Page 3

Chapter 3

Yarrowdale was a port town, gripping the Bay of Yarrow like a growth of barnacles about the curve of a cliff, then funneling south to cling to the Great Canals linking the bay to the River Asigis, and all the wealth of the Empire beyond. I had viewed many maps of the city during my trip here, engraving the layout in my mind. As we exited the ossuary and started off, I summoned them out of my memory.

The rambling sprawl mostly fell into three distinct pieces, moving from southeast to northwest along the side of the bay. At the southeast end was New Town, built by and for the many Iyalets of the Empire, for there they refined and shipped out countless priceless precursors and reagents through the canals. Northwest of that was Old Town, the original home of the Yarrow kings and their folk, though they had left that place long ago. And finally there was the High City, built in the ranges far northwest of that, where the current Yarrow king resided with all of his royal retinue, removed from the bustle of industry that now consumed the land of his ancestors.

The ossuary, being an Apoth facility, was situated in New Town, and as Malo and I passed through it the place seemed all cheerful, rambling roofs and rollicking movement, the damp lanes packed with tradesfolk and pack animals and imperial officers—mostly Apoths, going by the rivers of crimson cloaks surging about me. Tall, flowering fretvine buildings were piled up on either side of the street, the sea-facing sides blooming with bright green moss, like slices of toast layered with a curiously green butter. A band of pipers and drummers played at a crossroads ahead, and danced merrily when tossed a talint.

It was much like many imperial cities I had seen in my service, in other words, yet every path sloped down to the north, toward the Bay of Yarrow. And though the bay was hidden from my view, the awareness of the ocean was all about me: the murmur of waves, the scent of salt and seaweed on the air, and the hot, rumbling winds that came coursing down from the east.

I shuddered as we walked. It had been over a year since I’d ventured this close to the sea. Even though these waters were different from those in the East, I wished to look away from them.

“Something wrong?” asked Malo.

“I don’t much like the sea,” I muttered. “Nor being so close to it.”

“Ahh. You are a true imperial, then, eh?” she said.

I shot a glare at her and wiped my brow. “And you are not?”

“I am Yarrow, born and raised,” she said. She waved at the jungle-draped hills about us. “For better or worse. But do not fret yourself. Though we’re seaside and the wet season approaches, we’ve not had a living leviathan in Yarrowdale since before memory.”

I suppressed another shudder, now at one word of hers in particular: living.

—

It took nearly an hour of walking to reach Old Town. There the fretvine houses of New Town receded, and in their place stood tall, somber buildings of pale stone all stained faint green. Stone buildings were quite rare in the Empire, and these were of beautiful make, with a coral design running atop their roofs and coiling about their columns; yet many leaned at angles, or slumped in places, pooling water on their porches and overflowing with bundles of dark green growth.

“This is Old Town?” I asked dubiously.

“Used to be the high seat of Yarrow, many years back,” said Malo. “The place of the king and his noble court. Do you not find it impressive?”

I eyed a tumorous growth of mold crawling up one wall. “It seems rather lived in.”

“That is one term for it,” she conceded. “The craftsmen of the old courts grew these towers from a type of sand, full of tiny bugs. You could add things to the sand, put it in a mold, and the bugs within would make it harden into that shape. But the stone did not age well. Didn’t settle right. And many things leaned.”

I dodged a stream of water trickling down from the roofs. “So I see.”

“Yes. Then the Empire came, and made their deal with the king, and bought the land here. The Yarrow court abandoned this place, moving to the high holy city above, and took with them the arts of how to maintain these stones. Now it rots. As do all their people who dwell here.”

“The king simply left his people here? With no arrangements?”

“Yes?”

“Why would he do so?”

She paused and looked back at me, studying my face as if suddenly worried I was some reckless cretin. Then she shook her head and we continued on.

I followed her through the warrens. There was a somber air in this place: the people here were thin and unhealthy, and there was the ever-present echo of coughing.

A thought occurred to me.

“Beg pardon,” I said. “But—the Treasury delegation was lodged here ?”

“It’s as I told you.” Malo grunted as we climbed a short, awkward stair. “No one loves the tax man, Kol. Don’t want him to stay, stick him somewhere shit. The king of Yarrow apparently delights in torturing the Treasury officers they send to speak with him, and requested they stay here. Now—step fast. We are in a dangerous area. I don’t want anyone seeing your very pretty face, assuming you’re a rich man who paid for the shaping of it, and knifing you for your talints.”

“I did not pay for my face,” I said, nettled, but Malo was already moving.

—

We finally came to a tall stone building, rising high above the leaning sprawl of Old Town. It was easily the finest of the stone towers, spanning six stories, with an ornate, coral skin dotted with many small windows, yet despite its scale and artistry, it, too, was green with fungus and greatly aged by the coastal weather.

“That was his room,” Malo said, pointing. “Up there.”

I looked up, shadowed my eyes with a hand, and squinted. She appeared to be pointing at one window at the very top.

“Sujedo…was housed in that highest room?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“So he didn’t just disappear from a locked room,” I sighed, “but from a locked room four hundred span off the ground.”

“Thereabout. Quite a trick, no? Plucking a man from such a high room, with the windows locked and all, and no one saw nor heard a thing…I cannot ken it.”

I slid a shootstraw pipe from my pocket, stuck it in my mouth, and chewed on it, letting the taste of the tobacco calm my mind and stomach. “And I suppose he didn’t just fall out, being as a body striking the ground tends to produce a lot of noise and notice.”

“And a big stain,” she added. “Of which we have found none. Nor can I smell blood anywhere about this place—except within Sujedo’s rooms.”

I sniffed my vial, engraving this sight, and we entered the tower.

The rooms were guarded by three Apoth militii, who stood gawking in the hallways as Malo unlocked and opened the door to the dead man’s rooms for me. I paused in the entryway, taking it in. It must have been a stately place once, yet now it was musty and sodden. Rivulets of water wriggled across the rounded ceiling, leaving trails of mold in their wake like the slime of snails. Running along the curving outer wall of the suite of rooms were six rounded windows peering southeast, all shut, all locked. The doors of the cupboards in the corner were open but their shelves appeared totally bare.

Yet what drew my eye most was the mossbed sitting by the wall, with a dent in the fern pillow, and a wide brown stain crawling across the sheets: perhaps enough blood to fill two sotwine pots, if not more. A serious wound, then. And from the positioning, it would indicate a wound to the torso, perhaps the kidneys or liver. Fatal if untreated.

I grunted, thinking. Then I noticed: merely standing in the hall made me put more weight on my left foot than the right.

I squatted and placed my shootstraw pipe on the floor. It teetered for a moment, then decisively rolled to the left.

“We tilt, yes,” said Malo. “As many buildings in Old Town do. The Imperial Engineers have sworn this building should not fall over anytime soon, but it is worse the higher we go.”

I debated how to proceed. “Who else has been in here so far?” I asked.

“Lots of folk,” said Malo. “Sujedo’s guards. Me and the other Apoth wardens. We confirmed nothing was removed from the rooms. We placed everything we found on the table.”

I put my pipe back in my mouth, suppressing a cringe. Though she surely thought that made my job easier, she was quite wrong.

“Are any of the Treasury delegation members present?” I asked.

“I had instructed them to make themselves available, but apparently they’re busy today. Meeting with the king, you see,” she said with a false awe. “Or, more likely, his many courtly busybodies.”

“Who is lodged on either side of this room?”

“The room to the west is empty. But the room to the east is occupied by Sujedo’s colleague Immunis Valik.”

“Who heard…?”

“Nothing.”

“And the guard outside never saw anyone leave Sujedo’s rooms?”

“Except for maids and servants, no.”

I sucked my teeth for a moment, thinking. I slid my vial from my engraver’s satchel, sniffed it, then stepped inside the room.

First I reviewed the bed, studying the crinkle and bend of the sheets, and the way the fern pillows were piled atop one another.

“The topsheet’s gone,” I said.

“We took it to extract the blood upon it,” explained Malo. “For we’d also found a dribbling of piss in the chamber pot. We distilled the scents of both and found they came from the same man—and, when we found Sujedo’s corpse, we matched it to him. It is his blood, and his piss.”

“And you found no other sign of an intruder? No hair, nor blot of different blood?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Frowning, I moved on.

There was a large table set against one wall, and, as Malo had said, it was piled high with all the items they’d apparently discovered during their search. I grimaced as I approached it. Moving everything from its location made estimating its value to the investigation much more difficult: a knife found hidden behind a pillow is much more interesting than one packed away in a bag. But there was little to be gained from criticizing the work of the locals.

“We have reviewed these as well,” said Malo. “The clothes have a strong smell of citrus and mold. It made figuring out all the scents in here far trickier. I assumed the killer used it to cover their deeds.”

I bent low and sniffed. She was right: there was a bright flash of lime, followed by the unpleasant aroma of rotting wood. Curious.

I sniffed my vial again and reviewed Sujedo’s items one by one. A small mai-lantern; three Treasury uniforms, two standard white, one dress gray; a box of ceremonial heralds, along with cuff fasteners and other jewelry; three belts—two brown, one black; a bag of ashpens; a bag of coins, totaling sixty-three talints and four coppers; and an extensive bag of tinctures and vials of powders, mostly for managing pains of the head. Which made sense: like many in the Treasury, Sujedo had been an axiom—a person cognitively enhanced to be preternaturally talented at calculation—yet such an augmentation came with side effects, often leading to a truncated life span. As my own memory was significantly augmented, I knew this well.

I looked at all this for a long while, engraving each item in my memories. Then my eye fell on the final item on the table: a small rectangular piece of what appeared to be bare iron. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. It was heavy, smooth, and cold.

“Don’t know what that is,” said Malo. “We found it on the floor. Looks like simply a plug of iron.”

I studied it. It was about the length of my finger and seemed wholly unremarkable. Yet it was smooth and unmarred, as if it had been fashioned to be this shape and size. It bothered me.

“Where did you find it?” I asked.

She pointed to the wall with the windows. “Over there.”

I put the piece of iron in my pocket, then went to the wall and studied the floor, then the windows. I’d thought the iron might be a bit of broken component from the window but found nothing: all the shutters were both whole and securely fastened shut, using an iron sliding lock. The locks slid back and forth easily enough, but once they’d been fastened, the window didn’t jostle. Though the rest of the building leaned and leaked, the windows held fast.

I opened one window and stuck my head out, squinting through the sea breeze. A deathly drop yawned below me, made all the more alarming by the tilt of the tower. The idea of anyone going in or out of these windows was utterly mad.

I looked about, squinting again as the ocean breeze struck my face. I could see the cheery peaks of New Town to the east and south, the Apoth works puffing steams and smokes. Canals coiled all about them in slashes and tangles, each teeming with rippling ship sails. To the south and west I glimpsed some of the steaming, sprawling expanse of the jungle, cut through here and there with tiny farms and vales, and then, to the northwest of us, mounted atop a high clutch of hills, was a clutch of bone-white towers.

The High City: the domain of the king of Yarrow. It seemed smaller and more distant than I’d seen in the maps. I couldn’t help but think of it as a spirit kingdom from the stories, a place where playful sprites would lure children with a piper’s song.

Then, with great reluctance, I finally looked north.

The Bay of Yarrow unrolled before me, the afternoon sunlight glinting merrily off the vast waters.

And there, leagues away in the ocean, stood…

Something.

It looked a little like a tent, tall and pointed and swirling like the ones you might find at a canton fair, and though it was quite far away, its enormous scale was still evident, rising hundreds of spans out of the water, taller than anything I’d ever seen save the sea walls of the East. It glowed slightly in the midday sun, a soft, viridine glimmer. I narrowed my eyes, wondering what it was made of; perhaps vines or grasses, so closely grown they seemed to form shifting panes of green glass. Protected within this green cocoon, I knew, was the citadel at its center. I imagined I could almost discern the shape of walls and roofs somewhere within it.

“How bright it looks today,” remarked Malo, joining me at the window. “They say it gets brighter as the wet seasons approach, and darker as the leviathans slumber. The year has worn on faster than I’d thought.”

“That’s the Shroud?” I asked quietly.

“It is. Perhaps the most valuable thing in all of Yarrowdale, and the thing people fear most. And who can blame them? We are taught to fear the leviathans as children. It is only natural to fear their graveyard.”

I gazed at the Shroud, hypnotized by its movements, its surface roiling and undulating in the bright sun. It almost seemed to beckon to me.

“Sujedo didn’t have shit to do with the Shroud,” said Malo. “ Nobody wants anything to do with that, except for we Apoths. Seen enough here?”

I coughed, muttered, “Yes,” and gladly turned away. Though this investigation already offered no end of puzzles, I took solace in knowing it would have little to do with that unearthly place.