A Dark and Starless Night

Chapter Four

She mentally shook herself as she dodged a baker moving some bread back inside his bakery. What did it matter? This could just be a little lie. All she needed to see was that they were right, and that the city guard were doing everything in their power to solve this murder. Once she saw that she could go home and crawl into a bath to wash off the grime of the Greydocks.

The outside of Nadia's apartment building looked bleaker than it had two days ago. Maybe it was the shift in the sun's rays, or the piles of rubbish stacked along the front. As she approached, she stopped when she spotted a book in one of the piles. Maybe not rubbish... Nadia's belongings! Her stomach dropped to see tatters of clothes and other odd but somehow personal bits in the piles. Green silk, rich in colour. A carved bird made from a yellow wood. A shattered mirror.

"Excuse me," she said, grabbing the attention of the first person that walked from the building. The woman glared at her.

"What."

"What is all this?"

"Dead girl can't pay rent, can she? Had to move her stuff so we could start cleaning. The blood stains are taking too long to come out for my liking."

"But this is an active crime scene," Eve said, trying not to let her frustration show.

The woman barked a laugh. "Girl, for all your schooling, you're as dense as my husband's bread." The woman shook her head and continued laughing as she went, heading into the city.

Eve gritted her teeth as she stepped towards the piles of debris. The woman's lack of sympathy didn't help her mood. She sifted through the rubbish looking for anything solid. The book turned out to be a copy of a children's book that Don had gifted to Eve on her first birthday in the Isles. She had been too old for the story at the time, but, even so, she treasured the book deeply. It had helped her learn to read, both Islan and Zyrnan, both of which she had been able to speak, but never read. She tucked the book into her satchel.

The carving of the bird she admired for a heartbeat before wrapping it in the green silk and slipping it into the bag as well. She didn't recognise the little bird as anything from either Zyrna or the Isle, but maybe Alexis would know what it meant, if anything. There were a few other small objects that looked like they might be presents or tokens – a glass rose, a piece of a seaside painting, a red and white ribbon. Romantic gifts. Expensive ones. Perhaps Nadia had a lover! Or a rich client with the wrong idea. If someone cared more for Nadia than she did them, that might sting if it came out wrong. Or if Nadia was caught with another client. Would that be enough to make someone murder another? Probably.

She moved into the building and winced at the smell of must and piss that filled her nostrils. Not the nicest place to come home to after a day of pleasing others. And if that was the land lady, Eve felt a stab of sympathy for Nadia's living situation. The dimly lit corridor was lined with doors on the right, and the stairwell was directly in front of the doorway, built precariously into the left wall. As she slowly made her way up the creaking stairs and no one came barrelling out to see who was there, she could see how it wouldn't have been all together hard for someone to enter the building without being noticed.

It didn't take much work to find Nadia's room. She moved up the stairs, peering down corridors. On the upper most floor, the door to one of the rooms was ajar, a pile of debris to the side. She slowly moved towards the door, cringing at every creak that sounded underfoot. She carefully pushed the door open, letting it hit the wall. She waited, holding her breath as she strained to hear any noises. When nothing but silence greeted her, she crept forward. Once she was stood in the doorway, she straightened up. The small room was empty except for a bedframe, absent of its straw mattress, and pieces of rubbish. There were holes in the wooden walls and roof. It didn't rain often in the north of Zyrna, but it certainly got chilly in winter and early spring. She couldn't imagine that Nadia had lived comfortably here.

There weren't supposed to be slums in Zyrna. It was supposed to be better than the Isle, she thought, moving further into the room. Where were all the taxes going when there were people living in houses literally falling apart?

Her foot scuffed some debris – a shard of the shattered mirror – and she noticed a dark stain at the centre of the room underneath the largest of the holes in the roof. She staggered away. Blood. Her heart thundered in her chest and her limbs felt heavy. The blood had soaked into the wood and had spread outwards. She must have bled so much. How had it not seeped through the floor? She kept stepping backwards until her back was against the wall. It was as if the room and the debris outside were speaking to her. All that shattered glass from the mirror. The silk in tattered shreds. And the blood.

What had Nadia suffered before she'd died?

And why?

It took her a while – she couldn't say how long exactly – to calm her breathing and her heart. Once she managed to stop the hammering of her heart, she straightened up and walked around the stain to a sheet of paper under the window. It was a gossip rag, one of the ones that liked to make up stories about the royal family and the noble houses. The date was from five days ago – three days before Nadia was found. It didn't mean she'd been dead that long, but coupled with the fact that reports of a smell was the reason she was discovered, she would've had to have been there for more than a day.

She knew the smell of death all too well. It wasn't the kind of thing she could forget, no matter how long she had gone without smelling it. Too many blistering summers where drought had killed animals and the elderly as well. Usually it was the old that had no family to travel to wells for water that suffered, and, while the nobles of Teryon who wintered on the Isle were more than willing to allow the Islans on to their estates to access their wells, they weren't going to bring it to the old and infirm. The heat made the smell worse. She shuddered at the memories of smells and sights from those droughts, and quickly shook them off.

The rest of the room yielded nothing of note, but as she walked past the bed she noticed something jammed into the holder of a broken slat. She pulled it out carefully and saw that it was a medallion of some kind on the end of a golden chain. She held the medallion in her hand and ran her thumb over it. The symbol etched into the round coin wasn't something she'd ever seen – a strange shape like a letter or a word maybe? Eve knew both Zyrnan and Islan, but it wasn't a word or letter she recognised from either of those languages. Why would Nadia hide it rather than wear it? It was plain, but pretty, the kind of thing that probably wouldn't catch the eye of a thief.

Why hide it?

She sighed, slipping the medallion into her pocket. A great job the city guard had done searching the crime scene. She had hoped to learn something, anything, either about the crime or about Nadia. But she felt like she knew less than she did before.

At least she could say for certain

She heard a door slam downstairs and the sound of footsteps thundering down and out onto the street. It was close to lunchtime, and she imagined people would be moving around a lot more. Better not to get caught and have to try and come up with a clever excuse.

She stepped out into the hallway and started towards the stairs. Her foot was in the air, approaching the first step, when she heard a creak behind her.

Should probably mention fin here