Chapter 19 #2
I gazed around the clearing. The forest floor here was blank and lifeless, I noted. The earth was perfectly barren, and terribly smooth. Not a single tree or blade of grass sprouted.
“How was this place made?” I asked. “And the path leading to it?”
“The Apoths. The Orbiis disliked them doing this tremendously—they prefer that everyone keep out of the forest because of…well, what everyone thinks is at its center.”
“The tomb of the Daljen.”
“Yes. But the high families used their influence decades ago and had the Apoths carve paths to some of the statues. They used some kind of reagent to treat the soil, render it infertile. Gaddar’s is one of the easiest to access, really.”
I gazed back at Gaddar, my mind filled with thoughts of paths through the trees, and flashing lights in the leaves, and lost shines, and the words—Calm, calm.
Then it happened again.
Something shifted in my memories. Trembled. Reacted.
A voice whispered in me: I know that face.
I grunted, dismayed, and touched my temple.
“What is it?” asked Fotia.
“I…don’t know,” I muttered. “Or I do, actually. I am remembering something. But I don’t know what.”
“Oh? I thought your kind remembered everything perfectly.”
“I do. But usually I have to think of the memory and summon it, often with scent. More and more, I…I am finding that a few of my memories try to jump out to me of their own accord.”
“Is that normal?”
I did not answer. I forced myself to look at the faded face of Master Gaddar and silently asked—Who are you?
My memories trembled in my head. Then a sensation leaked into my fingers: the feel of something clasped in my hand, or many somethings, small and round and flat and cold.
“A coin?” I said softly and began rummaging in my pocket.
I pulled out a handful of talint coins. It wasn’t until I began to peer at them that I realized what my memories had been responding to.
Each imperial talint coin showed the etched visage of the emperor, of course—but the fifty-talint coin was always different.
The basics were present upon it: the long face of the emperor, the austere eyes, the ever-present imperial credo below, Sen sez imperiya.
Yet in the casting for this specific coin, I’d always felt there was something different about the emperor’s physiology.
His skull was too long, especially at the dome, which rose both too high and too narrowly at the back parietal section. His jawbone was slightly distended, the mandible dipping lower than it ought. And his eyes were a little too sunken, as if the brow had overgrown them.
I fished out the fifty-talint coin, then held it up so it was alongside the features of Master Gaddar. “There’s a resemblance there, yes?” I said softly.
Fotia peered at it. “Oh…so there is. Something about the shape of them. Something not quite…”
She did not say it, but I sensed the word: human.
“No one’s seen the emperor in over two hundred and fifty years,” murmured Fotia. “Hasn’t said a word or stuck his head out of his Sanctum since he went in. But—I wonder…in there, does he look like that strange thing? Or is he even stranger now?”
I put the coin away and thought of Ana, so small and bent. Not for the first time, I wondered—what gifts had been woven into her flesh? Was it a seed, perhaps? And would it one day sprout, and bloom into something terribly alien?
I shook myself. “Let’s check the trees for signs of our killer—if they came this way, that is.”
—
Together we walked the edge of the glade, sniffing our kerchiefs and peering into the leaning spokes of white trees.
“I’ve no idea what I’m looking for, though,” I said softly as we paced. “Would the trees devour any sign of passage? And, more, how would they get through the forest at all?”
“I’ve no idea, either,” said Fotia. “For all I know about this bastard, they float off the ground like an eidolon. Or perhaps some of the trees are false, and vanish at a tou—”
I stopped short, eyes narrowed, my gaze fixated on one patch of shadow in the trees.
“What is it?” asked Fotia.
I pointed into one gap in the trees some ten span deep, and said, “There.”
Fotia squinted. “There what? I don’t see a thing.”
“A footprint. I think. Two of them, perhaps…though there are about a hundred branches between us and that spot. It would tear a fellow to pieces trying to get there—unless you had some way of getting past them. Do you see it?”
“You can see all that in the leaves? Where’d you learn that skill?”
“A fellow officer, in Yarrow. She taught me many uglier things than that.”
“She?” said Fotia wryly. “I’ve no doubt she did.”
“It wasn’t what you think.”
“Isn’t it? I’ve heard what imperial officers get up to as they gallivant about.”
“It was not like that, with her. We were respectful peers who dutifully served in an investigation with the utmost decorum.”
“With her, then. So it was like that with others.”
I ignored her, reached into my satchel, and fumbled about for a tiny mai-lantern I always brought with me.
I slotted in a bit of food for the grub, flicked the lantern a few times, and waited for the little beast to grudgingly awake and begin to flash.
Then I gauged the distance and tossed the lantern into the trees so it landed next to where I’d seen the footprints.
“You’re never getting that back,” said Fotia.
I leaned in—my nerves and pulse protested furiously—and did my utmost to engrave the sight in my memories. “Two footprints. One leading in—and one leading out.”
“By hell…then I was right!” said Fotia. “This was where your Burav killer slipped into and out of Lacanthim, so no one saw them on the road. Yet how in hell did they actually get through the wood? I can’t imagine how they even got from here to where that footprint lies!”
I studied the footprints, then raised my eyes and studied how the pale light filtered through the leaves.
The branches just above the footprints were strangely bent. Whereas many of the trees were interlocking, with twig and bough tangled together to form a wall, these grew at right angles where they became close, as if avoiding each other’s touch.
I looked about, studying the rest of the trees. Nowhere else did the branches grow in such a fashion.
“A path,” I said softly.
“What?” said Fotia.
“There are paths through the wood,” I said. “Secret ones, hidden ones. I don’t know how they’re accessed, but…those branches there, they make me think of the latch of a gate, awaiting a ke—”
Then came a commotion from behind us. We turned to see pilgrims grouping at the entrance to the glade, muttering and staring as something approached. Then Commander Tauri entered.
Tauri stopped at the entrance and looked about.
His eyes were grim, but he wore an algaeoil apparatus about his nose and mouth, similar to the breathing contraption he’d sported when I’d first met him.
He was flanked by an Orbiis militis and a signum, both wearing similar masks.
They studied the trees with a wary eye as if passing through a hostile country.
Tauri’s eye fell on me, and he swiftly crossed the glade to us. He carried a large case in his hand, with several very complex locks.
“Kol,” he said lowly as he grew close. “Have you found anything? Please tell me you haven’t.”
I pointed in at the trees where my lantern lay beside the footprints.
Tauri gazed at it for a long while. Then he waved to his officers and said, “Clear the glade and lock this site down. No one else may enter.”
“Why?” said Fotia. “What’s going on?”
“Is it the web?” I said. “Is there risk of infection?”
Tauri looked Fotia over as though he’d just noticed her. “Who’s this?” he asked me.
“She’s my sister, sir,” I said. “She’s the reason we thought to search here to begin with.”
He looked at me. “She’ll have to go.”
“What?” said Fotia. “You tell me to leave after I led you right to the spot you needed to see?”
“Technically, Kol,” said Tauri to me, “I shouldn’t even let you stay. You are not approved for what is about to happen. I’ll permit you to see this only as a kindness to you and your immunis.”
“See what, sir?” I asked.
He said nothing.
A thrum of panic began to dance behind my heart. I looked at Fotia. “Go,” I said. “I’ll see you after.”
“Will you tell me what you find, at least?” she said. “I mean—these people tried to kill Ip, brother!”
“I’ll tell you if I can,” I said. “Go see my immunis, please. We’re staying at the Green Drover. I’ll find you there after.”
With an anxious look, she turned and slipped away through the shifting blue lights of the glade. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with the Orbiis and the silent figure of Master Gaddar.
—
“Apologies for causing any, ah, family squabbles, Kol,” said Tauri.
“But we’ve larger matters upon us now.” He reached into his coat, then produced another half-face mask and handed it to me.
“You’ll need this. The minted cloths can block a little of the forest’s airs, but they’ll be of no help where we’re going. ”
“And where are we going, sir?” I asked as I affixed the mask to my nose and mouth.
“Into the trees, of course. After our killer.”
Tauri placed his case on the ground, unlocked it with a key from his pocket, and opened it.
Within lay a familiar tool: a reagents thurible and several vials of milky substances.
His two officers knelt about it and began to assemble the apparatus, pouring the reagents into the thurible’s chimney and then setting a bit of sparkwood floating in it.
Then they lit a tiny flare-pot, nursed its blaze until it was fully alight, and dropped the pot into the thurible.
The sparkwood began to sputter and flame. The milky reagent about it hissed and burbled. Then a silvery, shimmering mist began to arise from the thurible’s meshings.