Page 12 of The Tainted Cup

“Ordinarily I can’t,” she said, “but that’s becauseordinarilyyou’re here stopping me, Din.”

“I do so, ma’am,” I snapped, “because you can’t keep cornering these poor people and wringing them of information like juice from an aplilot!”

“I am simply doing my utmost to make this dismal canton a little interesting,” she said blithely. She tightened a string on her contraption. “But that requires rather a lot ofwork.”

“Ma’am…”

“For example, are you aware, Din, that the southeasternmost water well in Daretana is almost certainly infected with irida?”

“How fascinating, ma’am.”

“Indeed. No one was aware. But I gleaned such from the sixty-two folk I’ve chatted with over the past months. Twelve of them who drank regularly from that well have, unknowingly, described slight aches and insomnia and an unnatural scent to their urine—allsymptoms commonly associated with the disease. I notified the captain of this, and recommended he purge the well.” Another tweak to the wires before her. “Thatis what I get from all these chats, Din. I just need enough information to divine the nature of the pattern.”

“Was that why you asked that Legion commander about the smell of his piss, ma’am?”

“Oh, no, not at all. At the time, I was merely curious.”

I allowed a quick glance at her. She was a tall, thin woman in her late forties or fifties—it was hard to tell with some altered folk—and though her skin had gray undertones like mine, hers was decidedly on the paler end. That was mostly because she never went outside, but part of it was likely because she was Sazi: a lighter-skinned race from the inner rings of the Empire, whose faces were more angular and narrower than Tala folk like me. With her bone-white hair, wide smile, and yellow eyes, she often seemed vaguely feline: a mad housecat, perhaps, roving through a home in pursuit of a suitable sunbeam, though always willing to torture the occasional mouse.

Today she was wearing a long black dress, and on top of this she had on a smudged, dark blue Iudex Iyalet cloak whose heralds were all arranged very much against imperial code, organized into perfectly symmetrical groups. Their sorting was different from yesterday’s: now organized by color, rather than size.

“Oh!” she said. “Books!”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?” I said.

“Did mybooksarrive, Din?”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. They’re waiting on the porch. I would have taken them in, but I was distracted by your torture of the captain.”

“And now you torture me with your attempt at wit,” she said. “But if you would be so kind…”

I bowed, went to the door, and paused to look back with my hand on the knob.

“Eyes averted!” she said. Her face was turned to the corner of the meeting room. “My eyes are averted!”

Once I confirmed she would not see out, I opened the door,snatched up the pile of books, hauled them in, and shut the door. Instantly she was behind me, wriggling one long, pale finger beneath the knot of twine and ripping it apart.

“Took ages this time,” she growled. “Two weeks! Can you believe it? Two goddamn weeks to get these to me.”

“Must be very hard to go so long without a decent crab book, ma’am.”

“You’ve no idea.” She flung them open one after another, shutting her eyes and feeling the pages. Though most of her skin was a pale gray, her fingertips were pink—altered through a graft, I guessed, to be so hypersensitive she could read printed and occasionally handwritten text by touch alone. Which she did quite a bit, since she spent a huge amount of the day blindfolded.Best to keep the senses limited,she’d explained once.And stay indoors. Too much stimulation drives a person mad.

As I watched her rip through each book, I wondered, not for the first time, how I’d be able to tell in her case. I assumed her afflictions had something to do with her augmentations—even though I had never been told exactly in what manner her mind had been augmented.

“Ahh,” Ana said. She rubbed the page of the crab book in a distinctly sensual manner. “This is a book from the Rathras canton. I can tell by the imprints. Their printing presses were first built to publish their holy books, in their language, so some letters slope to the left very slightly…Thank you for fetching these, Din. They should keep me occupied for a day or so.”

“A day, ma’am?” I said.

“Oh. Do you think it less, Din?” she said, worried.

“Can’t say, ma’am.”

“Or should I have gottenmorebooks, Din?”

“Can’t really say, ma’am.”

A taut pause.