What the Footage Left Out
Session: 2020-04-07
Dr Solstarni's office was on the fourth floor, behind a heavy wooden door. Taeon's notes begin there, at the door, before anything inside it. Perhaps he simply noticed it. A door that heavy is chosen by someone who wants to keep things in, or out.
Inside were agricultural tools, and what the notes call stuff. Someone had packed the room erratically and quickly. Nobody in the party said aloud what that looked like, but the notes do: suspect something criminal. Professor Muhaly, who had sent them there, also thought something was wrong.
They went through the room the way a party learns to, each one taking a part of it.
Bren found a field suit in a locker. There was a dent in a carbon-fibre locker. The records don't say which locker, or what made the dent, and I won't guess.
Qwitch saw a piece of paper sticking out and took it. It was a printed email from someone called Eyrub-Paqual. He was inviting Dr Solstarni to a café called the Five Arches to appraise artifacts he said he had uncovered. The meeting had been two days ago. Qwitch knew the name. Eyrub-Paqual, he said, was an associate of a local smuggler.
Taeon looked past a side table and found a printed copy of notes, annotated in her hand. Notes had been removed from it. What was left concerned something the page calls unique: the accursed pyramid city of Loskialua.
Grek found fifteen messages between the doctor and Eyrub-Paqual. They were about elven material. He insisted she appraise the artifacts. She refused. Reading them, Grek judged that she had been sceptical of him all along.
I was taught this Reading in the field, in a hollow where something had been taken from a nest. The one who taught me let us find it for ourselves before she recited a word.
Note the nest left in haste.
Note the down pulled loose and not yet scattered.
Note what was carried off, and what was left too heavy to carry.
Do not say the bird flew. You did not see it fly.
Note the branch that is bent and the branch that is broken.
One was the bird. One was not the bird.
A thing that leaves by its own will leaves in order.
A thing that is taken leaves in pieces.
Count the pieces.
Then ask who else has walked under this tree.
So sit. So look.
The disorder is a track. Read it the way you read the ground.
— the Observances, from the Readings on Absence
It names no city and no scholar. But a room packed fast, with pages torn from the one study that mattered, is a nest left in haste. Taeon would have known this Reading long before Qabarat.
Bren checked in with Akimbsy at reception and asked for any footage from outside the office. Then Bren started looking up whatever could be found on Eyrub-Paqual.
What turned up was a set of articles about elven ruins from the past six years. At first glance they looked real. On a closer reading they were anecdotal. There was not one photograph of the man, not even a fake one. Qwitch began to suspect that Eyrub-Paqual did not exist at all, at least not as the person in the articles.
Akimbsy called Bren back, again agitated and befuddled, and asked them to come and look at the video. It showed a trio of lashunta, brutish ones, entering and taking the stairs. There was no other footage of them. Grek studied it and found inconsistencies. Someone had edited it.
Recorded evidence is a witness. Witnesses can be bought.
Check the joins.
— the Field Canon, on Records, later additions
Somewhere in this the Gateway District port authority came up. The notes put it on its own line, beneath Grek's finding, and don't say why. Qwitch confirmed the other thing: the smuggling group was real.
Then a lashunta approached them. A detective from Qabarat, responding to a report of a missing person.
From there the notes move fast. Dr Solstarni was still scheduled for a sabbatical, and the line about it trails off before it says where. The letter that had granted her leave two days ago was a forgery.
So the records turn, in a few lines, from a scholar who left without permission to a scholar who may not have left by choice. Two days ago she had been invited to the Five Arches. Two days ago someone signed her leave.
The party had a choice to make, and Taeon wrote down the options without ranking them: the port authority, a bar, or Ukulam. Beneath them, after a row of dots, he wrote café. That is how they decided.
The Five Arches served a discerning palate. Someone, probably more than one of them, checked the place over before settling in. The notes record the result in two words: no snipers. After a ship's bridge, a hangar and a crowded port, I don't think anyone found that funny.
The android who received them was Ullie. Ullie promised authentic off-world cuisine and then gave them better advice than the menu could: skip it, order drinks, and keep the fights outside. The daily special was unintelligible.
The page ends there, at a table in the café where a missing scholar was invited two days earlier. They have a forged letter, an edited recording, and a man with no face. Of everything they found in her office, the find I keep coming back to is Taeon's: the notes with pages missing, and the name of the city that was left behind.