Sprout.
“To see these walls!” roared Ditelus. “To see what men have made! And know that they could have saved us, but…but…”
Then came a horrid sound, akin to thick fabric ripping, followed by an awful crackling, crinkling sound; and then, like a moth breaking free of its pupa, the dappleglass emerged, a thick, vibrant, undulating shock of bright iridescent green splitting his flesh and rising into the air. It burst from his collarbone, parting him along the side and boiling forth from the edge of his rib cage. Blood poured from his throat in a sudden splash, and then his face was concealed, lost in the shivering coils of roots and the quaking, dark leaves; but the crackling sound continued, as if the vegetation was breaking every length of his bones, crushing them to powder. Then the crackling stopped, yet the column of dappleglass kept silently rising, stretching into the sky in a dark, shimmering column.
I watched as the dappleglass consumed him, until he was little more than a giant puppet held aloft in the towering shoots. I heard the cries and the calls of the Apoths about me, but I had no mind to listen. There between two slender shoots I could spy a sliver of his face, his sad eyes staring into shadow.
“Must have been infected for some time,” Kitlan said. “His crackler’s body contained it until it…it…”
I kept staring at his tears. Watched how they gathered at his chin, growing into a pregnant pink drop, before tumbling off into the leaves.
“From where?” said Miljin’s voice beside me.
“Wh-what, sir?” I said dully. I turned to see his furious eyes watching me through the glass bubbles of his helm.
“He was coming from somewhere,” bellowed Miljin, “but from where?”
I looked north, in the direction Ditelus had been walking from. With a flutter to my eyes, I summoned the image of the map we’d seen at the Legion outpost.
“The old fortress,” I said. “It’s that way.”
“Then come on!” said Miljin. He turned his horse about and started north.
“We have to burn the contagion, sir!” said Kitlan. “It’s protocol!”
“Then leave some boys to follow protocol and fucking come on!” he bellowed over his shoulder.
* * *
—
KITLAN LEFT TWO Apoths to burn the body. Then we rode north with her and the rest until we finally spied it: a little clutch of structures leaning against one of the giant hills, just west of an open stretch of yellow-grassed fields.
We approached it slowly and quietly. The place was hardly more than a ruin, the fretvine and stonewood fortifications blasted apart or upended nearly everywhere, its many tottering towers and structures leaning about like a jaw full of broken teeth. There were curious ripples and crests in the soil about it, all radiating from the giant hill behind. I guessed that when the leviathan had fallen however many decades ago it had broken all the world below, before finally being eaten by grasses and trees like the other carcasses.
We entered the ruins on the western side. It felt like riding through a giant child’s broken toys, or some stretch of coast where shipwrecks were washed ashore. Nothing I saw seemed whole, except for a tall, crooked tower that leaned in the center of the wreckage.
Miljin caught my gaze and nodded. We led Kitlan and the three other Apoths through the maze of tumbledown structures until we finally approached the tower. It was tall, and whole—but the door, unlike everything else in this place, was well-maintained. Wood solid and dark, the rope handle white and new. Iron hinges free of rust.
I stared at the door, wondering what, or who, was behind it.
“Kitlan,” said Miljin quietly. “You want me to open that door or you?”
She didn’t answer. She just dismounted, tossed the reins of her horse to one of the other Apoths, and advanced. She placed a hand on the rope, took a deep breath, and pulled the door open.
I couldn’t see inside, but Kitlan stared through the doorway. Then she turned away, disgusted.
The door fell open, I glimpsed within.
A clutch of shoots nearly filled the interior tall tower. Leaves slender and dark green, dappled with blooms of white and purple. And there, suspended in the clutch of shoots, a figure: a woman, dead and rotting, her eyes dark and her yellow hair gleaming in the midday sun.
* * *
—
MILJIN AND I stood aside and watched as the Apoths came and went from the crooked tower. They were taking samples, they said, cataloging all the reagents and specimens found within, along with all the Apoth’s tools.
“She had quite the array,” said Kitlan, taking stock. “Fermentation chamber. Purification dome. Casks of suspension fluids. Suffusion feedstock. Phalm oil for any reagents gone awry. And tank after tank of plants…All of them the same kind.”
“Dappleglass,” I said.
She nodded her helmeted head. “This is where it happened. This is where they made it. Secreted out all this gear and got to work brewing up her poisons.”
“And we’re sure it’s her?” said Miljin. “That body in there is Jolgalgan?”
Kitlan walked to the pile of cataloged material, sorted through it, and returned with a sheaf of paper. It was a wall pass, like Aristan’s, permitting the bearer to pass from the Outer Rim of the Empire into the third ring. Though it was hard for my accursed eyes to read through the glass bubbles of the helmet, I could still barely make out the name JOLGALGAN written in the corner.
“There’s more,” said Kitlan. “More documents. Some in her name, some counterfeit and falsified. Seems she was hoarding up to run. But it’s her.”
Miljin stared in at the corpse suspended in the darkness. “And she just…”
“Had an accident, by the look of it,” said Kitlan. “My guess is something didn’t seal right. There’s a bottle in the back that’s burned dark and still warm. That was likely the source, boiling a bit of water that’s now evaporated, but the steam leaked out, carrying the spores. She’s been dead about a day or two. I suspect the crackler came to check on her and was exposed as well. If we didn’t have our helmets on right now, we’d be dead, too.”
I felt my heart quaking as I realized how close I’d come to meeting the same horrid fate as Ditelus. “How…how likely is such a mistake to actually happen, though?” I asked.
“Very,” said Kitlan. “This is an improvised laboratory. None of this is to Apoth code. And they were handling a very, very dangerous contagion. There’s a reason why we built walls around Oypat, after all.”
I gazed in at the tower. “How much dappleglass could she have brewed in there?”
Kitlan shrugged. “Lots.”
“Is there any way to know if there’s more out there? Planted among the canton, waiting to bloom?”
“No way to tell here, I’m afraid.”
She returned to the tower. We watched her in silence.
“So—the second we get close to Jolgalgan,” said Miljin quietly, “she goes and fucks up and gets herself and her sole collaborator killed.”
Wind ripped through the barren ruins. The corpse within the tower danced and shivered in the trees.
“That feel right to you?” Miljin asked me.
I said nothing.
CHAPTER 34
| | |
I FINISHED SPEAKING, MY voice hoarse, my eyelids aching from the fluttering. My last few words echoed in the adjudication chamber until they finally faded.
Commander-Prificto Vashta peered down at us from the high bench. “So,” she said slowly. “It’s…done?”
Ana shifted in her seat like she’d sat in something wet. “Partially,” she conceded. “Possibly.”
Vashta frowned. Though her Legion’s cuirass was bright and polished and her cloak dark and clean, the commander-prificto’s face looked more beleaguered than ever, so much so that I found myself worrying about the state of the sea walls.
“Immunis,” said Vashta, “could you kindly clarify what in hell you mean by that?”