Page 41 of A Drop of Corruption

“Certainly!” said Ana. “The perpetrator appears to possess intimate knowledge of all the workings of Yarrowdale, but especially of Ghrelin’s projects. Thus, it’s possible that not only is the culprit an Apoth but perhaps one that Ghrelin hasmetbefore—though he might not know it. Ghrelin has also just said he workedaloneupon his healing grafts, so the perpetrator likely did not meet him duringthese labors. Thus, Ghrelin might have met them in a previous station—including the Shroud.”

Thelenai glanced at her entourage. Her commanders looked back with their small, mistrustful eyes but said nothing.

“I consent,” said Thelenai. “But we can only offer you a limited testimony here.” She nodded to Ghrelin. “Continue, Immunis. Carefully.”

Ghrelin cleared his throat, then said, “Well, I…I worked upon the envelope, the veil of the Shroud. The thing that gives the installation its name. The veil absorbs and destroys most contagions as it comes into contact with them, airborne and otherwise. Without the veil, the, ah…theextractionof various critical reagents would be impossible.”

The sight of the Shroud flashed in my mind: huge and green and towering, and fluttering so strangely over the waters.

Ana picked up one of the percolator hoses, plugged it into her mouth, and took an enormous pull from it, the contraption whistling like a startled dove. Then she exhaled and said, “You mean, it would be damned hard to take a leviathan’s carcass and bleed it of all of its bloods and liquorswithoutunleashing catastrophic contagion on all of Yarrow?”

“C-correct,” said Ghrelin.

“How does it manage this feat, Immunis?” asked Ana.

Ghrelin laughed wearily. “That is like asking how the emperor has lived to be four hundred and forty-one years old! It is a great achievement that calls upon many arts, and few can claim to know or comprehend it all. But in crudest terms, the Shroud is based upon a…a tissue found inside of the leviathans themselves.”

“The Shroud is made from apieceof the leviathans?” asked Ana.

Again, Thelenai raised a hand. “This is a question of great secrecy. I am afraid I cannot permit discussion of it.”

“Noted,” said Ana, grinning. “How long did you work inside the Shroud?”

Ghrelin hesitated. Then, very slowly, his hand crept forward on the table.

“For…for three years,” he said quietly. “That is the longest one can serve there.”

His fingers twitched on the table. Then his thumb, index, and middle rose high like a mantis about to strike, and then…

Tap-tap-tap. Taptap. Taptap-tap.

Ana’s head cocked very slightly at the sound of it. I saw the hint of a smile to her lips. She appeared to think for a moment, listening to the tapping. Then she said, “Tell me, Ghrelin…can youexplainthe Shroud to me? For I’ve heard many things about it, but never from an Apoth, and certainly never from an Apoth who actuallyworkedupon it.”

Ghrelin’s fingers twitched away—Tap-tap. Taptap-tap-taptap-tap.

“I could…” he said quietly. “In broad terms.”

“Then please,” said Ana, “indulge me.”

I studied her, still grinning in her enormous cloud of smoke. She wished to keep him talking, I guessed; for when he talked of his time on the Shroud, he tapped, and she must have spied some value in his tapping.

“Well…it takes us about two weeks to move a leviathan carcass here, to Yarrowdale,” said Ghrelin. “We bring it into the bay, and we…we dock it alongside the Shroud, out there in the waters. And then we gather the veil about it.” He leaned forward, still tapping, his eyes bright with a curious light. “Each body is different, you know. No two leviathans are alike. We do not know why—we comprehend so very little about them, really—but there is always variation. And we at the Shroud have only a, a handful of days to look at the anatomy, to comprehend the structure of this new thing, before it decays beyond salvage.” He began speaking very fast, and tapping even faster. “There are layers and chambers to each one, you see, with different types of bloods within. And places where the blood is most corrosive, and chambers where it is purest.”

“Tell me about that,” said Ana softly.

He nodded eagerly, as if she’d stoked the fire in his mind. “The purest of titan’s blood—orqudaydin kani,as is the proper name—is powerfully metamorphic. When it comes into contact with asignificant concentration of living tissues, it mixes with them, forcing a strange blending. Flesh becomes as leaf, and leaf as bone, and so on. All is warped. There are places in the plains about Talagray in the East, for example, where many leviathans have been felled, and many strange and awful breeds of flowers still spring from the blighted lands…”

I kept my face grim and stoic at that, for I had seen such sights myself.

“What do you mean bysignificant concentration?” asked Ana.

“The very air about us is alight with a scant mist of life,” chanted Ghrelin, waving a hand. “But that is not enough. It takes a slight bit more. A dusting of fungi, a scraping of mold…Though tiny to our eyes, these are enough to induce a reaction from thekani.It is dangerous, but terribly valuable! And accessing it is hardest of all.” A wet gleam as he licked his lips, and he spoke still faster: “It…it comes to a question of parting flesh, of navigating this immense construct of bone and ligament and chitin, wending through the whole of its being until you find the one place, theone placewhere you ca—”

“Immunis,” said Thelenai softly.

Ghrelin stopped, abashed. The wild light in his eyes dimmed, and he cleared his throat and withdrew back into himself.

“We, ah, drain it of its most critical bloods,” Ghrelin finished quietly. “These we ship to the canals, to be fed through the orchards there to produce precursors and be further refined. The remainder of the carcass is hauled into the seas to the east, to sink, rot, and be lost.”