Chapter 3
It was a gloomy, melancholy walk to the Lacanthim custodi jail. Part of the gloom came, of course, from the figures all about me: though most of the gentry forces had withdrawn from the city, plenty still remained, and glowered fiercely at all who approached, including myself.
But much of my gloom came from the revelation Ana had just provided to me.
For three years now I had assisted her in her duties and had borne her many burdens without complaint—or, at least, too much complaint.
Yet now I had the burdens of my own augmentations to deal with as well—and all too early, it felt.
How many years of sanity do I have left? Twenty? Thirty? I did not know, but I felt as if a tremendous hourglass had been turned over within me, and each grain tumbled down with the crash of a boulder.
To a certain extent, my melancholy was melodramatic.
Death and madness in the Empire were no unfamiliar things.
Many Legionnaires didn’t live past thirty during their time battling the horrors of the East. High imperials who submitted to the Jurvi di Maerus—the “walk of the wall” that required a citizen to serve at least eight years at the sea walls before they could petition to serve in higher office—fared even worse and often perished before they finished.
An engraver reaching “maturation” at the age of twenty-three was far less bleak than those fates.
And yet it was my fate. Though Ana had been right: I’d fully known these consequences when I’d agreed to become an engraver in the first place.
When I’d taken the Sublime suffusions, I’d ceased being a common member of my species of birth.
Even my skin had turned faintly gray, as was ordinary for those who’d had significant suffusions done to them.
I was as distinct from them as an owl is from a sparrow.
Yet I could not reason away my dread. How strange it was to walk about this farm town feeling as if I had some traitor lurking within my skull, peeping out the backs of my eyes with me.
At least, I thought, I did all this for the right reasons. For my family is better off now.
Or I thought they were, at least. While it was true that I had submitted to serve the Empire to pay off my father’s debts and end my family’s poverty, I had no idea if I’d succeeded.
For the past three years, the only correspondence I’d received regarding my family had been bank notices indicating that the money I’d sent them had been punctually withdrawn.
(Besides, of course, the notice last year of my father’s death, and that had been regarding the costs of his treatment and burial.
Even in death, the man had been little more than a punishing expense.)
Beyond these invoices and notices of accounts, I hadn’t heard a word from my grandmother and sisters.
Nor had I sent them any letters myself. One reason for my silence was the sheer madness of working for Ana, as managing her moods tended to dominate the entirety of my day.
But more, I had come to sense a quiet, bitter resentment in my choice to no longer write to my family.
A trade had taken place: my future for their stability. I was uninterested in their contentment in the same way a slaughtered sow might be uninterested in learning whether its flesh had made for a delicious meal.
Better not to know. Focus on the path ahead, the investigation, and my orders, however mad they might be.
I plodded on into the muddy streets of Lacanthim, feeling uneasy and terribly alone.