KEPHEUS AND I walked the lanes of Talagray, moving slowly as he was on a crutch—a memento he’d won when the titan-killer had been fired. “Blasted me clear off my platform,” he said sheepishly. “Twisted my ankle. Medikkers should have me right in a day, but they’ve larger issues to deal with.”
“I saw it from a distance,” I said. “The thing, coming to the breach. I saw it…It had a face? And seemed to be trying to speak?”
“We killed it,” he said gruffly. “And held it back. That’s all’s that needs to be said of it.”
We did not talk any more of what we’d witnessed, he at the walls and I in the city. The things we’d seen and done now felt too big for words. Silence was a better language. Yet I did tell him of all that Captain Miljin had just said to me.
“Yes…” said Kepheus sadly. “It must be a hard thing, to go from the Legion to the Iudex.”
“Why so?”
“Well, in the Legion, you know each wet season if you have won or lost. Yet in the Iudex, you can do all your duties aright, and catch every crooked soul—but at the end, there is no putting right what wrong was done.”
I said nothing to that. I thought of Uhad, and how all his memories of so many injustices had changed him. I wondered, for the first time, if my own would do the same to me.
“You’re leaving,” he said finally. “Yes?”
“I…I think so,” I admitted. “Our investigation is done. And you?”
“I shall stay here. My family has asked me to return home, but…There’s more to do. And I mean to do it, until there is no more.”
“?‘The fulcrum on which the rest of the Empire pivots,’?” I quoted.
“Ha! You remembered.”
I gave him a look.
“Oh, right,” he said. “I suppose that’s not terribly surprising…But. Here. I’ve a gift for you, Dinios.”
“Oh. Well. You didn’t…”
He handed me a paper package. I did not need to untie it to know what it was: the scent of tobacco flowed from the paper the second I squeezed it.
“Pipes!” I said, laughing. “Shootstraw pipes. You’ll bankrupt yourself, giving me these.”
“I won’t.” He smiled at me. “I just hope they taste as good as the one we shared.”
I smiled back. “I don’t know how they could. That one had its own taste.”
We fell silent, facing the east. Perhaps it was the sudden weight of so many memories I now had within me, but I felt tears in my eyes, and tried to wipe them from my face.
“I’m only here for a few days longer,” I said. “It feels so little time.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. He smelled of leather, and oil, and the frail curls of fretvine leaves.
“This is Talagray,” he said. “Nothing is certain.”
I took him by the hand, and together we returned to the city to find what sweetness we could in the few days we had.
CHAPTER 42
| | |
I STARED BACKWARD AT the towers of Talagray as our carriage rumbled along, the Plains of the Path and the massive sea walls slowly retreating into the morning mist. I counted the remaining months of the wet season and grappled with the knowledge that in a mere handful of months more another season would come.
“Will it hold?” asked Ana’s voice softly.
I turned back around to her, sitting blindfolded in the seat across from me, with her hands folded pleasantly in her lap.
“Pardon, ma’am?” I said.
“Will it hold—that’s what you’re thinking, yes?” she said.
“Do you read thoughts now, ma’am?”
“Oh, no. It is the obvious thought one might have upon leaving Talagray—or coming to it. Will all those artifices and structures, built from the blood and toil of so many and planned by so many brilliant minds…will they hold in the face of what’s coming?” She cocked her head, grinning. “I wish I could read your thoughts, Din. Instead I’m forced to ask you stupid questions.”
“You’ve the rest of the trip to torment me, ma’am,” I said wryly. “No need to start early.”
“Mm. But I’m curious about one particular question I have for you.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’d like to ask you—what is the Empire, Din?”
I blinked as the carriage bounced along. “Ah…pardon, ma’am?”
“I’ve heard your reports, after all,” she said. “I’ve noticed many people made claims to you that the Empire was this, or that, or functioned in this way…It’s strange, isn’t it? Perhaps the existential nature of the canton provokes it. But I am curious what your conclusions are. What is the Empire, Din? Can you describe it?”
“You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you, ma’am?”
“I’m still your commanding officer. I could order you to do so. But that’d be rather boring.”
I thought about it. “Well…before I came here, ma’am…”
“Yes?”
“I would have told you the Empire was might, and mass, and strength, and scale.”
“And now?”
“Now…now it feels frail, and imperfect, and improvised, and…and coincidental, ma’am. The wrong wind might blow it all apart, should it go untended.”
“Accurate. And I somewhat agree. But I have always rather thought the Empire was wrought in the image of that which it was made to fight.”
“A…a titan, ma’am?”
“Oh, yes. For the Empire is huge. Complex. Often unwieldy and slow. And in many places, weak. A massive colossus, stretching out across the cantons, one in whose shadow we all live…and yet it is prone to wounds, infections, fevers, and ill humors. But its strangest feature is that the more its citizens feel it is broken, the more broken it actually becomes. Just look at Uhad. It must be tended to, as you said. For without this tending, the Empire shall fail. Yet it’s rather tricky to tend to something from inside it, yes?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “And…what is your role in tending to this colossus, ma’am?”
“Oh, I told you, Din,” she said, smiling dreamily. “When we last rumbled down this very road. 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 simply perform maintenance, in my own little way. And you have ably assisted me in that, of course.”
We rumbled on in silence for a moment.
I sucked my teeth, thinking. “You once said, ma’am, that there would be a time when you’d tell me many truths.”
“That’s so.”
“Is now such a time?”
“Now?” She pressed a hand against the wall of the carriage, feeling its shuddering. “Now is the time for some truths, should you like to hear them, Din. We can then decide if you’d like to hear more after that.”
“You are no ordinary Iudex Investigator. Are you?”
“That is true. I am not.”
“Not if you were stationed in Daretana to watch the Hazas, as part of some giant plot.”
“That is also true.”
“Though I wonder what you’re going to do in Daretana now, ma’am.”
“Oh, I am not going back to Daretana, Din,” she said. “The Iudex office there will now be closed. It was a very good place to be banished to, but it has served its purpose. Instead, this carriage shall first stop at a small town on the border of the Tala canton. There, I shall discuss the events of the past weeks with the conzulate, who waits for me now.”
I stared at her. “The…the Iudex conzulate? He’s waiting on you?”
“Has been for the past day. I am most eager to debrief him. It was his idea to invent the fiction of my banishment, after all.”
“Wait. And your assistant? Did the twitch kill her, or is she truly alive? Was that all just a story you invented to deceive the Hazas?”
“You do not know her,” sniffed Ana. “And her affairs are her own. I will not divulge her situation to you, as able and admirable as you are, Din.”
I boggled at this for a moment. The idea that a conzulate—one of the giant, ageless beings who were second only to the emperor himself in the imperial hierarchy—was now waiting on Ana was impossible for me to comprehend.