Page 23

Chapter 23

It had been a camp, once. That was obvious from the rings of tattered tent shapes, the firepits scattered here and there, and the ramshackle lookout tower on the western side, complete with a quiver of arrows hanging from the tower’s top.

Yet everything had been altered, from the blades of grass to the trunks of the trees at the edges. It was as if all life within this place had been instantly transmuted into something else: I saw trees with leaves akin to tongues, creased and pink and dripping; tents whose fabrics appeared to dissolve into dusty moth wings; firepits sprouting not flame or ash but coiling cairns of flowering fats and bones; grasses and weeds whose shoots were weighed down by not blooms but queer bunches of malformed human teeth, or fleshy lobes akin to ears; a flabby trunk of a tree, its bark fleshlike and patchy, and sprouting thick shocks of curling dark hair; yet worst of all were the people.

And they clearly had been people once. You could tell by the shapes: each had a head, and arms, and the arms were always raised, as if to ward off a blow; yet the bodies had somehow unraveled, turning into wild storms of fishbones, or bundles of warped leathers, or boiling, spidery clouds of gossamer threads, with clutches of teeth suspended in their glistening heads.

I stared about in horror. It was dark within the dome of growth, yet shafts of hazy, amber sunlight came stabbing through in places, shivering with the wind and sometimes illuminating some new horror at the edges of the shadow, or giving those close to me the illusion of movement. It was as if this little leafbound bubble of the world had gone utterly insane.

“By hell,” said Malo. “By hell…”

“I…I am to be sick, I’m sure,” gasped Tangis. “I’ll be sick in my helm, or…or I am mad, I am mad, surely.”

Some of the wardens were crying out or screaming. Sabudara traced signs in the air, signaling to some god for protection.

I fought to keep control of my thoughts, forcing myself to be calm and contained, to see this sight and engrave it.

“This is where it happened,” I whispered. “These people’s abdomens bloom fish bones—for their bellies were full of fish. The firepits overflow with fat or bones, and strange plants—for they must have roasted meats over them, and the residue was dusted with pollen, or molds…”

“By Sanctum,” said Tangis. “Then that would mean…” He counted them silently. “That would mean nigh on forty people met their deaths here, if not more.”

“But—again—how in hell did it happen ?” demanded Malo.

I calmed my mind and looked about the clearing, trying to spy any pattern in the chaos. Unless I was mistaken, the bodies seemed to be raising their arms to protect themselves from some blast, perhaps, and all of them appeared to be fleeing the center of the clearing.

I looked past all the crooked growths and shimmering shadows. There, in the center of the clearing, sat something very curious.

It appeared to be some kind of brewing instrument, resembling a dozen small, interconnected ceramic pots set in a leaning column, stationed over a firepit. The pot on the top featured a chimneyed glass dome, with nearly three dozen brass pipes running from it to the many other pots below. Hanging in the center of the top glass dome was an intricate bit of wiring that looked rather like a tea strainer, as if built to hold some delicate reagent, but now it was empty. It all appeared fabulously complicated to my eye, so much so that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have assembled it here.

I pointed to it. “Have any of you,” I asked, “ever seen a thing like that before?”

A shifting as they all moved to look. Then Tangis’s voice: “No.”

Malo spoke up. “No…but it is fermentation stuff, to be sure.”

“Fermentation?” I asked. “Like the fermentation works, in the center of Yarrowdale?”

“Yes. The type and amount of piping, the nature of the glass…those are all things they make.” Malo glanced at me through her helm. “You think that thing did this? That, what, it bubbled like a teapot, and then just…”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps it is like bombard powder. But instead of showering everything around it with shrapnel, it…changes things. Horribly.”

I narrowed my eyes at the distant device—it was a good two hundred span away—but I thought I could see something placed upright on the ground before it, facing away from us: a large, heavy sheet of some kind, hanging from two sticks shoved deep into the earth. Like a piece of laundry hung out to dry, or perhaps…

“A sign,” I murmured.

“What?” said Malo.

I searched the edges of the clearing. My vision was terrible through the glass of my helm, but I spied a small gap in the far western end and pointed at it. “Malo—do you see that?”

She squinted. “Yes. I see…a hole in the growth. Another one—one we didn’t make.” She turned to me. “Someone else has been here?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I think they went to that device— after all this changed.” My eye lingered on the sheet hanging before it. “They left something for us there. Tangis—is it safe to move about in here?”

“Hell no,” said Tangis. “ Qudaydin kani does burn itself out, so the transmutations eventually stop. Then there’s a moment of peace, before all the warped organisms begin…ah, cross-pollinating, so to speak. Then you can get contagion. A grass that grows on the skin, or a mite that infests the eye, and then the brain…Since we don’t know when this transmutation took place, I can’t say how safe it is now.”

“Yes,” I said, irritated. “But since we’re already in here, Princeps, and exposed to this—would walking about be any more or less dangerous?”

A bleak shrug. “Walk if you please, sir.”

“Malo,” I said. “I’ll need your eyes.”

Grumbling, Malo followed me as we stalked the edge of the clearing until we could see the sheet placed before the device. Malo’s eyes being better, she made sense of it first, and gasped and stopped.

“It’s him!” she whispered.

I pulled my spyglass from my pocket, stuck it to the glass bulb of my helm, and squinted at the sign placed in the grass.

It was not a sheet, but a large piece of hide, scraped thin, and it was not covered in writing but rather a grid of bizarre symbols, twenty-five little black circles with many strokes crossing their edges. Though they looked random to my eyes, each one had been so carefully painted onto the board that it was clear they’d been made with great intent.

I studied each symbol, engraving them in my thoughts. A code, surely, just like the tapping. While I did not have the mind to decipher it, perhaps Ana could.

There were words written at the top of the hide, above the symbols. The handwriting was achingly familiar, the same as the note we’d found in the bank. Yet this one read:

And all the world a savage garden, mindless and raging

I stared at the words. They felt unearthly and threatening in this cursed place.

“Malo,” I said hoarsely, “does any of that make sense to you?”

“Hell no,” Malo said. “But do you have it in that head of yours?”

“I have it.”

“Then let us flee this place, and quickly. I will have to send up a flare when we are close to the city. For we must burn all of this, and all that was ever here.” She cast one more glance around the clearing. “And good riddance to it, I will say.”