Read Online All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) by Elizabeth Bear - Free Book Online Page B

of them had taken time to rifle the body.
    Achilles turned to invite her into the circle around the body, and gave her a sideways eyeroll. “Your scent was on him.” Not an accusation. Not even a suggestion. Just a fact.
    If She had sent Selene, then She was not concerned that Selene’s scent was on the body. And so Achilles was not concerned, either.
    “He made a delivery.” She paused, as she came downwind of the body. “No blood.”
    “No.” He sniffed, as the other two unmans—another dog, prick-eared and fuzzy, and a brown-and-white skewbald rat with long nervous hands—fell back. “There’s more scent.”
    “That musk. It’s rank.” The same she’d caught last night, drifting from the Well.
    With an effort, Selene quelled her flehmen response. There were trumans about, observers and some Mongrels. They might mistake it for a snarl.
    “Can you smell the others?”
    She sniffed, lightly, and sneezed. “We’re not all hounds.”
    But she crouched beside the body nonetheless, balanced on the tough pads of her elongated feet. She placed her elbows on her knees and craned her neck, surveying the scene from closer now. Selene might not be a hound, but even after sunrise this intersection lay in the shadow of Her Tower, and would until afternoon. Hers was the dark-adapted eye.
    “Is there rigor?” she asked. She wasn’t ready to touch the dead man yet.
    She remembered the brush of his hand, the nervousness as he’d handed her the weapon, the determined lift of his jaw.
    “And the livor is congealed,” Achilles said, referring to the settling of uncirculated blood. His voice had a sonorous, belling quality, even when he spoke softly, and the slow fan of his tail accelerated. It was not friendliness, now: he was on the hunt. “At least four hours.”
    “And how many came up the stair, or along this road?”
    “The scent’s under the dew.” She looked up at him and he shrugged. “It’s strong, but there’s a lot of it. Too many to count. I might be able to pick one out individually.”
    “Mmm,” she said. She twisted her head to the side, ears flat,her tail curving for balance. There was, indeed, dew. Enough to soak the fur on the underside of her tail into twisted spikes. “And how many touched the body?”
    While Achilles spoke, Selene slowly focused her gaze from one end of Fasoltsen’s body to the other.
    “Four,” he said. “The bottom layer is—”
    “That,” she supplied, curling her lip.
    He whuffed understanding. “And then something else, truman or nearman, female. She touched his hair and kissed him on the mouth.”
    “Comforted him while he was dying? May I have a light along the body, please?”
    The rat moved to oblige.
    Achilles whined. “The one who stinks like a predator kissed him, too.”
    White light, directional, spilled the length of Fasoltsen’s corpse. Selene ducked lower, looking for the telltale shine of fiber. She wished the hawk, Diana—the only hawk—were here. “Interesting,” she said. “Sexual assault?”
    “It was only the two who came later that opened his clothes.”
    “To search him.”
    That little noise again. As if to say,
Your speculation, lead.
But not disagreeing with her.
    Selene shifted her head, and a bright filament caught her attention. The leather armor on her thighs was sewn with tubular pockets: she slipped a claw into one and hooked forth a set of tweezers, delicately so as not to scratch the metal. Her claws were no longer the horny barbs of her dim recollection, when she had been only a huntress and a mother, before she had become Selene. The claws she wore now could slice bone orgouge metal, and she had learned at painful cost to have a care for them.
    There were no instincts to provide for what She had made of Her unmans.
    Selene plucked up the hair and had no need to ask for an envelope. The rat was there with one already. Selene collected the evidence, and while she was writing out a tag, Achilles took the unsealed pouch