Page 3 of The Tainted Cup

A faint odor filled the air as we grew close to the door: something musty and sweet, and yet tinged with a rancid aroma.

My stomach trembled. I reminded myself to hold my head high, to keep my expression scowling and stoic, like a real assistant investigator might. Then I had to remind myself that Iwasa real assistant investigator, damn it all.

“Have you worked many death cases before, sir?” asked Otirios.

“Why?” I asked.

“Just curious, given the nature of this one.”

“I haven’t. Mostly the investigator and I have handled pay fraud among the officers here in Daretana.”

“You didn’t handle that murder last year? The sotted guard who attacked the fellow at the checkpoint?”

I felt something tighten in my cheek. “The Iudex Investigator position was created here only four months ago.”

“Oh, I see, sir. But you didn’t work any death inquiries with your investigator at your previous station?”

The muscle in my cheek tightened further. “When the investigator arrived here,” I said, “I was selected from the other local Sublimes to serve as her assistant. So. No.”

There was the slightest of pauses in Otirios’s stride. “So…you have only worked for an Iudex Investigator forfour months,sir?”

“What’s the point of this, Princeps?” I asked, irritated.

I could see the smirk playing at the edges of Otirios’s mouth again. “Well, sir,” he said. “Of all the death cases to be your first, I wouldn’t much like it being this one.”

He opened the door.

—

THE CHAMBER WITHINwas a bedroom, as grand as the rest of the house, with a wide, soft mossbed in one corner and a fernpaper wall and door separating off what I guessed was the bathing closet—for though I’d never seen a bathing closet inside a house, I knew such things existed. A mai-lantern hung in the corner; in the corner diagonal from it, another kirpis shroom. Beside it were two trunks and a leather satchel. Commander Blas’s possessions, I guessed.

But the most remarkable feature of the room was the clutch of leafy trees growing in the center—for it was growing from within a person.

Or rather,througha person.

The corpse hung suspended in the center of the bedchamber, speared by the many slender trees, but as Otirios had said it was initially difficult to identify it as a body at all. A bit of torso was visible in the thicket, and some of the left leg. What I could see of them suggested a middle-aged man wearing the purple colors of the Imperial Engineering Iyalet. The right arm was totally lost, and the right leg had been devoured by the swarm of roots pouring out from the trunks of the little trees and eating into the stonewood floor of the chamber.

I stared into the roots. I thought I could identify the pinkish nub of a femur amid all those curling coils.

I looked down. An enormous pool of blood had spread across the floor, as smooth and reflective as a black glass mirror.

A flicker in my stomach, like it held an eel trying to leap out.

I told myself to focus, to breathe. To stay controlled and contained. This was what I did for a living now.

“It’s safe to approach, sir,” Otirios said, a little too cheerily. “We’ve inspected the whole of the room. Worry not.”

I stepped closer to look at the greenery. They weren’t really trees, but some kind of long, flexible grass—a bit like shootstraw, the hollow, woody grass they used to make piping and scaffolding. The thicket of shoots appeared to have emerged from between Blas’s shoulder and neck—I spied a hint of vertebrae trapped within them and suppressed another pang of nausea.

Most remarkable was Blas’s face. It seemed the shoots had grown multiple branches as they’d emerged from his torso, and one had shot sideways through Blas’s skull, bending his head at an awful angle; yet the branch had somehow enveloped his skull above the upper jawline, swallowing his face and his nose and ears. All that was left of Blas’s skull was his lower jaw, hanging open in a silent scream; and there, above it in the wood, a half ring of teeth and the roof of a mouth, submerging into the rippling bark.

I stared at his chin. A whisper of steely stubble; a faint scar on the edge from some accident or conflict. I moved on, looked at the rest of him. Left arm furred with light brown hair, fingers calloused and crackling from years of labor. The leggings on the left leg were stained dark with blood, so much so that it had pooled in his boot, filling it like a pot of sotwine.

I felt a drop on my scalp and looked up. The shoots had punched through the roof of the house, and the morning mist was drifting inside in dribs and drabs.

“Sticks out about ten span past the top of the house, if you’recurious, sir,” said Otirios. “Shot through four span of roofing like it was fish fat. So—a pretty big growth. Never seen anything like it.”

“How long did this take?” I asked hoarsely.