The Inquisition of Miss Ila
They kept Attari waiting for three days.
See to it that she has every comfort, Venarch Orisai’s daughter had said as Attari was being arrested, and House Ilisaf had obeyed. Attari had been given a sitting room, bedroom, and bathroom all to herself. As soon as the guards had locked the doors behind her, she’d inspected each room from top to bottom, more to stave off a panic attack than out of any hope of escape.
The walls of all three rooms were pale green stone, soft and soothing. And windowless. Yet Attari still had daylight; all the ceilings were coated in a layer of artificial sky, captive light which mimicked sunlight so perfectly that she almost forgot about the lack of windows. There was a panel to control it in the sitting room, but Attari never touched it. The artificial sky darkened at sunset, went lunar-dim and silvery at night, brightened again in the morning. That felt natural, normal, and right now Attari was ready to grasp at any thread of normalcy she could find, no matter how thin or meaningless.
She had sunlight, but no windows; meals delivered three times each day, but no kitchen. She had a television panel in the sitting room, but her cellband had been taken. She had an obscenely comfortable couch and two matching, equally comfortable chairs; a bed she almost hated to sleep in, the linens were so much finer than her bed at home; and a luxuriously deep, wide bathtub, perfect for long soaks. It was all very nice, as long as Attari didn’t think about the part where she couldn’t leave.
Try to think of it as a vacation, she’d told herself on the first day, but that only reminded her of how, even if she walked free after this, she almost certainly wouldn’t have a job to return to. Attari tried not to think about that, either. Tried – but the memory of her last conversation with Kanatta Lari kept resurfacing anyway.
You’ll be well rewarded if you pull this off, my dear, Lari had told her. But if you fail…
When the owner of Cry Verasaahi had called Attari into her office, Attari had assumed she was fired. Instead, Lari had invited Attari to sit across from her, poured them each a measure of smoked-yam liquor, and then demanded the impossible.
That’s stupid, Attari had thought at once when Lari laid down her demand. Now she wished she’d said as much out loud. No – she wished she’d thrown the liquor in Lari’s face and stormed out, consequences be damned. Attari had thought she’d known fear back there in that dingy little office, face to face with the woman who held her livelihood in her hands; now she wanted to tell her past self that that was nothing. Lari was nothing. Being stared down by a woman who had the power to end your life with a word while hundreds of cameras looked on, eager to watch her do just that…that was real fear. All Attari had to do was recall the sound of Orisai VII Ilisaf’s voice, and her heart began to race, her airways to constrict. Even now, the memory of the venarch’s eyes cut through her brain like shards of green glass.
The moment Attari had taken her place along the walkway and seen the Tehariel wave monitors floating overhead, she’d known she was doomed to fail. Even if she’d been able to reach past the fear and channel the power of her paired spirit, doing so would have set off the wave monitors and brought House Ilisaf’s guards down on her head. So how was I supposed to draw Lady Orineimu’s notice, without being noticed myself? Attari thought in the present, in the confines of her green stone rooms. What did Lari expect to happen? Why did I even try?
Thoughts like those had started gnawing at her even as the guards walked her to what Venarch Orisai’s daughter had called guest quarters. Once they’d locked the doors and left her alone, those thoughts had begun eating her in earnest.
Attari wanted to reach out to Word in Emptiness for comfort, but couldn’t. Before they’d all left her, one of the guards had held out a thick glass box with an open lid. Wordlessly, Attari had dropped her paired spirit’s anchor inside and watched as the guard sealed the box shut. Word in Emptiness had chosen for its anchor an antique earbud microphone whose silver casings were tarnished with age, but still prettily engraved. When Attari had dropped her partner’s anchor into the box, it had made such a sad, lonely little clink that she’d almost cried. But what else was she meant to do? If she hadn’t given up Word’s anchor willingly, the guards would have seized it from her, and the idea of a stranger’s hands on her partner’s anchor was more than Attari could stand.
Naturally, Attari had tried to break open the box the second she was alone; she hadn’t expected to succeed, but she couldn’t stand not to try. But no matter how many times Attari threw the box against a wall or smashed it against the stone floor, she couldn’t so much as scratch the scabbing thing. When she ran her fingertips over its surfaces, looking for some kind of seam or chink she might pry open, she’d encountered only uniform smoothness. There was a single, tiny keyhole at the front of the box. Attari had destroyed the wire hooks on all four of her earrings trying to pick it open, then flushed those earrings down the toilet in a fit of helpless frustration. And immediately regretted it, because how was she going to replace them, now that she’d almost definitely lost her job?
Thinking of her job had reminded Attari of the conversation with Kanatta Lari all over again. That was when Attari had turned to the television panel for a distraction; it was much harder to think about how she’d just ruined her own life if she was busy watching Kukkyu’s Kitchen.
She’d spent the next three days rotating between television, bathing, and sleep, punctuated by the regular delivery of meals that always came pre-cut. They won’t give me any knives…but they still let me have sheets and a tub. Maybe I should just hang or drown, spare myself whatever Her Radiance has in store for me. But that was stupid, or so Attari tried to tell herself; violating the Nineteenth Edict as she had wasn’t enough to send her to the Heavenfacing Court. Alive and afraid is better than dead, she thought. I’ll keep my life as long as I can, no matter what kind of mess I’ve made of it.
“And for my third ingredient…oh, you people are just evil, you know that?” On the screen, Kukkyu reached into her basket, gave a dramatic sigh, and pulled out a handful of slimy, bluish tendrils. “Wrackweed, really? One of these days, I’m going to take away your voting privileges, but today…”
Whatever Kukkyu was about to make from terror bird steaks, giant ash hornet venom, and wrackweed, Attari missed it. The door to her rooms opened, startling her so badly that the box containing Word in Emptiness’s anchor slipped from where she’d been holding it on her lap and crashed to the stone floor.
“Who…?” she said, and couldn’t seem to say anything more.
“Your legalist, of course,” said the man who’d just entered her rooms. Attari stared at him, unable to help herself; he was the first person she’d seen face-to-face since the guards had locked her in. And he was pretty, too. For a moment, she forgot her decorum and simply took in his appearance: his round face, his black hair in long snake-locks, his dark skin and beautifully ultrablue star-marks. Though he was taller and heavier than Attari, he moved across the room with a light precision that she found herself envying.
“I’m Attari,” she said, remembering her manners. “Attari Ila. But you already knew that. Probably.” The words your legalist had brought back all the nervousness Attari had been trying to suppress these past three days. That, combined with how she’d had only herself and a sealed spirit partner to talk to, left her feeling positively witless. Attari decided to shut up and just bow.
“Rialu, third of Ca’unaal,” the legalist replied coolly, and inclined his head in return. It was polite of him to do even that much; Ca’unaal was an Omaticaani venule house, while Attari’s family name marked her as fully common. “I hope you’re ready to talk, Miss Ila.”
“I’m ready to do whatever I have to to go home,” said Attari. “Assuming that’s still on the table. Should we sit?” It felt ridiculous, offering Rialu a seat in the quarters where she was being held captive; but he had entered “her” rooms, not the other way around, and so she was, technically, his host.
Thankfully, Rialu was either too polite or too professional to comment on it. While he seated himself, Attari picked up the box containing her partner’s anchor, then joined him.
“You’ll forgive me if I record this and future conversations,” Rialu said. Attari looked at his jewelry and wondered which piece of it contained the mic. Was it one of the pearls hanging from his ears? Or one of the silver rings he wore in his locks? Probably not the choker, thought Attari, the reverb from his throat would fuck with the sound quality.
“I don’t mind,” she told Rialu. “You don’t need to record me, ah – visually?”
“You have been on camera this entire time,” Rialu said neutrally. Attari’s cheeks burned. Of course you have, they arrested you, why wouldn’t they have you under surveillance?
She fumbled for something else to say, anything. “I, um – what do you want to ask me first?”
“Name, age, and occupation will do nicely, for starters,” said Rialu.
“Attari Ila, thirty-four,” she said. “Occupation – well, I was a journalist for Cry Verasaahi.” An institution of glowing repute, surely, Venarch Orisai’s voice replayed in her mind. Rialu, mercifully, said nothing of the sort, though a slight raise of his eyebrows convinced her that he knew of Cry Verasaahi’s reputation all the same. “Was,” Attari said again, looking at her lap. “I don’t know if I still am, after…”
“We’ll discuss that in due time,” Rialu said. “Next question. You are paired to an awakened spirit, correct? Kindly state its name, nature, and anchor for the record, as well as any abilities of note.”
“Shouldn’t you be able to find all that out yourself through the Spirit Registry?” Attari asked, a touch plaintively.
“Protocol, Miss Ila,” said Rialu. “Are you perhaps afraid to answer? You should have nothing to fear, so long as your description matches what’s already on file.”
Attari swallowed and looked down at the glass box in her lap. “My paired spirit’s name is Word in Emptiness,” she said, giving one of the edges of the box a little stroke. “Its anchor is a silver-plated Totec earbud microphone/recorder unit, model Ai82.0.2. As for nature, it’s formed itself around the concept of a word spoken into an empty room…do you need me to describe it more than that?”
“Not at this time,” said Rialu. “Abilities?”
“Right,” said Attari. “I don’t have any of what you’d call, um, generalist abilities, but I do have one derived from my partner’s nature. No matter how crowded or noisy a place is, if I speak to someone, they’ll hear me as clearly as if I were speaking into their ear in dead silence. I have to target them, do it on purpose, but – oh, and I can do the reverse, too, pick a person to hear clearly.” She tapped on the box containing Word’s anchor. “The anchor always gives me a clean recording of what’s said whenever I do that, too. If I’m not using my power, it just works about as well as a mic this old can.”
“And it was this power that you used in order to draw Lady Orineimu’s attention, correct?”
Attari buried her face in her hands.
“I didn’t,” she almost moaned. She felt Rialu’s eyes on her, but couldn’t bear to meet them.
“Why is that?” Rialu asked. “Such an ability seems…useful, for what you were trying to do.”
“What good would it have done?” Attari said. “Tehariel wave monitors…they would have pinged me the second I activated my power.” She could see the monitors in the darkness behind her eyelids, their shining black snake-spine bodies swimming through the air over the crowd. “I got – desperate. I was already there, had already come this far – the venarch and her daughters were coming my way, soon they’d pass me by, and I knew someone like me would never be invited to stand under the pavilion…”
“Desperate?” Attari looked up and saw that Rialu had leaned forward ever so slightly in his seat, his fingers tented. “Can you tell me more about that?”
“Desperate,” Attari echoed. She tapped her nails against the glass box, thinking. “In more than one way.” Attari wished she could hold Word in Emptiness’s anchor in her hand, rub her thumb over the engravings – it always helped her think. “At first…”
But what was first? Attari thought back, and back, trying to find some starting place from which she could explain why she’d tried this at all.
Inevitably, it came back to her mother.
Attari had hoped, briefly, that she wouldn’t need to discuss her; now she saw that that hope was as foolish as her hope of getting away with a clean recording of the young Lady Orineimu. Her mother was the reason Attari had even worked for Cry Verasaahi at all. If she was going to explain anything about this mess to Rialu, she had to start there.
“Does the name Aiura Ila mean anything to you?” Another question rose in the shadow of her mind: just how much do you people know about me already?
“Some relation of yours?” Rialu looked at her with a neutrality that could have meant anything. Something about that look made Attari’s heart climb up her throat. She found herself wanting to push him; to ask him if he really didn’t know, if he hadn’t studied the whole of her small, common life before walking in, if it pleased this son of Ca’unaal to make her lay out her family’s shame before him.
Instead she said, stiffly, “Aiura Ila was my mother.” Rialu said nothing to that, so Attari went on: “Eleven years ago, she published a report in the Sun-Standard exposing the corruption of the Orunen facet court’s peacekeepers. It caused so much public outcry that House Ilisaf had to step in before blood could stain the streets.” Attari still remembered how proud she’d been of her mother the day the story broke, for bringing that corruption to light. “Her Radiance made House Orunen scour its keepers’ union and its lawcourts. Lots of people sent to face heaven after that came out. Lots more sent to the labs, the ateliers.” Attari looked Rialu in the eyes. “I can’t hate my mother for this, do you understand?” she said. “She saw a chance to purge some rot, make the world cleaner, and she took it. It’s what happened afterwards that ruined her.” Attari’s eyes dropped back to her lap. “Ruined me.”
Attari wanted dearly to stop there, but if she was going to get any mercy from House Ilisaf, she had to tell Rialu everything. You’re going to feel awful whether you talk or not. Sick it all up now, get it over with. Her fingers gripped the edges of the glass box. You want Word in Emptiness back? Then tell these people what they want to know.
“Lady Yacari, fourth of Orunen, was…involved, in that corruption,” said Attari. “When the story came out, she killed herself before they could send her to the Heavenfacing Court. Drowned herself in her family’s reflecting pool, if I remember correctly.” As if I could remember any other way. “The night before Lady Yacari died, my mother’s name opened doors for me. Then morning came, and House Orunen found Lady Yacari’s body…nothing happened to my mother, officially, but she disappeared within the year, and her name became poison overnight. I’d been considering an apprenticeship at the Glittering Record, but before I knew it, I was begging for the chance to work at whatever ragmill would have me.” Laughter threatened to spill from her then, nervous, rancid; Attari pressed her fingers to her lips for a moment, then went on. “Kanatta Lari owns Cry Verasaahi. She knew my mother when they were both girls, and took me on because of that. Said it was to honor my mother’s memory, and their friendship. She’s the only reason I could keep working in media at all. So when…when she…”
Attari’s words slowed, then stopped. This was betrayal. Wasn’t it? Lari was the one who’d kept Attari in media. It was thanks to the job Lari had given her that Attari could still buy the foods she wanted, instead of going to the dispensaries. Lari was her last connection to her mother. There was a bond, a debt…and Attari was about to repay it by telling Rialu everything she knew about Lari’s part in accosting the venarch’s daughter. But you haven’t actually said it yet, Attari thought desperately. It’s not too late to lie. You can still protect her.
Protect her? another part of Attari responded. The way she protected me, when she sent me to court alone?
Attari gripped the glass box until her fingers ached and found Rialu’s eyes once more.
“Kanatta Lari was the one who sent me to House Ilisaf’s press conference,” she told him. Her words came more cleanly now; it was as if some inner weak part of her had cooled and hardened. “I was ordered by her to obtain a voice recording of Her Radiance’s younger daughter.”
“And why did you obey?” said Rialu. His dark eyes narrowed slightly.
“In the moment, I couldn’t think of doing anything else,” said Attari. “Lari has…had? Has? I don’t even know anymore – well, when she gave the order, she had leverage over me. Like I said – she knew my mother, she kept me in media. No matter how much I hated working for Lari, I still owed everything I had to her, and she was never afraid to remind me of that. Over and over, for ten years. It – affected me.”
Attari tried to take a deep breath, and found herself stifling a cough instead. She hadn’t noticed how dry her throat was.
“Would you like to take a break?”
Attari wasn’t sure if she was more startled by Rialu’s offer, or by the concern she heard in his voice. Does he actually care, though, or is he just good at faking it? I’d want to get good at faking it, if I had his job.
But her throat really was awfully dry.
“I’d rather just get this over with,” Attari told Rialu. “But am I allowed to drink something while we talk? I can get myself some water, or…” Too late, she realized there was no or. She could draw a glass of filtered water, or drink nothing at all.
“I’m sure you’d prefer tea,” Rialu said. Attari stared at him. “Juice?” he tried instead. “Circumstance forbids me from offering you alcohol, I’m sorry to say.”
“No, no, I – tea would be wonderful,” Attari managed. Is he just being kind, or is this some sort of reward for cooperating? “Um – bittergreen? If that’s an option?”
“Did we hear?” Rialu said to the empty air. No – to whichever piece of jewelry concealed his microphone. “One pot of bittergreen. And two cups, if you please.”
Attari stiffened in her chair. Someone else, maybe several someones, had been listening to her and Rialu this whole time. You should have expected that, too, Attari told herself, but the feeling of violation lingered all the same.
The tea came in a violet pot whose surfaces, as well as those of the two matching cups, were cunningly wrought to resemble dragon scales edged with patterns drawn in hair-fine lines of gold; the man who brought it bowed shallowly to Rialu and didn’t so much as look at Attari. As he left, Attari wondered who he was – a peacekeeper? An Ilisaf servant? An apprentice legalist? But above all, she wondered if he was one of the people who’d been listening while Rialu questioned her.
“Please don’t touch that, Miss Ila,” Rialu said when she reached for the pot. Attari drew back, a little startled, vaguely embarrassed – had she done something wrong? Then Rialu smiled at her, and she found herself relaxing just a bit. “Protocol, I’m afraid. We mustn’t give anyone an opportunity to so much as suspect you of poisoning me.” His smile broadened slightly, and Attari noticed for the first time the matching sapphires set into his upper canines. “Besides, it’s only proper for the man to pour, is it not?”
Attari sat back and let him do it, then took the cup he slid her way. The tea filled her nose with a cloud of herbal steam; the first sip filled her mouth with the familiar bracing flavor that Attari so loved in bittergreen tea, but a finer version than anything she’d tasted before. I might have ruined my own life, Attari thought, but at least I got some really excellent tea out of it. Poured by a beautiful man, too, but Attari shoved that thought aside with all the mental force she could muster. Rialu was her legalist.
“So, back to Lari,” she said, turning her cup around in her hands. “Like I was saying – for ten years, she’d been beating it into my head that I owed her…well, everything. There’s no shortage of shameful work at a place like Cry Verasaahi, and she made me do plenty.” With one hand, Attari took another swallow of tea. With the other, she pulled the glass box sealing her partner close. “Lari told me I would attend Her Radiance’s press conference. That shocked me. A mudsucker like me, a nobody little ragmill journalist, going to an official event like that in person? Seeing the venarch and her daughters in the flesh? I thought that, I don’t know, maybe Lari just wanted pictures to sell, or a voice line from Her Radiance…”
“But of course, that wasn’t the case,” said Rialu. His tea sat untouched before him.
“No,” said Attari. She found herself unable to look at Rialu again, and dropped her gaze into her teacup. “Of course she still told me to get those things, if I could…but my real mission was to get a clean recording of young Lady Orineimu’s voice.” She sighed, and watched her reflection in the teacup dissolve into ripples. “I found some spine that day, but not enough. I asked Lari why – didn’t she know that Lady Orineimu wasn’t old enough yet? Didn’t she know what that meant for me? And Lari said…”
Attari went to take another sip of tea and realized that her lips were trembling.
“She said I’d be rewarded, if I managed to do it. We both would. She said that if I got this for us, we could leave Cry Verasaahi for something better. I asked her like what, and she said – ” Attari took a deep breath. “She said, that’s for you to find out, once your name is cleared.” Her voice cracked then; she couldn’t help it. “Desperation. You see?”
“I see that there may be mitigating factors to your case,” said Rialu. “Please continue, Miss Ila.”
“I didn’t think I could say no to Lari, but I thought – I thought that maybe if I dirtied myself for her one last time, I could finally get away. So I went. Isn’t that disgusting? I knew it was wrong, Lady Orineimu is only a child, but I still…”
“It was wrong,” said Rialu, “but you’re doing right now.” Attari looked at him, blinking back the needling-hot tears that suddenly wanted to leak from her eyes. “Confessing as you are. Telling me everything. I know this is not easy for you.”
That did it. Attari didn’t want to cry, not when there were people she couldn’t see listening in, but she couldn’t stop herself. She set down her teacup, then pressed her face into her hands and let out a low, ugly sob; another; and another. Her tears became a hot, slick layer behind her palms; when Attari pulled her hands away, her whole face was wet. As she rubbed her eyes clear, she saw that Rialu had taken out something pale and blue and pushed it across the table towards her – a pocket square.
“Thank you,” Attari said after she’d cleaned her face. She refolded the now noticeably-damp pocket square and set it down on the table. “So that – that was why I even went to court at all. But as soon as I got there, I could see that it was never going to work.” She gave an unsteady laugh. “I think I lost my mind a little. I was caught between Lari and the law, and I couldn’t see a way out. Maybe I just wanted to fail in a way where I wouldn’t have to face Lari afterwards…” Attari stopped short, then dragged her hands over her face. “Oh, gods,” she said. “I think that’s actually it.”
Rialu was looking at her with a terribly keen focus, as if she were a puzzle whose shape he had begun to understand. His gaze made it impossible to think of anything more to say, so instead Attari stared down at her teacup. Tea this fine was meant to be sipped and savored; Attari, nervous, downed the rest of hers in one big, wasteful swallow.
“Well,” Rialu said at last. “Understand that I can promise you nothing this early in the proceedings. That said: I am hopeful that I can get you a very light sentence.”
Attari tried to say something, but her voice failed her. She opened her mouth, closed it again, nodded.
“In order to achieve that, we will need to keep you here for continued questioning,” Rialu went on. “I will need to find out more about your work environment, your relationship with Lari, the kinds of things she made you do. I will need to know as much as you can tell me about Lari herself.” Attari opened her mouth to reply, but Rialu spoke over it. “This will be hard for you, I know. As a gesture of goodwill, I will request that your paired spirit’s anchor be unsealed whenever you are alone in these rooms. I expect this request to be granted. Forgive me for saying so, but your power is a minor one, and I cannot see any way in which you might use it to escape.” One of Rialu’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “Though I believe you have no real desire to escape, at this point.”
Attari couldn’t even begrudge him any of those remarks. For one, they were all true. For two, Rialu was going to try and get Word in Emptiness back. Attari had spent three days missing a piece of herself, three days reaching for her partner’s voice and finding nothing. If Rialu could end that, then he could say whatever he wanted about her.
“I won’t question you any further today,” Rialu said. “I’ve wrung quite enough from you for the time being, Miss Ila. I’ll be back tomorrow…but there is one final matter to address before I leave.”
“What’s that?” said Attari. She picked up her empty teacup and turned it around in her hands, admiring the delicate gilt edging on its ceramic scales. The waiting had been the worst part; now that she had some idea of what was going to happen to her, she felt almost relaxed.
“Her Ascendant Radiance Orialu wishes to speak with you.”
The cup slipped from Attari’s fingers and shattered against the stone floor.