Page 120 of A Drop of Corruption

A door, then a short passageway; then another door, and another short passageway.

“But most of all, do not tap, or beat out any rhythm before them. Nor should you hum, sing, or whistle any tune. That will agitate the augurs greatly, for they shall seek meaning and pattern in it. And when your two hours are done, they are done. No negotiations on that. Is that understood, sir?”

“Yes, Militis.”

“Very good, sir.”

Torgay took out a ring of keys, unlocked one last door, and gestured to me to enter. We passed into a small, dull, white stone passageway, lit by a string of blue mai-lamps. Three bronze doors were set on the left-hand side ahead. Besides these, the passageway was barren.

Torgay walked to the closest bronze door and unlocked and opened it. “You can enter, sir,” she said.

Bracing myself, I walked inside.

—

The little roomwas much like the observation cell I’d been placed in back in Yarrowdale, but larger: a thick, rippled glass wall split the space in two, with three plain wooden chairs on either side. Placed on each chair on our half were curious instruments: two plain wooden boards, set inside a small frame so there was a shred of a smallspan’s gap between them. Besides these, and the two mai-lamps glowing up above, the room was completely bare.

“Please take a seat, sirs,” said Torgay. “The officers will be with you shortly.”

We sat. The guards retreated and shut the door behind them, though I could tell by the shadows at the bottom that one stood outside, observing us through a slit in the door.

I eyed the glass wall. It looked to be at least two smallspan thick. “Will we, ah, be able to hear the augurs through that, sir?” I asked.

“We will,” said Ghrelin. There was a quaver to his voice now. “There are gaps in the ceiling to allow sound through. They are packed with moss to absorb contagions, so it will be faint—but we shall hear.”

“I see, sir.”

A silence passed.

“The Apothetikal Iyalet is actually the greatest consumer of glass in the Empire,” Ghrelin said suddenly. “Did you know that, Kol?”

“Ah—no, sir. But that makes sense.”

“Yes…the neutral, nonpermeable qualities of glass make it ideal for storing reagents. Though a tempered pane of this size is extremely difficult to create and ship.” He extended a hand to the glass, like he was imagining the caress of its surface. “A glass of this thickness, some two smallspan, perhaps more…I would estimate that this was tempered in Basiria, some hundreds of leagues to the south. Very fine sand there, of a most agreeable quality, and a proud and sprawling glassworks nearby.”

“I see, sir,” I said, puzzled by his enthusiasm.

“They heat the sand with blackwood until it is white-hot, then left to fine out, the bubbles weaving through its boiling puddles…Then it is layered and cooled, and bundled up in packings of moss from Qabirga, and shipped across the vast Lake of Khanum to Mycel—probably in spring, for that’s the period of calmest weather—and then down the Great River Asigis to here. I wonder if I see flaws in the glass…Some speck of seashell or earth that was lost in that sand, and then boiled into the tempered glass. What a miracle it is, to sit and stare through soil made transparent. What lake beach or valley in Basiria is it from? Kesy? Beik Enis? Layli? I wonder if I could smell it on the glass itself…”

I glanced sidelong at him. Though he’d acted strange before, now there was a feverish look to his eyes, and the words tumbled from his mouth so quickly they were nearly unintelligible through his helm.

The augury, I guessed. It had been working on him all this time,I’d suspected, but now it was at its zenith. I wondered what he was now, somewhere inside that suit.

Then there was a click of a door: not from our side but the other.

I looked up, and they entered the room.

—

The first strikingthing about them was their clothing, if it was clothing at all. From their necks to their knees they wore not shirts nor jerkin nor hose, but rather what first appeared to be a shapeless, formless tangle of papers and parchments. I squinted and saw that the papers were attached to a set of underlying robes by string, or pins, or adhesives, and were not of uniform size or type: there were many colors and shades of paper, with some large and neat and others crumpled, and some no more than torn-off corners. All the papers were covered in scribblings and text and numbers, equations and calculations and paragraphs, all rendered in smeary ashpen.

They were notes, I realized. The two augurs made so many notes and had secured so many of them to their bodies that they had almost come to resemble sheep, their figures white and plump and rustling.

I studied the augurs’ faces as they entered. They were gray-skinned, like myself; yet they were not simply bald, but totally hairless, their heads completely depilated, like Ghrelin and Thelenai. Their faces were smudged with ash and ink, which made it difficult for me to determine their sex; but one was a woman, I thought, and the other a man. Though perhaps these terms meant nothing to beings such as they. Perhaps the augurs, like some folk of the innermost cantons, had dispensed with such concepts altogether.

The two augurs walked to the barrier and looked at me, their faces so close to the glass that twin flowers of steam bloomed below their nostrils. There was something inaccessible to their gaze, as if they did not truly have eyes but rather the images of eyes painted on stones sitting within their sockets.

The augurs stared at me for a long while before fumbling about in their coats of parchments. They produced a set of boards that hung from their necks by ribbons. Then they sat down before the glass, placed the boards in their laps, and then…