ASHES DON'T LIE

ALDRIC'S ASHES

Chapter Two

Corbin did not believe her.

She watched him not believe her in real time, the way his face closed like a door being eased shut so it wouldn’t slam.

“Say that again,” he said.

“I saw Marcus Thorne shot in his private office. I saw him fall. I saw him look at me and say four words that no dead man should be able to say to someone who isn’t there yet.”

Elara’s arm had started to ache in a deep, structural way, the ache that came after the migraine had already done its worst and left the bones to finish complaining on their own.

“I know exactly how that sounds, Corbin.”

“It sounds like you’re describing something that hasn’t happened.”

“I am describing something that hasn’t happened. That’s the entire problem.”

He crouched in front of her, and for a moment she thought she saw something in his face that might have been belief, or might have been the particular species of fear that looks almost identical to belief from the inside.

“The Ash Touch shows the final sixty seconds of the dead. That’s what it does. That’s all it’s ever done, in every case you’ve worked, in every case any Ash Reader has ever worked. It does not show the future.”

“I’m aware of the rules, Corbin. I’ve spent nine years living inside them.”

“Then you understand why I have to ask you this.”

He lowered his voice further, glancing once toward the door as if the walls themselves might be listening, which in this building, she thought, was not an unreasonable fear.

“Is it possible the reading was contaminated? Fatigue, stress, something bleeding over from the last case?”

“Contaminated.”

She let the word sit in her mouth, tasting how insulting it was.

“You want to know if I imagined the head of the Pyre Council being murdered in front of me.”

“I want to know if there’s an explanation that doesn’t require me to walk into that briefing room and tell four Council officials their leader is going to be assassinated within the day based on the word of a woman who is currently having trouble standing up.”

She hadn’t realized she was still on her knees until he said it.

She pushed herself upright, one hand braced on the cold stone table, and made herself stand without swaying, because Corbin needed to see that she could, and because some stubborn animal part of her needed to prove it to herself as well.

“I need to see him,” she said. “Thorne. In person. If it’s a real vision, if it’s really coming, he needs to be warned.”

“You need to see him.”

“Yes.”

Corbin actually laughed, a short, unhappy bark of a sound.

“You are a forensic instrument of the Magistrate’s office, Vance. You do not get an audience with the head of the Pyre Council because you had an unusual dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream. I don’t dream when I touch ash. You know that better than anyone in this building.”

“I know what I’m going to write in my report.”

Something in his voice had gone flat and final, the voice of a man closing a door he had only just cracked open.

“I’m going to write that the reading was inconclusive. Migraine, exhaustion, an anomalous vision consistent with cumulative strain from repeated Ash Touch use. I am not going to write that you saw the future, because if I write that, the next people through that door won’t be interested in protecting Marcus Thorne. They’ll be interested in what to do about you.”

Elara stared at him.

“You’re going to bury it.”

“I’m going to survive the night. So are you, if you let me.”

He straightened up, already moving toward the door, already becoming the careful, closed-faced man she was used to instead of the frightened one she’d glimpsed for thirty seconds.

“Go home, Vance. Rest. This didn’t happen the way you think it happened.”

“It happened exactly the way I think it happened.”

He didn’t answer that.

He just held the door for her, and she understood, walking through it, that this was the last kindness he intended to offer her that night.

The walk home was worse than the one before it.

The migraine had settled into a steady drumbeat behind her left eye, and every gas lamp she passed sent a lance of light through it that made her wince and quicken her pace, wanting only the dark of her own rooms and the flat silence of her own bed.

She kept seeing it, over and over, unbidden.

The raised arm.

The catch of lamplight on metal.

Thorne’s eyes finding hers across a distance of time that shouldn’t have existed to be crossed.

You know the cost.

What cost?

Cost of what?

She didn’t hear the footsteps behind her until they were too close to be coincidence.

She turned, hand instinctively rising, though she carried no weapon and had never needed one before tonight.

A man in Ember Guard blue stood ten feet back, and past him, two more moved to flank the narrow street with the unhurried confidence of men who knew exactly how this was going to go and felt no need to hurry it along.

“Elara Vance,” the lead man said.

Not a question.

“You know who I am. You could have just knocked on my door like a civilized person.”

“Ash Reader Vance, you are being detained pending investigation into the fabrication of forensic testimony and the incitement of unrest against the Pyre Council.”

The words took a moment to arrange themselves into sense.

Fabrication.

Incitement.

As if what had happened in that examination chamber an hour ago had been a choice, a strategy, something she had built rather than something that had happened to her, the way the knife had happened to Oren Haltwick and the bullet had happened, would happen, was going to happen, to Marcus Thorne.

“I told the truth about what I saw,” she said. “That’s not fabrication.”

“You can explain that to the tribunal.”

He nodded once, and the two flanking guards started forward.

She thought, absurdly, of running, and dismissed it in the same breath.

There was nowhere in Aethelburg an Ash Reader could run that the Magistrate’s records didn’t already know about. No shelter she could reach in the time it would take three trained guards to close ten feet of empty street.

She let them take her arms.

She did not fight.

Fighting, she had learned long ago in a different kind of interrogation room, only gave them more to write down against you.

The cell they put her in was below the Magistrate building, on a level she had visited before only to observe other people’s confessions, never to sit inside one herself.

Stone walls sweated faint condensation. A single high window was too small and too barred to offer anything but a slice of night sky. A cot with a thin blanket smelled of someone else’s fear.

She sat on it anyway, because her legs had finally decided they were done, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until the light-lances of the migraine dulled to something almost bearable.

She did not sleep.

She listened instead.

Footsteps in the corridor outside.

The distant metallic clang of another door somewhere in the building’s lower reaches.

Her own heartbeat, which refused to slow no matter how evenly she tried to breathe.

Somewhere above her, in an office she would never see the inside of, men in Council livery were deciding what to do about a forensic instrument that had started seeing things it was not built to see.

She thought about the interrogation Corbin had warned her away from without quite saying the word.

She had heard, the way everyone in the Magistrate’s employ eventually heard, what happened to Ash Readers who became inconvenient.

Not execution. Nothing so clean or so easily explained to the public.

Retirement, the files called it.

A quiet transfer to a facility outside the city that no journalist had ever been permitted to visit, from which no Ash Reader had ever been permitted to return.

She was still turning that thought over, cold and slow, when she heard the key in her cell door.

It was not the guard who had brought her down.

It was not any guard shape she recognized from the corridor’s earlier traffic.

The man who stepped inside was tall, dressed in plain dark clothes rather than Ember Guard blue, with a scar cutting pale and thin along the line of his jaw and eyes that moved once, fast, over the cell and the corridor behind him before settling on her.

“I’m getting you out,” he said, low and even, as though he were commenting on the weather. “Don’t ask questions. Just move when I move.”

“Who are you?”

“That’s a question.”

He held out a hand, not to touch her, just an invitation to rise.

“We don’t have time for questions.”

Elara looked at the hand, at the scar, at the calm, controlled way he stood in a doorway that should have had a guard behind it and did not.

She thought about the retirement files.

She thought about Corbin’s careful, closing-door face.

She thought about a man who was going to die in a room that did not yet exist, unless someone did something about it, and about the fact that the only person who had seen it happen was currently locked in a cell three floors below the people who least wanted to hear about it.

She took the offered hand and stood.

“Fine,” she said. “No questions. Yet.”

Something almost like a smile moved across his mouth.

There and gone.

“Good start.”

He led her out into the corridor, moving fast and low.

Elara Vance, forensic instrument of the Aethelburg Magistrate, fugitive of exactly one hour’s standing, followed a stranger into the dark because the alternative was worse.

And because, for the first time since she had pressed her palm against Aldric Vale’s ashes, she had the sense that someone in this building actually believed her.