Page 145 of The Tainted Cup

Miljin finally smiled. “Ha! You think you’re going back to Daretana, boy? How quaint.”

I wondered what he meant by that, but then I heard a voice: “You’re all right!”

I looked over my shoulder and saw the Legionnaire on the crutch approaching, his head haloed by the setting sun behind. It took me a moment to spy the shabby, earnest smile of Captain Kepheus Strovi within that shadowy face.

“You remember how to open it, Kol?” said Miljin besideme.

Distracted, I returned to him. I nodded. “I do, sir. But—”

“Good.” He nodded to me. “Good luck in your travels, Signum. I wish you much honor, and great success.”

Then he turned and marched away, stumping out of the Trifecta toward the east.

—

KEPHEUS AND Iwalked the lanes of Talagray, moving slowly ashe 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 tome.

“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 tome.

“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 knowwhat it was: the scent of tobacco flowed from the paper the second I squeezedit.

“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.”