Page 43

Chapter 43

I woke in the dark, and the day proceeded like a dream.

The Apoths came and dressed me, sliding an algaeoil suit over my limbs. I felt none of it, but simply watched my own flesh being maneuvered about like it belonged to someone else. Then they placed the warding helm upon me, fastened it tight, and spoke to me, murmuring commands. Some core of my mind must have understood their words, for I followed them.

There was no word for my existence: the grafts within me were bubbling brightly, and in their froth, time and location lost meaning. Events continued, unrolled, unraveled. I was moving; I heard my own breath hissing in my helm, then the rattle of carriage wheels; I slept; then someone shook me, and I awoke once again.

I was at the shore. The sky was slate-gray and mutinous, the dawning sun a narrow blade of riotous red in the east. I clambered out of the carriage and stumbled along the jetty to the waiting cargo ship, trying to coordinate my arms and legs to move aright. I was lost inside my body, which was lost inside the suit, and the whole of me was lost on this wandering stripe of rocky coast.

There were figures toiling ahead of me, also bound in algaecloth and helms, loading goods and crates onto the cargo ship. I spied one person standing alone and identified him as Immunis Ghrelin by the bars and circle at his shoulder: even in such mad circumstances, the Empire scrupulously maintained rank.

Ghrelin did a double take as I stiffly approached. I saw that his face was unpainted behind his warding helm, yet his eyes crinkled in a smile. Then I heard his voice, faint and wispy through the barriers of our helms: “Good morning, Kol. How goes it? Are you managing it all well?”

“I…am standing, sir,” I heard myself say.

“Are you.” He held up four fingers. “How many fingers do you see here now, Kol?”

“F-four, sir,” I said numbly.

“Oh, good. That was a reasonably fast response, given the katapra in you. And at least you got the answer right.”

I stood limply beside him, watching the workers load their goods. There seemed to be a great number of folk, but I no longer had the faculties to count them.

“So…you are truly no closer to catching him, then?” asked Ghrelin suddenly. There was a desperate note to his voice. “He evades you still?”

“We are closer, sir,” I stammered. “But not close enough.”

“I see…” he said faintly. “Well. I hope this shall help. We will be embarking shortly, and will sail for the northeastern portion of the Shroud, pass through the veil, and dock. You must follow me carefully then, Kol. Do not deviate from my path—is that clear? Some wished to blindfold you for this, but…given that so many preparations for the marrow now take place there, the Shroud is very busy, and the wrong stumble would be disastrous. Is this all clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am told you also wished to review our preparations for transporting the marrow to the inner Empire. We shall do this first, then proceed to the…interview.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was an awkward silence. He turned to face inland. “If you wish to see something of import, however, this pier is most certainly such a place!”

I turned about, woozily staring at the pier, which appeared to be little more than a long strip of wood and stone dangling out into the gray waters, and many fretvine warehouses clumped up together at the shore. “Is it, sir?”

“Oh, yes. You were told of the commander-prificto’s plan to move the marrow, yes? Here is where the ship shall first come to restock, before continuing on to the Shroud. We get so few vessels that sail abroad that this is the only place that can handle a ship of that size—yet it’s hardly ever used, Kol. No reagents have passed through those warehouses in months, and what few wardens we’ve spared to search this place have found not a whiff. Hopefully the Shroud will offer more guidance for you…Regardless, let us board, so we can get comfortable, and wait.”

We did so, I walking wobbily as the cargo boat rocked beneath me. Then we sat and waited. My bones felt heavy where they rested within my flesh. It was something of a struggle just to sit upright.

“Thelenai told you how the interview should proceed, yes?” Ghrelin asked. “I will accompany you to the augurs, and then…I will change. I will be someone different, as the grafts within me take hold.”

Again, I nodded. “You were an augur yourself, sir, weren’t you?” I asked. “What was it like? What should I expect?”

“That’s a little like asking about a half-remembered dream, Signum,” he said. “And more so, former augurs are strictly instructed not to discuss their work within the Shroud. But I suppose I can break policy for this…” His eyes narrowed in a reflective half smile. “In a large group, it is wonderful. So much sharing of information, so much work, so much worth…In smaller groups it is powerfully, curiously intimate. Relationships there are…very different.” A pause, lost in a memory. “Which is all to say, I do not know what to expect. I was an augur long ago, and it is different for each one.”

I gazed at him for a moment, my thoughts lumbering through the channels of my mind. “Has your memory perhaps been altered, sir?” I slurred.

His helmeted head snapped to face me. “What?”

“Y-your memory, sir. My immunis said the Empire can alter some folk, so that they cannot discuss certain subjects, and speculated if it might have been done to you. I have not heard of such a thing truly done, but I wondered if yo—”

“No!” Ghrelin said vehemently. “No, no! No, my memories have not been altered.” He shuddered. “Such a practice exists, certainly, but I can’t comprehend why Dolabra brought it up regarding myself! I personally have never heard of it being implemented, but I can only imagine…”

“Imagine what, sir?”

“Well. That if it were ever truly used, it would be done for secrets far more dreadful than any found here.”

“Than…the Shroud ? There are secrets in the Empire more dangerous than even that, sir?”

Ghrelin was silent. Then I heard a tremendous fluttering, and I looked up and saw the billowing sails unfurling above us. They rippled, caught wind, and snapped into sharp white blades set against the slate-gray sky. A great, curious swimming feeling came over me, like the sky and sea were spinning about the ship.

Ghrelin’s voice echoed from deep within his helm: “We’re leaving.”

I fought to find the shore and saw that he was right: Yarrowdale was receding, the cheery tips of the fretvine cottages growing smaller before my eyes.

—

The cargo ship tumbled out into the gray waters, and soon all of civilization fell to a tiny, rambling thread of black in the distance. Despite the grafts within me, I felt my pulse quicken as the expanse of water between myself and civilization grew. I had never truly grasped the enormity of the sea, this great, swilling, surging blankness. I tried to imagine its depths, to wonder how deep it reached, and then, inevitably, came the question of what might be lying down there on the sea floor, gazing up at me—a drifting giant in repose, perhaps?

We drifted on, and on. Then I heard shouts from the crew, calling to one another to be careful, be ready.

“We come to it,” said Ghrelin quietly. “If you wish to see it, now would be a good moment.”

I turned and looked ahead.

To call it tall, or big, or immense did not come close to capturing the nature of the thing rising from the sea. It was unimaginably colossal, a towering sheath of shimmering green that seemed to fill all the horizon ahead of us. I had glimpsed the distant sea walls in the East, yes, and witnessed the landfall of a leviathan from leagues away, but never had I in all my life been so close to something so enormous. The only thing that could contest its size, I thought, would be the sea itself.

We sailed nearer. The Shroud was not a tent, I realized, nor a structure of gauze or moss, as I’d previously imagined; rather, it was thicker, fleshier, more gelatinous, less akin to fabric or vines and more like some colossal growth of seaweed rising from the waters. Nor was it all one piece, but layered like a flower’s petals, each roll of its husk coiled about the next, its viridine flesh shot through with veins of dark green bubbles.

And it moved. It rippled and shifted, billowing in one long, undulating flex from end to end, over and over. It was so strange, and beautiful, and artful; yet there was a subtle terror to it, and to look upon it set something crawling behind my eyes.

Ghrelin pointed up at its peak. “Do you see that bit there?” he asked. “That arch? I made that. It grew weak after a storm, and they raised me and a few others up on scaffolds, and I planted the grafts and nurtured them over the weeks, and…now look at it. I rather think I did a good job…”

I kept watching as the Shroud rippled, studying the gentle, silent curling of the massive construct.

Then I frowned, my muddy brain struck with a thought.

I glanced at the sails above me and saw that they were tight and firm. The wind was constant, then, and very strong.

I looked back at the Shroud. Its strange billowing, I realized, was not caused by the wind.

“It…it moves, sir,” I said quietly. “It moves on its own.”

Ghrelin said nothing.

“Does it, sir? Am I right?”

“You are,” he said. “I take it you, like many on the shore, have assumed it was shifting in the breeze, like a flag or a standard?”

I was speechless for a moment, transfixed by the thing’s undulations. “I knew it was a living thing,” I said. “But not…quite so alive as this.”

“Yes,” he said. “The Shroud is one organism, Kol, one being. It is one we have created. There is no other like it in this world. We had to make it so, to stem back the bloods of the leviathans.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this, sir?” I asked.

“I believe I did,” he said, bemused. “I told you the Shroud was based upon the tissues of a leviathan. But perhaps I did not make the ramifications of this clear.”

We pounded on. The world tipped and turned again, and the prow of the cargo ship leaned to the right, making a large curve, then back to the left, toward the Shroud.

From this angle I could see that the green sheath was not perfectly symmetrical: the northeastern side of it stretched out, making me think of a gentrywoman’s elaborate gown, fitted with a trailing veil. I thought I could spy enormous chains reaching down from some high, hidden mechanism, linked to the corners of the sweeping portion of the sheath. I imagined the chains retracting, lifting this edge of the Shroud high like the hem of a dress, so that ships could tow in…something.

Something enormous, surely. Something that would lie in the waters there like the spirit maiden from the old tales, floating in her pool, awaiting a kiss to return her to the waking world; yet this maiden, I knew, would be something very different. Something monstrous beyond mention.

“People worshipped them as gods once,” said Ghrelin quietly. “I think of that whenever I make this voyage.”

The great, glimmering skin of the Shroud loomed ahead. My body was slick with sweat, my mouth thick and heavy.

“And I cannot blame them,” Ghrelin continued. “These giant, inexplicable things, thundering ashore, bringing so much death and strangeness with them. That’s what faith and the divine is, isn’t it? A line stretching from little beings like us, to the ineffable, the incomprehensible.”

The wall of the Shroud ahead trembled, like the skin of a drum. Then it split and, shuddering tremendously, it began to draw back. The foamy sea came rushing in to fill it, and I was struck with terror, imagining it to be a mouth. Suddenly I was sure that the Shroud was no imperial creation but rather a leviathan in hiding, this monstrous thing that now opened its maw to consume us.

But then I saw chains at the end of the corners of the split wall of skin, and I realized there was some mechanism inside, shifting back the curtain of Shroud like one might a drawbridge, allowing us within: a smaller version of the massive sheath intended for the titans, perhaps.

“But then we found a way to kill them,” whispered Ghrelin beside me. “Slaughter them and haul their flesh and bones so far from where they once wandered, to…here.”

We passed through the veil, and I beheld the structure within.

It was not a conventional building or a fortress, and though I spied many braids of tissues and tendons about it, neither was it an organism, precisely. Rather, it was a mixing of both, an uncanny, churning, shuddering flower of brick and flesh, bronze and ligament, bone and stone and coiling wood. A bright, tremulous wall of pale flesh would subside into a wall of dull, brown brick, only to then be followed by a hull of plated steel, with tiny, glassy windows stubbling its surface; and all about it were looping pipes and vessels, some wrought of bronze, others of flesh, like tracts of ropy intestine, carrying fluids up and down the hide of the tremendous thing.

And toiling on every layer were tiny, glimmering dots: people, I realized, bound up in crimson algaeoil suits. There were hundreds of them, and I was reminded not of Engineers or officers as much as I was of ants, frantically attempting to strip a chunk of carcass; yet the people did not break or tear the construct, but rather built, and healed. They appeared to be feeding the citadel, mending it, suffusing it with grafts, patching up its wounded flesh, stitching shut any rents or tears, or sealing the hulls where they had rusted or split.

We built this, I thought. We have built this unnatural thing, and it has built us in turn.

The ship sloshed on through the waters, the green veil now behind us, a small pier awaiting ahead.

I heard Ghrelin’s voice continue beside me, whispering, “So I wonder now. I wonder—what does that make us?”

“I…I beg pardon, sir?” I asked.

I turned and saw him smiling sadly at me through the glass of his helm. “What does it mean,” he said, “when the line that once connected us to the inscrutable and ineffable instead coils about, forms a great loop—and then comes back to us?”

The veil of the Shroud closed with a gentle sigh, and all the world turned to green.