Page 28

Chapter 28

“I…I was assigned here nearly thirty years ago,” Thelenai began quietly. “I was a hypokratos officer in Yarrowdale when the Shroud was originally built, and I contributed designs to nearly all the subsequent expansions. Now it encompasses the whole of my duties. It is my strange child, in a way, and I its mother. And…to many people, the Shroud is a marvelous achievement. To some, it is almost a holy site.” She paused. “But what few see is that everything about the Shroud is so vulnerable. It depends on so much for all to go aright.”

“I assume you mean,” drawled Ana, “it is rather obviously bad for the entire Empire to depend on slaughtering and bleeding these tremendous, horrible beasts once a year…”

“Yes,” said Ghrelin, his voice as quiet as a breeze. “But it’s even worse than that. Extracting the qudaydin kani is one thing. Storing it is yet another. But it is fragile in other ways, too.”

“The location of it all,” said Thelenai. “The hostility of the Yarrow king, and the constant smugglers. But the sheer distance is troublesome. The larger shipments cannot be shipped at all during the dry seasons, and so many reagents degrade. Though few Apoths admit it, the conclusion is obvious.”

“The Empire has outgrown the Shroud,” said Ghrelin. “And Yarrowdale. It cannot function as it has for much longer.”

The two Apoths leaned back in their seats, a look of miserable relief on their faces, like they’d both confessed to some horrible sin.

“Yes, yes,” said Ana, dismissive. “That is why you sought the marrow. Correct?”

“True,” said Thelenai. “The…the marrow is a cylinder of spongy bone resting in the inner chambers of their anatomy, you see. When the leviathan is brought to the Shroud, we first bleed it of its most dangerous ichors, and the marrow is saved for last. That is where the kani is found. That is what we drain, and extract. That is why Yarrowdale exists.”

“The Senate of the Sanctum authorized a research project here in Yarrowdale just over a decade ago,” said Ghrelin, his voice growing fragile, “to answer one question—what if we could extract not only the blood but the marrow itself ? What if we could bathe it in nutrients and maintain it so it kept producing the blood well after the titan has died?”

“This was your secret task, then?” asked Ana. “To remove an organ from a leviathan and keep it alive, like a child trapping a frog in a pot?”

“Your comparison is crude,” said Thelenai, “but apt. We have kept our labors secret, for obvious reasons—if the king of Yarrow were to find out we were laboring in his backyard to render his entire kingdom irrelevant to the Empire, it would be politically destabilizing. But…if we achieved this feat, the effects would go well beyond ridding us of the king.”

“How so?” asked Ana.

“Many reagents decay during the long journey through the canals,” explained Ghrelin. “Which makes many grafts impossible. If we could remove the marrow, stabilize it, and ship it into the inner rings, we could produce kani at scale, and onsite! Close to where it would be used. We could even duplicate the marrow, perhaps, like taking cuttings from a plant, and grow more specimens. And with this, we could change all the Empire.”

“Healing grafts and suffusions you can scarcely imagine,” said Thelenai. “We could end the plague of sterility that comes with so many alterations. Bring about an age of abundance like when the first Khanum emerged from the valley in the ancient days and changed all the world before them.”

“We could even heal our Sublimes,” said Ghrelin. “Many of us are plagued by mental afflictions as we grow old and lead short lives. With an abundance of kani, we could change even that.”

I had listened to all this with a mix of wonder and horror, but that caught my attention. I had seen engravers grow old and mad well before their natural age, afflicted by hallucinations and dreams; to hear that the Empire could be laboring even now to save me from that fate filled me with wonder.

Ana’s cold voice cut in. “Remarkable,” she said flatly. “So. Why isn’t this wonderful world achieved?”

“Because it is a logistical nightmare,” sighed Thelenai. “How could we safely extract, contain, and ship the marrow itself, which continually excretes titan’s blood in its purest form? It would be like trying to hold a flaming coal without burning your hand, or snuffing it out.”

“We p-partly solved the problem,” stammered Ghrelin. “For we Apoths already possessed arts of preserving pieces of the dead…”

Malo spoke up: “Ah! You wish to use ossuary moss, don’t you? You’re trying to bind it up in ossuary moss, just like we do for our dead.”

A fleeting smile from Thelenai. “Indeed. By carefully injecting the organ with an advanced strain of oli muk —or ossuary moss, as you refer to it—we could wrap up the marrow like a fly in a spider’s web and keep it preserved indefinitely. We had to do it in the right sequence, but…but if we could figure that out, then the work could proceed.”

Now it was Ana’s turn to sit up. She fumbled blindly about on the table and stuck a finger in the parchment of symbols I’d drawn for her minutes ago. “And that’s what this is, isn’t it? This isn’t some damned code. This is the process you designed to bind up the marrow.”

“Correct,” said Thelenai. “The symbols you witnessed, Signums, show when and where to inject the moss to preserve the tissue. Indeed, it is the process we’ve had the most success with. But it took tremendous effort, years of toil, to get even there.”

“Why?” asked Ana impatiently.

“Because as I told you when we last met,” said Ghrelin, “each leviathan is always different. No two are alike. We suspect that they have evolved to change continuously, adapting to new forms—and that, perhaps, is why their blood is so powerfully transmutational.”

“But this means the marrow, too, is always different,” said Thelenai. “Biologically different in shape, density, nature…so each extraction had to be different. We needed a way of reading the randomness. Only then could we succeed.”

Thelenai swallowed. Her face looked terrifically aged now, as if saying these words drained the very life from her flesh.

“What we needed,” she said finally, “was a different way of looking at it. A different type of mind. That is why we produced augury. And that changed everything.”

—

“Augury…” murmured Ana. “What is this augury? I do not know of it.”

“It is…a type of alteration,” continued Thelenai slowly. “It is produced as a black pellet, placed underneath the tongue to dissolve as you slumber. But it alters the human mind, as opposed to flesh.”

“A new type of Sublime, ma’am?” I asked. “A suffusion that changes what you are, how you think?”

“No,” said Thelenai. “No, not like what was done to you or me, Kol. It is more like a graft, or perhaps a mood graft, bestowing a temporary effect. One that works only upon axioms—and grants those who consume it an unusually heightened mental state.”

“Ahh…” Ana steepled her fingers beneath her nose. “Let me guess,” she whispered. “This graft, this augury…did it grant people unusual pattern-identifying abilities?”

Thelenai and Ghrelin exchanged a bleak look.

“You have it exactly,” muttered Thelenai.

“Under the effects of augury, any normal axiom’s cerebral capacities are magnified,” said Ghrelin. “They attain a stunning capability to rapidly analyze, dissect, and deduce marvelously accurate predictions, about the most complicated of phenomena, from the barest shreds of evidence or data.”

“They were instrumental in our progress,” said Thelenai. “The physiology of the leviathans is so unpredictable, so dangerous, and so random—only the augurs could make sense of it.”

“Then if this augury graft was so successful, ma’am,” Ana asked, “why is it not known? Why isn’t it used across the Empire, to predict all the ills of the world?”

The two Apoths hesitated.

“I should guess,” muttered Malo, “that it had some unintended effects…”

“Yes,” said Thelenai quietly. “If an axiom remained in a high state of augury for more than three years, they began to exhibit…afflictions.”

“Apophenia being the worst, and most notable,” said Ghrelin. “An uncontrollable, debilitating impulse to spy patterns in everything. ”

I glanced at Ana, but she only smiled and wryly said, “Oh, I’m familiar with that one…”

“But perhaps not to the extent of this,” said Thelenai. “Some augurs would sit in their rooms, studying the bricks in the wall, trying to comprehend which spot of earth they came from, and grow so absorbed in the task that they nearly starved to death.”

“Others became unreasonable,” said Ghrelin. “They believed they had identified some horrible motivation in the behaviors of others. They grew paranoid, mistrustful.”

“Enough effects, then,” said Ana, “that this augury was never approved for use. Yes?”

“Correct,” said Ghrelin slowly. “It…was not approved for use in the Empire.”

The silence lingered. Ghrelin looked to Thelenai, his painted features full of anguish.

“Ohh,” said Ana slowly. “Use in the Empire. But…Yarrowdale is not technically the Empire. Is that it?”

“True,” said Thelenai softly. “It is not.”

At that, Ana gave a great, exasperated sigh and said, “Including this Pyktis, then?”

Thelenai’s green eyes glimmered like she was close to tears. Then she whispered, “We are a different character of Apoths here. Higher, stronger, nobler. They had to pass many tests. And…and they only participated if they wished to. We did not force anyone’s consent. They could have stopped any time.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sakes,” snarled Ana. “For fuck’s sakes! You have damned us all with your high-minded hypocrisy, woman! Do you comprehend that?”

“Wh-what?” I said, startled. “What do you mean?”

“Is it not obvious, Din?” Ana snapped. “Thelenai has been operating her own little trial run of an enormously advanced, unapproved graft that augments axioms until they can predict almost anything. That’s the secret they’ve been hiding from us! She’s done a very good job of keeping it off the books—until now, because one of her altered axioms has apparently gone stark raving mad! And now we have a preposterously brilliant madman skulking about the jungle—and he is using those powers of prediction for slaughter and sabotage. That is how he’s done all this—and that is why we cannot catch him!” She sat back, furious and fuming. “Well. Well! This is going to be a fucking tricky one, and no mistake!”