Page 111 of A Drop of Corruption

Thelenai meditated on this, her face wan. Then she whispered, “All right. I shall make it so. Yet we have never let an engraver within the Shroud, and certainly never allowed one to glimpse our greatest treasures. It is against policy. Policy can be waived in an emergency, but engravers may still be fragile in such a place. Such memories lie differently within the mind. It will require a different formula of soothings and grafts to calibrate him.”

“You’re going to…to alter my moods, ma’am?” I asked.

She laughed lightly. “Of course! Almost all who go there receive such treatments. Yet I have never done so for an engraver…”

“May I assist, ma’am?” asked Ana. “For I must have all of his memories to do my work.”

“Certainly,” said Thelenai wearily. “I would welcome such help…”

She offered Ana an arm, and together they went to her desk on the far side of the room to plot my fate.

—

I sat on my pillow,dazed and horrified. It was not the first time my duties had required me to go to unholy places, yet the Shroud was another thing entirely. The sea walls of the East were dangerous once a season; the Shroud was a dangerous thing at every hour of every day of the year, like a dreadful chrysalis always threatening to hatch. And here I was, set to go traipsing within the guts of the thing, the marrow perhaps sleeping just beneath each footfall.

“Feeling doomed, Kol?” asked Malo beside me.

“Yes,” I said faintly. “You know, I rather am.”

A bitter laugh. “At least if the Shroud kills you, your death will be quick. Others will have to wait and dread ours before it finally falls.”

I frowned a bit, then realized what she meant. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know what the Treasury planned for…for Yarrow.”

She grunted but said nothing.

“Surely they won’t abandon you here?” I asked. “You’re an Apoth signum, after all.”

“Will they? I do not know. I am not a citizen of the Empire. And even if they did get me out, where would I go? I’ve never been beyond the borders of these fetid swamps. But this pain feels small, knowing how many others will be damned to useless toil on the land of some noble or another, for all their miserable lives.”

“I can’t imagine what it’s like, to have this glimmer of hope, and then have it so quickly smothered.”

“I can,” muttered Malo.

I glanced at her. “Were you one of them once?” I asked. “Anaukari?”

She debated answering, then shrugged. “As were many.”

“Did you run away?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Only if you wish to tell me.”

She was silent for a long moment. “I did not flee. I was freed. But…such an act came at a cost.” She looked back at the window and the slice of the moon shining through. “I have seen only three oathcoins in all my life, Kol. The second was the one you have now in your pocket. The third was the one we discovered in Pyktis’s den. But the first…it was when a boy I toiled alongside saved the life of our lord. Lord Prabhu di Gudia was the nobleman’s name. A lover of horses but a terrible horseman. He was thrown from his steed and broke his arm in a ditch. The bone cut through a vein, and he could have bled out—had not young Dokha leapt into the ditch, tied off the wound with his belt, thrown the lord over his shoulders, and run himback to his ancestral house. He saved his lord’s life, and for this act, Dokha was granted an oathcoin, passed down from the king through many lords.

“But there is a silent agreement of how oathcoins work. You return it to the man who gave it to you for a favor. Youcouldgo above him, to a higher lord or even the king—but only if the need is great, and the favor does not bring insult. Otherwise, you would be in tremendous peril. But Dokha…he was a very good boy. Very selfless, you see.”

“He asked for your freedom?” I guessed.

“He did,” said Malo. “The freedom of all thenaukariwho were below the age of ten. And they made us watch as they killed him for it. Struck his head from his shoulders as if it were a piece of clay, then sank his corpse to the bottom of one of our holy lakes.”

“That’s horrible,” I said softly.

“Yes. But that is what it takes to break so much tradition, so much old power. Yet do you know what saddens my heart most, Kol? It is not that Dokha died so, though I grant that is a horror. It is how my folk so eagerly cling to the poisoned relics of throne and chain. They would gladly die clinging to them and proclaim it salvation.” She plucked a leaf off a plant and kneaded it between her fingers. “So. You will leave, as any wise people would. We will stay here, ruled by the king and the nobles. Those who once served the Empire will be hunted, I expect. And things shall stay the same—or grow even worse. Maybe I will go into the swamp and live as one of those people. I could find a use for my nose and eyes there, at least.”

I gazed at Ana and Thelenai, murmuring at her desk on the other side of her chambers. “What if…what if I could get you out?” I asked.

“Out? To where?”