Chapter 13
Though Velona Armenta had spoken romantically of the pastures and hills of the canton of Sapirdad, as I rode the tired nag I’d rented to trail the Orbiis, I decided it was the most monotonous, featureless country I’d ever passed through.
The land was flat, dusty, and filled up with bean crops.
It was like a landscape painted by an artist running out of paints and simply trying to make do.
Seriv’s men had indicated that the Orbiis were surveying the Burav fields to the southwest. Each field was demarcated by a row of tall spindle-trees planted to prevent soil erosion from the wind, but they made it impossible to use my spyglass to see far ahead.
I was forced instead to trot through empty field after empty field, with naught but the beans to look at.
Then I passed through one wall of spindle-trees, heard the clatter of hooves and cart and the chiming of reins, and looked to my left.
An ornately decorated cart was trundling toward me along the edge of the field, sporting three high pennants, all striped with crimson and purple.
The cart was followed by nearly a dozen people in capes and coats sporting a similar pattern.
As they walked, they snipped off pieces of the tree leaves and the crops and stowed them away in a pot at their side as they walked.
Though this was strange, what sat in the middle of the cart was even stranger: it appeared to be some kind of throne, with a feathery, delicate, pale tree growing from its back, and a figure slouching in the seat before it.
I gazed at the figure. They, too, were draped in fabric striped with purple and crimson—the colors of the Imperial Engineers and Apoths, I realized, but mixed—yet they had a mask affixed to the bottom half of their face, covering their nose and mouth, with algaeoil tubes coiling down to a set of dark red casks beside the throne.
The figure was sitting in a position of profound boredom, one masked cheek resting on their hand, eyes staring idly out over the endless fields of crops.
Whether they were male or female, I could not tell: they were slender and pale, with bright, flaxen hair flowing down one shoulder to spill into their lap.
Though I could glimpse no more than this—save perhaps a smooth, clear brow and a set of somber eyes—I thought them very beautiful, even at this distance.
I studied the procession, taken aback. These were the Orbiis officers? This looked more like the ritualistic parades the Legion held before the wet season, to bless the warriors who’d hold the walls. Yet this was where Seriv had indicated they’d be, so it must have been them.
Now, I thought to myself, how to convince these people to return with me to Lacanthim to cut up a corpse?
I nudged my nag forward and called to them some fifty span out, announcing my presence. To my surprise, none of them responded. They just kept marching on, taking snippets of the leaves and spoonfuls of the soil.
“Hail there!” I called. “Hail! I am from the Iudex. I wish to speak to you.”
Yet they did not stop or even look. As I drew near I noticed many of them wore masks, just like the fellow on the cart: not warding helms, but some kind of breathing apparatus that covered only their noses and mouths and were then connected by algaeoil tubes to glass percolation pots at their sides.
They churned little handles set in the pots to stir the contents as they walked, like pipe-players in a corner band.
I drew closer to observe. One masked officer was strolling along, breathing the airs from his pot with a serene look on his face, like a mendicant at meditation.
I glanced at his pot and saw that he appeared to be churning simple grass and leaves within it—more or less exactly what the others had been snipping from the fields.
I peered at his heralds, hoping they could offer some explanation.
They merely told me the fellow was a spatiast: another type of Imperial Sublime, like myself, but whereas I was augmented to perfectly remember all I experienced, a spatiast was augmented to analyze, capture, and manipulate physical distances to an inhumanly perfect degree.
This made them astonishing artists, mapmakers, and engineers—and, occasionally, deadly crack shots.
But I had never heard of spatiasts ambling about huffing muddy waters like a mood-addict puffing at a tincture.
The officer looked up at me with a queer bliss to his gaze.
“Ahh—apologies,” I said. “Didn’t meant to interrupt.”
He blinked and smiled a little. Then he extended a hand to me, his thumb, index, and middle finger stuck straight out, his ring and pinky curled in.
I rode alongside him, waiting for the meaning of the gesture to become apparent. When this did not occur, I coughed and said, “Are you all right, sir?”
Then a calm, loud voice from ahead: “What do you want?”
I looked up. The figure in the cart was now leaning over the arm of his throne, his masked face still resting in the palm of his hand (for I sensed the voice was male—perhaps). He watched me with a rather bored expression while the cart trundled along, wheels squeaking.
“I’m Signum Dinios Kol, sir,” I said. “From the Iudex. I wished to speak to the Orbiis commanding officer, if I cou—”
“Ohh,” he said, as if disappointed. “Did you.” He raised a hand, and the parade came to a halt. Then he sat there for a long while, blinking slowly, and again leaned forward to peer at me.
“You,” he said finally, “are wearing blue.”
“I…yes. That is so.”
“A dark blue. Not the light blue of the canton custodi.”
“Ah. Yes. That is also true.”
“Mm. So—you are Iudex, then!” he said with a touch of pride, as if he’d just solved a tricky puzzle. “For only they wear dark blue.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I…believe I said that.”
“Did you?” he said absently. “I can’t recall…You said so much, after all.”
I frowned, aware that I had only said a handful of words at most.
“So—what is it you wish to talk about?” said the fellow.
“We’re very busy today, chap. Got a lot of fields to review.
Many samples to taste, and flora to sample.
The wet season comes, and with it many molds, many invasive species floating downstream, many rivulets and ravines slashing through.
” He studied me again. “That horse is much too small for you, by the way.”
I struggled to get ahold of this conversation. “I…wished to speak to the commanding officer of the Orbiis here, if I could, regarding a specific organism.”
“Ohh?” said the fellow. He pushed his blond hair back with a flamboyant flick. “How intriguing…I don’t often get chaps riding out of nowhere wishing to chat about organisms. Even specific ones. Which one might you mean?”
“The guiding web,” I said.
Instantly, all the Orbiis officers—even the ones who were masked and tasting of the churned grass-waters—turned to look at me.
The throned fellow’s dreaminess dropped like a curtain. “Ahh,” he said. “That one.”
“Yes.”
“Well. Shit,” he muttered. He reached up and began to unbuckle his mask. “Then I shall help you. I am Commander Raudoti Tauri, the lead officer of the Orbiis here. But…” He paused. “I note—you are Iudex.”
“Yes?” I said warily. I did not wish to revisit this subject again.
“I have actually never met a Iudex officer. And you are here to talk to me…about the guiding web?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Then that would suggest something…well, criminal has occurred regarding its use.”
Something tightened in my face. Despite his dreamy madness, it seemed this Commander Tauri was no fool.
“I wish to consult with you, sir,” I said, “and learn more. That is all.”
He slid off his mask and stepped down from the cart. “Let’s step away for a bit, chap,” he said, “and have some privacy.”
—
As I followed Commander Tauri out into the bean fields, I decided he was the most unusual senior officer I had ever met.
His hair was tied up in a sloppy knot, he bore no heralds at all, and he wore no jerkin nor shirt beneath his Orbiis coat—indeed, he didn’t seem to notice at all when an errant breeze blew its flaps open, baring his skinny gray chest to the sun.
He hummed idly as he strode, pausing only to remark, “A little farther, Iudex! My folk have keen ears. I’d like to put much wind between us and them…
for I frankly dread what you’re about to say. ”
I glanced back at the parade of people, who still stood in the field with dreamy looks on their faces. “What are they doing?”
“Ohh, busywork, mostly. The Orbiis is tasked with maintaining the environmental stability of the cantons. Lots of ways to do that, of course. A chap could go about peering through spyglasses all day and measuring things. Depths of creeks. Widths of forests. Dreck like that. And we do do that, true. But, really, a simpler thing is to—well, to become the landscape, via one means or another.”
“Become…?”
“Yes.”
I expected him to explain. He continued humming aimlessly instead.
“How do you mean, sir?”
“Oh. All Orbiis officers are neurologically altered, you see. Specifically, we are altered so that we directly receive complex information from trace organic matter. You can learn all kinds of wonderful things just from, oh, pollens, molds, nutritional breakdowns. All the nature of nature is embedded in such tiny creations.”
“So…when I saw those officers churning grass and breathing it in, they were…”
“They were becoming that grass, yes. For a moment, at least. It reveals to them environmental shifts invisible to nearly every other form of human observation. Much faster, too, of course.”
“But how do you become pollen, or mold?”