Free A Vile Justice by Lauren Haney Page A

women, servants he had seen in the kitchen at daybreak, stood chatting near the top of the steps leading down to the water. One balanced a large, heavy jar on her head, the second held an empty container by the neck. Glimpsing Ineni, the former hurried toward the kitchen and the latter hastened down the steps to fetch water.
    Bak made no comment until he and Ineni were midway along the row of granaries, when the servants were too far away to hear. "Was the sergeant who died, Senmut, small and no longer young?"
    "He was as tall as you," Ineni admitted with a crooked smile, "and he prided himself on his strength."
    "Yet there was no sign of a struggle." "None."
    Bak stopped in the shade near the rear door of the house, and gave his companion a curious look. "You seem unmoved by Hatnofer's death. Wasn't she a mother to you, as she was to Khawet?"
    Ineni's laugh was harsh, derisive. "My mother was a servant, Lieutenant. She was young and beautiful, I've been told, and he took her as his own the day she walked into this villa. Hatnofer hated her from that time forward, and she had no more use for me. When my mother died giving birth to a stillborn daughter, I was sent to our estate at Nubt. There I was raised by a houseful of servants, all of whom I think of as parents."
    The tale was not unusual, but moved Bak nonetheless. "Do you go often to Nubt?"
    "I'd be there now if my father hadn't summoned me." Ineni snorted. "Sometimes I think he fears his own shadow."
    Bak eyed him curiously. "Aren't you yet convinced he has reason to fear? Five people have died thus far."
    Ineni walked to the door and lifted the latch. "If I'd been so inclined, I'd have slain Hatnofer many years ago. Sergeant Senmut was a braggart, a man who believed himself above all others in any endeavor he chose to pursue. The guard Montu ... Well, he seemed a nice enough fellow, but he drank to excess and he loved to talk. He could say more about less than any man I ever met."
    "What of Lieutenant Dedi? And the boy Nakht?"
    "Dedi was young and full of himself, not one to take too seriously, I'd have thought. But who knows? Maybe someone resented his ... His enthusiasm." Ineni lifted the latch and shoved the door open. "Nakht is a puzzle. The child was small and slight, gentle. An innocent. Why he had to die, I can't begin to guess."
    Nor could Bak. If Hatnofer had been slain because she was small and vulnerable, the child's death could be explained in the same way. However, neither Senmut nor Montu had been small men, and both had been stabbed without a struggle. Five deaths, with not a man or woman or child offering resistance to the assailant. Bak could think of no way to accomplish such a feat unless the man who slew them had blinded them with magic. Or, more likely, with familiarity.
    "I must admit my relief when I learned another had been slain and I could rest easy." Amethu hiked up his long white kilt, bunching the fabric over his bulging stomach, and dropped onto a portable stool. "Does that sound heartless, Lieutenant?"
    "You're not the first to voice the thought," Bak said, "and I doubt you'll be the last."
    The steward gave him a fleeting smile, his thoughts on the task before him: the weekly distribution of grain to those who toiled in the governor's kitchen.
    Bak knelt beside him in a strip of shade cast by Nebmose's villa-how quickly he had come to accept the local name for the dwelling-watching servants empty one of the granaries. One man knelt before an opening twice the size of a man's head located at the base of the tall conical tower. Another man, who had climbed down an interior ladder, swept the remaining wheat into a basket and poured a golden stream through the hole, gradually filling the larger basket his companion held. Dust billowed from the cascading grain, making the man outside cough. Amethu noted the amount on a bit of broken pottery. Later, Bak knew, he would total the various quantities and record them on a scroll.
    "I'll miss