THE DARETANA CANTON DIDN’T have a true city in any normal sense of the word, but rather a clutch of Imperial Iyalet buildings clinging to the main crossroads, along with countless lots and warehouses and storage barns for all the materials and livestock constantly being routed to the sea walls. That afternoon it was the usual morass of mud and men and the press of horseflesh. I danced south along the corners through the town, pausing for the carts and wagons, and saw the familiar sights: horses with copper red mud churned up to their bellies; crawling swarms of thrumming flies; sweat-drenched officers of the Legion, the Engineers, and the other Iyalets bellowing names and orders, seemingly indifferent as to whether they were heard or heeded. I bowed and nodded and bowed and nodded until I was free of the throng and into the jungle.

The woods were dark and shimmering hot. The sun was in its descent, spears of its tawny light plunging through the canopy. I found the narrow jungle path to my master’s house and stepped along it, greeted by the familiar chirrup of frog and beetle. Then the steam-drenched leaves parted and I glimpsed her little fretvine quarters waiting in the shade.

I picked my way through the tree stumps. The Engineers had cut all these trees down when my master had first been appointed Iudex Investigator of this canton, some four months ago now, and then they’d made her a house from fretvine—the special, altered vine the Apothetikals had tamed to grow into any shape. Whereas I’d trodden this path so many times I practically walked in my own footprints, she had not left that place since she’d moved in. Not once.

I walked up the steps to her front door and saw a stack of books waiting before the door, tied up with string. Delivery from the Daretana post station, I guessed. I squatted and flipped a few open to read their titles. As always, the letters shook and danced before my eyes, making it hard for me to put them together—the shifting jungle light didn’t help—but I made out Summation of the Transfer of Landed Properties, Qabirga Canton, 1100–1120 and Theories Related to the Increase in Mass of the Eastern Scuttlecrab Since 800.

“The hell?” I muttered.

Then I paused, listening. I heard the chirrup of a tossfrog, and the low call of a mika lark; but then I realized I had heard something else: the mutter of a man, within the house.

I pressed my ear to the front door. I could hear one voice within—my master’s—but then a second, a man’s. One that sounded anxious, even nervous.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “She’s gone and trapped another one…”

I threw the door open and dashed in.

---

—

THE MOST REMARKABLE feature of the interior of the little fretvine house, as always, was the sheer number of books: walls and stacks and veritable canyons of tomes, on any number of obscure subjects. My master quite literally lived between books, often using them as a desk and nightstand. She even had to carve out a little cavern in them for her bed.

I peered through the valleys of tomes and approached the meeting room at the back of the little house. I could already see the feet of someone sitting in a chair back there—officer’s boots, black and shiny—and grimaced. I smoothed back my hair and walked into the meeting room.

The meeting room had gotten worse since yesterday: it was now brimming with tangles of potted plants, many exotic and half-dead, and stringed musical instruments in varying states of disrepair. On the left side of the room sat a small stuffed chair, and today a captain from Engineering occupied it, a thin, middle-aged man who looked absolutely terrified.

The reason for his terror was obvious, for most people found themselves terrified to share a room with my master: Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, Iudex Investigator of the Daretana Canton, who was sitting on the floor facing away from the captain as she worked on yet another one of her projects. It appeared to be some contraption of wires and string I could make no sense of. I guessed she’d taken apart one of her many situr harps—she was an avid if inattentive musician—and was making some kind of loom from its strings.

“I told you, Din,” Ana said, “to knock. Always.”

I stood up straight at attention, hands behind my back, heels shoulder-width apart, knees straight. “Thought I heard voices, ma’am,” I said. “Came to check.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to be worried about.” She looked over her shoulder at me, grinning. A strand of her snowy-white hair arched down over her cheek, like the crest feather of some exotic bird. I maintained my stance, but she could not see me, for she was wearing a wide strip of crimson cloth as a blindfold. “The captain and I,” she said, “have been having the most delightful conversation.”

The captain stared at me in naked dread.

“Have you, ma’am,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said. She turned back to her project. “The captain here is in charge of maintaining the irrigation networks about Daretana. During their works they discovered ruins, hundreds of years old, built by some of the folk who lived here before the Empire came. Isn’t that right, Captain Tischte?”

The captain looked at me and mouthed—Help me!

“Most curiously,” Ana continued, “apparently some of the ruins were built using a complex herringbone brick structure, requiring less mortar in their application! Isn’t that fascinating?”

The captain was now gesturing desperately at me and pointing at the door.

“Very fascinating, ma’am,” I said.

“Especially because,” she said, “I have long nursed a theory that many of the Kurmini folk in the third ring of the Empire originally migrated from these lands before the Empire was established. And this would offer some confirmation of that, as the herringbone brick pattern is extremely common in the Kurmin canton! The people migrated inward, obviously, because…” She waved her hand easterly. “I mean, if you wanted to survive, that was what you did.”

The captain paused in his gesturing, having noticed a white cloth on a tray beside him. Before I could stop him, he lifted it and stared in horror at the sight underneath: a little jipti sparrow that Ana had caught some weeks ago, then killed, dissected, and preserved in a glass jar. The captain dropped the cloth, his hand trembling.

I rushed to think up a story. “Actually, ma’am,” I said, clearing my throat, “I happened to run into some officers from Engineering on the way here.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, ma’am. They mentioned they needed Captain Tischte right away.”

Ana paused before her contraption, then cocked her head. “Hm. No. That is a lie, Din. You’re a very bad liar, and I can hear it in your voice. But! I will admit, besides the herringbone discussion, Captain Tischte hasn’t really had anything interesting to say, and I’m getting rather bored of him.” She turned to him, still blindfolded, still grinning. “You can go, Captain. I do appreciate your time.”

Captain Tischte shot to his feet, looking scandalized. He bowed, uttered a single hoarse “M-madam,” and then made for the door.

I accompanied him out into the steamy afternoon, wondering how to undo the damage this time.

“I apologize for that, sir,” I said. “There’s no excuse fo—”

“Apologize!” he squawked once we were outside. “Apologize! She sends me a letter to come round with some maps, and when I oblige, she traps me there for three hours interrogating me about the whole of my life! She even asked me about the shape of my feet!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I bowed, glanced up, saw his furious face, then bowed deeper, until my nose nearly touched my ratty boots. “I would have stopped it if I’d been here, sir, I really would ha—”

“And then…then she has the temerity to call me boring!” he said. “To think that that madwoman is our Iudex Investigator, I just…” He turned and stormed off along the jungle path, back to town.

I watched him go, muttered, “Shit,” and reentered the house.

Ana was still coiled before her contraption in the meeting room, posture taut, fingers thoughtfully dancing over the strings.

I said, “You do know…” then paused to rethink my words.

“Go on, Din,” she said. She tugged off her blindfold. “I almost thought you were about to rebuke me. That would be splendidly entertaining.”

“Well, you do know, ma’am,” I said, “that…that you really can’t keep doing that.”

“Ordinarily I can’t,” she said, “but that’s because ordinarily you’re here stopping me, Din.”

“I do so, ma’am,” I snapped, “because you can’t keep cornering these poor people and wringing them of information like juice from an aplilot!”

“I am simply doing my utmost to make this dismal canton a little interesting,” she said blithely. She tightened a string on her contraption. “But that requires rather a lot of work.”

“Ma’am…”

“For example, are you aware, Din, that the southeasternmost water well in Daretana is almost certainly infected with irida?”

“How fascinating, ma’am.”

“Indeed. No one was aware. But I gleaned such from the sixty-two folk I’ve chatted with over the past months. Twelve of them who drank regularly from that well have, unknowingly, described slight aches and insomnia and an unnatural scent to their urine—all symptoms commonly associated with the disease. I notified the captain of this, and recommended he purge the well.” Another tweak to the wires before her. “That is what I get from all these chats, Din. I just need enough information to divine the nature of the pattern.”

“Was that why you asked that Legion commander about the smell of his piss, ma’am?”

“Oh, no, not at all. At the time, I was merely curious.”

I allowed a quick glance at her. She was a tall, thin woman in her late forties or fifties—it was hard to tell with some altered folk—and though her skin had gray undertones like mine, hers was decidedly on the paler end. That was mostly because she never went outside, but part of it was likely because she was Sazi: a lighter-skinned race from the inner rings of the Empire, whose faces were more angular and narrower than Tala folk like me. With her bone-white hair, wide smile, and yellow eyes, she often seemed vaguely feline: a mad housecat, perhaps, roving through a home in pursuit of a suitable sunbeam, though always willing to torture the occasional mouse.

Today she was wearing a long black dress, and on top of this she had on a smudged, dark blue Iudex Iyalet cloak whose heralds were all arranged very much against imperial code, organized into perfectly symmetrical groups. Their sorting was different from yesterday’s: now organized by color, rather than size.

“Oh!” she said. “Books!”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?” I said.

“Did my books arrive, Din?”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. They’re waiting on the porch. I would have taken them in, but I was distracted by your torture of the captain.”

“And now you torture me with your attempt at wit,” she said. “But if you would be so kind…”

I bowed, went to the door, and paused to look back with my hand on the knob.

“Eyes averted!” she said. Her face was turned to the corner of the meeting room. “My eyes are averted!”

Once I confirmed she would not see out, I opened the door, snatched up the pile of books, hauled them in, and shut the door. Instantly she was behind me, wriggling one long, pale finger beneath the knot of twine and ripping it apart.

“Took ages this time,” she growled. “Two weeks! Can you believe it? Two goddamn weeks to get these to me.”

“Must be very hard to go so long without a decent crab book, ma’am.”

“You’ve no idea.” She flung them open one after another, shutting her eyes and feeling the pages. Though most of her skin was a pale gray, her fingertips were pink—altered through a graft, I guessed, to be so hypersensitive she could read printed and occasionally handwritten text by touch alone. Which she did quite a bit, since she spent a huge amount of the day blindfolded. Best to keep the senses limited, she’d explained once. And stay indoors. Too much stimulation drives a person mad.

As I watched her rip through each book, I wondered, not for the first time, how I’d be able to tell in her case. I assumed her afflictions had something to do with her augmentations—even though I had never been told exactly in what manner her mind had been augmented.

“Ahh,” Ana said. She rubbed the page of the crab book in a distinctly sensual manner. “This is a book from the Rathras canton. I can tell by the imprints. Their printing presses were first built to publish their holy books, in their language, so some letters slope to the left very slightly…Thank you for fetching these, Din. They should keep me occupied for a day or so.”

“A day, ma’am?” I said.

“Oh. Do you think it less, Din?” she said, worried.

“Can’t say, ma’am.”

“Or should I have gotten more books, Din?”

“Can’t really say, ma’am.”

A taut pause.

“Is it possible for you to say a sentence,” she said, “that is more than ten words in length, Din?”

I hazarded a glance into her pale yellow gaze and suppressed a smirk. “Could, ma’am,” I said.

“I do so admire,” she said, “how you can be a flippant shit with a mere handful of syllables. Quite a talent.” With a sigh she stood, tottered back to her meeting room, and flopped down in her chair.

I followed, then stood at attention at the doorway. She stared around at the room and all its half-finished projects. A slightly despondent look crept over her face.

“Now that I think about it, Din,” she said, “I just might be going a little fucking mad in here.”

“Very sorry to hear that, ma’am.”

She picked up a small situr harp and absently plucked at it. “Mostly,” she said, “because nothing ever happens in this dull little canton. And the books take so long to arrive.”

I was now familiar with these moods. First the elation of a new idea, new problem, new toy; and then, having unraveled it, a crushing melancholy. The only thing to do was give her a new one.

“Well, speaking of which, ma’am,” I said, “this morning I—”

“It pains me to say that it’s all far more tolerable when you’re around,” she said. “You’re so grim and so serious and so dull, Din, that you keep me very grounded.”

“I will attempt to take that as a compliment, ma’am,” I said. “But that’s why I wanted to te—”

“But your position on my standing request,” she said, “is still the same?”

I shot her a stern look. “Could you clarify, ma’am?”

“You know damned well what I mean.” She leaned forward, grinning. “Will you finally buy me some damned moodies? I’d stop interrogating people if you did!”

“The purchase of mood-altering grafts is strictly outlawed among officers of the Imperial Iyalets,” I said stolidly. “And I don’t break policy, ma’am. Being as I want to keep my position, you see.”

“Just a few of the psychedelic ones,” she said. “That’d buy me a day away from this boredom.”

“Does the imperial code of conduct apply to the psychedelic mood grafts as well, ma’am? For if so, you already have my answer.”

She squinted at me and plucked a single harsh chord on the situr.

Here it comes, I thought.

“When I performed my duties in the inner rings of the Empire…” she said.

And there it is.

“…my assistant investigators procured all kinds of materials and substances for me!” she finished. “Without question!”

“If you’d like to venture outside, ma’am,” I said, “to visit all the graft merchants you’d like, you’re free to do so. I can’t stop you.”

Her glare hardened. “You know that’s not going to happen.”

“I understand. Too much stimulation for you out there, ma’am.”

“Yes,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “Titan’s taint! Of all the Sublimes who could have been my assistant, why did it have to be the one with a forty-span stick up his ass?”

“Well, technically, you selected me from the list of applicants, ma’am.”

“Then I can unselect you and get someone else!”

“That seems unlikely, ma’am,” I said. “Given that you have interrogated sixty-two officers in Daretana, and most everyone in the canton now thinks you’re mad, finding new Sublimes will probably be difficult.”

She cast her situr aside. It tumbled onto the floor with a dull tonk. “Fuck’s sakes. Fuck’s sakes. How I wish I were back in more civilized lands…”

This was a common conflict of ours: to hear Ana tell it, she’d served as investigator in all the deepest, richest enclaves of the Empire of Khanum, and each one had been madder and more depraved than the last. She kept claiming to be confounded when some illicit material or barbarous act was not easily acquired in Daretana, and acted like it was a backwater hole for failing to provide them within an hour.

Which made one ask the question, of course—why had Immunis Ana Dolabra been appointed here, to the Outer Rim, of all places?

And the only reasonable answer, as far as I could see, was banishment. The role of Iudex Investigator of the Daretana Canton had not even existed as recently as five months ago. They must have invented it as punishment, presumably because transferring her was easier than dismissing her.

Which made sense. I’d only worked for Ana for four months, but you just had to spend one minute with her to realize she had a gift for inciting outrage. It was easy to imagine some elite imperials getting fed up with her and giving her the boot all the way to my far-flung canton, where she could only get one assistant from the selection of local Sublimes.

But I was that Sublime. Assistant Investigator was the only position I’d managed to get, and I would work it underneath Ana’s supervision and receive my dispensation until I was no longer able to collect it. Unless, of course, she got me to do something so illegal that I was discharged straightaway.

“Would you like some tea, ma’am?” I asked.

“No, Din,” she muttered, arm cast over her eyes. “Flavorful as it is, no, I do not want any of your goddamn tea.”

“Then would you like to discuss the death scene, ma’am?”

She lifted her arm and stared at me for a moment, perplexed. Then her face lit up with delight. “Oh! That dead fucker! Right!”

“Right,” I sighed.

“When I got that message from Immunis Irtos,” she said, “I had assumed some goddamn idiot had swallowed the wrong graft or something. That seemed about right for this dull little town. But from your demeanor, Din, I gather it was not?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “It was not.”

“Then what is interesting about it?”

“A large clutch of trees had spontaneously grown from within the deceased, tearing him apart from the inside, ma’am.” I shuddered. “It was…it was one of the most horrifying sights I’d ever seen in all my life.”

She went totally still. And for the first time that day, all the wild madness in her eyes went dead.

“My goodness gracious,” she murmured. “Did you hear that, Din?”

“Hear what, ma’am?”

“That emotion,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“That was the most emotion I’ve ever heard in anything you’ve ever said, Din! This must be a real corker of a death if it’s cracked your dull demeanor and summoned forth such wild passion.”

She pulled on her blindfold, grinning. There was something unsettlingly predatorial about her grin: too many teeth, and all too white.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “Everything you’ve engraved within that pretty little skull of yours, Dinios Kol. Go.”

I opened my engraver’s satchel, slid out the vial of lye aroma, uncorked it, and inhaled deeply. Then I felt a fluttering behind my eyes, and I started talking.