Page 124 of A Drop of Corruption

“Small and secretive and strange, our order is,” said the man. “But if it were to have saints, surely Sunus Pyktis would sit among them, so wisely did he serve.”

“The stories were told to us when we first passed through the veil to serve,” said the woman. “For he was best and brightest of us. A man without peer.”

“Quiet and modest,” said the man. “Humble to the point of effacement.”

“Yet the stories were loud and grand, even if he was not,” said the woman. “It was Pyktis who pioneered the use ofoli mukto bind the titan’s marrow. Winding it up in ossuary moss and smuggling the secrets of their flesh away for us to study.”

“He did not invent it,” the man corrected her gently. “But he made the most advances with it.”

“He guided it through their tissue like a needle through cloth,” the woman said.

The man’s wide, shallow eyes danced up and down my figure, and he tapped: “You know of the marrow. I feel you may have even laid eyes upon our prize. You know that when the wet seasons are high, and the Legion fells a titan, we augurs wend through the depths ofthese great, rotting entities, passing through chambers and veins and hollows like the deepest of mines.”

“It is we who read their bodies, their flesh,” tapped the woman. “Like dowsers in the steppes, sensing sleeping water beneath a curl of clay. This is no easy task. It takes many minds, and powerful minds at that, to read the flesh of the leviathans.”

“We work in groups,” said the man. “Polytiais the word—groups of three, who live together, labor together, learn together.”

“In a polytia we become one,” said the woman. “One mind, one stream of thought, one entity.”

“And Pyktis was a member of your polytia?” I asked.

The woman’s hands tapped out a message, and Ghrelin breathlessly translated: “He was our eldest, our prificto-polytia. We were his juniors, serving with him during his third, final year. He was to drum the beat of our lives. It was an honor to serve with him.”

Then the man, cautious, anxious: “Yet…we augurs are skilled at learning the natures of folk. This is most important in a polytia. To doubt your colleagues while wandering a titan’s breast…that is certain death. But when it came to Pyktis…”

“Pyktis was bright, brilliant—but also unreachable,unknowable,” said the woman. “He would give us truths, offer us data—but it was only data. Information. Facts.”

The man: “Where he was born—in Ta-Rath, in Rathras, far to the southeast.”

The woman again: “His mother, beloved and beautiful, who had perished when he was a young man.”

“His desire, endless and passionate, to bring betterment to the Empire—healing and growth and restoration.”

“His perfect marks, perfect scores, perfect service record. It was data. Records. It was not knowledge. Notcomprehension.”

The man, wistfully, dreamily: “To serve with him was akin to loving a person made of glass. So difficult to perceive. So still, so cold, so hard to the touch.”

They lapsed into a meditative silence.

Yet I noted: love? They had loved him?

I recalled what Ghrelin had told me:Relationships there are…very different.

“He lived a story, then,” I said. “And hid his true self—is that it?”

The augurs frowned. The woman riffled through her coat of notes and produced yet another smeary piece of parchment, which she studied like it was sacred script. Then she absently tapped on her board with one hand, and Ghrelin translated: “No…not entirely. For sometimes hedidshow one side of himself so hidden. During the days of remembrance.”

I recalled Ghrelin mentioning these as we toured the reagent crates. “The days of remembrance…What are those?”

“It is a holy day upon the Shroud, every six months,” explained the man. “It is on these days that we memorialize the ones we have lost. Augurs and officers killed in our duties, laboring away on the carcasses of these great mysteries.”

“Devoured by contagion,” tapped the woman. “Sickness. Madness. Plague.”

The woman: “During these holy days, we read the names of those who have perished in the past months. We thank them for their service, and pledge our love, to remember them always. And it was on these days, only these two days that I saw, that Pyktis…wept.”

“Wept?” I said.

The man tapped rapidly: “Yes. Hewept.Wept with anguish, wept with agony. I have never seen a person weep so.”