The Malykant Mysteries

Chapter Two-2

Nanda was the person to ask about that. The depth of her knowledge alarmed Konrad sometimes: she knew all manner of details about the poisons she sold, as if she had personally tested the unique properties and applications of each one. In truth she merely collected that information from customers, associates and colleagues; she was curious-minded and adept at putting herself in just the right places to pick up plenty of tidbits.

Nonetheless, she could be unnerving.

His thoughts full of muddlesome, puzzling Irinanda, Konrad jumped violently when Nanda’s own voice spoke from the doorway behind him.

‘Here you are,’ she said, rather obviously. ‘Lounging around? How very… privileged of you.’

Konrad leapt out of his chair and spun around to face her. She was wearing a blue cloak with the hood up, and the familiar, teasing smirk that she frequently adopted around him.

‘Am I interrupting your interlude?’

‘My interlude? I was thinking!’ Konrad folded his arms and glared at her. He was quite a bit taller than she, and he knew himself to be intimidating when he wanted to be.

Nanda merely grinned. ‘About what?’

You, he thought promptly, and felt his face flush in a mortifying way. ‘I was thinking about this case,’ he said coolly. ‘No leads have turned up and I’m stumped.’

Nanda shrugged off her cloak and threw it over the back of a chair. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Of course, but…’ Konrad frowned at the discarded cloak. ‘Why didn’t my man take that for you? Why are you here anyway?’

‘He didn’t, because I didn’t use the front door,’ Irinanda replied, settling herself in his own favourite armchair. ‘And I’m here because I have information for you and I thought you might want it right away.’

‘Nice try, but that doesn’t fly,’ Konrad said, hanging her cloak on the back of the door. ‘Normally you’d send me a nice, peremptory note of summons. If you do come to see me, you go to the marsh house. You never come here.’ Never was a strong word, but the perfect truth in this instance: Irinanda professed to hate his luxurious lifestyle and had always avoided Bakar House.

But she only shrugged. ‘Maybe I was lonely.’

‘You? Lonely?’ He laughed. ‘Never.’

She shot him a mischievous smile, showing a hint of a dimple in one cheek. ‘Weveroth’s keeping shop for me, but I shouldn’t stay long.’

Konrad’s eyebrows shot up. Weveroth was keeping shop? The monkey? He blinked at her, but she didn’t elaborate.

Then again, the little gold-furred simian was oddly intelligent and peculiarly capable, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise him. He let that one pass.

‘Tell me what you’ve found,’ he said instead, snatching the footstool and carrying it over to the other chair. Nanda’s blue eyes glinted at him with annoyance, but she merely tucked her legs up under her and leaned back into the softness of the chair.

‘Maybe luxury has its benefits,’ she murmured, closing her eyes in pleasure. ‘I could do with one of these in my house.’

‘I’ll send you one,’ he promised. ‘Just as soon as you tell me what you’ve discovered.’

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have got your hopes up. I haven’t found much. But I did enquire with the other poisoners.’

‘And?’

‘And there’s a tiny shop right on the edge of the city, new place, just opened up last month. The owner’s a friend. He says his supply of ceruleaf has been raided.’

Konrad sat up. ‘Yes? Does he know who did it?’

Nanda shook her head. ‘He didn’t even notice it had happened until I asked him about his stock of that particular poison. He’d had a full jar of it—new shop, you know, and he hadn’t sold any of it yet. The jar’s gone.’

Konrad slumped back into his chair, dejected. ‘Don’t tell me. No clues left behind, no hints of any kind as to who took it.’

‘Correct. You’re welcome to look for yourself if you like; Danil said it would be all right. But I’ve checked as thoroughly as I know how and asked plenty of questions, and I came up with nothing.’

‘I’m starting to hate this case,’ Konrad groaned. ‘Though your information isn’t useless by any means: it does suggest that there is a ceruleaf poisoner loose in Ekamet.’

‘Thank you,’ Nanda said stiffly.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t mean that it’s worthless. It’s just that I’ve never had a case with so little to go on and it is driving me crazy. Here’s a question for you. What’s the best way to administer ceruleaf?’

‘The best way? You mean the most effective way, or the most untraceable way?’

‘If there’s a method that’s both effective and untraceable I’d be interested to hear about it.’

‘The ear,’ she said promptly. ‘A careful poisoner could use a syringe of some kind to apply a liquid ceruleaf-powder solution to the ear canal. If he or she did it while the victim was asleep, it would result in the sort of death-scene you described.’

‘The ear,’ Konrad repeated slowly. ‘So we are looking for a poisoner of unknown gender, with considerable knowledge of both poisons and the weirder methods of application. And also a reason to kill a humble baker and simple manservant, on opposite sides of the city, with no money or assets of any kind and no connection to anything more nefarious than bread and silver trays.’ He paused. ‘Should be easy.’

Irinanda narrowed her eyes at him. ‘We?’

‘All right, I.’

She gave him a rare smile without any mockery in it. ‘I don’t mind “we”.’

He smiled back. ‘All right, mine ally. What do you suggest should be our next move?’

Her smile disappeared. ‘No idea.’

‘Excellent,’ he sighed. ‘Me neither.’ A disturbing thought occurred to him and he frowned. ‘They took the whole jar, you said?’

‘If you were wondering, yes, that is enough for more than two lethal doses.’

‘So there could be another target.’

‘It’s quite possible, yes. We’d better catch this person before they have chance to use the poison again.’

‘Agreed, but how? With what? We’re at a standstill here.’

‘You’ll think of something.’ Irinanda stood up and looked around for her cloak.

Konrad didn’t miss the choice of pronoun. So much for “we”. ‘Leaving already?’ he said, retrieving her cloak for her. ‘This was a short visit indeed.’

‘I told you it would be.’ Nanda accepted her cloak from him and swirled it over her shoulders, drawing the hood up to cover her white-blonde hair once more. She grinned up at him. ‘Let me know how I can help.’

‘Wait,’ Konrad said, stopping her as she made for the door. ‘Have dinner with me.’

She lifted her pale brows at him, her expression incredulous. He couldn’t tell if she was pleased. ‘I told you, I have to get back. I can’t leave Weveroth to mind the shop forever.’

‘But you could come back in a little while.’

She glowered up at him. ‘Is this because I said I was lonely?’

He held up his hands and stepped back, a picture of innocence. ‘Not in the slightest!’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Actually I have another engagement. Danil invited me to dinner tonight.’

Danil? It took a moment for him to remember: she’d mentioned Danil as the man with the new poison shop. A friend of hers, she’d said.

He scowled. ‘Very well, leave me.’ He took another step back and out of her way, squashing the flicker of disappointment he felt. What had possessed him to ask anyway? The question had emerged before he really knew what he was going to say.

‘Sometime,’ Nanda said, sailing past him with her chin high, ‘I might invite you to have dinner with me. How about that?’

That, Konrad thought, defied belief. If it was unusual for her to visit him at Bakar House, it was at least as unlikely for her to invite him—or anyone—into her house. But before he could think of a suitable reply to this small miracle, Nanda had gone.

‘That would be fine,’ he mumbled uselessly to the empty doorway.

Danil Dubin proved to be a quiet young man with a mild manner and more than passably good looks. Konrad went straight over to his shop, hoping to find Nanda there, but she hadn’t yet arrived for her dinner engagement.

‘Mr Savast,’ Dubin said, stammering over the name a little. ‘Iri said you might visit but I didn’t really think—I mean, it’s an honour, sir.’

Iri? Konrad’s scowl deepened. ‘Is it an honour? Why?’

‘Oh… well, you’re a prominent personage in Ekamet, sir, and, um.’ Dubin floundered to a confused halt, and stared at the floor.

‘For no great reason, Mr Dubin; merely for possessing great wealth. Can you name a single truly impressive thing that I’ve done?’

Dubin’s cheeks flamed red and he didn’t look up.

‘I didn’t think so,’ Konrad sighed. Honestly. His wealth was comfortable but not nearly as considerable as people thought; the widespread belief in his princely riches had come from the Order of the Malykt, and they spread those rumours for his benefit. Doors opened to people who had wealth, they’d said; it carried considerable power with it.

Konrad couldn’t deny that it had served him well on more than one occasion. He had gained access to many places that would have been closed to him otherwise; places he needed to go in order to fulfill his role as the Malykant. But his status as a city celebrity irritated him enormously.

‘Miss Falenia didn’t happen to mention why I’m here, did she?’ he said with terrific restraint.

‘M-miss Falenia? Who… oh, Iri.’ Dubin risked a glance up at Konrad’s grim face. ‘Something about the ceruleaf?’ he mumbled.

‘Quite so. You aren’t going to ask why I’m interested in the ceruleaf, are you, Mr Dubin?’

The young man shook his head. He looked so depressed that Konrad’s annoyance faded. The kid might be foolish but he was probably harmless.

‘Where do you store the ceruleaf? I would like a few minutes alone in that area, and then I shall leave.’

Dubin hastened out of the room and Konrad followed. The young poison trader had a small storage room behind the shop floor, packed with jars of powders, leaves and roots. Konrad could see at a glance that nothing was out of place: hundreds of jars sat in perfectly ordered rows, each one sporting a tightly sealed lid.

‘Who has had access to this room in the past few weeks, Mr Dubin?’ Konrad said, his keen eyes sweeping across each shelf in search of a clue.

‘W-well, anyone, Mr Savast,’ the miserable young man mumbled. ‘I’ve only just got started, you see, and for a while I had lots of things in boxes and… well, I wasn’t too careful about security. Hardly anyone knew I was here.’

And that would be why the thief had chosen this shop, Konrad thought with an inner sigh. Lots of fresh stock, an empty shop and a careless—or clueless?—owner.

‘My thanks,’ Konrad said shortly, and stalked out of the storeroom.

On his way out of the shop he bumped into Irinanda. She had changed her clothes and now wore a pretty red dress under a dark cloak, and a necklace of polished glass. Her hair was loose. She looked very different from the Nanda he knew, more usually attired in her thick workroom coat and with her hair bound back.

As he approached, she stopped where she stood—blocking the doorway—and gave him a cool, speculative look. ‘I hope you haven’t been scaring my friend, Konrad.’

He didn’t like the slight emphasis she’d placed on the word “friend”. What was that supposed to mean?

‘Of course I have,’ he growled. Lifting the brim of his hat in a salute, he waited with exaggerated politeness for her to move. He could hear Danil Dubin trotting up behind him, practically radiating awkward delight.

‘Iri! You’re a bit early—I mean, not that I’m—it’s marvellous that you’re here. You know Mr Savast, I assume? No, wait, I meant—of course you do.’

Nanda’s eyes flicked to Danil. Judging from the faint surprise in her eyes, the kid wasn’t usually such a bumbling i***t.

Oops, thought Konrad. He’d scared the boy more than he’d meant to.

‘Do enjoy your dinner,’ he said with a false smile, and as soon as Nanda moved he slipped past her and out the door. He strode away into the cold, darkening evening feeling profoundly irritated. The visit had brought him no leads and no clues: just an aggravation. Why would an independent, intelligent woman like Nanda waste her time on such an infantile youngster as Dubin?