Page 59 of The Tainted Cup

A small chest sat at the bottom, finely made of pale wood with a bronze top. I tried to open it and found it locked. I reached into my sleeve to produce my lockpicks again, hoping I would get lucky a second time tonight.

My first attempt failed, as did my second. But upon trying the third technique I’d memorized I heard another satisfying click, and slowly lifted the top of the box.

I looked inside.

I stared. Then I shut the box.

I glanced around the tiny house again, confirming I was alone. Then I swallowed, reopened the box, and peered within, struggling to believe I was seeing aright.

Placed in the bottom was a small leather bag, tied shut; and there, beside that, was a stack of oblong, thick silver plates, each bright and shiny and about the size of my palm—and each was carved with the herald of the Iyalet of the Treasury.

I picked one plate up and studied it in the weak light. Its tiny lettering readONE THOUSAND TALINTS OF THE GREAT AND HEAVENLY EMPIRE OF KHANUM.

I set the silver plate down, feeling faint. I had only ever heard of thousand-talint coins but had never seen one. I’d certainly never expected to touch one.

I turned the coin over, thinking. Then I took out my small knife and ran the point along its face, gouging it. The interior was silver as well. A true imperial talint, then.

I took the remainder of the coins out and stacked them on the floor before me. If I was seeing correctly, there were now seven thousand imperial talints here, which was surely more money than I’d ever see in all my days.

I sat on the floor, now weak in the knees, my heart fluttering in my chest. What was this strange little house? And what in hell was goingon?

I returned to the box and took out the little leather bag. I untied it gently, worried what improbable thing it might contain. Perhaps a piece of titan bone, I thought, or the keys to the emperor’s Sanctum.

But the first item that tumbled out was not nearly so interesting: it was an imperial wall pass, a little leather booklet containing a metal symbol indicating the bearer possessed the right to pass through the third wall of the Empire and to travel from the Outer Rim to the third ring. Written within the front cover in official blue inks was the nameRona Aristan.I flipped through the pages, reading the seals from the third-ring cantons she had visited; the third ring was far more rigorous about contagion than the Outer Rim, and tracked all visitors carefully.

Rona Aristan, it seemed, had visited four cantons within the third ring again and again: the Qabirga, Juldiz, Bekinis, and Mitral cantons. She must have traveled to each one at least once per year over the past nine years.

I grunted in surprise and summoned the map of the Empire in my mind. These four cantons were mostly plains country, devoted to growing grain and reagents behind the safety of the walls. What a Talagray Engineering secretary was doing traveling to such places was beyond me. But then, neither could I comprehend how she’ddied, nor why she’d hidden seven thousand-talint coins in an empty house mere streets away from where she’d lived.

I set the wall pass down on the table, then reached back into the little leather bag and pulled out the final item within. I paused as I saw it, for this one was more familiar than the rest.

I held it up to the dim light: a small, bronze disc with a little glass vial set in the center, sloshing with black fluid.

A reagents key. Another one, athirdone, after the two Miljin and I had found. But this key was far less ornate than the one the ten dead Engineers had possessed, and featured only one vial, suggesting it was intended for a much less protected portal.

I studied the three very different valuables placed on the floor before me: the reagents key, the wall pass, and the seven thousand talints.

“Hum,” I said aloud.

Not knowing what else to do, I opened up my engraver’s satchel and carefully placed them all inside, using a kerchief to cover the silver coins and prevent them from clinking and clanking. Then I buckled my satchel tight, exited and locked the door behind me, and slipped away into the drizzle, sprinting back to the Trinity as the final curfew bells began to ring.

CHAPTER 17

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WHEN I FINISHED MYreport to Ana, I was slightly pleased when she just sat there on the edge of her bed, boggled. She opened her mouth to speak; then paused, rethinking her words; and then she did so again, and again, like she had so many questions for me she wasn’t able to get any one of them past her lips.

Finally, she managed to say, “Let me see one of those talints.”

I slipped out one of the huge silver coins and handed it over to her. She turned it about in her hands. “So…let me get this straight, Din,” she said. “You have…just been walking around the city…withseven thousand talintsin your bag? Like they were cabbages for the cooking pot?”

“Ah…yes, ma’am?”

“By Sanctum,” she said. “And people thinkI’mfucking mad! And you didn’t slip an extra one in your boot or something, did you?”

“Ah…no, ma’am. That seems a good way to invite more hell into my life, when I already have hell aplenty.”

“How encouraging it is to see you show wisdom! But…but this has been nothing short of an utter vomit of revelations! Secret meetings! A missing survivor! Murdered secretaries making secret journeys across the Empire! And not only a sack containing a goddamn fortune, butthreereagents keys discovered in one day?” She fumed for a moment. “Well. Well! I shall need to do somedeep immersionto make sense of all this.”