Page 8

Chapter 8

Ana proved to be right: as I walked the short distance to the Yarrowdale imperial post station, the city about me was still thriving and thrumming. The manufactuaries and breweries and fermentation stills clung close to the canals, each resembling giant ceramic pots with many little spouts and spigots, each one leaking threads of silvery steam into the night sky. In the sparkling light of the mai-lanterns, the sight reminded me of shrines in the third ring, their cauldrons releasing fumes as worshippers tossed in pellets of faithwood.

I fetched the post—a small bundle of letters that had been rerouted from all over the Empire—and trudged back to our lodgings, a mai-lantern swinging from my hand. I slipped the letters under her door one by one but paused on the third package of parchments, which was slender, thick, and utterly black.

A message from Ana’s commanding officer, surely. She received one about every two months. I shuddered and quickly put it under the door as if the parchment was poisoned. I had only met Ana’s commanding officer once, when he had first offered me my position in the Iudex Special Division, and I fervently wished to avoid meeting him again. I hardly wanted to even touch the man’s writing, if the word man was even appropriate for a being of that nature.

Once this was done, I tottered into my rooms, shut the door, slid off my boots, and set my mai-lantern down on the floor. I rubbed my face, grumbling, and debated the task before me.

You’ve put this off long enough, I thought. No more to it, then.

I slid Madam Poskit’s roll of parchment from my pocket, squatted by my lantern, and read it slowly, squinting to make its tiny writing legible to me.

The terms proved even worse than I could’ve imagined. A full two thirds of my monthly dispensations would now be going to service my father’s debts. Most of the remaining third, of course, would be sent home to support my family, which meant I was now living off a scant handful of talints a day.

I crumpled up the parchment and tossed it away. I would have to grow accustomed to eating rice and lentils until this investigation was over; presuming that this was enough to get Madam Poskit to remove me from the burden of her dreadful liability allowances, that is.

I sat in the dark, longing for something good to savor, if only for a moment.

“Fine,” I whispered. “Fine, fine.”

I went to my bags, opened my satchel, and reached into a tiny compartment in the back. I slid out the slim slip of parchment there, so carefully folded and so carefully stowed away. Then I unfolded it by the mai-lantern with trembling fingers, as if I handled not mere parchment but some holy writ from a sacred tome.

The letters at the top of the parchment did not dance for my accursed eyes, for they were bright and big and black: TRANSFERRAL PETITION FOR THE IYALET OF THE IMPERIAL LEGION.

I gazed at the petition and all my answers written below. I had answered it over the course of many nights, meticulously shaping each letter with each agonizing twirl of the ashpen. An imperial officer could petition to be transferred to another Iyalet only after two years of service in their first assignment; in but a few months I could submit this form and leave Ana for the grand ranks of the Legion.

My heart quickened at the thought of it. Though all the Iyalets of the Empire were admired, it was the Legion that held the greatest respect, for it was the Legion that fought back the leviathans each year, holding them at the sea walls, raining fire and death upon them with bombard and ballista. It was they who bore the entirety of the Empire upon their backs, these noble warriors adorned in black and silver. It was their suffering and toil and service that ensured that our civilization persisted for another season.

Those who donned the sable uniforms saved untold lives every year, whereas I, in the Iudex, merely looked upon the dead, and could do little else.

Yet as my gaze lingered on the parchment in my hands, I knew the time to apply would come and go. The life of a Legionnaire was deadly work, and Madam Poskit’s contract would never allow for such a transfer. No matter how much I’d paid already, I would have to stay alive, and keep paying, and keep serving the Iudex: to deal only in the dead, and the small, petty-hearted people who’d killed them for one foul reason or another, while in the East, along the sea walls, the greatest of us fought and died, and gave for their nation.

I folded up the petition, the parchment creasing at its familiar folds and bends, and stowed it away again in my satchel. Then I sat there in the dark.

I thought of my brief service in Talagray, and the Legionnaires I had known there. One soldier burned bright in my mind: Captain Kepheus Strovi, with whom I’d spent only a handful of days, yet in my augmented mind it felt akin to a lifetime.

I placed my hand on my mossbed and let my eyes flutter in my skull. My thoughts sang with the touch of him, the smell of him. The way he slept so restlessly in bed, as if in combat with his pillow; the slow, lazy, confident smile he wore when facing the day. The caress of his hand, the drip of his sweat, the press of his heel in the small of my back.

My eyes stopped fluttering, and I returned to the present. I leaned my head against the corner of the bed. Not for the first time, I wondered: were such eternal memories a blessing, or a plague?

The sea thundered on the shore outside. The smell of salt filled my chamber.

Rest, Ana had told me, and nothing else.

I slid my boots back on and left.

—

The first sotbar I found in Yarrowdale that night was of a distinctly Apoth bent: there was one table of crooked-looking young princepii, for example, who eagerly reviewed an array of glass tinctures to augment their evening. Many of the other Apoth militii present were Yarrow, with green eyes and thick beards, quaffing common sot with an enthusiasm that bordered on suicidal.

But I was not here to drink. Even though I ambled up to the bar and purchased a small pot of sot, I had other aims tonight.

I gauged the crowd as I sipped. The men here were not to my liking—the Yarrow boys were too bearded, and the Apoth princepii too reedy—so, a bit downcast, I reviewed the women and found some suitable candidates. A few had already cast eyes at me.

I pinned my hair back, took another sip of sotwine, and went to work.

I moved throughout the crowd in slow, familiar steps as I went about my dance: waiting for the right look, the proper fleeting glance, before approaching with a small smile; then, my eyes fluttering, I’d recall the best greeting, the best clever comment; or the right movements, or the right positioning; or when to look them in the eye, or look away; or when to let my hair fall in my face, and when to pin it back again.

To others, the dance might have seemed artful, yet to me, it was routine. I had memorized this method over the past year as I’d moved from place to place: much like picking a lock, some combination of these gestures and exchanges worked to win the right attentions. Or perhaps that was not quite it: perhaps I was more like a man dabbing bloods and scents upon his flesh as he stood before a darkened wood, waiting for some predator within to pounce on him and spirit him away.

The one who moved most boldly was a Yarrow girl, about my own age, pink-skinned and tall and well-built, with a wild mane of fair, frizzy hair, and green-tinted eyes that were no less wild. Her senses had been augmented like Malo’s—there was the telltale purpled flesh about her eyes, nose, and ears, almost as though they’d been painted with purple ink—but I still thought her lovely, or lovely enough. She approached me gladly, the collar of her Apoth uniform unbuttoned and askew, and she gestured to my cup and said in Pithian: “Ki iha mire lai koi hai?”

Though I did not speak Pithian, I caught the nature of the comment and bought her a pot of sot.

We talked, somewhat: she spoke very little imperial standard—her speech was almost entirely monosyllabic—and I knew no Pithian at all. But we laughed at each other’s outsized gestures as we tried to explain ourselves, and each knew what the other was saying.

Finally she leaned close, her green-stained eyes shining, and she said something in Pithian and cackled.

“Ahh. What was that?” I asked, smiling.

A silver-haired medikker nearby rolled his eyes and said, “She said your face is so pretty, but she is worried it is like a small horse.”

“What? She said what now?”

“It is a local expression, and a depraved one at that—she means, she is worried she might crush it while riding it.” He shook his head and muttered, “Damned Yarrows…”

I turned back to her. She was watching me with a greedy gleam in her eyes.

“Can you take me away from here?” I asked.

She grabbed me by the hand, and we left.

—

I’d heard it said that engravers are good lovers, for they remember what people want. I’d come to think this true, not just by the responses I’d witnessed when coupling—for such things, as I knew from my own experience, could be faked—but from how often I was invited back. Yet though I was attentive that evening, and grew passionate when I sensed she desired, and ferocious when she asked, I knew these acts were mere labor I paid for the moment after.

Afterward: when all was spent, and the shuddering grew still, and the sweaty limbs atop my own grew cool. Only then I could hold them and make the world small for me.

No more debts or moneylenders. No more bodies and blood. No more trivial little people burdened with hearts both vicious and dull. Only then, perhaps, the absence of Kepheus would burn a little less bright, and all would be small and controllable.

I lay there with my arm cast across her pale breast, my face lost in her auburn hair. I let the silence steal over me like a cloak.

Suffocate me, I told it, and let me sleep.

I tried very hard not to listen to the voice in the back of my head: the little one that pointed out that Ana had ordered me specifically not to do this; the one that stolidly reminded me that Ana knew that I spent about half my evenings in someone else’s bed, and did not appreciate it.

Let me go, let me go, I told the little voice. I am owed something good, let me go. Yet now sleep would not come.

I sighed where I lay. Then the girl—I realized I still did not even know her name—stirred and rolled over to look at me.

I cracked an eye. Her grin had returned, as had the wild light to her eyes.

“Is all well?” I asked her warily.

She said something in Pithian—“ Ika hora, dubira, aukiha ”—and reached down and took my wick in her hand and massaged it. When it did not respond quickly enough to her liking, she sat up—still grasping me—gave me an appraising look, and nodded at the door and said the four words again.

I took the meaning immediately: Another round, or you can go.

“Ohh,” I said, somewhat crestfallen. “Really?”

Her eyes shone yet more brightly, and the cadence of her massage quickened.

I took a breath, estimating how much work I would have to do to earn peace tonight. “Well. If you insist.”