Page 25

Chapter 25

We did not talk as we sailed away from the camp. We simply sat on the deck, the sun beating on our shoulders, the only sounds the biting flies, the lap of the waves, and the whimperings of our prisoners. No one moved but Malo, who steered, and Tangis, who set to mending the smugglers’ wounds.

“Can we question them?” I asked him.

“Not yet, sir,” said Tangis. “It will take at least an hour or two for my healing grafts to work.”

“You can question them all you like as we sail back to Yarrowdale,” said Malo, flicking the reins. “But you may not get to tell anyone. We shall be put under containment the instant we get close.”

“Because of what we’ve been exposed to,” I said.

“Indeed. We’ll be back to the city soon—easier to go downstream than up—and there we shall be examined and bathed in oils and reagents, and then examined again, and again. If we are lucky, it will not last more than a day or so.” She shuddered. “I hope I get a medikker with warm hands this time, and short fingers…”

I glanced back at the few survivors, lying prone on the deck of the boat with Tangis’s healing grafts foaming over their wounds. “And they’ll be taken from us, too, as they could be infected,” I said. “So this will be our only chance to question them for some time.” I grimaced and tapped at the glass bulbs on my helm again. “When can I take this damned thing off?”

“After you pass your blotley test,” Malo said. “Tangis?”

Tangis reached into a cabinet in the side of the boat, slid out a large, heavy metal box, and opened it. Lying within on a bed of white salt were what looked like two dozen insect chrysalises, all brown and withered, each about the size of a finger. Tangis dug in the salt until he found a small wooden tube, and he uncapped it and slid out a little sponge, which he squeezed over each chrysalis, allowing a few drops of fluid to fall on them before repackaging the sponge in the tube.

Quickly the little chrysalises bloomed with a pale red color, and tiny, twitching legs emerged from their undersides. Tangis picked one up with his fingers, approached me, and said, “Roll your sleeve up, please, sir.”

I eyed the twitching little chrysalis. Now that it was close, I could see a suckerlike mouth at one end.

“Ahh—what the hell is that?” I asked.

“A blotley larva,” he said. “Type of highly altered, parasitic fly. Sucks your blood, yes—but they’re very sensitive. Even the slightest trace of contagion within you will kill them.”

I nodded grimly and extended my arm. “So if this thing dies on me, I don’t get to take my helmet off.”

“Just so. It’s a recent development here in Yarrowdale, sir. We’ve a lot more contagion to worry about than other places, you see. Especially the kind that sleeps in your blood unnoticed.” A sour smile. “It’s become one of our most popular exports.”

He stuck the little larva to the inside of my arm. There was a slight pinch, then a dull itch. I watched with grotesque fascination as a translucent cavity within the larva turned a deep crimson, yet the thing did not perish, but kept cheerily sucking away at me.

“So Din is clean, and only giving it a meal,” said Malo.

“How pleasant,” I said. “When will it stop?”

“It won’t,” said Tangis. “This is an altered, unnatural creature, created for this one purpose. It can’t survive in the wild anymore. It can’t even eat properly. If I let it go long enough, it’ll actually start leaking your own blood back into you.” He delicately plucked it off. “But I shall stop it here.”

I rubbed my arm, where a painful, winking, red sore was forming. Tangis moved on, doing the same to the rest of the wardens, along with our four prisoners. All of us passed the gruesome little test, and we eagerly removed our warding helmets.

“It’s a miracle none of us are contaminated,” said Tangis. “I expect that device you spied only dispersed a tiny amount of titan’s blood, sir, just enough to create the faintest dusting…but it was deadly enough.”

There was a dreadful silence at that. I rubbed at the blotley sore on my arm, which was growing steadily more irritated, then drank greedily from a cask of water, desperate to flood my body with moisture.

A cough from one of our prisoners: the man I’d disabled. He moaned and opened his eyes, then gazed around at us, horrified.

“Get him water, and get him up,” I told Tangis. “I’ll need him talking soon.”

—

It was not until early afternoon that our prisoner regained the strength to speak, sipping at Tangis’s cures and grafts and cringing every time the boat shifted. I sat with him and Malo in the stern. He was a skinny, pink-skinned thing, malnourished and miserable and dappled with rashes. Like all Yarrow folk, he had a green hue to his eyes and his teeth, which were just as rotten as those of the Yarrow court.

He spoke not a word of imperial standard, but only Pithian, so I leaned on Malo to translate yet again. Yet she warned me as we began: “These are woodfolk. Swamp-dwellers. They have known a grinding poverty and ignorance that you and I can hardly comprehend. They are considered crude even by the basest folk of the Yarrow realm, even lower than naukari —servants, I mean. It may be difficult to understand such a person, even if I translate well.”

I rubbed at the welt on my arm as I wondered how to start. “What’s his name?” I asked.

She asked him, speaking rapidly in Pithian. He frowned at me mistrustfully, then answered. Malo made an irritated face, then said, “He wants us to call him Latha. It means ‘corpse.’ Because he says he is a dead man.”

“Why?”

She spoke to him, but he remained silent, frowning into his lap. “He won’t say,” she said. “But he did admit he is a member of the Kachu clan—a smuggling gang. One of the larger ones.”

I pondered that. I had no idea how to question someone so otherworldly to me. “Tell him who I am,” I said, “and tell him I’m from the Imperial Iudex, and no harm shall come to him under my protection.”

Malo snorted. “This idiot’s not going to understand that shit.”

“Tell him anyway. In case he’s smarter than he looks.”

She did so, speaking rapidly in Pithian. The man looked absolutely dumbfounded.

“Fine. Ask him what happened back there at the camp,” I said to Malo.

She translated. He was silent for a good while. Then he bowed his head and began weeping and mumbling. Malo did not lean close to listen, I noticed: her augmented hearing likely meant she didn’t haveto.

“He says he doesn’t know,” she explained as he spoke. “Because he wasn’t there. That’s why he’s still alive, along with the others we fought. They went on watch, and came back and found the place…changed. Shouted to the people within the wall of trees and…and they heard nothing, and guessed all within were dead.”

“Does he know why it happened?” I asked. “What we saw back there wasn’t a mistake.”

She spoke to him; Latha shrugged, but when he responded, his face was full of fear.

“He…says he thinks the king came,” Malo said slowly. “And he found them wanting. Not worthy. A…failure? And so he cursed them.”

“The…king?” I asked. “The Yarrow king?”

Malo shook her head. “Can’t be.” She spoke to him, more, and the man hesitated a long time before whispering his response.

“He says it was done by the…the pale king, watcher of the waters, who is different from all other men, for he is blessed with…with great foresight?” She shook her head, confused, and asked him something else, insisting he explain. He responded, pointing at the trees, then the skies, then his face. “The pale king has the invisible eye that predicts all,” she said. “He thinks the king even predicted his capture, and what he says now, every word.”

“You think this man’s mad?” I asked her dubiously. “He doesn’t look mad.”

“Superstitious, yes,” Malo said. “Starving, yes. Ignorant, definitely. But, no, not mad.”

“What does this king look like?” I asked.

Malo asked, and she listened to his murmured answer. “He says he doesn’t know that, either,” she said. “Says the king…wore a mask all the time.” The man jabbed a finger at our warding helms, and he spoke on for a bit. “Like a warding helm. But painted…white? It looked as a skull, he says. The king was never seen without it.”

“This king wore a warding helm at all times?”

“That’s what he says,” said Malo.

I considered this. “When did this king first appear?”

She asked, listened to him speak again, and translated. “Over two years ago,” she said. “He says the king came to them and…hired them? Paid them?”

“Is this pale king working with them, or are they working for him?”

Malo flapped a hand at me impatiently as the man spoke on. “He says…the king emerged from the forest like a spirit from the old days, and spoke to the Kachu clan, and proposed a deal. He would pay them a fortune to steal one shipment of reagents.”

I raised a hand. “Hold there. This king—he spoke Pithian?”

She spoke to Latha, who nodded.

“How well did he speak the language?” I asked. “Clumsily? Perfectly?”

She asked and translated: “Perfectly. Like a native.”

I frowned at this: our quarry this far had seemed an expert in all things imperial. It troubled me to hear me he was also so deft in all things Yarrow. I waved at them to continue.

Latha spoke on, and Malo translated: “The king made the job very simple for them, for he knew everything about the shipment. Where it would be, where it’d be stored, how it’d be guarded. The Kachu clan did this task, and the king was pleased, and…and suggested they become allies. The clan had come to see his wisdom and foresight, and agreed. He would tell them where the shipments would come and how to attack them, and they would do the plundering. Every time, they made a fortune, and grew rich.”

I studied Latha’s fearful face, then glanced at Malo. “Should it be possible for someone to know such things?” I asked.

“No,” she said firmly. “Hell no.”

“Then how did the king know when and where to attack the boats?” I asked.

“Because…the king knew all?” Malo translated uncertainly as Latha spoke. “He knew all things of all people. He could see someone, and look at them, and…know things of them, instantly. Their accomplishments. Their histories. Their sins. The king could look at a man’s walk, he says, and know every person he’d seen that day. From the quickest glance, he could know all. No secret was safe from him.”

I felt a flicker in my heart. The testimony of the guard outside Sujedo’s rooms returned to me: It seemed a clever thing, to know so much from just a glance. I supposed it was just something Sublimes like you could do, sir.

“Ask him if this king ever tapped on things,” I said.

Again, Malo asked for me. The man’s face grew grave. He answered, and she translated. “He says the king did tap,” she said quietly. “Tapped on everything around him. Stones, trees, everything. He wants to know how we knew this.”

I fought a shiver. “How did the king curse them? Does he have any suspicions about what happened?”

Again, Malo asked. “He thinks the king might have gone to…bless them,” she translated. “Give them the medicines and magics of the emperor. But he thinks the smokes became an evil thing instead. The pale king had blessed them before, made them strong and healthy. He’d made some…some tool to suck at? He compares it to a cow’s udder, full of smoke?”

“A percolator,” I said, surprised. “This king made one for them, I suppose. They must have thought he was making the same thing back there in the camp. Ask him where we can find this pale king now.”

She spoke rapidly in Pithian, and Latha hesitated a long while before answering. “He doesn’t know,” she said. “The king would often appear in the night, then vanish just as suddenly. Such was his skill that they almost thought he was a warden, if not a ghost. But…there was a place where they sometimes found him.” She narrowed her eyes as she listened. “A…shrine? The king would dwell there, among the stones. They would come to seek his counsel. At times he would emerge and speak. Others, he would be absent or stayed hidden.”

“Ask him where this shrine is.”

She did so and listened keenly as he answered. “The Midlow,” she said finally. “A stretch of jungle flooded over from the canals, and very swampy. But also not far from here.”

“Then we should go,” I said, “and see for ourselves—yes?”

“We can do so. But whatever waits for us there, we cannot stay long. We must report the clearing back to my superiors, so they can dispose of it. It would be a foolish thing to find a place so corroded and leave it to fester.”

—

We entered the Midlow as late afternoon came on. The sky turned to riotous red with whorls of hazy, peachy pinks. Then the rivers changed to pools, then swamps, and the trees grew heavy with moss, the waters trembling as tiny, black beasts danced in their depths. Finally forms of pale stone emerged from the dark wood, slabs and wedges and huge, curling shelves. I recognized them not as natural rock but the filyra-stone that the Engineers mixed from powder and lime, forming strange, smooth shapes uncommon to the wild.

“They were once dams,” Malo explained. “Made while the canals were dug many years ago.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“When the canals were done and the dams were no longer needed, the Empire pulled them down and let the waters go free again. Now here they sit.”

I gazed at the curious, coiling stone sculptures as we passed through the swamp, feeling as if we were not in the wild but some dripping graveyard, piled with fallen monuments. Even the moss-laden trees had the look of grieving widows wandering the tombs in lace gowns. Then Latha pointed ahead with a trembling finger, whispering directions to Malo: a strangely timorous little psychopomp.

A form emerged from the gloom: a broad arch of filyra-stone, rising from a clutch of trees. It had the look of the bow of a giant ship that had run aground on the muddy shores.

Latha whispered a word. “That’s it,” translated Malo. Sabudara pulled on the seakip reins, and our vessel slowed to a halt. For a great while the wardens simply studied the stone arch and sniffed the air and glanced about: checking for any sign of our quarry, I guessed, or traps.

Then Malo nodded to Sabudara, and the two of them climbed down and entered the muddy waters. They made not for the stone arch but for the network of trees to its east, and there they stepped lightly from root to root, approaching the place silently. I lost them in the gloom, and together we all waited, listening and watching the curling mist.

Then a rough shout: “It is safe. He is not here. Come.”

A warden flicked the reins, and we approached slowly. The site I’d glimpsed was not merely an arch of stone, I saw, but a small island, surrounded by a wide bank of mud and many intertangled reeds. The filyra-stone arch lay nestled against a rocky hillock, and this formed a wedge of space between the two, creating a wide, shallow cavern. I was vaguely reminded of the lid of an eye, cracking open to peer out at the world.

Yet it was undoubtedly a place of some significance, for all about the opening of the cavern stood many stone cairns, each carefully created, many rising as high as my shoulder. Some stacks had been connected to form a narrow arch: a fiendishly impressive bit of engineering whose art I could not divine. It all seemed a spectral sight, ruins within ruins in this dismal place.

I leapt down onto the muddy shores, and Malo emerged from the mists. “There is not much here that I see yet,” she said. “No reagents, no records, no anything. There is a seat, and many of these eerie stone sculptures, but nothing else.”

The cavern yawned open before me. Now that I was close, I saw that most of the gap was veiled with nets of reeds and vines. Positioned in between the two curtains, in the direct center of the cavern, was a set of thick slabs of stones, stacked and arranged in a form that could only have been a chair.

Not a chair, I realized. A throne.

“A pale king,” I said softly. “And there he sat and gave his commands to all who listened. Yet we shall still search it all, true?”

“Of course.” Malo called to her wardens in Pithian, and they clambered down the boat and vanished into the mists about us.

I wandered the totems and cairns about the cavern, searching all I saw while the wardens did the same. The cairns stood upright from some marvelous manipulation of physics—an Imperial Engineer could have hardly done better—and many were covered with vines, which looped about the stacks in brambly bunches.

Yet the vines were adorned with more than leaves. Some had ribbons tied to their twists. Others had bones or even talints or charms threaded about them. A few sported drawings, done on hide or crude parchment, rolled up and stuffed within their curls.

I plucked one out and studied it in the dim light: it appeared to be a drawing of a man, standing within circles, with arrows and blades bouncing off their edges. A plea for sacred protection, perhaps.

“They worshipped him as a god,” said Malo.

“So it seems,” I said. I replaced the drawing, unsure why I did so.

Then I saw one tall cairn on the eastern side of the shore that stood naked, unadorned with vines. I confirmed it was the only one like it; in fact, the soil about it was nearly shorn clear of all growth. I had stepped forward to study it when we heard a shout from the other side of the island.

We walked along the shore and found Sabudara and one other warden, pointing at something trapped in the reeds. As I approached, I caught a powerful scent of rot.

“ Lasa mari, ” said Sabudara. “Dead things. Many.”

I peered at the forms in the reeds. The closer clumps appeared to be the corpses of rats or ground squirrels, yet there were also a few dead fish, pale and swollen, and even the carcass of a snake.

“Not creatures he killed for sustenance,” said Malo. “These died from something else.”

Sabudara then pointed down, closer to the shore. A small cooking cauldron sat half-submerged in the silt and mud, with some broken clay pots about it.

I stooped to examine it. Lying within the cauldron were the muddy remains of large, shelled nuts. They had a waxy sheen even in the dying light of afternoon. Each one was dark brown and bulbous, and capped with a long, drapelike growth that coiled around their shells. My eyes fluttered as I consulted my memories, but I had never seen their like before.

“He’s been boiling these nuts, it seems,” I said. “And left them here.” My gaze shifted to the dead animals floating in the reeds. “The rats ate the remains of these nuts, perhaps, and died. The fish and the snakes tasted the dead rats and died as well.”

“You think he brewed poison?” Malo asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, standing. “But I do think he left something more here.”

“What do you mean?” asked Malo. “We cannot keep searching for hours, not if we need to report the warpings in the clearing.”

“It won’t take long,” I said. I walked to the cairn that bore no vines and shoved it over, sending the stones clattering across the mud. “Provided you have a spade.” I stooped, picked up one of the larger flat stones, and began making scores in the mud where the cairn had stood.

“You think there’s something buried down there?” asked Malo.

“The one stone sculpture with no vines,” I said. “Which means it’s new. So—why?” I stabbed at the mud with the slab of stone again. “ Do you have a spade?”

“Give me a moment,” she said. “I did not realize we’d have to pack an entire camp for this!”

She fetched a tiny spade mostly for putting out campfires, and I made quick work of the soil. Within minutes I felt the tip of the spade stop short on something wooden, and the wardens gathered about me as I hastened to pull it free.

It proved to be a small wooden box, no larger than a hand, tied tight with canal rigger’s twine. I set it on the muddy shore and sat before it to study it.

“Maybe not a good idea to go about opening this man’s shit,” muttered Malo. “I mean—we saw trees turned into fucking tongues back there.”

“It’s been soaking in damp soil for days,” I said. “If it held contagion, it would have bled out by now.”

I cut the twine away with my knife. Then I stepped back, reached forward with the knife’s tip, and flipped the box open.

I stepped back farther, expecting some hiss or pop and a fog of poison to rise up, yet the only thing within the box was a small bundle of cloth, carefully folded.

Again, I stooped and reached out with the knife and parted the folds of cloth. I saw a glittering of silver, then frowned, squatted, and unfolded the rest by hand.

It was a small disc of silver, hard and heavy and cold. It was engraved with the image of a man, grim-faced and sporting a beard in braids, and a narrow circlet set upon his brow.

“Is that a…” said Malo.

I gazed at the large coin, and my eyes began to flutter.

I recalled the morning I’d followed Prificto Kardas to the prison on the outskirts of the city. There I’d met two Yarrow nobles, one of them purple-faced Pavitar, and the other the green-faced Darhi, who’d said to me: It seems a pity for someone with so valiant a task to have come so far, and alone, only to be sent away…I am moved to grant him a token of my favor.

I reached into my pocket and slid out the coin Darhi had given me, for I’d taken care not to discard it. I held it up next to this new coin. The two were exactly alike.

“A Yarrow oathcoin,” I said quietly.

“By Sanctum, it is!” said Malo. “What in hell was he doing with one of those?”

I turned each coin over in my hands. The one we’d just dug up was more scuffed and muddied, but it was clear they were about the same age, with little difference between the two.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be uncommon for a smuggler to snatch up one of these,” I said. “Just as so many other stolen valuables come into their hands.”

“No, for there are far fewer of these than there are grafts in Yarrow! I’d imagine there are no more than…oh, twenty oathcoins in all the realm. That is why I was so surprised when this Darhi gave you one so freely! Yet who could have given our man this?”

“Who would normally give them to a person?”

“Well…a Yarrow noble, a member of the court. But they do not consort with smugglers.”

“So you say,” I said. “And yet, here it is.” I stowed the oathcoins away and walked back along the shore.

—

I returned to our landing spot to wait for the wardens to finish their search. I gazed upon the empty throne, its stone seat blank and smooth, and I imagined a figure sitting there, dressed in rags, a white, skull-like helm atop his head, peering out at his supplicants as they approached his presence.

“I say we are done here,” said Malo. “There is no more to see. But at least we finally found something he did not intend for us to find—true?”

I gazed at the throne a minute longer. Then I turned and walked back to the boat.