“Golly. What’s this?
“He pulls his hand out of the muck and finds it covered with blood.
“He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He lifts his hand all the way to his nose, perhaps because he wants a closer look and perhaps because he’s begun to identify the smell we’ve all sensed by this time as coming from him. The act leaves a tiny bloodstain on the tip of his nose.
“Remember again who he is. He’s an expert on the K’cenhowten reign of terror. He knows that a Claw of God, a weapon from the society he wrote about, turned up in an attack on me earlier in the day. It must occur to him at once that yet another Claw of God has been used on him in the last few minutes. What’s more, he remains coherent enough to backtrack and realize just which one of us did this terrible thing.
“But he’s dying. He knows he’s dying. He feels himself losing consciousness. He can barely hold his head up even now. He certainly can’t raise his voice and shout out the name of the guilty party. And he may have only seconds to tell us what he knows.
“He can use his fingernails to scratch a message into the weave of the armrest.
“But time is fleeting. It will probably take more time and strength than he has to scratch out a complete word, especially if he uses the ornate Bocaian alphabet, which is likely the only written language he knows. Not that it matters. How can he have the time to scratch the complete name of a human being while using all those frills and flourishes?
“But he’s fortunate, our ailing Khaajiir. Because he’s clever and he has his staff, the tool that has allowed him such hearty play at the game of words. He has his right hand on the interface and barely has to stir at all to think the name of his murderer, hoping to be provided with a translation he can use.
“I don’t know how many possibilities it gave him in the next second or two. From his ease at using the translation system to impress people, there may have been several, including a number that may have been too hard to transcribe.
“But he was provided with at least one he could use.
“And so his last act before he lost consciousness was to draw three crude zigzags, side by side.”
The Porrinyards indicated the three claw marks the Khaajiir had made in his dying moments, miming the zigzag pattern with their hands.
I faced Brown and Wethers. “We know it was the last thing he did. As I noted at the time, one of the fibers he ripped from the armrest was still stuck under one of the fingernails he used.”
Oscin pointed to the fingertip in question.
“He must have died seconds later,” I said.
The Porrinyards left the corpse behind, with its bloody walking stick, and returned to their previous positions at either side of me, waiting.
Farley Pearlman was reaching into his jacket to scratch his ribs. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t feel too inadequate,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have had a clue unless you knew the specific language the Khaajiir was referencing. I had to consult the staff myself, to compare the many possible explanations for those three zigzags with their potential interpretations in other languages.
“I didn’t get anywhere until after I realized that the message might have been meant for me, the one person here with a background in crime investigation…and remembered that when we’d spoken, he’d referenced an extinct human tongue known as English. Would it not make sense to concentrate on meanings I could access via that dialect?
“After that it was just a question of figuring out what he might have drawn that could have been as familiar to a Bocaian as it would be to any human being. And realizing that it was much more likely to be a natural phenomenon found all over the universe than any symbol restricted to our respective cultures.”
“Just say it,” Philip demanded.
I mimed the three jagged lines again. “Three lightning bolts.”
I spoke a single word familiar to all of us in the common tongue Hom.Sap Mercantile.
Still, nobody got it.
I hadn’t expected them to.
But now I faced the murderer and spoke its damning translation in English.
“Weathers.”
We only thought we were prepared for what happened next.
But there were two more murders in the next six seconds…
18
BLOODBATH
Farley Pearlman had never struck me as a coiled spring.
Before I’d learned what he was he’d struck me as an amiable mediocrity, desperate for appreciation from the boss. Afterward he’d struck me as a self-pitying predatory coward, sick and evil but even more pathetic. He had always been among the possible accessories, but had never seemed a credible threat.
The Porrinyards, the Bettelhines, and I had expected the true threat to come from the stewards, who were so conditioned to obedience that they would have been the easiest to control.
That’s the problem with being a creature of logic, like myself, or merchants of military hardware, like the Bettelhines. You think in straight lines.
You forget that targets of opportunity can be useful too.
You overlook that chaos for its own sake is a fine military objective.
So this is what happened.
One second.
Farley, who had been idly scratching his ribs with his left hand, whipped it out and slammed a black disk into the base of Colette Wilson’s neck.
She gasped, but not out of any special pain; the impact was not especially hard, and her reaction no more than the start anybody would have given after such an unexpected blow. By the time she looked down, still not comprehending what had been done to her, Farley had already leaped to his feet, the same Claw still in his hand as he tried to make me next.
Two seconds.
Several figures moved to intercept Farley, not just the Porrinyards but also Dejah and Brown and Mendez and Jeck.
Colette realized what she’d been hit with and took a deep breath to fuel what was about to become an ear-splitting scream.
Jeck reached Farley and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back and away from me an instant before I would have been in range.
Three seconds.
Farley altered his swing and clapped the Claw of God against Jeck’s chest instead.
Three sets of hands closed on Farley’s left wrist, seizing control of that arm even as his right remained free and swinging. His first punch smashed Brown’s nose.
Jason and Jelaine, moving as one, rounded the ends of the couch.
Six people screamed, all at the same moment. One was Colette, howling as she realized her life could now be measured in minutes. Another was Jeck, faster to the same realization. A third was Dina, who had risen to her feet and was, perhaps out of long habit, calling her nominal husband a bastard. Jason, Jelaine, and Paakth-Doy screamed my name because they were the only ones among us who saw that Farley had successfully distracted us all from what Vernon Wethers was doing.
Four seconds.
Brown crumpled.
I whirled just in time to see Wethers swinging the Khaajiir’s staff like a club. Had I not moved at all, the blow might have crushed my skull. As it was I was not fast enough to avoid the impact. It may have been one of the two or three worst blows to the head I’ve ever taken. Something cracked in my jaw as I stumbled backward, blackness flickering at the edges of my vision.
Five seconds.
Wethers swung the Khaajiir’s staff to keep Paakth-Doy at a distance. Doy stayed out of range but did not retreat, Jason and Jelaine just a step behind her. I shook my head to banish the looming threat of unconsciousness and stumbled toward them, tasting blood. Dina Pearlman was still calling her husband an asshole.