The Domino Pattern

“I would appreciate it very much,” he said, putting an emphasis on the last two words. “Even small bits of preliminary knowledge would be worth a great deal to me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I promised. “If I should happen to learn anything, whom shall I ask for?”

He studied me another couple of heartbeats. “I am Logra Emikai,” he identified himself. “My seat is four coaches forward, in the car just to the front of the dining car.”

“Understood,” I said. “A pleasant evening to you, Logra Emikai.”

“And to you.” With a brief nod of his head, he turned and headed down the aisle toward the front of the car and his own seat four coaches away.

“Interesting,” I murmured, catching Bayta’s eye and nodding toward the departing Filly. “You catch all that?”

“You mean the fact that he just tried to bribe us?” Bayta asked, her voice stiff.

“Well, yes, that too,” I said, turning back to watch Emikai’s progress. He was moving briskly, adroitly dodging around the slower-moving passengers who weren’t in nearly so much of a hurry. “I was mostly referring to the fact that he seemed to know we’d already taken samples from Master Bofiv’s body.”

“How do you know that?” Bayta asked, her moral outrage at the bribery attempt starting to fade into fresh interest.

“From his reaction to my comment that di-Master Strinni hadn’t let us take samples,” I said. “The question is, how did he know? Okay—let’s see what he does.”

“With what?” Bayta asked, craning her neck to see over the crowd.

“Not with what,” I corrected. “With whom. Specifically, with Master Tririn. Or hadn’t you noticed that Tririn didn’t bother to come back here to see what we were doing?”

“Maybe he’s just tired.”

“Or he already knows what we will or won’t find,” I said. “Or he didn’t need to come himself because he already had a friend on the scene.”

“Logra Emikai?”

“Could be.” I said. “You have any idea what sort of rank logra is?”

“Not in that form,” Bayta said. “It could be a dialectal variant of lomagra, one of the middle artisan classes.”

“Or else it’s something new, something private, or something he made up out of thin air.” I said.

“And you think he and Master Tririn are working together?”

“We’ll know in a second,” I said. “Even if they just know each other, there ought to be some signal or at least recognition as Emikai passes him.”

But to my disappointment, the Filly passed by Tririn’s seat without so much as a sideways glance in the Shorshian’s direction. “Or not,” I said. “Well, that tells us something, too,” I added, turning away.

“Wait a second,” Bayta said, her voice suddenly urgent.

“What?” I asked, turning back.

“Logra Emikai’s head dipped to his right just there,” Bayta said. “Like he was saying something to—”

And right on cue. Terese German stood up and stepped into the aisle.

“To our young friend with the bad stomach?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” Bayta said. Terese made a show of stretching as she casually but carefully looked around her, then headed after the departing Filly. Logra Emikai reached the vestibule and disappeared inside, heading for the next car. A few steps behind him, Terese did likewise. “Coincidence?” Bayta asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve been assuming that when we were in the bar earlier she just grabbed the first likely-looking lug to protect her from me. The whole incident makes a lot more sense if the choice wasn’t nearly that spur-of-the-moment.”

Bayta pondered that for a moment. “Thought it still could be perfectly innocent,” she pointed out. “They’ve been passengers on the same train for the past two weeks. If they’d already gotten to know each other, she would naturally go to him for help.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But she’s never struck me as the gregarious sort. Come on—time to go.”

“Where?” Bayta asked as I took her arm and steered us forward down the aisle. “We’re not going to follow them, are we?”

“We just happen to be going the same direction, that’s all,” I assured her as we wove our way around the other passengers wending their way to and fro down the aisle. “Tell the Spiders they can put the filter equipment back together again. We’re done here.”

———

My original plan—actually, at this point we were probably on my second or third original plan—had been to have a look at the late Master Colix’s storage compartments while we were checking on the air filter. But again, things weren’t working out the way I’d hoped. This time, it was the large number of passengers still watching our every move that persuaded me to put off the compartment exam a little longer. Convincing them that two deaths a few hours apart had been just an unhappy happenstance would be a much harder sell if I was seen rooting through the personal effects of one of the dearly departeds. Hopefully, we could come back later tonight when things had quieted down.

As I’d promised Bayta, we did indeed follow Terese and Emikai toward the front of the train, but only because we all happened to be going in the same direction. The girl and the Filly only made it as far as the bar end of the dining car. I noted as we passed, whereas Bayta and I were going four cars farther, to the second/third dispensary.

“What are we doing here?” Bayta asked as I ushered her into the small room.

“Finding a place where we can be alone,” I said. “Is there a curtain or something we can close over this doorway?”

In response, the server Spider standing his post by the drug cabinet skittered over and slid a cleverly hidden pocket door over the opening. “Thank you,” I said, stepping over to the treatment table and laying out my newly filled sample vials. “More importantly, I wanted someplace I could do a quick analysis without a lot of people looking over our shoulders.”

“Why don’t we just go back to our compartments?” Bayta asked as I pulled out my reader and lighter.

“Because our next real stop is the first-class dispensary to check on Strinni, and I don’t want to go all the way forward and then have to backtrack,” I told her. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of all this walking.”

I started with Givvrac’s untouched drink. I hadn’t really expected to find anything sinister lurking there, and for once I was right. “As I said, even it Kennrick is involved, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to lace a drink only he had access to,” I reminded Bayta as I set the vial aside. “These others may be more interesting.”

They were. But not in the way I’d expected.

“What is all that?” Bayta asked, staring in bewilderment as the chemical list scrolled across my reader’s display.

And scrolled some more, and then kept on scrolling, for another four pages. Whatever the Spiders’ third-stage filter was collecting, it was collecting a lot of it. “Whatever it is, the good news is that the air isn’t the source of the poisoning,” I said. “You can see—right there—that there’s barely a trace of cadmium in the whole mix.”

“Not enough to kill them?”

“Not even enough to make them sick,” I said. “As to the rest of this soup, be patient. The analyzer has a huge database, and it’ll take some time for it to sort through everything.”

I watched the reader as the first trace compound ID came up, a type of perfume used by Fibibibi to mask some of the pheromones that appeared in females at potentially awkward times. “We’ve got a make on Contestant Number Two,” I said as the next part of the analysis came up. “Actually, make that Contestants Two through Eight. It’s a cluster of digestive exhalation products. Pirkarli. mostly.”

Bayta wrinkled her nose. “There were two Pirks back there.”

“And I’m sure the rest of the car is grateful for the focused ventilation system you have by Pirk seats,” I said,