“That’s correct, ma’am.” I nodded at the papers and said, “I hope this isn’t all about her.”
“This? Oh, no. These are Preservation Board approvals. The Legion is preparing a new armament to combat the titans after the breach. Lots of grafts and alterations go with it—mostly explosives.” She gestured along her back wall, where glass jars containing a dark powder sat in a row. “Some kind of bombard. I’m to review and process the paperwork confirming that none of these alterations can escape the canton and cause havoc.” She cast a bleary eye over the remaining parchments. “But paperwork is a task I’m well accustomed to. I manage paper more than reagents these days. Now, I am curious…why did you ask about this Jolgalgan?”
I explained the interviews with the Engineers from yesterday, and all I’d learned with Miljin.
Nusis’s expression grew somber, so much so that I forgot about my own anxieties. “I see,” she said carefully. “Well. I regret to inform you that everyone who knew Captain Jolgalgan is dead.”
“Dead? Truly, ma’am?”
“Yes. She was a member of the Twelfth Cohort of the Apoths. And all of that cohort died at Sapfir, during the breach. Can’t even recover their bodies. Horrid thing. You will have no one to interview, I’m afraid.”
“But Jolgalgan,” I said. “Is she also…”
“Her status is…a different matter.” Nusis pivoted to her safe, then paused. “Might you avert your eyes again, please, Signum?”
I did so while she again went through the laborious process of unlocking her safe. She popped it open and slid out a scroll of parchment. Then she took the reagents key from her desk and placed it in the safe, next to all her boxes of immunities grafts. “Might as well keep that in here for now…I mean, it is evidence, yes? Anyway. I went ahead and fetched Jolgalgan’s alteration papers for you…She’s a Sublime, like you and I. An axiom, inducted and altered some six years ago in the Kurmin canton. Scored very high on her exams. Something else you two have in common, I think.”
I coughed and nodded.
“But Jolgalgan always demonstrated—how shall I put this—issues of the psyche,” said Nusis delicately.
“Issues?” I asked.
“Anger. Fits of rage. And anxiety, and paranoia. She was a hard worker, but she was hard to work with. She has had a pattern of complaints and outbursts throughout her career.”
I opened my engraver’s satchel. “Is it all right if I…”
“Be my guest,” said Nusis.
I selected the ash-scented vial again and sniffed at it, anchoring this conversation in my memories. “What was wrong with her?” I said. “Something to do with her alterations?”
“No,” she said. “No. It is not that.”
I watched her. Eyes still, mouth fixed in a soft frown. She had gone somewhere far away in her mind, I felt. I waited.
“You are aware, Signum,” she said, “that I was assigned to be on this investigation team because I served in Oypat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what do you know of Oypat?”
“I’d never heard of it until Blas. I learned it had been a canton that had been consumed by dappleglass, the same contagion that’s been wielded as a weapon here. That is all of it.”
“Well…I will tell you now, Kol, that what happened in Oypat made many people fear alterations as much as the titans. With good reason. I was a junior officer then, barely out of Sublime training. Axiom,” she said, tapping her head. “Figures and mathematics.”
“I remember, ma’am.”
“Of course you do. I worked on the environmental monitoring team during Oypat, ensuring that no dappleglass escaped the territory. I peered through a spyglass day after day, watching distant hills being eaten by grass. And then in the afternoon, when I served in the medikkers’ wards, I saw people having the grass cut from them—tangles in their kidneys, in their lungs, in their uteri. Many more died, of course. Especially after we sealed the whole thing up. They never made it out.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Those that did survive were resettled by the Iudex. And some…some of the Oypati say that it wasn’t the dappleglass that killed their home. They say it was us. That we imperials killed them with our lethargy. But that isn’t so. We tried. It was just too complex. The great and heavenly world is just all too complex, sometimes.”
“I see,” I said. “But—what’s this to do with Jolgalgan, ma’am?”
“You have heard that Jolgalgan has a curious look to her,” she said. “Yellow, curly hair. Yes?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“That is because though she has a Kurmini last name, the captain was not born to a Kurmini family. She was adopted. Her birth name was Prarasta. An uncommon name—mostly because all the people who’d normally have such a name are now dispersed or dead.” She fixed me in a sad gaze. “Jolgalgan was Oypati, you see. She escaped the dying canton when she was a child. Lost her parents. And was resettled. Such a history…Well, it’s no wonder she displayed afflictions of the psyche.”
I felt my skin break out in goosebumps. “I notice, ma’am, that you haven’t told me whether Jolgalgan died with her cohort.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “Because Captain Jolgalgan has been missing for weeks.” She handed the scroll of parchment out to me. “She vanished just a few days before the assassination of Commander Blas, as a matter of fact. And just before so many Engineers suddenly started dying of the very contagion that killed her canton. Curious—isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 19
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IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when I raced across the Iudex tower atrium, Jolgalgan’s parchments rustling in my pocket. I felt I looked quite a sight, but then I saw Captain Miljin doing the same, sprinting across the atrium, though he was going out rather than in.
He skidded to a stop as he passed me. “Kol!” he breathed. “Where the devil…”
I took in his flush face, his wild eyes. Instantly I knew he had found Aristan.
I fought to keep my voice steady, and asked, “What’s going on, sir?”
“We’ve just found the maddest mess of shit, simply the maddest thing, but…” Miljin looked back out the door. “But I have business to tend to. Go and ask your immunis. She can fill you in!” Then he dashed away, moving surprisingly fast for a man of his age.
I watched him go. I wondered if Ana’s little experiment had yielded results.
I raced up the stairs for the second time that day, my head spilling over with thoughts. Yet when I came to Ana’s door, I paused.
Voices from inside: hers, then a man’s. Soft, not agitated—or at least not yet.
I knocked. The customary singing “Come!”
I opened the door. Young Captain Kepheus Strovi sat in a chair in the middle of the room, dressed in Legion blacks with his legs crossed—a casual pose, like he was perfectly at home here. He looked over his shoulder and his eyes widened slightly when he saw me.
I stopped short at the sight of him. It took me a moment to recall he was meant to be helping Ana find information on all the fernpaper millers in Talagray.
I looked about for Ana but couldn’t find her. Then the overpowering scent of fish struck my nostrils, and I heard her voice: “Din! What good timing. Strovi here has just brought me all those fernpaper orders I’d requested.”
I looked down. Ana was lying on the floor on her back at Strovi’s feet, half-concealed in a pile of parchments, blindfolded as usual. To her left was a tray containing the remains of a fish, salted and piled with herbs, the flesh so pink it must have never known flame.
“Why are you…” I said.