The Tainted Cup, page 10
Vashta nodded.
“Were they the only ones who died in such a fashion?” she asked.
Again, the two Legionnaires exchanged a glance.
“They were not,” said Vashta.
“Eight other people throughout the canton underwent a similar transformation, almost at the exact same time,” said Strovi.
I was so shocked that I forgot myself. “Ten!” I said aloud. “Sanctum…ten Engineers were poisoned?”
The two Legionnaires glanced at me. Strovi offered me a tiny, sympathetic smile. “Yes,” said Vashta. “This is possibly the worst incident of mass poisoning in all the history of the Empire.”
“Four died on the sea walls, including the two who caused the collapse,” said Strovi. “Others were in the city of Talagray. One fellow was even on a horse when it happened.”
“Oh!” said Ana, interested. “What happened to the horse?”
Strovi coughed. “It, ah, died, ma’am,” he said.
“Ohh. Hm.” She nodded, a little disappointed, as if she’d expected something more entertaining. “Were there any commonalities to the ten deaths? Did they all use the same bathing facilities? Or visit any site that featured a large amount of steam?”
“They did not,” said Vashta. “We’ve treated this as a contagion so far, reviewing their movements to see what event might have spread this to them all. But so far we can’t find any moment when they were even in the same room together in the past month, let alone all inhaling the same steam.”
“The only commonality, ma’am,” said Strovi, “is that they were all part of the Engineering Iyalet.”
“Engineering…” said Ana quietly.
“Yes,” said Vashta. “The worry is that someone is targeting Engineers for assassination. Perhaps as sabotage. We do not yet know.”
“But to do so during the wet season…” Strovi shook his head.
“You think,” said Ana, “that someone wants to set the titans loose within all of Khanum.”
“It would be madness to imagine it,” said Vashta. “But these days have been nothing if not mad.”
Ana fell silent, her head bowed in thought.
“We need to know how this happened, Dolabra,” said Vashta. “To find out who did this and capture them—before any other calamities occur. Hundreds if not thousands of people are maimed or dead. The entire canton is at risk, if not the Empire. We cannot repair the breach or battle the titans with confidence until we are sure the threat is resolved. And you are the only person I am aware of, Immunis, who has encountered this phenomenon previously, and it is my understanding that you accurately identified it, and responded to it, within a day. We need all the help we can get right now—but I have surmised that we especially need your help.”
Ana’s fingers were drumming wildly on the tabletop now, a frenetic tatter-tat. “I can’t help you from here, ma’am. I rely a lot on Din for these investigations, but, well, the commute from here to Talagray would be a bit much.”
“We had anticipated that,” said Vashta. “I have ordered a carriage sent here straightaway, on the hopes that you would consent. It should arrive by morning.”
“There are likely some issues of procedure and jurisdiction—yes?” Ana asked. “I am not an Iudex Investigator of that canton. Din is an apprentice, and I believe isn’t allowed to leave Daretana until his formal assignment.”
“A state of emergency has been declared for the entire Outer Rim,” said Vashta. “Policies are being suspended left and right. We can suspend any statute stopping you as well, and the Iudex Investigator of Talagray is all too happy for the help. The only concern anyone has now is to make it through the wet season.”
“And…what are the prospects of that?” asked Ana.
A bleak smile. “The prospects of that,” Vashta said, “are evolving. And will likely depend in no small part on your work in Talagray.”
“In that case,” said Ana, “how could I possibly say no? Right, Din?”
I said nothing. For there is nothing worth saying when you are being forced into a pit of horrors.
CHAPTER 10
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I HAD ONCE THOUGHT transport by carriage to be the domain of princes and the gentry. But as I sat in that dank little box for the sixth hour, clutching my seat while the walls and floors bucked and heaved about me, I felt it was the most awful damned punishment I could imagine.
The air was hot and stagnant. There was little to see out the windows except the close, dark, steaming jungle and the occasional flash of a mika lark. Though we traveled along imperial roads, which were bricked and well maintained, the carriage still bumped and banged every few seconds, making sleep or reflection impossible. And Ana, of course, was horrid company, sitting there blindfolded and chattering ceaselessly.
“That bump there!” she’d say to me, excited. “Right there! That bump occurs every seventeen seconds when we are on the southern side of the road, and every nineteen seconds when we are on the northern side of the road! This indicates to me that it is not a flaw in a wheel of our carriage, but is instead some quirk in the process the Engineers used to build this road, segment by segment! Or perhaps…perhaps an issue with the land or an effect of the humidity on the stone…”
She grew most excited when we passed one of the Engineering teams responsible for maintaining the road, and demanded I stick my head out and study the cart of bricks, and the way the dusty, muddy workers dislodged the cracking ones from the road and replaced them.
“That’s the real Empire right there, Din,” she said, grinning. “The boys and girls who fix the roads.”
“Being as we’re headed to the sea walls, ma’am,” I said, “I might disagree.”
“Oh, people love the Legion, with their swords and their walls and their bombards. But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.”
I shook my head and focused on the maps Ana had gotten for me to engrave in my mind: maps of the city of Talagray, of the Tala canton, of the sea walls, and so on and so on. She’d also procured lists of all senior Engineering officers in Talagray, and asked me to memorize them, hundreds and thousands of names—which I did, haltingly whispering each name as I read them.
Finally we turned a sharp corner in the road. I leaned out the window and tasted the air. A hint of salt on the wind, perhaps, acrid and tangy. I glimpsed a hill to the west, its southern cliff flat and stark. My eyes fluttered, and I summoned the map of the canton in my mind, searching the memory for these landmarks—a kink in the road, and a cliff-carved hill—and calculated where we were.
“Think we’re close to the sea walls now, ma’am,” I said.
“Already?”
“Yes, ma’am. I should be able to see them out the eastern-facing window soon enough.”
“Describe them to me the second you do. I would much like to have them in my mind to puzzle over.”
The carriage rattled along. The jungle fell back like a curtain, revealing a wide green plain swimming with mist; and there, far in the distance, the shore.
I pulled out a spyglass I’d brought, pressed it to my eye, and peered east.
A towering, slate-gray cliff, running underneath the red-stained sky like a frame below a painting, its stone wet and gleaming and crawling with vines and growth; and there, in one long, vertical seam in the cliff, a hint of movement: some insect, I thought, crawling from base to top in a slow, labored procession.
My eye trembled as I focused on it. I realized it was not an insect but instead a tiny box, wrought of wood, being hauled up on a set of strings. As it reached another notch in the gray cliffs, the box stopped, and even tinier figures emerged.
Horses. Four of them, all hauling a shining steel bombard from the box.
I blinked, staring into the spyglass. The tiny box was not tiny at all: it was a lift, made for hauling troops and armaments up the vast expanse of the sea walls.
I lowered the spyglass and stared at the walls in the distance, dumbfounded.
“Well?” said Ana. “Do you see them? What are they like?”
“The walls,” I said slowly, “are very, very big, ma’am.”
I described it to her as best I could. I was no spatiast, so I ran out of words for big very quickly, trying to express this tremendous spine of stone and earthworks running along the seas. I glassed their tops and spied at least two dozen mammoth bombards arranged there, most pointed out to sea—but some pointed in. Just in case something broke through, I supposed.
“Some of the bombards can be wheeled about by horses,” Ana explained. “For the truly giant ones, some segments of walls have rails running along their tops, to make it easier for horses to haul them about.”
“How big are those, ma’am?”
“Five to six times as long as you are tall, Din, if you were to stand beside them. The forging of such bombards is immensely difficult. Like so much of what the Empire does, they are achievements of complexity—imagine the systems, the management, the coordination it takes not only to marshal resources and knowledge and facilities to make these remarkable things, but to make them by the hundreds, and ship them to the walls every wet season!”
“And…how tall are the leviathans, again?”
“Some are as tall as the walls. Most are slightly taller.”
I tried to conceive of it, to project an image of such a thing onto the landscape beyond. I began to feel slightly ill at the thought.
“Have you ever seen one, Din?” asked Ana. “Or a piece of one, a bone or a segment of chitin?”
I shook my head.
“Din,” she said tersely, “I am blindfolded, so if you’ve nodded your head, I’ve no fucking idea.”
“No, ma’am, I have not.”
“Mm. It’s a remarkable experience…a tooth as long as two men laid end over end. A claw the size of three carriages. The city of Ashradel actually has a leviathan skull from the old days as part of its citadel. It’s about as big as a small fort, I’m told. Quite the sight. How astonishing it is to know that the leviathans grow bigger every wet season.”
“I thought that was a rumor.”
“They don’t like to put numbers to it,” she said. “Numbers would make everyone worry.”
I stared out the window, shaken. “Have you ever seen a living one, ma’am?” I asked.
“Oh, sadly no. Only bits of dead ones. When the Legion fells them and they sink into the sea, they send ships afterward to try to haul the carcass to ports for study. Chop it up, peel it like an onion. Dangerous work, given their toxic blood, but so many suffusions and grafts are based on their unique abilities. I’ve had the chance to survey only a few such specimens.” She grinned. “I asked the Apoths once if I could eat some of the flesh, but they said no. I’ve never quite forgiven them for that…”
As we approached Talagray the world about us filled up, the fields suddenly swarming with Legionnaires and Engineers and horses, all hauling materials or hastily constructing earthworks on the soaking plains. I even saw slothiks—the altered, giant sloths used for hauling momentously huge loads—which I’d never seen in Daretana. Many of the soldiers were augmented in ways I’d never witnessed: people with large, black eyes, or enormous, curiously pointed ears, or huge, hulking men eight or nine span tall, carrying blocks of stone like they were bales of hay. I described this last sort to Ana as we passed.
“Cracklers,” she said. “Or crackle-men. Chaps who’ve been grafted so they grow so much muscle they need new bones added to their skeletons to support it all. They make odd little clicking sounds as they walk about—hence the name.”
“Sounds rather monstrous,” I said.
“So might a boy whose brain swims with tiny beasts, making it so he can’t forget anything. It’s tough being a crackler—most don’t live past fifty—but the Empire needs them, and venerates and honors them, and pays them well.” Another grin. “That’s the nature of Khanum, eh? Safety and security for strangeness. Many are willing to make the deal.”
* * *
—
THE CARRIAGE RATTLED on, and Talagray emerged from the mist ahead. At first the city looked like a long row of low cairns, each one cylindrical and tapered, separated by wide gulfs; but then we rounded a hill and I saw they were not cairns but fretvine towers, with wide bases and narrow tops, like dozens of clay ovens freshly made and set out to dry. Being wrought of fretvine, they bloomed here and there, tiny tufts of sparkling orange or frail green. They were all bedecked in mai-lanterns, rings and rings of glimmering blue lights, so much so that the city looked like some spectral night sky.
Then I noticed the fortifications: though the city had no walls on the western side, the eastern side sported massive ramparts and earthworks, and everywhere they were covered in bombards, all pointed east. I realized that this was where all the soldiers about us were going, adding to the massive artillery placed between the eastern plains and the city.
I described it to Ana.
“Yes…it’s a utility city, Din,” she said. “Run by the Legion and built to service the sea walls, and it in turn is built along its own walls, a city trapped in the shade of ramparts and bombards. The bombards you see won’t do much to a titan, mind. They’re mostly there to slow it down, give everyone in the city time to escape to the third-ring wall.”
“Why’s it all so oddly spaced, ma’am?” I asked.
“Quakes. My understanding is they don’t build many structures above five or six stories, and almost all are fretvine and fernpaper. When the leviathans emerge from the depths of the seas, the whole city trembles like it’s built on the skin of a drum.” She leaned her head out the window, smiling as the wind played with her bone-white hair. “A poet once wrote about making love when the earth shook in Talagray…It sounded like quite the spectacle.”
We rumbled closer and closer, the great wall of the city rising up on our left, the bombards looming overhead. Everywhere I looked there were armored veterans far more experienced than I could ever hope to be—and all of them, and all of the city, existed for one purpose: to do as much damage to a leviathan as possible before it got to the third-ring wall.
“We’re getting close, ma’am,” I said hoarsely.
“You sound,” she said, “a touch shook there, Din.”
“I think it’d be mad if I didn’t, ma’am. The only comfort I have is knowing you’re accustomed to things like this.”
She frowned. “Accustomed? Hell, Din, I’ve no idea what I’m fucking doing.”
“I…I had thought, ma’am,” I said, “that your career in the Iudex had taken you across the Empire?”
“Well, sure, but breaches in the sea walls? Dead leviathans? This is all totally new boots to me, as the old maid says.” She pressed her hand against the wall, grinning as she felt the vibrations of the carriage. “We must analyze it for what it is—a new phenomenon, with its own idiosyncrasies and aberrations, all articulating a larger design. And that’s your job, Din. To go and see. Exciting, isn’t it?”
The mammoth gates of Talagray opened, and we trundled through.
CHAPTER 11
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I KNEW FROM THE maps that at the center of the city sat what was called the Trifecta: the offices of the Legion, Iudex, and Engineering Iyalets, around which the other offices gathered like a small constellation. Our Legion driver piloted us toward it, navigating the churning traffic running about the fretvine towers. It was hard to catch the nature of the city from within the carriage, but it felt an improvised place: slapdash fernpaper houses fluttering about us like flocks of fragile moths, with fernpaper signs on leaning poles denoting smithies, boardinghouses, sotbars. The only permanent thing seemed to be the roads and foundations, wrought of stone and brick. All else was impermanent and haphazard. A sketch or a doodle of civilization, perhaps, hastily done on a canvas of soaking stone.
Finally the Trifecta came into view: three tall, conical fretvine towers, each sealed with mossclay and arrayed with the black, blue, or red colors of their Iyalet.
“Keep your eyes open,” Ana said to me. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Trying to take it all in as best I can, ma’am.”
“Bother less with the sights,” she said, “and more with the people. You’re going to be with a lot of elite officers soon, Din. They won’t ask you to talk much, but you need to watch them. Watch what they look at, what disturbs them, and get it all for me. I want to know who we’re working with.”
“Is it vialworthy, ma’am?” I said, grabbing my engraver’s satchel.
“Of course! Pick a glass and stick it up your damn nose quick!”
We rumbled into the courtyard of the Trifecta. A small group of people were gathering in wait for us before the Iudex building, no more than a half-dozen Engineers, Apoths, and officers in Iudex dark blue.
I studied the Iudex officers most as we pulled up. There were two of them: one a tall, thin, gray-faced man whose breast bore the two bars signifying he was the investigator; and there, beside that heraldry, the eye within a box, indicating he was an engraver, like me. Next to him was a grizzled brick of a man with enormous shoulders, six span tall and six span wide, squinting at us as we pulled up. This man had evidently been altered for strength, so much so he could quite likely cleave a person in two. Upon his breast I spied a twinkle: the bar and the flower, indicating he was an assistant investigator.
I stared at him. This scarred, broad, blunt instrument of a human being was my Talagray equivalent. Even though I was nearly a span taller than him, I had never felt so young and so small in all my life.
When the carriage came to a stop I opened the door, clambered out, and helped Ana climb down. Though the crowd was small, I felt every eye upon me like they were a leaden weight.
