Chương 2: Everything Found On Him

I helped Corso carry the body down to the washing room, where Corso removed the clothing and left me to it. The rigor had set hard, and I worked it out of his limbs joint by joint before anything else. The familiar work of cleaning the body lifted my thoughts, and when I was done and had washed my hands I stood a moment in the doorway, looking at the shape on the slab, before moving to the chair.

Naked, eyes open and with the colour of his skin already changing into death, I think most people would have struggled to guess his age, and even I had to admit that the man from the arcade could be anywhere from a forty-year-old given rough treatment by life to a well-kept sixty-year-old. I wrote 50 years, give or take on the sheet of paper by my hand, before getting back to my feet.

"Right, then," I said, in the tone reserved for my clients.

"Let's see what you have to tell me." Corso had laid out the man's possessions on the table against the far wall. A coat, stiff with grime. A length of cord, a wooden button. Two worn coppers, and a crust of bread gone hard as brick, wrapped in a scrap of paper. It was sadly not an unusual array of effects for the type of man he had been, and in my mind I was already filling in the remainder of the form as I walked over to the table. Sinon probably has the right of it.

I reached out my hands, and moved them over the things as another quiet settled on my shoulders. The old calm of work done a thousand times, familiar movements and smells and sights and sounds. And in my course of work, an added element: with every corpse came a chance of surprise or a mystery. For many years, when I was young, I had regretted the skill I purchased when I was still a boy.

I had cursed that child for his ignorance and stupidity, and I had let that regret pull me here and there as I let my temper direct the course of my lived years. It was, considering my somewhat advanced age, surprisingly recently that I came to my so-called senses and truly considered that choice, that purpose, and the path the skill had given me in life. A whim, yes. A stupid purchase, absolutely.

I still thought that young boy was a complete and utter idiot needing a slap to the back of his head, but if I had learned anything over my thirty-eight years in this life, it was to forgive the young their small stupidities. I had come across too many of their big stupidities, washing their beautiful bodies, unblemished by age but horrendously damaged as a result of some type of stunt. It was always young men, never women. If asked today if I would have chosen differently with all the wisdom of hindsight…

I do not know what my answer would be. I know that many people will not even know what a quaesitor is, or what he does, and in most situations I simply answer with investigator if asked what I do for a living. But I was barely twenty years old when I was offered the position, to answer for a particularly violent political conflict between the Quarenghi and the Alverno.

The current quaesitor then was retiring, and by happenstance I had recently come into the good favour of the man who led the Misericordia before Sinon. When asked to appoint someone who could determine causes of death and to read the corpses coming through our doors, he pointed at me. Certainly, because it was easier to go with somebody that he knew, and probably because he was already then struggling with his addiction to wine, but I like to think that it was also because he saw something in me. So, my skill.

Varenza held smaller auctions every week—estates, salvage, relics—but only the Mandate opened the Auction, and only at solstice. Families spent the rest of the year turning everything they could into florins for that single day. Mine was a strangely useless yet useful skill that nobody else in the Auction had bid on, yet it perfectly matched my main purpose on that solstice day when I was sixteen: to spite my parents, who had apparently charted the course of my life without consulting me.

So, when this oddly overpriced skill sat there until near-midnight, and with my parents shouting at me through the Auction doors, I had made the purchase and spent the entirety of the funds they had given me, some two hundred florins. The result was a spectacularly successful and expensive statement that I was my own man and that I made my own (stupid) choices. My father did not speak to me for a year after, and my mother cleaned out my room that very evening.

It was only later that I discovered the skill's unique utility. I passed my hand over the coat. RECOGNISE PERSONAL EFFECTS Worn Coat Subjective Value Negligible Objective Value 8 florins Well, there. Eight florins was… no great sum to Varenza, but it would have fed this man for several weeks. A strangely expensive coat. And if the man had a half-century to spend on clothing, why not something warmer that would shield against the coming winter? If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen.

Please report the violation. Hold on, I thought, quickly moving to the last item on the table. RECOGNISE PERSONAL EFFECTS Crust of Bread Subjective Value Cherished Objective Value Less than 1 florin I looked at the hard crust for a moment. Cherished. This man had been hungry. So hungry that this small piece of old, stale bread had come to mean something to him. It was what would keep him alive for one more day. I turned to my left, looked back to the coat.

An expensive coat, but not one that would have kept him from freezing on the cobblestones. Valuable, and you would think, valuable enough to at least deserve an honourable mention as the man considered what was of worth to him. Negligible did not add up. I quickly inspected the cord, the button and the coppers. They were meaningless, both to the man and to the Mandate.

Filling out my report for the Misericordia records as well as for the guild's functionaries, I did not know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of their expressions when they read my assessment. The norm was that they would reach out and claim subjectively valuable effects just as quickly as those with objective value. Will they reclaim the crust of bread, considering it their due to own everything cherished by anyone? Corso came in with the kettle and set it by the brazier, humming.

"You'll want that before you open him." He poured into the washing pail and the steam went up.

"Cold hands, etcetera. And after touching that coat, they are grimy."

"True, Corso," I said, and thought. I looked up at him.

"He wrote the cause before I opened the man. Sinon. In the ledger."

"And exposure is what they write on every arcade body from the first cold to the thaw." He had the outgoing tally sheet against his knee and was counting the dead man's things against it, lips moving over each line. Coat, one. Cord, one. Button, one. Coppers, two.

"You know that, Marek. Sinon was just trying to move things along, just as you should be doing. The book's a fortnight behind and he's the man they shout at."

"They shout at him for an explanation, Corso. For the cause of death, the real one. Not for a conclusion written before the examination."

"Before, after." He turned the sheet over.

"Nothing's closed. You can strike it. Your hand's the one that decides, quaesitor. That's what the examination's for, that's what corrections are for. Isn't it?" He paused before continuing.

"Also, the guild's factor had sent down message boys twice only since he came in," he said.

"They want this moved on, and Sinon's job is to do what they ask. Same as reading the man is yours." I took up the crust from the table and turned it over. Hard as brick, and the paper it came wrapped in gone soft with damp.

"Quick? The guild gets this then," I said.

"Itemised report by tomorrow's dusk bell, and this crust of bread will be at the top. Next to the button. Everything found on him, and everything found on him is theirs, because he died on their stones. Schedule a courier, I don't think we will need a cart for the effects."

"They get the coat. Eight florins of coat, fair enough." He took the crust out of my hand and set it back on its paper, gently, the way he handled all of them.

"But don't… don't antagonise them, Marek. Why do you insist on being this way?"

"The ordinance says effects. It doesn't say effects over a florin." I knew I was being petulant, I knew I was making Corso's life a misery. But if you cannot spread misery in the Misericordia, then where can you?

"And you'll write it, will you?" He grinned." One crust, stale. And somewhere down the line, another clerk has to read it, and wonder why you wrote it down. Perhaps he has a superior who is a stickler for the rules, and when we keep the bread here, he has to send a boy for it." The grin left his face as he continued.

"But it costs you an hour of a short day," he said.

"That's what an itemised report costs. Your time, which you could have spent on an ochre. Or one of a hundred little things I know you could be doing. Writing takes longer than reading, and do you think you will get paid extra for extra words?"

"Then they shouldn't have asked for it."

"Marek! You are testing my patience. You know they always ask, but not so you will get a chance to be petulant. You should be smart enough to know what is what. You are smart enough, and you know this." I decided to let that argument die. I knew that he was right, and that I was wrong.

"Sinon asked me to come to him first. If I found a wound."

"And did you find one?"

"I haven't looked yet." He took the kettle off the heat.

"So right now, the page speaks true. There's a form, filled early, by a man behind in his book. Welcome to Varenza, quaesitor Vale, this is what we do." He gathered the tally sheet under his arm.

"Comb him, write what you find, and if it's a wound you know where the Regesta is. But don't sit here making a mystery where there is none." Then he went, a small smile in my direction as he left, humming tunelessly. I sat there and thought about his words as the humming went away down the corridor and left me with a dead man on a slab. He was right. In the grand machinery of this great city, this man, this death, was not even a footnote.

It was something that had happened, which required a certain procedure to be followed. Not only that, but it was a procedure I fully supported, and not only because it kept me in a job. My years in the Misericordia had taught me that I should not treat every man or woman who came across my slab as a grand mystery. Yet. They all have to count; they all need to be worthy. Or none of them are.