Page 14

Chapter 14

I leaned against the wall outside the Treasury bank, chewing my pipe as late afternoon slowly blended into evening. Within, I knew, the Apoth contagion crew was subjecting the severed head to no end of tests, not only to identify it but also to ensure that it held no contagion or dangerous issue. As they’d been in there for nearly three hours and there’d been no alarm yet, I assumed all was safe, or at least as safe as a bank with boxes of severed heads could possibly be.

For the twentieth time, I debated if there was anything I could do besides wait here. I had no one else to question, really: after his collapse, Immunis Ghrelin had been rushed to a medikker’s bay. Though I had told them I wished to speak to him further, they rather curtly informed me that I’d need the approval of his superiors first. I did not love the sound of that, for it only deepened my misgivings about what might have been in that box.

I took my pipe out of my mouth and tetchily studied it. Chewing it was no substitute for its smoke, and though this habit of mine was dreadfully expensive, now seemed a good time to indulge.

I squatted, reached into my satchel, and took out my kindling bag and a tiny clay pot. The pot was no larger than my thumb and held a stiff, lumpy little mushroom. I speared the mushroom through with a splinter of treated wood; a thread of smoke unscrolled from within it; then the splinter of wood suddenly danced with a tiny, merry yellow flame.

I held it to the tip of my pipe, sparked the tobacco, and took a long pull from it, relishing the hot billow of smoke in my lungs. Then I placed the firestarter pot on the brick pathway and stomped on it, killing its flame. A foolish thing, perhaps, to waste it on a single pipe; but the taste of the tobacco calmed my nerves and thoughts, and I thanked Sanctum as the fumes poured from my lips.

Then the door of the bank opened and a figure emerged, wearing an immense mask wrought of glass and slickly shining algaeoil cloth, with a long metal snout: a warding helm, to protect against contagion.

A voice came from within the helm, sour and resentful: “You look like you’re having a pleasant time.”

The person undid the fasteners on the back and slid the helm off to reveal the sweaty, pink, furious face of Malo.

I nodded to her and spoke, my words animated with smoke: “How goes it?”

“How do you think?” she snapped.

I nodded sympathetically, then sat down on the ground along the bank wall and gestured for her to do the same. Growling, she sat beside me and leaned her head back.

“It is a head,” she said. “And only a head. It has no secret plagues or contagion within it. A relief, I suppose! But…it is not Sujedo’s head.”

“As I thought,” I said. “Being as that head still had its jawbone. Any idea when we’ll discover whose it is?”

“We already know. It apparently belonged to an Apoth princeps. A Princeps Traukta Kaukole. He died about two years ago.”

My mouth fell open in surprise before I realized how they must have identified the victim so quickly. “Ah. Fellow had a banded tooth?”

“Oh, yes. Here in Yarrowdale, we make sure to track all the bits of our people as best as we can.”

A banded tooth was a false molar that had been grown in a reagents tank with a unique striping pattern running across the enamel. When an officer received such a tooth, the pattern was assigned to their name, so if their corpse was ever discovered in the future, it could be speedily identified.

“And how did this Kaukole die?” I asked.

“He was assigned to the management of an Apoth barge that shipped out of here—but the barge vanished en route, along with the entire crew. We never found the barge, nor any sign of their bodies. We eventually marked them all as dead.” She spat bitterly onto the bricked pathway leading to the bank. “We assumed smugglers were behind it. One of their first attacks before they became more violent.”

“And our impostor…took the man’s head, and preserved it for two years?” I asked, mystified.

“So it seems!”

“Only to leave it here for us to find, while robbing the bank?”

“So it seems! And he used a very specific art to preserve it, a method of dehydration commonly practiced by we Apoths. But I’ve no idea why he would do such a thing, or indeed do any of it at all! Unless he does it to send a message, stating that he is a smuggler himself, and…he now takes credit for this man’s death? And perhaps many others?”

“Like a hunting trophy,” I said quietly. “Except the prey he hunts is us?”

Malo made a gesture at the sky, beseeching the attention of one of the elder pantheons. “How I dislike the reversal.”

“The note it held. Did I read that right?”

“I assume you did,” said Malo. “It said— For those who sip from the marrow, Te siz imperiya. ”

I turned this over. I had no idea what the first words about the marrow meant, but the final three words were in Old Khanum, an ancient language almost no one spoke anymore, as nearly all the Khanum had gone extinct ages ago; yet they seemed to echo the Emperor’s common dictum, Sen sez imperiya, which roughly translated to You are the Empire, the ancient motto empowering all imperial citizens to make the Empire their own in their own way.

But this message was an inversion of that. Not the standard You are the Empire, but rather…

“ I am the Empire?” I said out loud.

Malo laughed bleakly. “Apparently!”

“A skull with words in its mouth,” I said. “Stating that it is the Empire…It’s a message, too, clearly. But I can’t make sense of it.”

“If you can make sense of this, Kol, it would make me think you have a worm in your brain.” She lay back on the brick pathway.

“What will you do with the head?” I asked.

“Once we are done testing it, we shall treat it as a body of one fallen in war. We’ll place it in a gilded box, with signs and offerings of reverence from his commanding officers and Iyalet, and have it sent home to his family. They will have already received his lands and dispensation, given that we declared him dead long ago. As if that could ever be enough. Yet still—I am half-tempted to curse you, Kol.”

“Pardon?”

“You have come here and not only not solved the murder of Sujedo—you have revealed more crimes that may be far worse! The only thing we can think to do is haul in every smuggler and jungle ruffian we know and see what they can tell us about this Kaukole’s death—or any movements of this bank robber, should he truly be a smuggler. Though given what we have seen of him so far, I am not optimistic that we shall learn much.” She yawned. “Perhaps Tufwa is a good drawer. Maybe he can sketch his likeness…”

I looked at Malo sympathetically. All her brash barbarism had melted away, and now she was little more than an exhausted girl sprawled in this empty courtyard. Only a little younger than me, but she seemed at that moment very young.

I held out my pipe. “Care for a puff? Might help.”

“Gods, no.” She made the sound of hawking something up and spitting it out. “Though this day is ill fated, I will not resort to smoke. Inhaling fumes is terrible for you. I shall keep to my hina root.”

“Makes your teeth black.”

“So does smoke.”

I shrugged and puffed on my pipe. Again we lapsed into silence, listening to the calls of the Apoths in the bank.

“So, this man…” I said. “This man somehow hears news of the Treasury delegation and keeps close observation of their movements. He figures out when the last member is going to arrive. He kidnaps the fellow and comes into Yarrowdale and spends the entire day pretending to be this man, just so he can get into the Treasury vault—through means we still can’t comprehend. Yet he doesn’t just take his prize, whatever it was. Instead, he very calmly places a withered, severed head in the box, along with his inscrutable note. Then he shuts it, returns to his masquerade as Sujedo…and then fabricates his own murder before vanishing into thin air. Is that the full spill of it?”

A dreary silence as Malo thought. “It seems so,” she said.

I took one last puff of my pipe, then tapped it out on the bricks. “All for healing grafts,” I said. “For a cough. It makes no damned sense.”

“Perhaps he knows someone who is sick?” said Malo.

“I doubt it.” I stood, dusted myself off, and carefully stowed the remainder of my pipe away.

“Then what are you thinking?” Malo asked.

“I think something is wrong,” I said. “But I don’t yet know what.” Then I bade her good night and started back up the path to Ana’s lodgings.