Chapter 29
Ana had returned to her chambers at the Green Drover during our long trip through the altered forest, though she had taken much of Burav’s library with her.
Dozens of precious, aging parchments had been hung from the walls about her, creating a crackling, dull brown tapestry with the occasional flash of orange from some artistic illuminator.
As I trooped through the door still damp and reeking of decontaminants from the wash the Orbiis had put me through (“Must be thorough, Kol,” Tauri had remarked to me), she hardly looked up from the current object of her attentions: a moldy, disintegrating tome titled Dhe Hisdorieas Sorrowed dhe Daljhene.
“Well?” she purred.
I staggered up to her, said, “Jalin’s dead. Slit his own wrists, ma’am,” and handed her Burav’s journal.
She tugged down her blindfold and peered at it. “And what is that?”
“Burilis Burav’s journal of altering the guiding web.”
“What!” she squawked. She snatched it out of my hands as if it was a collection of her own imprudent correspondence. “And you just found it in the middle of the damned woods?”
“In a tiny cabin laboratory in the woods, ma’am. Though it was in some kind of…Well. Crumbling Daljeni city.”
She gazed, open-mouthed, between the book and myself. “Well, don’t just stand there, you fool of a boy! Speak!”
With a groan of relief, I sat on the chair in the corner and did so.
I had expected Ana to beam with triumph as I described how all her intuitions had proven true, but instead her pale, skeletal face filled with dismay, and she turned the pages of the journal faster and faster, her enhanced fingers seeking out each curl of ink.
“So,” she said softly at the end of my report.
“You have passed through lands long forgotten and looked upon ruins that drifted out of history into myth centuries ago…and yet you have found so little, Din. Jalin Burav left us almost nothing to pursue. There is no sign of who was blackmailing him. He did not leave a note like he did in the cache near the shrine of Gaddar. All we have is this journal…which is a riddle in its own right.”
“Is there anything of use in its pages, ma’am?” I asked.
“Oh, there is much here about Burav’s original experimentation, nearly three decades ago.
He details his clinical method of killing dozens of drokha-cats and then sinking their rotting bodies in a great tank infected with the guiding web.
And many details—precise temperatures, water densities, salinities, and concentrations of fungal detritus that must be present in the blood.
” Her pinkened fingers followed one line of script like an ant scurrying along its trail to its colony.
“There are some facts that are of mild interest. Cranial fruitings always occur precisely three days after death, for example. Nocturnal hallucinations transpire within forty-eight hours after conditioning. But nothing actionable, so to speak.” Her finger stopped moving.
“It is what is not here that is most interesting.”
“Which is…”
“There is no evidence, Din, whatsoever, that Burilis Burav ever trained the web to work upon humans. In fact, as far as I can tell, the word human doesn’t appear even once in this text.”
I stared at the book, perplexed. “So if Burilis Burav didn’t train it to work on humans…then Jalin?”
“An anxious, traumatized boy with absolutely no Apothetikal training? I somewhat doubt it.”
“Then who, ma’am?”
She fell silent, head bowed. “I sense that this answer is, too, not actionable. Not in the near term, and not for the killer we seek. But…” She gazed at me, her yellow eyes bright in her grayish face.
“If I can, I shall show you eventually, Din. You are owed that answer. For what is your duty besides to gaze upon truths most would prefer go ignored? Yet for now, I’ve no idea what to do.
Rest, boy, and give me a moment to think on this. ”
—
I went to the Orbiis office before I ventured out to find Fotia.
Tauri’s officers were hard at work cleansing all their tools—including the wheellock bombards and lypi lances—but Tauri himself came rushing out as I approached, his hair still wet from his own wash.
“Did you show her the journal?” he asked. “What did she say?”
I filled him in on Ana’s response, though I skipped her more dreadful utterings.
He nodded grimly. “I worried that would be the case. We have caught up to Burilis Burav—save, of course, for where he originally found the web. It is the other killer who’s still ahead of us.
” He sighed. “How miserable it is to do so much, and discover all, and yet have nowhere to go! Is this common to your line of work, Kol?”
I conceded that it was sometimes so.
“How dreadful. And if they never strike again?”
A strange look crept into his eyes: something between hunger and terror. It gave me pause, yet I also found it strangely compelling.
“Why, sir?”
“Well. What’s the procedure if they can’t be caught?”
“We’ll conduct inquiries until the Iudex is satisfied. At this point we’ll compile a report and issue it to the canton custodi.”
“So,” said Tauri softly. “You will be here for some time, then.”
“Yes, sir. I suppose so.”
He wiped at his eyes, which suddenly shone with tears. “The decontaminants. Damned things. Bother me for hours after.”
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Yes. No. I am unsure. I suppose nothing will change, then. I will keep surveying these lands. I will keep recording all the flux and shift of all the rot and death from this industry. And some other family shall take up the cause.”
“You wanted it to change.”
“Doesn’t everyone wish for change? But that’s the nature of the Empire, isn’t it.
It’s so big and has so much momentum. Very difficult for it to shift.
I would have thought dozens of deaths would do so.
But perhaps not.” He began the laborious process of tying his hair back in a sloppy bun.
He gazed at me, his eyes still bright with tears—yet I glimpsed a new, strange desperation in them now.
“Do you know what, Kol? I feel that I deserve a soaking.”
“Pardon?”
“A bath, I mean. Something to get all those damned reagents off me. They have a good bathhouse here, of course, for the drovers.”
I met his eyes.
“That’s good to know, sir,” I said.
“If ever I am owed a bath, it is today. Perhaps I shall see you there—should nothing intervene. Yes?”
I watched him go, thinking, my pulse suddenly hot in my ears. Why, I wondered, did such a beautiful thing have to suffer so?
Ana had told me, very explicitly, not to do this. Much too important, and much too smart.
I swallowed, turned, and walked away.
—
I sought my sister at the canton jailhouse, but Seriv confessed she hadn’t been by. “Said she was chasing some Burav drover,” he told me. “Believed he lived south of here now. She had a great fire in her to do so. But she’s not been back yet.”
“I see,” I said.
“What happened today, sir? Did you find anything in the wood? Anything that could give some succor to young Ippeas, specifically? He’s in a low state, I find.”
The sight of Jalin Burav sitting slumped and bleeding on the fountain wall flashed in my mind.
“No,” I said quietly. “Nothing that could help him. And it seems we found nothing of use, Seriv.”
“A tough toss, sir. What will you do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, and left.
I wandered the streets of Lacanthim as I returned to the Green Drover. And yet, somehow, I knew I was not going there. Not back to my chambers, so lined with animal skins and wreathed in bone and horn. Too much of this canton was dead and crumbling. I could not bear it anymore.
That was the problem with temptation. It never let you be: it just stayed there, perched on your shoulder, whispering in your ear.
The bathing halls roiled with steam so greatly that from a distance they had the look of a kitchen full of ricepots, all bubbling and boiling away.
The columns and coils and scrolls of steam came tumbling out, flashing past the bright blue mai-lamps, and though the air was heavy and moist I could hear songs within, and voices, and much merry speaking.
I felt thick and slow and torpid as I approached. It was madness to do this, I knew. Childish foolery to dally so with another during an investigation. And yet, whenever I thought of my own chambers, my mind was doused in the aroma of apricots and spice, and my feet kept moving forward.
“Ah,” said the attendant as I approached. “Your chamber is in the second hall. Bath 23.”
I stared at him, perplexed. “I…”
“Oh, the fellow said you’d be here. Look for a tall, sad-looking chap in blue. And, pardon my saying so, but…that does match you a bit, true?”
I took the key from him and wandered through the corridors, the steaming pools and the saunas, the soaking rooms and the fountains and the little gated meres.
And then, at the very end of one long passageway, a small, rounded wooden door, with a plated sign reading 23 above it; and there, beside the door, a hook with an Orbiis uniform hanging from it, and a pair of shoes below.
I undressed and hung my own uniform. Stepped out of my boots—how my toes ached—and propped my sword in the corner. Then I steeled myself and opened the door.
The flash of steam, and the gleam of a mane of golden hair in the corner. Then a waft of apricot, and spice, and rich earth, and a low, pleased voice: “Ah. There you are.”