Page 73 of A Drop of Corruption

“Where did you get that?” demanded Thelenai.

“Din found it in the clearing,” said Ana. “On a big piece of leather, stuck in front of that instrument that turned fifty fucking people intobrush and sedge in mere seconds. Do you know, I rather think our killer left it specifically for you two?”

Thelenai’s eyes rose from the parchment to stare at Ana in horror.

“Here,” said Ana forcefully, “is what shall now happen. You, Commander-Prificto, are going to startactuallycooperating with this investigation as if we sat upon true imperial soil. You are going to tell me the truth—even if you do not wish to. And I don’t think you do, because I think you know you have done something very wrong. I suspect you believe you have done this wrong thing for all the right reasons—and perhaps you have!—but that is all moot now.” All the smugness vanished from Ana’s face, replaced by a cold, terrible fury. “It is moot, because someone fromyour househas slipped away into the jungle. He has gone into those trees, and he has reinvented himself, and he has now killed not onlyfiftyYarrow folk, butSanctum knowshow many Apoth officers, canal riggers, and imperial servants in the past two years! He may in fact be the most prolific murderer in imperial history, for all I fucking know! And though I don’t yet understand him, I know he’s not going to stop. This fellow’s got a taste for it now. Helikesit. He’s practiced it, foryears.And he is doing something, making something, playing some game—and I cannot unravel it until you tell me the emperor’s honest fucking truth. Am I clear?”

For a long while, nobody moved: Malo sat hunched in her chair, elbows on her knees, watching Thelenai and Ghrelin; Ana was leaning so far forward she was practically standing up, her chin stuck out like a battering ram; Ghrelin’s body twitched and shuddered, his fingers beating out a tattoo upon his hip.

Then Thelenai slumped, defeated. “I…I can’t tell you one piece,” she said softly. “For you to…to understand one piece, I would have to tell you all. I don’t know where to start.”

“Why don’t you start with the marrow, then?” asked Ana. “For that’s what this is about, yes?”

“Y-yes,” whispered Thelenai. She shut her eyes. “Come, Ghrelin. Let us tell them.”

Chapter 28

“I…I was assigned here nearlythirty years ago,” Thelenai began quietly. “I was a hypokratos officer in Yarrowdale when the Shroud was originally built, and I contributed designs to nearly all the subsequent expansions. Now it encompasses the whole of my duties. It is my strange child, in a way, and I its mother. And…to many people, the Shroud is a marvelous achievement. To some, it is almost a holy site.” She paused. “But what few see is that everything about the Shroud is sovulnerable.It depends on so much for all to go aright.”

“I assume you mean,” drawled Ana, “it is rather obviously bad for the entire Empire to depend on slaughtering and bleeding these tremendous, horrible beasts once a year…”

“Yes,” said Ghrelin, his voice as quiet as a breeze. “But it’s even worse than that. Extracting thequdaydin kaniis one thing. Storing it is yet another. But it is fragile in other ways, too.”

“The location of it all,” said Thelenai. “The hostility of the Yarrow king, and the constant smugglers. But the sheer distance is troublesome. The larger shipments cannot be shipped at all during the dry seasons, and so many reagents degrade. Though few Apoths admit it, the conclusion is obvious.”

“The Empire has outgrown the Shroud,” said Ghrelin. “And Yarrowdale. It cannot function as it has for much longer.”

The two Apoths leaned back in their seats, a look of miserable relief on their faces, like they’d both confessed to some horrible sin.

“Yes, yes,” said Ana, dismissive. “That is why you sought themarrow. Correct?”

“True,” said Thelenai. “The…the marrow is a cylinder of spongy bone resting in the inner chambers of their anatomy, you see. When the leviathan is brought to the Shroud, we first bleed it of its most dangerous ichors, and the marrow is saved for last. That is where thekaniis found. That is what we drain, and extract.Thatis why Yarrowdale exists.”

“The Senate of the Sanctum authorized a research project here in Yarrowdale just over a decade ago,” said Ghrelin, his voice growing fragile, “to answer one question—what if we could extract not only the blood but the marrowitself? What if we could bathe it in nutrients and maintain it so it kept producing the blood wellafterthe titan has died?”

“This was your secret task, then?” asked Ana. “To remove an organ from a leviathan and keep it alive, like a child trapping a frog in a pot?”

“Your comparison is crude,” said Thelenai, “but apt. We have kept our labors secret, for obvious reasons—if the king of Yarrow were to find out we were laboring in his backyard to render his entire kingdom irrelevant to the Empire, it would be politically destabilizing. But…if we achieved this feat, the effects would go well beyond ridding us of the king.”

“How so?” asked Ana.

“Many reagents decay during the long journey through the canals,” explained Ghrelin. “Which makes many grafts impossible. If we could remove the marrow, stabilize it, and ship it into the inner rings, we could producekaniat scale, and onsite! Close to where it would beused.We could even duplicate the marrow, perhaps, like taking cuttings from a plant, and grow more specimens. And with this, we could change all the Empire.”

“Healing grafts and suffusions you can scarcely imagine,” said Thelenai. “We could end the plague of sterility that comes with so many alterations. Bring about an age of abundance like when the first Khanum emerged from the valley in the ancient days and changed all the world before them.”

“We could even heal our Sublimes,” said Ghrelin. “Many of us areplagued by mental afflictions as we grow old and lead short lives. With an abundance ofkani,we could change even that.”

I had listened to all this with a mix of wonder and horror, but that caught my attention. I had seen engravers grow old and mad well before their natural age, afflicted by hallucinations and dreams; to hear that the Empire could be laboring even now to save me from that fate filled me with wonder.

Ana’s cold voice cut in. “Remarkable,” she said flatly. “So. Why isn’t this wonderful world achieved?”

“Because it is a logistical nightmare,” sighed Thelenai. “How could we safely extract, contain, and ship the marrowitself,which continually excretes titan’s blood in its purest form? It would be like trying to hold a flaming coal without burning your hand,orsnuffing it out.”

“We p-partly solved the problem,” stammered Ghrelin. “For we Apoths already possessed arts of preserving pieces of the dead…”

Malo spoke up: “Ah! You wish to use ossuary moss, don’t you? You’re trying to bind it up in ossuary moss, just like we do for our dead.”

A fleeting smile from Thelenai. “Indeed. By carefully injecting the organ with an advanced strain ofoli muk—or ossuary moss, as you refer to it—we could wrap up the marrow like a fly in a spider’s web and keep it preserved indefinitely. We had to do it in the right sequence, but…but if we could figure that out, then the work could proceed.”