“Eight other people throughout the canton underwent a similar transformation, almost at the exact same time,” said Strovi.
I was so shocked that I forgot myself. “Ten!” I said aloud. “Sanctum…ten Engineers were poisoned?”
The two Legionnaires glanced at me. Strovi offered me a tiny, sympathetic smile. “Yes,” said Vashta. “This is possibly the worst incident of mass poisoning in all the history of the Empire.”
“Four died on the sea walls, including the two who caused the collapse,” said Strovi. “Others were in the city of Talagray. One fellow was even on a horse when it happened.”
“Oh!” said Ana, interested. “What happened to the horse?”
Strovi coughed. “It, ah, died, ma’am,” he said.
“Ohh. Hm.” She nodded, a little disappointed, as if she’d expected something more entertaining. “Were there any commonalities to the ten deaths? Did they all use the same bathing facilities? Or visit any site that featured a large amount of steam?”
“They did not,” said Vashta. “We’ve treated this as a contagion so far, reviewing their movements to see what event might have spread this to them all. But so far we can’t find any moment when they were even in the same room together in the past month, let alone all inhaling the same steam.”
“The only commonality, ma’am,” said Strovi, “is that they were all part of the Engineering Iyalet.”
“Engineering…” said Ana quietly.
“Yes,” said Vashta. “The worry is that someone is targeting Engineers for assassination. Perhaps as sabotage. We do not yet know.”
“But to do so during the wet season…” Strovi shook his head.
“You think,” said Ana, “that someone wants to set the titans loose within all of Khanum.”
“It would be madness to imagine it,” said Vashta. “But these days have been nothing if not mad.”
Ana fell silent, her head bowed in thought.
“We need to know how this happened, Dolabra,” said Vashta. “To find out who did this and capture them—before any other calamities occur. Hundreds if not thousands of people are maimed or dead. The entire canton is at risk, if not the Empire. We cannot repair the breach or battle the titans with confidence until we are sure the threat is resolved. And you are the only person I am aware of, Immunis, who has encountered this phenomenon previously, and it is my understanding that you accurately identified it, and responded to it, within a day. We need all the help we can get right now—but I have surmised that we especially need your help.”
Ana’s fingers were drumming wildly on the tabletop now, a frenetic tatter-tat. “I can’t help you from here, ma’am. I rely a lot on Din for these investigations, but, well, the commute from here to Talagray would be a bit much.”
“We had anticipated that,” said Vashta. “I have ordered a carriage sent here straightaway, on the hopes that you would consent. It should arrive by morning.”
“There are likely some issues of procedure and jurisdiction—yes?” Ana asked. “I am not an Iudex Investigator of that canton. Din is an apprentice, and I believe isn’t allowed to leave Daretana until his formal assignment.”
“A state of emergency has been declared for the entire Outer Rim,” said Vashta. “Policies are being suspended left and right. We can suspend any statute stopping you as well, and the Iudex Investigator of Talagray is all too happy for the help. The only concern anyone has now is to make it through the wet season.”
“And…what are the prospects of that?” asked Ana.
A bleak smile. “The prospects of that,” Vashta said, “are evolving. And will likely depend in no small part on your work in Talagray.”
“In that case,” said Ana, “how could I possibly say no? Right, Din?”
I said nothing. For there is nothing worth saying when you are being forced into a pit of horrors.
CHAPTER 10
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I HAD ONCE THOUGHT transport by carriage to be the domain of princes and the gentry. But as I sat in that dank little box for the sixth hour, clutching my seat while the walls and floors bucked and heaved about me, I felt it was the most awful damned punishment I could imagine.
The air was hot and stagnant. There was little to see out the windows except the close, dark, steaming jungle and the occasional flash of a mika lark. Though we traveled along imperial roads, which were bricked and well maintained, the carriage still bumped and banged every few seconds, making sleep or reflection impossible. And Ana, of course, was horrid company, sitting there blindfolded and chattering ceaselessly.
“That bump there!” she’d say to me, excited. “Right there! That bump occurs every seventeen seconds when we are on the southern side of the road, and every nineteen seconds when we are on the northern side of the road! This indicates to me that it is not a flaw in a wheel of our carriage, but is instead some quirk in the process the Engineers used to build this road, segment by segment! Or perhaps…perhaps an issue with the land or an effect of the humidity on the stone…”
She grew most excited when we passed one of the Engineering teams responsible for maintaining the road, and demanded I stick my head out and study the cart of bricks, and the way the dusty, muddy workers dislodged the cracking ones from the road and replaced them.
“That’s the real Empire right there, Din,” she said, grinning. “The boys and girls who fix the roads.”
“Being as we’re headed to the sea walls, ma’am,” I said, “I might disagree.”
“Oh, people love the Legion, with their swords and their walls and their bombards. But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.”
I shook my head and focused on the maps Ana had gotten for me to engrave in my mind: maps of the city of Talagray, of the Tala canton, of the sea walls, and so on and so on. She’d also procured lists of all senior Engineering officers in Talagray, and asked me to memorize them, hundreds and thousands of names—which I did, haltingly whispering each name as I read them.
Finally we turned a sharp corner in the road. I leaned out the window and tasted the air. A hint of salt on the wind, perhaps, acrid and tangy. I glimpsed a hill to the west, its southern cliff flat and stark. My eyes fluttered, and I summoned the map of the canton in my mind, searching the memory for these landmarks—a kink in the road, and a cliff-carved hill—and calculated where we were.
“Think we’re close to the sea walls now, ma’am,” I said.
“Already?”
“Yes, ma’am. I should be able to see them out the eastern-facing window soon enough.”
“Describe them to me the second you do. I would much like to have them in my mind to puzzle over.”
The carriage rattled along. The jungle fell back like a curtain, revealing a wide green plain swimming with mist; and there, far in the distance, the shore.
I pulled out a spyglass I’d brought, pressed it to my eye, and peered east.
A towering, slate-gray cliff, running underneath the red-stained sky like a frame below a painting, its stone wet and gleaming and crawling with vines and growth; and there, in one long, vertical seam in the cliff, a hint of movement: some insect, I thought, crawling from base to top in a slow, labored procession.
My eye trembled as I focused on it. I realized it was not an insect but instead a tiny box, wrought of wood, being hauled up on a set of strings. As it reached another notch in the gray cliffs, the box stopped, and even tinier figures emerged.
Horses. Four of them, all hauling a shining steel bombard from the box.
I blinked, staring into the spyglass. The tiny box was not tiny at all: it was a lift, made for hauling troops and armaments up the vast expanse of the sea walls.
I lowered the spyglass and stared at the walls in the distance, dumbfounded.
“Well?” said Ana. “Do you see them? What are they like?”