Page 2 of A Drop of Corruption

“My immunis shall come in her own time,” I said. “I presume there are lodgings assigned for us?”

“Of course. My comrades shall take care of her, when she comes.” She nodded toward the folk I’d taken to be indigents, seated at the waterfront. I realized now they were also bound in Apoth cloaks, as muddy as they were. “But before we go—would you prefer to vomit here, out of doors, Kol? Or would you prefer to wait?”

I stared. “I’m sorry?”

“The scent of fish on your breath,” she said. “It is not decent. I think the fish has turned sour, and whoever served it to you spiced it so you could not taste it. I give it, oh, about an hour until your stomach starts burbling, and then it shall come up.” She turned to me, smiling lazily. “It will not be helped by the ossuary. It is a difficult place, even if one’s stomach is as still as stone. And especially given the state of our dead man.”

I pressed my hand against my stomach, thinking she had to be wrong. But then there, in some crevice of my belly: did I feel the slightest unpleasant flutter?

I glared at her. “You make many assumptions, Malo. I am fine, and ready to begin our work.”

“Are you,” she said lightly. “Very good, then! Let us go to the ossuary and do our filthiness there.”

—

The Yarrowdale ossuarydid not put me at ease: between the low, vaulted ceilings and the distant mutterings of other Apoths,the building felt much like a catacomb, and worst of all, the dank air reeked of a vaguely musky yet awful scent.

“You are a lucky man, Kol,” Malo said as we walked its passages. “You know this?”

“Why is that?”

“They recently did a purge of our samples,” she said. “Tossed out all the ones well past their term, for we can only preserve them for so long. The air in here is now like a spring meadow, compared to how it was last month.”

I pressed a knuckle to my nostrils. “How can anyone bear it?”

“A simple answer.” She stopped to grab a cart on high spoked wheels and began pushing it along with us. “Most don’t.”

I looked Malo over as we walked. She did not seem bothered by our surroundings in the least: she sauntered along, chewing languidly on a piece of hina root—a minor stimulant—which gave her mouth a blackish tinge. She’d hung her cloak up at the door, and I saw now that she sported not only a short sword sheathed at her side, but two knives in her belt, one in her boot, and a little one sheathed at her wrist. I wondered exactly what her duties were, to require such strength of arms.

Finally we came to a little cupboard door at the end of the hall. “Here he is,” she sang.

She opened the cupboard door. I braced myself, yet the only thing within was a wooden box, about ten smallspan tall and three span wide and long: not much larger than a Legionnaire’s shield. Malo grasped the box and slid it out onto her rolling cart, the spindly spokes of the wheels creaking with the new weight.

I studied the shallow wooden box.

“I had thought,” I said slowly, “I was coming to review a body.”

“A what?”

“My orders said I was to review the body of an officer found in a canal, who is suspected to be a victim of violence.”

“Ohh,” she said thoughtfully. “Well. Then someone has made a mistake! For I did not say we had abody.I told my superiors we had foundremains.I chose the word most carefully.”

There was a silence as I continued looking at the small, flat box on the cart.

“So,” I said, sighing. “I take it he’s not just very short.”

She grinned, her teeth now black as Rathras grapes from the hina root. “No such luck. Shall we take a peek?”

—

We moved toa circular, laboratory-like room, with a wide, bronze table beneath a row of glimmering blue mai-lanterns. The air here smelled strongly of lye and other cleaning reagents. A drain was set in the floor beneath the table, with a pinkish halo of stain on the stone about it: a place often cleaned, I supposed, but never truly clean.

Humming, Signum Malo slid the box from the cart to the table, then walked to the shelves and donned a large leather apron and gloves over her muddy, crimson Apoth’s uniform. “You might want to get a chair,” she said. “This can take time. I am a warden, and thus trained in many Apoth arts, but most of what I do is tracking and, ah…” She mimed firing a bow and arrow. “Resolving disputes, I should say?”

I parted my soaking cloak and dumped myself into the chair, my sword swinging at my side. “I’d thought a warden’s tasks were keeping valuable reagents and precursors safe, not combat.”

“Well, we don’t get any Legionnaires for protection out here. We are far from the Empire proper, and there are no leviathans this far north. Yet it makes a crude sense, does it not? For what are human beings, if not walking bags of valuable reagents and compounds?” She grinned. “Why should I not track them, and bleed them of some critical reagents when deemed fit?”