Chapter 31
Ana sat on the floor of her chamber, the orange scrap of parchment trapped between her finger and thumb like it bore some secret message in invisible inks.
I stood before her, recounting my bizarre dream, while Tauri paced behind me, hands behind his back.
We had not bothered to hide our deeds that evening: though we could have invented some story and arrived at separate times, the revelation that I was now poisoned and conditioned seemed much more important than any dalliance.
“So,” said Ana softly when I finished. “So, so, so…”
“It is a terrible thing,” said Tauri. “And an impossible thing! How could Kol be poisoned with the web, as well as have his killer’s commands written into him already? I mean, I can’t imagine he got conditioned accidentally, or some such!”
“I don’t find it impossible at all,” said Ana. “Din—you’ve a ewer of water in your bedroom, true?” Then, pointedly: “I mean the bedroom here, in the Green Drover, boy. Go and get it. Let us test it now.”
We did so, hurrying down the hall, fetching it, and testing it there in Ana’s rooms. Instantly, the parchment turned orange.
“Oh, hell,” whispered Tauri.
“I take it that his water, too, bears the fungus?” asked Ana.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said hoarsely. “But…how could they have gotten it—”
“Commander Tauri, sir,” said Ana. “Does the Green Drover draw from the wells you’ve tested so far?”
“N-no? We have focused on the wells near the irrigation systems first. I believe the Drover has its own well and pump belo—”
“Have your people tested the waters of that well?”
“Ahh. No. Not yet.”
Ana waved a hand. “Then let us presume that the well for this establishment is infected,” she said. “As is everyone else in the tavern! I shall need you to rouse your testing team, sir, and quickly.”
Yet Tauri was still dumbfounded. “It…it takes time for the fungus to infect a water source as well, though! Days, if not weeks! Are you saying they predicted you’d be staying here?”
“No!” said Ana sharply. “Not at all! I am saying, sir, that our killer has done something they have thus far rather frustratingly failed to do—they have made a mistake. Now—your testing team, sir! I need you to wake them, but I’ve no wish for you to go about testing every fucking well in Lacanthim!
Instead, I want for you to test two places specifically—the wells for the Prancing Calf tavern, and the Crooked Horn, as well as every well adjoining them. ”
I frowned as I heard those names. The Crooked Horn, of course, was where Ippeas and his father had stayed in the days before the Burav fire.
And though I’d never been to the Prancing Calf, I had heard Velona Armenta speak of it: I dream…
of the chambers kept for us at the Prancing Calf in the city.
How wondrous were our festivities at that fine place.
So many toasts, and much boasting and tales and song…
“Fetch Seriv,” said Ana, “and do this for me swiftly, sir. Long have we wondered how our killer managed to bring the infested water to their victims’ lips! Yet now another story comes to mind—perhaps they brought the victims to the waters instead.”
Astonished, Tauri stood, readied to dash to the door, but then paused. “Ah, Dolabra…”
“Yes?” she snapped.
“We have not tested you yet.”
“Well, I am sure I am infected, too!” said Ana, exasperated. “As I have been drinking the waters and staying at the same goddamn inn as Din here—if not more so, as I rarely leave the place! But let us confirm.”
He tore off a bit of parchment. Ana gave it a lick (I shivered as she did so, for her tongue was always far longer than one would expect), and it swiftly turned bright orange.
“Oh, yes,” said Tauri, discouraged. “As you said. But have you had the dreams, as Din did?”
“No, because I haven’t slept,” said Ana. “And I won’t bother doing so now!” She paused briefly, and an inscrutable expression stole over her. “But let us assume that I, too, am conditioned. I mean, I could hardly resist hearing the same toot of the fucker’s flute that bewitched Din here.”
“Is it safe for you to remain here on this investigation, then?” asked Tauri.
“I am probably conditioned to just sit and read books!” she cried.
“Because I am sure that’s what I was doing when the damned tune was played!
It does not matter! We are so close to finding this foul little turd that I’d continue even if I had glass lodged in my gullet! Now go and test those damned wells!”
Tauri slipped out the door and hurried off into the night.
—
The instant the latch clicked, Ana whirled on me.
“Well, boy,” she growled. “I am most frustrated to find you did not listen to my direct fucking orders!”
“Pardon? Ahh—oh.” I winced. “Yes, ma’am. That is so.”
“You have not, I note, explained why you and Tauri somehow discovered your poisoning together in the middle of the night. Nor do you need to! You smell like a brothel’s cheapest rooms, you feckless little bastard!
The man’s odor is all over you, and I won’t begin to describe the aroma on your breath! ”
“It…was foolish, ma’am,” I admitted. “I am a dotard for doing it. You have my deepest apolo—”
“And yet I don’t hear much regret in your words, boy!
Sounds to me like you’d do it again in a heartbeat!
Perhaps that flaxen hillside offers many delights for your plowing!
” She grabbed my arm tightly. “Don’t you see the danger, Din?
That man is one of the few other folk in all the canton who knew everything necessary to bring all this death about!
More, it is known that he hated both families!
Something he had in common with Jalin! And recall what Jalin said—He owns me utterly.
He, boy!” She bowed her head. “And then there is the matter of your dream. Not that you had it, but when you had it. For it seems that Burav’s dull notes are now of use! ”
I puzzled at that for a moment, but then recalled her words after she’d read his journals: Nocturnal hallucinations transpire within forty-eight hours after conditioning.
“Precisely two days…” I said softly.
“Yes. Unless I am mistaken—and I know that I am not—it means that your conditioning occurred on the night that Castus Armenta sprouted. His lysis, to use the clinical term. And who was about then?”
I swallowed. “Commander Tauri.”
“Oh, yes. Rushed about to clean up what was left of Castus! And that is but a few minutes’ walk from your chambers at the Green Drover, true?”
“But…but why would he be helping us now if—”
“He appears to help us now.” She grimaced. “And there are other candidates. Ones, perhaps, now more likely than he. But I gave you that order for many reasons, boy! He is too important, and much too clever! Even if he is innocent, I do not wish him too involved!”
“Should I be dismissed, ma’am? Or recused from the investigation?”
“Oh, probably,” said Ana. “Or I would if I had anyone else of fucking use about! But as kindly a soul as Seriv might be, he is not the fellow of the moment. So I shall have to keep you on.”
“Even though…though I am infected, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“And conditioned?”
“Yes.”
“But—isn’t that terribly unwise?”
“Not particularly,” said Ana. “Recall, boy, that this fungus infects the brain. But your brain isn’t exactly normal—for it bears the countless alterations of the Imperial fucking Sublimes!
You are now so greatly augmented that you don’t even quite count as human anymore, Dinios Kol.
Which means that the fungus doesn’t quite work on your species, so to speak.
” She leaned forward. “But it is more than that. Not just that you’re a Sublime, but what type of Sublime.
You are an engraver—and the guiding web, of course, works using memories.
I believe it associates the memory of an action with a tone, and when the tone is played, it delivers the host back into that memory and forces them to reenact the action, granting them a sense of profound joy when they do so.
This is why the infected dream of such things—because the memory is floating to the surface of their subconscious, overriding their thoughts.
But your brain is augmented to parse and store memories perfectly!
It is capable of identifying when you are being artificially forced back into the past!
And in this instance, it did not like it. ”
I said nothing. My thoughts dwelt not on the horror of being infected and conditioned but rather the figure I’d glimpsed in the dream, hazy and shadowy as they sat on the bed.
“I thought,” I said slowly, “that my memories almost had a…a voice. A face.”
“Ah!” said Ana. “That is not uncommon. Some engravers experience a sense of imbued personification as their abilities advance—literally, the objects around them seem to speak, voicing memories. Others aggregate the memories entirely, giving them a figure, a personality. Often someone they are familiar with. Who was it?”
I said nothing.
“I shall not pry,” she said. “But I think this knowledge is a weapon, Din, at least for now. You are not immune, child, but you are terribly resistant. That is a good thing. Let us now focus on the great misstep our killer made, choosing to practice their arts on my own goddamned assistant. I shall put them through the flensing halls for that!”
—
Toward midday, Seriv and Tauri returned, both looking sweaty and distraught.
“It’s exactly as you said, Dolabra,” said Tauri. “The wells of both the Crooked Horn and the Prancing Calf are poisoned. As is the well of this very tavern—I asked my folk to confirm that one, too…”
Seriv shot an alarmed glance at the ewer sitting beside Ana.
“Thank you,” said Ana, oblivious. “And what of all the adjoining wells?”
“They’re all clear. Not a drop of fungus in them. These wells were poisoned with great intent, then.”