather leaned on it, in a position a living biped might have considered too uncomfortable to endure for long. He’d rested his staff across the two armrests, crossing in front of his now-sunken abdomen like the safety bar in a child’s high chair. His left palm, painted black by the goo that less than an hour before had been solid and functioning aside him, pinned the staff to the armrest on that side, both holding it in place and marking it with the stain of his death. A shiny crust had formed where his fingertips soaked the plush fabric. His right arm pinned the other end of the staff to the armrest on the other side, but more of his hand extended over it. Sometime in his last few minutes his fingertips had convulsed in some way, scratching at the fabric on that side to produce a series of three jagged lines, all identicaclass="underline" each consisting of three diagonals, leaning left and then right and then left again to produce zigzags. His unmoving fingertip still rested at the base of the zigzag farthest from the right. Enduring the stench, I leaned in close and saw a wisp of fiber from the chair lodged beneath that fingertip, fluttering in some unseen air current.
“Note this,” I told Skye.
“Noted,” she said.
The Khaajiir’s features had gone slack, free of the contorted trauma that sometimes remains on the faces of those who perish by violent means. His eyes were closed, his lips curled in an expression that looked like a smile but was probably just the expression they assumed at rest. A thin trickle of saliva, without any visible blood content, had trickled from the corner of his mouth. The only sign that his fate had been anything but a natural one was a single bloodstain, the size of a fingertip, on the tip of his nose.
I remembered the funeral of an elderly Bocaian neighbor who had died in his sleep when I was seven, about a year before so many others met deaths that had been much worse. All my Bocaian neighbors, and all of my human ones as well, had filed past the platform where the deceased lay in state, and whispered the same respectful phrase, Bocaian for Walk in Light, Where We Must Follow. I hadn’t thought of that for longer than I now wanted to contemplate, but the words came to my lips again now. I spoke them under my breath, shook my head as I realized what I’d just done, and said, “That was the first Bocaian phrase I’ve spoken in decades.”
Skye hovered close, protectively. “You said a few words earlier tonight.”
“Really? I don’t remember.”
“It is to be expected,” Paakth-Doy clucked. “I know at that times of stress I revert to my first tongue, Riirgaani.”
I’d been around far too many dead bodies in my professional life, and had learned to face the cooling collections of meat as abstractions, more problems to be solved than truncated lives to be mourned. But being around another dead Bocaian, after all these years, was tearing the scabs off old wounds. For a few seconds I found myself eight years old again. I sniffed, rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand, and, unable to come up with any more relevant comments, murmured, “It must have been agony.”
“I would not want to die in such a way,” Paakth-Doy said.
“It’s not what you think,” Skye told us. “Based on my readings, when I worked with the species, the K’cenhowten were never torturers in the way you and I understand the term.”
“How so?”
“Torture means something else to the K’cenhowten. Their sense of pain is not acute by human standards. They know when horrific things are being done to their bodies, and they feel all the dismay you and I might expect when they see their persons ravaged, but there’s always been a certain upper limit to the agony they can feel, and it’s well within their ability to function. It’s a built-in limit that prevents them from being incapacitated by agony, and relieves them of our human tendency to faint or convulse or, for prisoners experiencing extended torture, mind-destroying shock.”
“That’s one hell of a survival mechanism,” I said. “But would it work with a Claw of God?”
“Especially with a Claw of God,” Skye said. “K’cenhowten’s age of darkness did feature several methods of execution unbearable by human standards, but the Claw itself fries most of the body’s internal pain receptors the same way it fries the rest of the organs. The point of the torture was not inflicting pain, but rather horror. Its victims were positioned in front of mirrors and forced to watch everything that made their lives possible drain from them, despite exoskeletons that remained intact. For a K’cenhowten, wrapped in its impervious shell, this would have upset their very perceptions of the world.”
Paakth-Doy shuddered. “I’d imagined…agony.”
“And you imagined correctly, Doy, but not the right kind. Imagine that you were a human prisoner in medieval times, slowly roasted over an open flame after first being provided a drug that incapacitated your ability to feel any pain whatsoever. Imagine you were able to watch your skin turn black, your fatty tissues bubble and run like water. Imagine that your agony was not great enough to drown out every other thought, or to give you the blessed escape of unconsciousness. Imagine instead having to dwell on what was happening to you, and its terrible permanence, at whatever length your captors decide it should last. Is that better? Or worse?”