Chapter 14 #3
I lacked words for the sight of it. It was as if someone had pumped air into a leather sack until it split at its seam.
Her skull parted along the lines that Tauri had painted on it, and as it did so, many thick, black, glistening curls came pouring out, as if her parietal plate was a door and these curls were guests trying to rush inside to avoid a downpour.
I stared in horror and disgust. They were unmistakably fungal stalks, somewhat akin to what one might find growing on the underside of a fallen tree trunk on a walk in the woods.
Yet these moved so quickly, so hungrily, as if eager to escape their prison.
They boiled out of her skull, rising a full span into the air; then they slowed in their ascent; then their surfaces grew slightly hazy and shimmering.
Tauri and his people watched this monstrosity with an interested eye.
“A very sizable postmortem fruiting! It is not mature, however. If it were, you’d see a powder in the air, and the telltale plants would be rioting…
” He leaned closer to the glass, studying the tiny telltale plants hanging from the ceiling.
Some had changed colors, some had perished, and some hadn’t changed at all.
“An interesting set of signals,” Tauri said softly.
“I’ll study it more, but for now…like the other breeds, it seems this variety of the guiding web must be cultivated in fresh water first. It offers no danger if you merely breathe in the spores.
The interstitial phase must reach maturity in order for it to be a threat to the host. But the concentration moss I hung there—it suggests it takes a good bit of consumption for the fungus to be able to cultivate a human.
Repeated doses, delivered over time. A single drop in a cup of wine won’t do, for example.
Yet it is a resilient thing…those browning leaves, right there!
They indicate that the spores would survive great temperatures. ”
“So someone could bake the thing into a fucking cake, and it’d still be effective?” asked Ana.
“So the telltales say. As to how the fungus behaves when it is in the body, the telltales can’t attest. But—it is a very vigorous variety of the web. Unusually powerful. And quite, quite deadly. I expect that if a host wasn’t forced to act out their own demise, they were surely doomed.”
Ana gritted her teeth for a moment. “Given that Zansay required a steady dose of the fungus in order for it to infest her, then I am given to think that the source of her infection was there on the family grounds. And given Burilis Burav’s curious behavior, it makes me think many things…”
“You think she might have been poisoned under his supervision, ma’am,” I said.
“Perhaps so. Though I cannot imagine the reason!” She turned to Tauri.
“Sir—please continue with your labors here and wring every grain of truth out of that dead girl. Din—a carriage, please, and then let’s fetch Seriv.
I don’t care what time of night it is! I intend to kick Burilis Burav out of bed and force him to answer my fucking questions! ”
—
Princeps Seriv proved easy to rouse, for he’d not been sleeping at all.
“Find it hard to sleep these days,” he told us haggardly as he climbed into our carriage, “given the feeling of something festering behind my eyes.” When we reported all we’d discovered to him, he reacted with beleaguered dismay: “Then it’s as we feared.
The man who fashioned the weapon has been wielding it in secret. Let’s see which way he jumps.”
“I admire that attitude, Princeps!” said Ana. “But take care—if he jumps for a whistle or pipe, we must be ready.”
We rode south and then west, along the Great Spoke Road.
I had not ridden in a destrier-driven carriage before, and though the wheels were cunningly wrought of a special fretvine to make the ride feel smoother, the steeds pulling us were far more advanced than the fretvine.
The experience was like being stuffed in a box that was then shoved off a cliff.
Seriv kept attempting to put his pipe in his mouth for a puff, and missing; I kept falling asleep and getting awoken as my head cracked the back panel; and Ana, of course, just sat hunched and muttering.
Whether her rocking was caused by the carriage, her own metronomic twitching, or both, I did not know.
Then she went still. She sniffed once, then twice. “What’s that?” she asked sharply.
“What d’you mean, ma’am?” asked Seriv.
“That smell!” she snapped. “I smell a fume on the air! What is that?”
I sniffed the dank air. Immediately, my nose burned so badly I was forced to sneeze. At the precise same time, our carriage began slowing to a halt, and I heard our carriage pilot crying out, calling to his mounts to stop, stop.
“Something is wrong,” said Ana. “Something is quite wrong…”
Frowning, Seriv opened the shuttered window and stuck his head out. The moment he turned his face to peer southwest, his features lit up with a hellish, bright orange luminescence, and his eyes opened wide with fear.
“Oh, hell,” he whispered. “It all burns! Fire! Fire!” The carriage came to a stop, and he flung open the door and leapt out.
“Din!” said Ana sharply.
“I am to it, ma’am,” I said, and followed.
I felt the heat the instant I moved beyond the walls of our carriage, a low, soft wall of warmth settling over me like a flickering blanket.
My eyes burned greatly, and for a moment I saw only the moon above, which had the look of an aging tea-stain hanging in the churning, smoggy sky.
Then I turned and beheld the lands to the southwest.
We had been coming to the entrance of the Burav main spread, I saw; two tremendous fretvine pillars rose up on either side of the road ahead.
Set between them was the gentry-gate. Its high, slender trellises framed the road stretching through, wandering amid the open, mown lawns—and then there, some two leagues down its length, stood a burning mountain.
No, not a mountain, I saw: a building, a structure, one that had been enormous, five or six stories tall, with two high towers on either end.
Black smoke poured from the building’s windows like velvety curtains pulled out by the wind, and all the air about it danced with sparks and twirling cinders.
Then the night filled up with the ringing of bells: warning bells, tocsin bells, signaling to the populace to awake, awake and take heed.
I absently rubbed tears from my face. How often had I heard the tones of tocsin bells in my service—but I’d not ever expected to do so in the safe, protected third ring of the Empire.
“Din!” hissed Ana’s voice from the carriage.
I tottered over to her, vaguely aware that Seriv was commandeering a destrier from our carriage pilot and intended to speed toward the inferno.
“Is it the Burav estate?” she asked. “Is that what burns?”
“I…believe so, ma’am,” I said faintly.
She cocked her blindfolded head, listening to the tolling of the bells. “Well!” she sighed. “This, I shall say, is quite a fucking complication!”