I walked across the floorboard, taking in the room. “Such a small coin,” I said, “really could be anywhere—”
Then Miljin’s green-bladed sword was in his hand, and he went to work.
His sword bit through the bed, the clothes, the walls of the room, chewing through the fretvine, through the planked wood, carving up everything in sight.
“Sir?” I said, alarmed. “What are you doing?”
“Looking,” he grunted. His sword slashed open the lock of a trunk, and he dumped clothing from it. “What else?”
“We can’t destroy the property of other officers, sir,” I said. “Not without due cause, whi—”
“She’s dead!” he snapped. “And the damn walls have been breached! And you didn’t seem to complain when I nearly put my blade in Vartas’s balls! By the Harvester, child, get your head out of your policy book and into the moment!”
Then Miljin stopped and stooped over a rent he’d carved in the floor. With the flick of his sword, he turned the rent into a square hole about three span wide. Then he squatted over it, reached into the hole, and slid out a bronze box.
“Here we go,” he said. “Here we go, here we go, here we go…” He studied it. “No lock, no graft trips…”
“Graft trips?” I asked.
“A fungus or something what grows in the crack, so when it’s opened improperly it releases a toxin…” He rapped on it. “This is just a box. And what’s inside it…”
He flicked it open. Inside was a small bed of moss, and lying upon that, a very strange contraption.
It was a small, circular, intricately engraved bronze plate, with five tiny glass vials embedded in it, each one containing fluids of many different colors. Miljin frowned at it, then sniffed it, and grunted, “Well, I’ll be fucked.”
“What is it, sir?”
“It’s a reagents key.”
A flutter in my eyes. I recalled Princeps Otirios back in Daretana, taking out a small glass vial sloshing with black fluid and saying—You’ll need to follow close, sir. This gate is a bit old. Can be fussy.
“For vinegates and the like?” I asked.
“Yeah…but I’ve never seen one like this before. Five different reagents? Whatever portal or path this is for, it must be one of the most secure places on earth.” He stood, grimacing. “Let’s check another room.”
We went to the quarters of Signum Jilki, Topirak’s lover. Again, the flicker-flash of the green sword. Another bronze box—this one hidden in a wall—and inside, another reagents key, this one the same as with Loveh.
“Another,” Miljin muttered. “Another.” He squinted west over his shoulder, like he could see the walls of Talagray just behind him. “Exactly what in the hell,” he said slowly, “was going on in my city?”
I waited, watching his brows bristle. Then he made a fist with his hand, all the knuckles crackling again, and he growled, “You keep one, and I keep the other. Got it? Then let’s get out of here.”
He left, but I tarried behind, thinking of Topirak’s testimony. I went through Jilki’s wardrobe, sniffing at her garments, wondering if I could catch the strange aroma Topirak had described.
Then I caught something, faint but present on a small scarf: a scent of oranje-leaf and some kind of spice.
My eyes fluttered as I matched the scent to a memory. Suddenly I was in Daretana again, crouched before the mangled corpse of Taqtasa Blas suspended in the trees. I’d held a pot of oil in my hands and sniffed it—and caught the aroma of spice and oranje-leaf and wine mullings and perhaps incense.
That was it. Jilki’s scarf smelled just like Blas’s pot of oil. Exactly the same.
Then Miljin’s voice over my shoulder: “Kol…are you smelling that dead woman’s clothes?”
I dropped the scarf. “Coming, sir.”
CHAPTER 15
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WE RODE BACK TO Talagray in silence. Miljin’s gruff bravado had vanished. Now he slumped on his horse, glowering ahead, scabbard swinging at his side. It wasn’t until we could see the fortifications and the bombards ahead—all pointed toward us—that he finally spoke.
“Didn’t use to be like this,” he said.
“Pardon, sir?” I asked. “Like what?”
“All this skulking and skullduggery,” he said. “Keeping order out here used to mean using this…” He patted his sword again. “Until everyone got in line. I mean, it’s a goddamned military city. But then the Empire got good at making money, and then they went and got it in everything, even here. Got big, got complex. Now we need boys like you with brains brimming with…hell, I’ve no idea what’s in your skull, son.”
I glanced at him. “So you, sir…You’re not…”
“I’m no Sublime,” he said. “Got grafts and suffusions and the like for strength and reaction speed and recovery. Same shit they use on horses, some tell me. But none of it went toward my mind. Sometimes feel like they keep me around out of some misguided sense of duty.”
“Ana did say you’re a war hero, sir,” I said.
He laughed roughly. “The thing about war, boy, is while it happens, you’ve no idea what’s going on—and when it’s over, everyone spends the rest of your life telling you what you did.” He gestured at the towers of Talagray ahead. “We don’t need war heroes here anyway. We need plotters. Like your Ana. Even if she has pissed off a lot of powerful people.”
“She has?”
“Oh, yes. That’s the problem with figuring shit out—eventually you run into someone who’d prefer all their shit remained thoroughly unfigured. You know much with a blade, lad?”
“I was first in my swordsmanship class, sir,” I said. “About the only class I was ever any good at.”
“That doesn’t sound right. You were as sharp as a medikker’s knife back there. About as cheery and personable, too. But Uhad mentioned you were made for the Iudex.”
“He did?” I said, surprised.
“Aye. Said you scored shit on all your other Iyalet exams, except Iudex. Those you were fantastic on.”
I looked at him sidelong. The comment seemed genuine, and I did not see any suspicion on Miljin’s face. I tried to relax.
“Still, exams are different from serving,” he said. “Just as policy and codes of conduct can’t guide every goddamn investigation. Ever been in a fight, boy? A real one?”
“No, sir.”
“Hum. You’ll want to amend that.”
I looked at him again. He appeared serious. “Why’s that, sir?”
“Ever wonder why Dolabra was transferred to your little canton,” he said, “but without an assistant?”
I blinked. The idea had not occurred to me. I’d always assumed her previous staff had stayed behind.
“Rumor has it,” he said, “Dolabra’s previous assistant investigator ran into the wrong end of a sword. Were I in your trousers, boy, I’d learn all I could about fighting, and start growing eyes on all sides of my head.” Then he spat and glanced up at the sky. “If you want to see it, now’s your chance.”
My mind was still spinning from what he’d said. “Wh-what, sir?” I said, startled.
“You were looking east this morning, yeah?” he said. “But the mist was too heavy. Well, now it’s burned off. Take your gander if you please, boy.”
I looked back over my shoulder. Then I pulled on the reins of my horse and stopped.
The plains of Tala stretched out behind me, brilliant and viridine, yet the landscape was not flat, not everywhere: huge, tufty humps and hills lay here and there, some high, some sunken, and—strangest of all—each was covered with huge, ancient tree stumps like scales on a fish. The largest hill was enormous, almost like a small mountain, shot through with curving rock formations that were a glimmering pale green. The trees that covered its surface were not stumps but newly grown saplings, narrow and stretching into the sky, and their trunks were of many strange colors, violet and blue and a dull yellow.
I stared at the hill and saw something buried in its side. An appendage, perhaps, like a beetle’s leg—an enormous one, a quarter of a league long, covered in pale gray chitin and ending in a curious claw. I wondered what was buried in that hill.
And then I realized. The green rock formations in the hill were not rock at all.