“Worms can figure out how to live in any part of you, and eat any part of you, you know,” Nusis said as she searched. “Almost have to admire them, really. I once treated a captain whose legs were so brimming with them you could hear them sloshing about as he sat. Have you ever had an infestation, Kol?”
I eyed a glass cylinder containing a dark yellow fluid. Something long and thin and slimy lay coiled at the bottom, and it nosed the glass, as if smelling me. “Ah—no, ma’am. Not to my knowledge.”
“Mm. A pity. You gain a lot of respect for them after…Hm. Looks like I’m out of the usual grafts. I’ll have to tap into my personal reserves. One moment.”
Her red coat fluttered as she darted to a large steel safe behind her desk, one with nearly a dozen little metal doors on the front. She knelt before it, slid a key out of a drawer, and went about unlocking—and occasionally relocking—each lock in what seemed to be a random order, top left, then middle right bottom, then top right, bottom middle, and on and on.
“Do all senior officers keep safes in their rooms, ma’am?” I asked.
“No. Normally I wouldn’t have to resort to such measures. But advanced immunity grafts are the preferred targets of thieves—affluent folk are more than eager to pay for protection. That means I have to go through the right sequence of locks every time I have to fetch something.”
I watched as she plied the key in the many locks. It was a dizzyingly complex combination of movements—and yet, I realized, I was engraving them all in my memory.
“Would you like me to leave the room, ma’am?” I asked.
“Leave the room?”
“I’m an engraver, ma’am. Don’t think you’d like me memorizing your system.”
“Oh!” she said. “Yes, good point, I always forget. Please, if you’d avert your eyes…”
I turned to the wall and listened to the clinks and clanks as the last locks and tumblers turned.
“There!” she said. “And…one moment…Yes, here’s all you shall need.”
I turned. She had retrieved four small pellets of varying colors from a set of boxes inside the safe. One pellet was blue, one white, one yellow, and one brown. Each was about the size of a knuckle.
“I shall muddle these and mix them with milk,” Nusis said, bustling about her office. “The proteins and fats will help you digest them. Check yourself in the mirror for an hour after you consume these. Look for any yellow hues to the whites of your eyes, or a rapid retreat where your gums meet your teeth. That would indicate an adverse reaction. In which case, contact the medikkers immediately.”
She muddled the pellets with the milk until it was a thick, light brown concoction.
“Will there be any other effects?” I asked. “Psychological ones?”
She slowed the grinding of her pestle. “Psychological…Ah. That’s right. The last alterations you consumed would have probably been your own engraver’s suffusions, yes? To become a Sublime?”
I nodded.
“Did you opt to sleep as they changed your mind, Kol?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You stayed awake? Throughout your transmutation?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How fascinating,” she said. “I myself chose sleep when I became an axiom. No, there will be no psychological effects to consuming these grafts. But you must be a tough little bird to have suffered so, Kol.” She handed the mixing bowl to me. A smile crinkled her purple-hued face. “Let’s hope, at least.”
“Why hope, ma’am?”
“Most engravers don’t last long in Talagray. Too many bad memories, you see. Especially ones that visit the Plains of the Path. But you’re young. It should be all right.”
I stared into the milky brown concoction, recalling Immunis Uhad’s weary, lined face. Then I tossed the concoction back and swallowed it.
* * *
—
WHEN I WAS done with my treatments I hobbled back to the Iudex tower and climbed the stairs to my rooms. Once there I unpacked my meager belongings: coat and shirt, leggings and underlinens. Standard-issue imperial razor. Wooden practice sword. I arranged them all on the cabinet and waited for the room to feel familiar. The feeling never came.
I rubbed my chin, felt the scrubby friction of stubble. My gaze moved to the burnished bronze mirror on the far wall. I stripped to the waist, grabbed my razor, and stood before the mirror and attempted to shave.
The night wind played with the fretvine tower, making it shift and dance; but my hand was steady, and I carefully guided the edge of the razor, cleanly parting all the scrub from my chin and cheek. How fine it felt to do something so mundane and ordinary, in this most abnormal of places. When I finished shaving I looked for any sign of the reactions Nusis had warned me about, but I could find nothing. My face was my own.
I stared into my eyes, remembering.
The mixing of my suffusions. The way the medikkers had muddled them in a bowl with a pestle. The splash and coil of the milk. And then the chalky taste at the back of my throat as I drank, and drank, and drank.
Then their whisper in my ear: I could take a sleeping draft, and slumber through what was coming; though this made the transition longer, and I might dream. Yet I’d told them I wished to stay awake. I wished to comprehend what was happening to me. To see it, and know, and remember.
Then came four miserable, awful days of hallucinations and headaches and insomnia, days and days of wandering in the dreary dark, time stretching about me like the black plains of an endless desert. For my mind was being reforged within my skull; and as it changed, its concept of time changed as well.
And when I emerged from that dark, I was different. My skin was gray, certainly, but I no longer formed normal memories. For a memory is just a sketch a mind makes of one’s experiences, imperfect and interpretive; yet what my mind made, from that moment on, was perfect, absolute, and endless.
I stood in the Iudex fretvine tower, feeling it dance in the wind. I stared at my face, my eyes fluttering as I studied the tiny scars and imperfections here and there. The origin of each minuscule wound persisted perfectly in my mind.
I turned to look at my back and caught the faint gleam of a handful of scars. Three times Captain Thalamis had caned me during my training, yet he’d always saved his cruelest strokes for the end. The snap and crack of the cane still echoed in my ears.
“You’ve been through worse,” I said to my reflection.
My eyes looked like I was straining to believe it.
Then a quiver in the floor, the faintest reverberation. I went to the window, cracked it, peeked out. The city lay quiet and still, no shouts or cries. A quake, but not one worth troubling over, it seemed.
My eyes lingered on the darkness in the east. I saw no flares, neither green nor any other color. I reflected that, should I fail in my task, and should more Engineers die here, then I might soon see those flares, and the walls in the distance might fall. And then, of course, I would have far more to worry about than sending my dispensations home.
CHAPTER 13
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TALAGRAY ERUPTED AS DAWN fell across the city, the streets and lanes and corridors swarming with foot traffic like ants tumbling out of a broken anthill. The tides of people were tinted by the various Iyalet colors as they scurried to their duties, rainbows of muddy reds and purples and blacks. The great machinery that made the Empire work was coming to life.