"We fought," Finch continued. "It's part of why I look this way."
Rathven leaned on the broom. Eyes narrowed. "How does he look?"
"I don't follow y-"
"Because I wouldn't know. I've never met him."
"Never even seen him? He used to be a powerful man for Frankwrithe before the Rising."
"No."
Hard to read her. Had, for that reason, sometimes been tempted to request her file from the gray caps. Resisted the urge. Didn't want to have Heretic asking him why.
In a low voice, "Are you investigating me?" Her tone said, After all the help I've given you.
"No, of course not." Scrambled for cover: "Could you do me a favor? He has a couple of aliases I need checked out."
Finch searched for a piece of paper. Wrote down Graansvoort, Dar Sardice.
The truth: he couldn't really imagine Rathven hurting him. Not on purpose. Suspected her of hiding something. But that might have nothing to do with him. Everyone in the city kept secrets.
She looked at the names on the piece of paper.
"It's all getting more and more complicated, Rathven. Hard to keep it all clear in my head."
"More complicated than Duncan Shriek?"
"Much more complicated." Doors that were more than doors. Wyte become something greater and lesser than human. Suddenly, the city was several cities. Time was several times. As if he'd been looking at his map and the overlay, and suddenly realized more overlays were needed to really see Ambergris.
The confusion must have shown because she gave him a half-smile. A kind of peace offering. "I'll be finished soon. Then you should get some sleep."
In the apartment Bliss can visit anytime he wants to?
He tried to smile back. "But why did you call? Really?" Teetering now. Two towers. Heretic's skery. Wyte's improbable charge. Dapple sprawled in the dirt. Dead.
She held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. As if trying to convey something to him that could not be said aloud.
"Sintra came by the hotel this morning."
"I know. She told me."
"Did she tell you she came down to see me?"
Finch, suddenly alert: "No ..."
"Did she tell you she asked about your case?"
"It was a short phone call." Already marshaling stones, sandbags, the wreckage of tanks as a barricade.
"Well, she did, Finch," Rathven said. "She asked me about the case. We talked about it."
"And you told her about Shriek?" Incredulous.
Flat, dead tone. Not a glimmer of humor in her eyes.
"No. She already knew."
Feral came to the door scratching about ten minutes after Rathven had left. Frantic as Finch undid the locks on his apartment door. Complaining about the tragedy of not having been fed. That there should be such injustice in the world. Despite himself, Finch smiled.
Finch locked the door behind Feral. Once again shoved a chair up against the doorknob. Put down twice the normal amount of food for the cat. Then lay down on his couch, forcing himself to eat a packet of gray cap rations. The packet was porous. The contents a swelling purple. In his mouth, it tasted like onions and salt and chicken. Knew it was not.
Welcomed the utter fatigue. It emptied his head. Made it hard to think about unthinkable things. He'd go back to the station in the morning. Sort it out. Somehow. The apartment still looked like shit, but not as much like someone had trashed it. Actually found himself hoping it had been Bliss, come back to finish the job. Otherwise, Stark was already upping the pressure. Or, there was an unknown element out there.
Too tired to sleep. Poured himself another whisky. Sat down with Shriek: An Afterword and Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables. He was facing the apartment door, with his Lewden Special wedged in beside his left leg. So he could reach across his body to draw it. Sitting upright eased the pain in his shoulder.
Cinsorium looked like a kind of abridgment of Duncan Shriek's theories. He started to read it, then put it down. Needed something first that gave him more of a sense of Duncan's character.
He picked up Shriek, began to skim it. Saw at once the conceit: Duncan's voice in parentheses, commenting on Janice's history of a broken family and the first war between the Houses. Skipped to the end, read the editor's afterword. Duncan's disappearance. His sister's disappearance and possible death. The manuscript found in a pub Finch figured must've gone under or been destroyed years ago. With notes scrawled on the pages by Duncan. Which meant he'd still been alive when Janice went missing.
Finch turned back to the beginning. Charted Duncan's rise and fall as an historian, a believer in fringe theories about the gray caps. Almost all of them now proven true. Obsessed with a student at the academy where he'd taught history. A long, unhappy love affair. Duncan turned into a stalker. Discredited. Become unbelievable. Skipped Janice's own rise in the art world. Beside the point to Finch. He found Janice an exasperating narrator. She hid things, lied, delayed the truth. To undermine and slant. Like a particularly crafty interrogation subject.
Gradually, he got a sense of the tragedy of Duncan's life. How close Shriek had been to success. To being a kind of prophet. An injustice, his fate working at Finch's sense of fairness. A staggering sense of an opportunity lost. A path not taken. An Ambergris where Duncan Shriek was lauded and the Rising had never happened. Or been defeated. A horror at the idea of nothing really changing in a century. The Houses had gone from war to war. The city was more fractured than ever. Would still be fractured even if the gray caps disappeared tomorrow.
All depressingly similar, and yet he remembered the brief years of peace more vividly than the war. No matter how hard he tried to forget. A better life. A better way.
Kept searching Duncan's asides for anything that might point to why the man would wind up dead a hundred years later in an apartment he'd once lived in. Found a reference to switching apartments to evade the gray caps. Another reference to working as a tour guide while living in an apartment in Trillian Square. The place had been destroyed long before the Rising. Finch wondered if the few children growing up now even knew who Trillian was anymore.
Then there was Shriek's obsession with Manzikert. With the Silence. And with Samuel Tonsure, the monk who accompanied Manzikert underground and who never returned, although his journal-half evidence of an ill-fated expedition, half the ravings of a madmanreappeared sixty years later.
I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.