Page 42

Chapter 42

Once I’d consumed the grafts, I was stripped yet again, taken to one of their observation chambers, and washed. Then we waited, I sitting there on the floor of the chamber, no more than a blanket to veil my form, and Ana hunched and blindfolded on the other side of the glass.

“Fourteen hours until your departure,” she muttered. “Unless my math has gone awry…Are you still well, Din?”

I gave a vaguely affirmative grunt.

“Not feeling a great gust of high spirits yet?” she asked, grinning. “Perhaps once this is done, I’ll let you try katapra pure. It can make for a very giggly day.”

I gave another grunt, this one far more hostile as the potions in my belly began to affect me. There was the abrupt hypersensitivity of various body parts: a nipple suddenly flaring hot, then the back of one thigh tingly and cold; and, inevitably, the pounding headache, though this one felt chilled and foggy, like a stone from the bottom of a mountain river. The only thing I could feel with any great awareness was the powerful itch of the blotley welt upon the flesh of my arm, which irritated me so much that I couldn’t stop scratching it.

Ana sat up. “Boy—what are you doing there? I can hear you fuss with something. What is it?”

“The blotley sting, ma’am,” I said resentfully.

“What about it?”

“It pains me still.”

She cocked her head. “ Does it? Despite all the healing treatments you’ve received since the creature was applied to you?”

I grunted vaguely.

Ana paused for a very long while, her head crooked on her shoulders. Then she asked, “Tell me, child—how large is this welt? Is it about…about the size of a talint coin, say?”

“I would suppose so. Perhaps smaller, ma’am.”

“How fascinating,” she whispered. “How fascinating. Sometimes the smallest thing can sometimes prove to be of greatest importance…”

I grunted again.

“Hm! You seem rather bitter about this whole thing, Din,” she said. “Usually you’re very prim and proper in your speech.”

“Perhaps it’s on account of that you’re on that side of the glass, ma’am, fully clothed,” I muttered, “and I am here on the other, and am not.”

“Maybe so! But I feel there is something else on your mind. Speak, boy! Speak at will.”

I glowered at her, pulled my blanket tight about me, and said, “It’s the wardens, ma’am. I find it hard to tolerate the idea of abandoning them here, after they’ve served us so. I proposed to Malo the thought of transferring them to the Iudex to reassign them elsewhere…”

“Did you?” Ana said, bemused. “I did not think you such a deft bureaucratic navigator, boy.”

“But Malo doubted if this would work,” I said. “And I understand why. For…the Empire has not always proven willing to allow its people to serve it, or serve it to the best of their powers—even if they may fervently wish to.”

Ana arched her eyebrows at that. “Ohh? Am I to believe, Din, that you now compare your own struggles with those wardens and naukari of Yarrow? That your own stymied hopes of transferring to the Legion make you akin to abandoned warriors and entrapped slaves? That’s really rather rich, isn’t it?”

“I made no such comparison,” I said, blushing.

“No, but the sketch of it is there, under the paint.” She rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “Regarding the wardens and the naukari, I personally find the situation reprehensible. But good governance is about choosing the least bad option. Invading and holding Yarrow, well…is not that. Yet do not despair! There may be options less foul than the ones now presented to us. But as to your own predicament…” She sighed. “You still yearn for the blacks of the Legion, and the sea walls—don’t you? That is where you plan to be, at the end of all this.”

I said nothing.

“Was where we left it not agreeable to you?” she asked. “I told you I’d recommend you to the Legion myself, when the time came.”

I wondered what to say. Yet she had asked me to speak, and speak I would.

“But…I won’t be able to do so,” I said softly. “My father left too many debts, ma’am. And the Legion is far too perilous, you see.”

“Ahh. So—your creditors will call in your debts if they think you risk your life too cavalierly?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.” She sniffed and drummed her knees. “Hm. Would the people who possess all your debts be the Usini Lending Group, Din?”

“Yes,” I said, startled. “How did y—”

“I am aware of them,” she said archly. “Another question, Din—have you been approached here by a representative of the Usini Lending Group? Perhaps one intending to use your stationing to this dangerous canton as an excuse to alter your loans to a ruinous arrangement?”

I hesitated.

“A yes, then. Hmm!” she said. “Fascinating. Now, one final question.” One long finger tapped her cheek. “Back in Talagray…was it a girl? Or a boy, perhaps? I am merely curious, you see.”

I watched her guardedly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean the person you left behind there, of course. For I know you are a sentimental sort, Din. Someone made an impression on you, so much so that you are drawn back to that place. True?”

I swallowed, stung. “There…was a man, yes. But that is not why I wish to serve there and be counted among the Legion.”

“Oh? Then why?”

I sighed and spread my hands. “How can I live knowing that he and thousands like him expose themselves to such danger each day? Why should I be one of the folk they save each year? I wish to save lives in my service, ma’am, and be put to tasks that are much…” I trailed off, unsure what to say.

“More important?” she suggested.

I stayed silent.

She chuckled lowly. “Oh, child…are you not aware you are about to be sent to perhaps the second most dangerous site in the Empire? All because some wretched villain threatens the very foundations of our civilization? Do you truly claim these tasks are so insignificant?”

My face grew hot, and I turned away.

“Oh, no,” she said, sighing. “I do not mean to mock you, Din. For I understand. Justice is not a terribly satisfying task, is it? The Engineer can see a bridge span a river, and marvel at what they made. The Legionnaire can look upon the carcass of a leviathan, and know they’ve saved countless lives. And the Apoth can watch a body mend and heal and change, and smile. But the Iudex…we are not granted such favors.”

She leaned closer to the glass. “This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the Iudex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it. We keep the stain from spreading, yes, but it is never gone. Yet this job is perhaps the most important in all the Iyalets, for without it, well…the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow, where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check. And tell me—does that realm look capable of fighting off a leviathan?”

“No,” I said softly. “But we have the gentry, and many powerful folk in the inner rings. We have our own lords and nobles and kings, don’t we?”

Her pale face shot closer to the glass. “Perhaps! But recall, boy,” she hissed, grinning savagely, “that I traveled to your tiny canton specifically to entrap the most powerful, most corrupt gentryclan in all the Empire—and we did it! We broke their backs, and they stayed broken! And oh, how that deed warms my heart still!”

I fell silent, abashed.

Ana withdrew. All warmth and sympathy was gone from her face now, and when she spoke again, her voice was taut and joyless: “Do you know, Din, that when I first considered you for this job, there was only one manner in which you were deficient. And it was that you weren’t hurt enough.”

“Hurt?”

“Yes. For the most passionate Iudex officers are the ones who’ve been harmed, you see. Those who have been wounded once and watched the wicked go unpunished. It puts a fire in them. Doesn’t make them good at what they do, necessarily, but it does make them…enthusiastic, let us say. Willing to suffer, and bear burdens others could not.” She licked her teeth. “You are not like this, Dinios Kol. You serve to support your family—a decent, dutiful cause, certainly, but one born of desperation, not pain.”

There was the click and groan of a door in the room beyond, then footsteps, many of them.

“For this reason, some in the Iudex doubted my selection of you as assistant,” Ana continued. “They did not feel that you possessed this conviction, and could not succeed. Thus far, they have been proven wrong. We shall see if that trend continues! Personally, I believe that at the end of this, you will still gladly don the blues of the Iudex, rather than the blacks of the Legion.”

“Do you expect me to be harmed, and filled with this vindictive passion you describe?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said. “I think no such thing. Rather, I think you are clever and decent, more than most. You shall learn it all in the end.”

“Learn what, precisely?”

She sighed. “Do you wish me to make a prophecy, like a fortune-teller in a canton fair? Fine. If that will please you, I shall do so.” She thought about it for a moment, and a sly, rather evil grin crossed her face. Then she pressed her thumb to her forehead, assumed a theatrical pose, and said, “You shall soon receive two revelations, Dinios Kol! One very obvious, and one very secret. Together, they shall change the course of your life.”

“Even now, ma’am,” I said, “you make a joke of everything.”

“Oh? Was I joking?” She stood and turned to the approaching gaggle of Apoths. “Ah! Good afternoon. Would one of you be able to assist this poor woman to see Thelenai?”

One officer helped her away. Another placed a small pot within the slot at the bottom of the glass wall and murmured, “For sleep, sir. You shall need it.”

I drank, lay back, and slept.