Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [65]
Jeryd said, “And you can tell me nothing more about the creature?”
“Nothing.”
“What did it look like?”
“I can’t tell.” She began to seem impatient. “It was definitely not human or rumel. That’s all.”
“Okay. There were no flashes in your vision that might indicate who’d want him dead?”
“No, investigator. City politics makes little difference to our lives.”
A chair scraped over to one side in the other room, and Jeryd glimpsed one of the other banshees rush outside. As she slammed the door behind her, one of the lanterns flickered.
He turned to regard Mayter Sidhe once again. “Anything strange happening that you know of?”
“Nothing that seems related. There’re rumors of some of the Council members being Ovinists …”
Jeryd was aware those rumors had been circulating for years, the degrees of information depending on which tavern you drank in. Stories told of politicians gathered in darkened rooms drinking pig’s blood. Divining secrets from these animals’ hearts. Bathing in offal. Ritualistic slaughter. Even if it was true, it was all possibly harmless. How much damage could you do with a dead pig?
“Well,” Jeryd said, “I’ve not seen any evidence of such practices. And it’s very hard to bring the law down on those who think they’re above it. Short of forcing them all into a Jorsalir church for cleansing, there’s not a lot we can do.”
Faintly, in the distance, there was a scream, and he realized that it must have come from the woman who had left a few minutes earlier.
Meanwhile, Mayter Sidhe regarded him with an unsettling gaze. Jeryd never knew what these banshees really thought about anything: they never opened up, never showed any emotion. Yet they seemed to get distraught and upset whenever a death was near, as if they felt the same pain, and were sharing it with the sufferer. Nor did they ever seem to age. Mayter Sidhe herself could be anywhere between forty and ninety years, yet she looked eternally young, didn’t she, and even vaguely beautiful. If anyone knew much about the secrets of these witch women of Villjamur, they didn’t share them. Amid all gossip purveyed in the taverns of the city, the banshees were least spoken of. Perhaps it was a healthy fear that they could announce anyone’s death simply at their own volition. As there existed the possibility it could be your own death, he felt it was best not to anger them.
Jeryd realized he would get no further information here, so he said good-bye, then proceeded on to interview the person who he was least looking forward to talking to.
Up here the houses were also tall and narrow, three-floor constructions, most elaborately decorated with ridiculous statuettes of angelic creatures. The place reminded him of the ghost plays he’d watched in the underground theaters when he was still a young rumel. Beula Ghuda, of course, already knew about her husband’s death, something at least for Jeryd to feel relieved about. Dealing with dead bodies and criminals was much easier than talking to the relatives of someone who had died in suspicious circumstances. You had to look them directly in the eye while being prepared for any number of reactions, any number of extreme emotions.
How could this happen?
What do you mean, dead?
You bastard, don’t lie to me.
In his more morbid moments, back when his wife loved him still, he would wonder how she might react to being informed of Jeryd’s own death, and played out her possible reactions as if he was a fly on the wall. No matter how many years he had been in the Inquisition, these parts were often the most difficult, and as he knocked on the door the feeling was still as unpleasant as the very first time. A fragile-looking blonde answered it. She was about mid- to late-thirties, a green silk dress draped loosely over a tiny frame, with a face as gloomy as the banshees he had just been visiting—and you couldn’t blame her for that, could you, at a time