The erratic woman's regalia
Electrum, pearl and two masks, stripped off her body in the street and left unidentified with Ashanti, one of the masks the Chantry's
Everything the erratic woman was wearing and carrying when Koa cut her in half, stripped off the body where it lay and handed over in a bundle to Professor Ashanti al-Hassan. None of it has been identified.
She was dressed a great deal better than the street she died in. A harness of electrum ran over her hands, filthy, but made of a very fine stuff shot through with a shimmering thread. There were cuff rings, an outfit embroidered with pearl, a fine gold necklace with a lyre for a pendant, and bracers of electrum worked in an animal pattern, for the arm or the shin. And two masks: one an elaborate electrum filigree, and one belonging to the Chantry of Tranquility.
Slung in with it was a burlap sack, foul and disorganized, full of organic reagents and small crystals of no particular worth, which gives off a smell of mildew every time it swings.
There was no coin on her anywhere.
The Chantry keeps the hospital in Haudh-Gwenn and its people go masked. A hired caster in Beltran’s pay, sanctioned by nobody, was carrying their insignia when she died. It went into the pile with the rings and the sack and has sat in Ashanti’s keeping since. Nobody has asked why she had it.