Page 56 of A Drop of Corruption

The body floated facedown, arms at its sides, its feet low enough in the water that they were lost in the muddy haze. It was not yet bloated, and we could see no marring to the corpse as it approached us. One of the wardens pulled a lance from the stock of arms, reached out, and hooked the body. Then he brought it close and rolled it over.

Instantly the wardens recoiled, crying out; for on the underside, the body was not truly a body at all.

From the chest to the hip bone, the bare torso appeared to bloom into a tangle of silvery, slender skeletons, like the bones of many fish, yet it was difficult to tell where the man’s body ended and this twisted storm of glistening fishbones began. It was as if they sprouted from his flesh, or from his pelvis and rib cage, like a school of minnows leaping from his abdomen, and some of the skeletons had eyes that were small, malformed, and peeping.

But worst was his skull, which no longer bore a face. Instead his eyes and cheeks and nose had been replaced by a clutch of coiling, dark tubers, complete with tiny, pale roots. They had apparently erupted from his head with such a violent burst that they had dislocated his jawbone, which hung by a tendon from his skull, and it, too, sprouted tiny dark tubers, some of which had dislodged his teeth.

Malo hissed something at the warden with the lance, and he let it go, then tossed the lance in after it. I watched the body float away and sniffed my vials, carefully engraving the sight I had just beheld, no matter how horrible it had been. The wardens fell to whispering questions, until Malo turned to me.

“Kol,” she whispered. “What inhellwas that? Have you seen anything like that before?”

I tried to calm my heart, and considered it. An idea had already floated to the top of mind, but I fought to ignore it, for it felt too mad to speak aloud. I would not say such things, I decided, not yet.

“I have not seen that, but…I’ve seen things like that,” I saidcarefully. “It has the look of serious contagion. Something has altered that man horribly.” I looked to Tangis. “Correct, Princeps?”

He nodded, his dark face now white about the lips. “Y-yes…I have viewed such things in books, but…I’ve never seen such a sight in Yarrow, or any of Pithia.” He swallowed and said to Malo, “We’ll have to take precautions, ma’am. For while I’ve no idea what happened to him, we’re going in the same direction—yes?”

“Of course,” Malo muttered. She walked to one box in the boat and opened it. Within were two dozen warding helms, and she began passing them out. “Have you worn one of these?” she asked me.

“I wore one in Talagray, for a bit.”

“Drink as much water as you can—for I can’t say when you’ll have your next chance—then get it on. It is a difficult thing to wear in the heat, and my folk shall love them even less, for they’ll dull our noses and eyes and ears far more than yours. Yet we must. I don’t want us exposed to whatever did that to that man.”

I took a great draught of water, stuffed the helm on my face, and strapped it down. Instantly, the world about me turned to dark and acrid oilcloth. I readjusted it until my eyes aligned with the glass eyepieces, and the world coalesced into a blurry, glassy version of itself.

I peered upriver through the eyepieces. “I am ready if you are,” I said softly.

Malo laughed dully. “How ready could one ever be for such a task?”

—

The journey upstreamwas tense and silent, all of last evening’s merriment wiped from our minds. The wardens seemed especially affected. I reckoned that the warding helms disrupted their senses so much that they were bothered a great deal.

“We grow close to the camp,” murmured Malo. “To arms, then.”

She and the wardens began stringing their bows and fitting them to their slings. The wardens did not wield common bows but ones unusually thick and long. I saw for the first time that many of the wardens had one arm wider and more corded than the other; somehad hints of purple to their elbows and hands and forearms, as if the appendages had been grafted for strength.

We followed the little river around one long curve. Then Sabudara flung out a finger, pointing ahead, and whispered one word: “Ute!”

“Seen something,” said Malo softly. She tugged at the reins, slowing the seakips, and went to Sabudara. Together they huddled and peered off into the trees. Sabudara pointed at some distant part of the canopies, and I stuck a spyglass to the glass bulb of my helm and squinted.

Eventually I found it: the silhouette of a person, crouched on a stand at the top of a tree. The morning sun was just behind them, so I could make out no more than their shoulders and head, but they peered out at the river toward us. They did not move but sat still as stone.

Malo, Sabudara, and another warden knelt behind one of the boat’s armored walls, whispering. Then Malo plucked at her cloak, ripped some fibers free, and dropped them, gauging the wind. She whispered something; then, all in unison, the three wardens aimed, drew, and fired, their strings creaking and clacking as the missiles took flight.

All three arrows flew straight and true—incredible shots, so accurate I was awed—and pierced the figure in the tree three times. Yet the figure did not cry out or stagger. They sat still and silent, as if perfectly content to have been shot through three times over.

The wardens frowned, confused. Malo waited for a moment, studying the figure, before tugging at the reins of the seakips again. She nudged the beasts to the shore and gestured to her people. One of the wardens leapt out, slipped into the brush at the bank, and scaled the tree quick as a squirrel.

We watched as he made it to the stand and vanished into the branches. Then we heard a grunt, and a creak above, and something large and dark plummeted into the water before us.

One of the wardens hooked the thing with a spear and hauled it aboard. A few wardens gasped with surprise. It was like a statue of aman in a crouching position, but it was wrought of tightly wound vines, all closely compact and blooming here and there with rosy-pink cups. It had been shot through with the three arrows, two in its wattled chest and one in its neck. I found the figure strikingly lifelike: something in the tilt of its head, like the vine-person had just heard something startling.

“Strange,” said Malo softly. “A trick, perhaps, to scare off intruders?”

I spied something glimmering in the depths of the vines. I crouched, drew my knife, and dug at the vines until I freed the thing.

A belt buckle, made of brass. Not just a buckle, though, but also part of a belt, like the vines had grown around it and torn the leather to pieces.