Page 44

Chapter 44

I kept staring up at the giant, flowering citadel above as we approached; so much so that it was quite the surprise when the entire ship was hosed down with reagents so acrid they made the air shiver, and I could hardly see three span in front of my face.

All fell to movement and chaos as the dripping workers unloaded the cargo. Ghrelin and I worked our way around them until we climbed a set of steps. I glanced back only once to see that the world beyond was a shimmering, green smear, as if I saw the horizon through the thickest of tinted glass.

Four guards awaited us at the top of the stairs, each bound in algaecloth and wearing warding helms. “Immunis Ghrelin?” asked one—a militis, judging by the markings on their suit. “And Signum Kol?”

We nodded, and the four guards saluted.

“I am Militis Torgay,” said the one who’d spoken, who bowed. Though sex was difficult to determine given our suits, I believed her to be female. “I will be accompanying you on your journey today and shall first escort you to the western transport bays, where the preparations for transport are taking place. Are you ready to depart, sir?”

A dribbling sound echoed from above. I glanced up to see a bulging, pale white wall of flesh suddenly flex and retract within a crevice of brick.

“Ahh—yes,” I said. “Yes, I…think I am?”

“Excellent,” she said brightly. “Follow me, please, sir.”

We entered a tall steel door set in the side of the citadel, and from there the comparison to an ant mound became even stronger: though the flooring within was mostly level, the passageways resembled bowel-like chambers or tunnels more than an orderly hall of an imperial fortress. Teams of workers in Apoth red algaeoil suits poured about us, rushing down a twist of tunnel or emerging from hidden doors to go about their duties. I could see no faces, just warding helms, and steam-fogged glass, and the occasional glimpse of a panicked eye.

“Very busy here, sir,” said Torgay. “Though I’m sure you understand.” A sidelong glance. “You have been fully briefed, I assume?”

Ghrelin’s voice, soft and hushed: “He has been, Militis.”

Torgay shook her helmeted head. “Still a bit stunned that word is being shared shoreside. Even here, that shipment is a deadly secret.”

“And I will keep it.” I wished to add— If I manage to leave here alive —but did not say this.

“So I hope,” said Torgay. “The shipment reagents are just ahead. It is not far!”

We wound through one intestinal passageway and came to a great door wrought of iron and stonewood. Torgay undid its heavy latches, pushed it open, then bowed, bidding us enter.

The chamber within was akin to a massive, rippling orb, made of a strain of fretvine whose fibers more resembled stone than bark. Watery green light filtered down from above, where open windows looked up on the shimmering envelope of the Shroud. Stacked all about us were reagent crates. Nearly a dozen Apoths were clambering over the boxes like goats on a rocky cliff. Each one carried a caged set of plants like a priest might a thurible, waving the clutches of ferns and mosses over each crate and carefully inspecting their leaves and curls.

Ghrelin’s voice was a whisper in the dark: “We check them now, to confirm that our enemy has not sabotaged them, for these shall all accompany our gift on its travels. It’s rather like the funeral rites of the emperors of old, perhaps, transported up the Asigis on barges painted purest white and attended by their greatest possessions…”

I swallowed, unnerved both by this place and by the tenor of his voice. Perhaps the grafts he’d consumed accounted for his strangeness. “What are these reagents?”

“Many things. Nutrients. Stimulants for the unique strain of oli muk, the ossuary moss that binds the marrow. And contingency germinations should the excised sample grow unstable.”

“How likely is that?”

A wry, weak chuckle. “Greater than I prefer. But that would always be my answer, Kol.”

I turned about, gazing at the Apoths doing their work. “They’ve found no sign of tampering on any of the crates in here?”

“No, sir,” said Militis Torgay. “But there are four other chambers just like this one, of course.”

“There are four others? How large will this vessel be?”

“It shall be borne within an imperial hydricyst,” said Ghrelin, “the second largest of our seagoing ships, two hundred span long and seventy-five span wide. It shall dock in Yarrowdale briefly to stock up on simple goods—rope, water, food for the crew—and then it shall come to the Shroud to be adjusted. From thence it shall be less like a ship and more like a floating manufactuary, with all these reagents and precursors and compounds flowing within. All shall be part of a system designed to do one thing—to keep our gift sleeping soundly in its bed of bone, until it comes to the port city of Qapqa, on the River Asigis. There it shall be transferred again to barges of a similar type, but more suited to riverwork—for we control the whole of the Asigis.” His words grew soft and sad. “Strange that we control that long river but not the canals of our own making.”

We continued to the next chamber, and the next, each stocked with cargo crates and crawling with Apoths and their telltale plants.

“How much will this all cost, sir?” I asked.

“Cost?” said Ghrelin. “The cost is so great it’s nigh beyond thought. You look now upon the product of thousands of hours of labor, which are themselves the product of thousands of grafts and suffusions and augmentations to make the people capable of making them. And this hardly speaks at all to the cost of life —how many people have we lost on the Shroud this year alone, Torgay?”

“Eleven,” she said softly. “Two augurs and nine reagent mesinomies, sir.”

“And I myself know the full number of folk who perished to pursue the marrow,” said Ghrelin. “We sing their names even now in the annals of the Apoths, and here on the Shroud, on the days of remembrance. Their families shall be endowed with dispensations and lands, but…in many ways we have yet to compensate them enough. For each of them perished in the pursuit of this great goal—to control that which is uncontrollable and bring safety and healing to thousands. A future so much better than this present it is like a foreign country to me.” He stopped, his shoulders anointed with rippling green. “Would you like to see it now, Signum?” he whispered.

“See what, sir?”

“The dark miracle we have trapped, the fruit of all our sorrowful labors.”

I looked to Torgay, but she did not meet my eyes.

“Come,” said Ghrelin. “Come, Kol, and see!”

—

Ghrelin took me to a long stone passageway. “It sleeps, you see,” he whispered as we walked it. “Like a baby. Silent yet fitful, always threatening to wake.”

The hallway ended in a stonewood door that had been reinforced many times over, with a viewing hatch positioned in the center. I gazed at it, my skin crawling and my suit boiling with heat.

Ghrelin nodded to the hatch. “There it lies. Look! Look upon it and know that it is real.”

I walked up to the hatch, opened it, and peered through.

Within lay another curving, rippling spherical chamber wrought of stony fretvine, again lit by the swirling green light of the Shroud above. To my confusion, it appeared to be sleeting within the room: thick, white flakes danced about in the darkness, churning and swirling as they rippled through the green light.

“Sir,” I said. “What is…”

“Petals,” said Ghrelin. “Petals of the kyap tree blossom. They are light and plentiful—and shall be the first to warp, should the marrow’s containment fail. How many times I have looked within a chamber like this, and seen them change color, or grow heavy and fail to dance on the air. Then our prize’s bony cradle would bloom with curious growths, and sprout teeth and ribs, and then we were forced to burn the entire creation and await the next wet season. But look past the flowers now! See past their drifts, Kol!”

I narrowed my eyes, peering through the snowstorm of flower petals. Standing in the center of the chamber was a tall frame of stonewood, fifteen span wide and long. Hanging within it was a weblike array of thick, ropy, coiling shoots of a material that resembled ossuary moss, yet it had a metallic sheen to it. And there, in the middle of the spiderweb of shining moss, sat a growth: a lump, a curious, misshapen tumor, five span tall and wide, shaped almost like a calf’s kidney. It sat suspended in the web, entombed in the metallic moss, yet unless I was mistaken, very occasionally, the lump would…

Shake. Vibrate. Quiver. Like an egg just before its hatching.

“Do you see the moss?” whispered Ghrelin beside me. “How it shimmers? It is a breed we created specifically for this purpose, fed with iron deposits to line its bark, which already had the nature of stone. Only this can form the sheath that resists the kani and the many alterations and mutations of the titan’s blood. And yet even still, it stirs. Do you see?”

The gleaming lump trembled again, like a lyre string gently plucked. A bulge emerged in the silvery carapace, like a bubble about to burst, but then it froze, and shrank, yet did not vanish.

“I do,” I said softly.

“In that shell lies the future, Kol. Some are so bold as to call it the Fifth Empire—a nigh sacrilegious thing, as new eras are only anointed at the death of an emperor! And yet, if he were here, I feel Emperor Daavir might agree…”

I pulled my eye away from the hatch and shut it, my blood buzzing in my veins.

“Thirty-two,” said Ghrelin to me.

“Sir?”

“Thirty-two augurs died to bring us that treasure,” he said. “And how I weep for each of them. But once the count was thirty- three …for we thought Pyktis dead, didn’t we, Kol? Yet now we know otherwise.”

I said nothing, haunted by the sight of the marrow suspended in the dark among the dancing flowers.

“Strange, that he intends to make a weapon of the thing he once fought to procure,” said Ghrelin somberly. “Our deliverance, but his armament. Now—are you ready to speak to those beings who secured that prize?”