Even after the two sisters had been locked up in the guardhouse, Tera was still all but trembling with anger.
"It should have worked," Janyn said quietly. "Hedge her round with her own fears, using the truth as a weapon, then offer her hope, the easy out. She should have talked and been relieved to do it."
"She should have, but she didn't."
"She just broke down."
They'd put the two women in the same cell. Saya had been clinging to her sister and sobbing when they left; it would have taken physical violence to separate her from Mira at that point.
"I don't understand people like that!" Tera exclaimed. "How can anyone be so deranged by fear that they do the exact opposite of what would protect them from that fear? And Mira! I despise those of her sort!"
Janyn was shocked by her vehemence.
"Tera, she just wanted to protect her sister." Unlike me, guilt lashed him, who pushed at a poor, weak woman's vulnerability until she had a breakdown.
"She's no different than Ned Crain, no different at all! 'Put aside desire and walk the righteous path!' Zio says. Crain desires money, and perhaps the pleasure of wielding power, so he steals and extorts. Mira desires that her sister be left alone, so she thwarts the law and helps a murderer."
"She did it out of love."
"If I cut your throat, does it matter to you if I did it for love, hate, or greed? Sins are not excused by good intentions! Besides that, if her love was pure instead of selfish, she'd have wanted Saya to do the right thing. Saya was weak of spirit and I cannot blame her for that any more than I can blame a weak man for not being able to lift a heavy rock, but Mira is not weak and she chose to do evil. She should have helped us. With her aid, Saya could have been coaxed to talk gently, eased along to see the truth and face her fears, but instead Mira chose to fight us, to create a conflict, force us to be hard and demanding, and increase the stress on her sister every time she spoke."
It was a hard philosophy, Janyn thought, but...wasn't there some truth to it? He and Tera were trying to catch a vicious and brutal murderer. They had to try to gather all evidence possible, not just to exact justice, but to save innocent lives in the future, lives like his own client's.
A swollen, blackened tongue protruding from slack lips, a body twisting at the end of a rope.
Mira had instead chosen protecting her sister over the cost to those innocents. Worse yet, she'd used bad judgment in choosing how to protect, giving Saya what she wanted--no, what Saya's fear wanted--instead of what she needed.
And yet, was it right to blame Mira for that? Wasn't that holding her to an unreasonable standard? Who would be so coldly rational in the face of a loved one's misery? No one would, and after a moment Janyn realized that Tera didn't really expect reason to win out. It was faith, the same kind of passionate belief she herself had in Zio's "righteous" path, that could overcome strong, personal emotions, that could make someone act in accord with a greater principle.
The problem was, those with faith always expected everyone else to have it, too, or at least used it as a yardstick to measure by. Most people, though, didn't have that kind of dedication to the abstract that would let them rise above the personal.
And sometimes, people put their faith in the wrong things.
"Are you seriously going to charge Mira? Have her tried as an accessory to these murders?"
"Yes!" Tera snapped, then paused. She looked uncertain, an emotion that didn't look natural on her. "Maybe," she amended. "Maybe I'm letting my feelings cloud my judgment?"
"Just because she offends you doesn't necessarily mean she's offended justice, you mean?"
Her head bobbed up and down on her skinny neck.
"I think we should wait and see," she decided. "We will solve this case. When we do, we'll know if Saya's testimony would have helped us do it any faster. If it didn't matter, then I'll release them. If it turns out that the information would have saved people's lives, then Mira will have to pay for that." She sighed deeply. "She'll pay for it anyway. We carry our sins with us eternally."
"Grim philosophy."
"A true one, though. The world still bears the weight of million-year-old sins written in the heavens."
Janyn had a hard time finding an argument against this piece of Zioite belief, and regretted the lack.
"I think that's enough philosophy for now. We need to find the one behind a few more recent sins."
"Yes," Tera agreed.
There were, however, no easy answers. The rest of the day spent in further investigation yielded nothing but dust in the wind, leaving Janyn with nothing but vague, frustrated hopes. The sky had already turned to star-strewn velvet when he decided to speak to Dolan Brent once more. The links were there, Tyrell to Prentiss to Brent, even if they didn't properly close. Crain, too, was tied in, but was his belligerence born of guilty knowledge or just the viciousness and arrogance that so often personified his type of career criminal?
It wasn't that he thought Brent was hiding something, not really. The man was staring at murder charges. Trevor Paul might have been a cut above the local village guard, and Tera was clearly intelligent, but they were officers of the law. The people's thirst for justice was ravenous; the villagers would not accept living in fear. They would demand to be set free of those fears; someone would have to dangle from the end of a rope to keep them safe, not from a killer, but from their own dread. He'd felt the signs over dinner, the hushed voices of other diners in the common room--or the other extreme, the too-eager smiles and laughter whose brittle facade of happiness would crack at any sudden noise or strangely cast shadows.
If he knew something--if he knew anything--Brent would talk, to keep his own neck from filling that noose. Point the inevitable hand of the law somewhere else, anywhere else! That would be the only rational thing to do.
Only, fear isn't rational, Janyn admitted glumly. Hadn't they just proved that when they'd locked up Saya and Mira? If Brent really did have guilty secrets that pointed to the real killer, might he be too afraid to reveal them? Or, as seemed likely, if the secrets related to criminal business dealings, too greedy? Did he hope to still profit from them?
Or, perhaps Brent had no secrets at all. Perhaps he had told all he knew, and there was no more to say. No matter how deeply one dug, a dry well would yield no water.
I sound like Tera, he thought as he knocked on the door. Proverbs and pithy metaphors were not his style. He knew he shouldn't have taken this job. It was stirring up all the wrong feelings inside him, turning his thoughts topsy-turvy. He needed a clear head, a clear heart. He longed for the simple purity of stalking biomonsters in the wild.
The door was locked, and only after Janyn identified himself did the housekeeper draw back the bolts.
"Do you usually lock up at night?" he asked her.
She shook her head.
"No; only since...since Mr. Prentiss was killed. Mr. Brent's orders."
Janyn nodded.
"It was probably a good idea. At the least, it can't hurt." It probably wouldn't help, either, to judge by the first two crimes, but there was no reason to tell her that. He was glad Tera wasn't with him, because she would likely have spoken the plain truth, without so much as thinking about it. Even on the strength of two days' acquaintance, Janyn was confident the idea of watching one's words to avoid causing needless fear had never crossed Tera Serin's mind.
"I need to speak with Mr. Brent." Back to business. "Is he in?"
"Yes, sir. I'll let him know you're here."
Brent was in the rock garden again, the flickering lamplight casting his face in a bronze glow. It gave Janyn a strong sense of deja vu; it almost seemed to him as if the events of the night before were repeating themselves. The same place, the same people, the same conversation.
It also struck him that despite Brent's apparent concern for his safety--the locked door--he apparently felt no need to stay behind that barricade. It was odd, unless locking the door was a pose of some kind. The obvious truth was that the guilty need not fear their own knives, but it might be something innocuous as well, such as a gesture to a worried servant with a child in the house.
Thinking of the boy called Janyn's attention to one difference he could see. This time, Brent already had his drink in hand, so there would be no repeat of the scene with the boy's spillage. Remembering the fury Brent had shown then, Janyn had to repress a shudder. He wondered if his client's temper was entirely due to the pressures Brent was under, or if it was just naturally vile.
Then he saw something else, behind Brent in the shadows. A glint, a spark of light struck by a flickering flame on steel.
"Ah, Mr. Carlyle, did--"
"Down!" Janyn shouted, lunging for him at the same time. Janyn's extended arm got there first, hand fisting in his shirtfront, pulling as the glint took flight and an arrow from a bow-gun whisked past their shoulders. He heard the dull sound of its point striking off the house even as they crashed to the ground, the impact spraying sand and dislodging ornamental rocks. There was a grunt of pain and surprise from Brent, but Janyn had no time to explain if he hadn't figured it out on his own; the would-be killer might be readying another bolt.
Worse, the assassin might be escaping with the first real clue, the first hard evidence in this case.
The hunter's feet scrabbled for purchase in the soft sand and he pushed himself up, charging in the direction where he'd seen the glint. The circle of lamplight made it almost impossible to see outside its radius, and Janyn nearly stumbled over an ill-placed rock as he crashed through the border of Brent's garden, but once he, too was in shadow his eyes began to adapt at once and he could just make out a patch, a single spot of complete blackness through which starlight did not pass. It was manlike in size, moving rapidly away, but Janyn put on a burst of speed and soon narrowed the gap. He was a big, solidly-built man with a frame one rarely associates with speed, but as a hunter he was superbly conditioned, used to maintaining hard physical activity for a long time. Steadily, he closed the gap on his quarry.
Whether it was the pounding footsteps or simply that certain people seem to develop in long years of running away, the assassin served to realize that flight would be futile and spun back towards Janyn. The darkness made it difficult to see, but at the last moment Janyn realized that his quarry had pulled a blade from a wrist sheath while turning, making his movement into the start of a sweeping attack. Janyn doubted that it would penetrate his mail, but nonetheless he pulled back reflexively.
The assassin followed up at once, lunging and slashing. He was big, as tall as Janyn, but with more bulk, possibly more strength. What he didn't have was more skill. The cuts were forceful, but wild. Janyn swept his leg up, cracking his boot against the assassin's forward knee. Overbalanced, the man fell forward as the knee gave way. Janyn caught his weight, left hand on the man's wrist, wrenching, twisting the knife free. The hunter's right hand descended once, twice, again in powerful clubbing blows that left the would-be killer stretched out unconscious on the sand.
Was it over, then? That easily?
No, Janyn decided, binding the assassin's wrists, it wasn't anywhere near over.