CHAPTER 33
THE NEXT MORNING MILJIN and I met the Apoths’ contagion crew at the Talagray stables. There were six of them—four women, two men—all wearing curious armor of leather and glue-like grass that appeared to seal off their whole beings from the air, except for the heads. The leader of the group, a tall woman with a steely gaze, shook Miljin’s hand and introduced herself. “Signum Kitlan. Told we’re here to deal with contagion, possibly out in the Plains of the Path—that right, sir?”
“That’s right, Signum,” Miljin said.
“Can you tell me more about this contagion?”
“It’s a plant being used by an Apoth and a crackler. A spore, I’m told. Breathable. Similar to dappleglass.”
None of them seemed surprised or even intimidated by this. They just nodded, eyes flinty. They were so altered their faces were more purple than gray, and some of them bore strange scars on their faces and necks, patches of puckered white from some injury or another. They were easily the hardest-looking officers I’d ever seen.
“Where are we starting, sir?” Kitlan asked Miljin.
Miljin waved to me. My eyes fluttered as I recalled Ana’s briefing from early this morning, her teeth gleaming in a grin as she’d pronounced: One! There is only one crackler in service to the Legion stationed here in Talagray who hails from Oypat. A Militis Drolis Ditelus, stationed at a forward outpost close to the walls. And he’s had quite a lot of demerits recently. Can you guess what for?
I assume not for poisoning various imperial peoples with dappleglass, ma’am, I’d said.
To which she’d responded: Don’t be smug. No. He’s apparently been wandering off to do fuck knows what out in the Plains of the Path when he’s supposed to be at the wall. Fellow’s in deep shit, really! He has to be our man.
I relayed this information to the Apoths as we geared up to ride out, along with how dappleglass functioned: fertile and infectious when exposed to steaming water, but after its horrid bloom, it was safe. Again, they did not react.
“We find this crackler, this Drolis Ditelus,” said Kitlan. “He takes us to this traitor Apothetikal, and we find the contagion there and destroy it—that it, sir?”
“If it proves that simple,” Miljin said, “I’ll be overjoyed. But yes.”
She spat so profusely on the ground that Miljin looked impressed. “We’ll make it simple.”
We mounted up and started east, across the Plains of the Path, the same road we took to the medikkers’ bay just a few days ago. Our progress was soon blocked, however, for the road east was suddenly packed with teams of beasts—horses, oxen, and giant slothiks—all hauling something toward the walls. Or rather pieces of something, something enormous. At first I thought it was perhaps some kind of piping, huge and curving and carried on massive carts, but then I realized I was wrong.
It was a bombard. Segments of a bombard, slowly making its way toward the distant sea walls. A bombard so huge and so complex my mind could hardly grasp it.
“Huh,” I said aloud. “A titan-killer. Just like Captain Strovi said.”
“It’ll be devilish hard to get to this crackler with all that ahead,” growled Miljin. “We’ll have to cut across country. Come on.”
Our horses were none too pleased with the change in terrain, which made the going much slower. But as midmorning changed to midday we finally approached the forward Legion outpost, which much like the road was crawling with movement.
I studied the scene as we arrived. Panic hung heavy in the air. Legionnaires darted about with hurried, fraught movements, like people readying for some desperate escape. We reined our horses at the front gate and stalked inside, and after a few moments of Miljin’s hollering we were brought to the princeps of the outpost.
“Ditelus, sir?” she said. “You’re looking for him? Hell, get in line. I’d love to find him, too.”
“He’s missing?” asked Miljin.
“Yes. Again! With the quakes so hard that the mud dances at our feet, and the titan-killer churning up the road out there. I shall behead the bastard when I find him again.” The princeps paused to look us over. “If Iudex is looking for him, though, then he’s done something serious…” She looked back at Kitlan and her people, impatiently waiting behind us. “And you’ve a contagion crew with you?”
“We need to know where he is immediately,” Miljin said to her. “Is there anyone who worked with him who might know?”
She shook her head. “Everyone’s off to assist with the bombard. Engineers say the titan’ll be here in a matter of days, maybe hours. Ditelus’s whole cohort is long gone.”
I looked at the princeps, thinking. It had been weeks since I’d last interrogated a princeps—the smirking Otirios, back in Daretana—but it suddenly came to me easier now, with death and madness rumbling past the horizon.
“You’re Ditelus’s commanding officer?” I asked.
“I’m the operating officer of this outpost, yes, sir,” she said.
“So you would have been the one to write up his demerits?”
“Ah—yes? The Iudex manages demerits now?”
“He was marked for absences, correct?” I said. “Did you ever catch him coming back to the outpost after his absence?”
“I did, a couple of times.”
“What direction might he have been coming from?” I asked. “And is there anything out there?”
She fetched a map and pointed to the spot. “He was coming from the west, back toward Talagray. There used to be an old Legion fortress that way, decades ago, but it got destroyed during a breach. Killed a titan and it fell right on top of it. Some Legionnaires used to sneak out to the ruins to get sotted back in my day. You think he’s there?”
“Much thanks, Princeps,” said Miljin curtly.
We left, mounted our horses, and departed, pausing only for Miljin to give me the tiniest nod—Well done.
—
“WE’RE IN A bad stretch of land now,” warned Kitlan as we rode. “You see anything moving that isn’t grass or leaves, don’t go near. The Plains are rife with contagion. Worm pits and nests and hives abound. This whole bit of world wishes to eat you.”
“Are we allowed to be here?” I wondered aloud.
“Allowed?” Kitlan snorted contemptuously. “No one bothers to fence off these lands, Signum. You’d have to be a fool to traipse in thoughtlessly.”
I didn’t argue. We’d entered a strange part of the Plains, with giant hills rising on either side of us covered in tussocks of thick, yellow grass—the remains of dead leviathans, surely, felled by the Legion decades if not centuries ago. There were so many hills that I began to wonder why we still called it the “Plains of the Path” at all. Much of this place had to be of higher elevation than the rest of the canton.
More disturbing still were the flowers on the ground about us. None were alike. There were blooms shaped like cups and funnels and rosettes and bells; some were huge and pendulous, others tiny as fleas; and in the deeper parts of the hills, where the rainwater gathered, the blooms grew as thick as the stars, yet all were of different colors, whorls of pink and orange and purple.
The sights did not cheer me, for I knew the ground here had long soaked in the otherworldly blood of the leviathans. Dappleglass no longer seemed such an uncommon threat.
I started glancing over my shoulder toward the east every few miles, looking up at the sky.
“What you looking for, Kol?” asked Miljin.
“Flares, sir,” I said. “Just in case.”
He laughed roughly. “Warning flares? That won’t matter, lad.”
“How might you mean, sir?”
“I mean, if we see red or yellow in the sky, it won’t matter. We’re too close to run. We’ll just be dead. So look forward, boy, and not back.”
I did as he asked, counting the hills about us as we passed. I’d memorized the princeps’s map, but it hadn’t been totally accurate regarding the number of carcasses about. Yet I knew we were getting close to the ruins of the fort.
Then one of the Apoths cried out: “Scent! Got scent!”
Kitlan wheeled her horse around to him and demanded, “What kind?”
“Blood, ma’am.” The Apoth raised his face and sniffed the air again—his nose was large and violet-hued—and pointed south. “That way.”
We followed the Apoth until he stopped at what appeared to be an undistinguished patch of meadow. But he pointed down, and I saw a large splotch of blood resting among the rocks.
“Wet,” said Miljin. “And fresh. But is it Ditelus’s?”
“Don’t know, as we don’t have his scent,” said the tracker Apoth. He pointed south. “But I smell more that way.”
We wheeled about and headed south.
—
WE FOUND HIM within an hour.
He was easy to spy, a huge, shambling, shifting form just on the horizon, trudging south. Yet even though we were still so far from him, I could see there was something amiss.
The figure in the distance didn’t move right. He limped. Staggered. Hobbled along, like he’d broken many bones in his feet, perhaps.
Miljin sensed it, too. “Don’t like this,” he muttered. “Something’s wrong. Is that really him? Where’s he going? And what’s he running to?”
“Could have worms,” mused Kitlan.
“You goddamned Apoths always think it’s worms.”
“That’s because so many people have so many fucking worms.”
Kitlan and Miljin led the way, spurring their horses on but pursuing the figure carefully. When we were a quarter of a league away, Kitlan raised a hand for us to stop. Then she and her people pulled bizarre, complex helmets from their packs: the helms had glass bubbles for eyes and were conical in shape, giving them a wasplike appearance, and they ended in what looked like a small brass grate that was packed with moss.
“Warding helms?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kitlan said. “Uses suffused mosses and materials to filter out contagion. It will keep us safe as we approach.” Then she tossed one to me. “It buckles about the neck.”
I pulled mine on and buckled it. The world grew muffled and hot and dark immediately, and I had to squint through the glass bubbles to see. I hoped I didn’t wander off blindly and get lost out here among all the horrors about me.
Kitlan waved a hand and we proceeded, gaining on the distant figure hobbling across the wretched wilderness. As we grew closer I came to comprehend the size of the person we were following. He was enormous, nearly as tall as one and a half of me, and as wide as three of me standing shoulder to shoulder—and I was no small person. His black-clad back was as broad as a carriage, and his feet made tremendous thumps as he staggered across the Plains, his giant boots churning up the grass and mud before him.
And he was bleeding. From something on his front. I could see the blood dribbling down from between his knees, rills of dark red threading over his thighs.
We rode on until we were within fifty span of him. Then Miljin bellowed through his mask: “Ditelus! Hold!”
The crackler didn’t stop moving. He just kept hobbling on.
“Stop where you are, damn you!” said Miljin. “By order of the Imperial Iudex, I command you to stop!”
He did not stop.
“Militis,” said Kitlan in a warning voice. “We are here from the contagion crew. If you don’t comply, and if we can’t determine your state, we will have to set you alight. It’s up to you if you’re alive or dead while you burn.”
Still, he did not stop.
We all looked at one another. Then we spurred our horses on until we were alongside Ditelus, though we rode at a safe distance.
Unlike his body, the crackler’s face was surprisingly normal. His pale gold hair was cropped close to his dark, sun-tanned scalp, and his eyes were small and sad. Blood poured from his lips down his chin and his neck, soaking through his black shirt and dribbling between his legs. He wheezed and gasped as he walked, his massive lungs gurgling and clicking with each breath. Every now and again his face spasmed with pain, like he was putting weight on some bone broken within his foot.
“Ditelus! Where is Captain Kiz Jolgalgan?” demanded Miljin. “Is she here?”
The crackler said nothing. He just shambled on, his giant boots making a thump-thump.
“Where have you been? What have you done?”
He said nothing.
“Did you help her break into the halls of the Hazas?”
Still nothing.
Then, sighing, Miljin asked, “Ditelus…where are you going, man?”
For a while Ditelus kept hobbling on. Yet then he answered in a soft, curious, high-pitched voice, whispering, “H-home.”
“You’re going home?”
“Yes,” he gasped. Blood flew from his lips with the word.
Miljin looked ahead. “There’s naught but wall in this direction, son.”
“I…I am going home,” whispered Ditelus. His face shook with pain. “To the g-green fields of beans, and…and yellow fields of wheat I once knew.” He blinked hard, and tears began running down his cheeks, carving cloudy lines through the blood. “Air hazy with pollen in early spring. And th-the forests thick with leaves just after, and then heavy with d-dark fruit.” As he limped on, his body began to shake, and he wept. “I shall be there soon.”
“The hell is he talking about?” said Kitlan.
“Oypat,” I said quietly. “I think he’s describing Oypat.”
“Y-yes,” whispered Ditelus. “It was my home. Yet it is dead, and…and I go to join it. I will wander those lands in this next world. And w-what…what a joyous thing that will be.”
Then he stopped, arms limp at his side. His whole body was quaking now.
“Captain Miljin,” said Kitlan lowly. “Get away. Get clear.”
“They took it from us,” wept Ditelus. “Let it die. Made it die.”
“What do you mean?” Miljin demanded. “Who did?”
“And then her…He did it to her, I…I…He did it to her, didn’t he?” Ditelus said helplessly. “Didn’t he?”
“Who?” demanded Miljin. “Jolgalgan? Is that who you mean? What’s happened?”
“Miljin!” said Kitlan, louder. “Get away! Something’s wrong!”
She was right. Something was moving at Ditelus’s breastbone. Something twitching and curling, under his shirt.
“You…you Iudex,” screamed Ditelus. “You say you want justice. You always say that! You always say that!”
Miljin saw what was happening now. He wheeled his horse away, looking back over his shoulder as something within Ditelus began to…
Sprout.
“To see these walls!” roared Ditelus. “To see what men have made! And know that they could have saved us, but…but…”
Then came a horrid sound, akin to thick fabric ripping, followed by an awful crackling, crinkling sound; and then, like a moth breaking free of its pupa, the dappleglass emerged, a thick, vibrant, undulating shock of bright iridescent green splitting his flesh and rising into the air. It burst from his collarbone, parting him along the side and boiling forth from the edge of his rib cage. Blood poured from his throat in a sudden splash, and then his face was concealed, lost in the shivering coils of roots and the quaking, dark leaves; but the crackling sound continued, as if the vegetation was breaking every length of his bones, crushing them to powder. Then the crackling stopped, yet the column of dappleglass kept silently rising, stretching into the sky in a dark, shimmering column.
I watched as the dappleglass consumed him, until he was little more than a giant puppet held aloft in the towering shoots. I heard the cries and the calls of the Apoths about me, but I had no mind to listen. There between two slender shoots I could spy a sliver of his face, his sad eyes staring into shadow.
“Must have been infected for some time,” Kitlan said. “His crackler’s body contained it until it…it…”
I kept staring at his tears. Watched how they gathered at his chin, growing into a pregnant pink drop, before tumbling off into the leaves.
“From where?” said Miljin’s voice beside me.
“Wh-what, sir?” I said dully. I turned to see his furious eyes watching me through the glass bubbles of his helm.
“He was coming from somewhere,” bellowed Miljin, “but from where?”
I looked north, in the direction Ditelus had been walking from. With a flutter to my eyes, I summoned the image of the map we’d seen at the Legion outpost.
“The old fortress,” I said. “It’s that way.”
“Then come on!” said Miljin. He turned his horse about and started north.
“We have to burn the contagion, sir!” said Kitlan. “It’s protocol!”
“Then leave some boys to follow protocol and fucking come on!” he bellowed over his shoulder.
—
KITLAN LEFT TWO Apoths to burn the body. Then we rode north with her and the rest until we finally spied it: a little clutch of structures leaning against one of the giant hills, just west of an open stretch of yellow-grassed fields.
We approached it slowly and quietly. The place was hardly more than a ruin, the fretvine and stonewood fortifications blasted apart or upended nearly everywhere, its many tottering towers and structures leaning about like a jaw full of broken teeth. There were curious ripples and crests in the soil about it, all radiating from the giant hill behind. I guessed that when the leviathan had fallen however many decades ago it had broken all the world below, before finally being eaten by grasses and trees like the other carcasses.
We entered the ruins on the western side. It felt like riding through a giant child’s broken toys, or some stretch of coast where shipwrecks were washed ashore. Nothing I saw seemed whole, except for a tall, crooked tower that leaned in the center of the wreckage.
Miljin caught my gaze and nodded. We led Kitlan and the three other Apoths through the maze of tumbledown structures until we finally approached the tower. It was tall, and whole—but the door, unlike everything else in this place, was well-maintained. Wood solid and dark, the rope handle white and new. Iron hinges free of rust.
I stared at the door, wondering what, or who, was behind it.
“Kitlan,” said Miljin quietly. “You want me to open that door or you?”
She didn’t answer. She just dismounted, tossed the reins of her horse to one of the other Apoths, and advanced. She placed a hand on the rope, took a deep breath, and pulled the door open.
I couldn’t see inside, but Kitlan stared through the doorway. Then she turned away, disgusted.
The door fell open, I glimpsed within.
A clutch of shoots nearly filled the interior tall tower. Leaves slender and dark green, dappled with blooms of white and purple. And there, suspended in the clutch of shoots, a figure: a woman, dead and rotting, her eyes dark and her yellow hair gleaming in the midday sun.
—
MILJIN AND I stood aside and watched as the Apoths came and went from the crooked tower. They were taking samples, they said, cataloging all the reagents and specimens found within, along with all the Apoth’s tools.
“She had quite the array,” said Kitlan, taking stock. “Fermentation chamber. Purification dome. Casks of suspension fluids. Suffusion feedstock. Phalm oil for any reagents gone awry. And tank after tank of plants…All of them the same kind.”
“Dappleglass,” I said.
She nodded her helmeted head. “This is where it happened. This is where they made it. Secreted out all this gear and got to work brewing up her poisons.”
“And we’re sure it’s her?” said Miljin. “That body in there is Jolgalgan?”
Kitlan walked to the pile of cataloged material, sorted through it, and returned with a sheaf of paper. It was a wall pass, like Aristan’s, permitting the bearer to pass from the Outer Rim of the Empire into the third ring. Though it was hard for my accursed eyes to read through the glass bubbles of the helmet, I could still barely make out the name JOLGALGAN written in the corner.
“There’s more,” said Kitlan. “More documents. Some in her name, some counterfeit and falsified. Seems she was hoarding up to run. But it’s her.”
Miljin stared in at the corpse suspended in the darkness. “And she just…”
“Had an accident, by the look of it,” said Kitlan. “My guess is something didn’t seal right. There’s a bottle in the back that’s burned dark and still warm. That was likely the source, boiling a bit of water that’s now evaporated, but the steam leaked out, carrying the spores. She’s been dead about a day or two. I suspect the crackler came to check on her and was exposed as well. If we didn’t have our helmets on right now, we’d be dead, too.”
I felt my heart quaking as I realized how close I’d come to meeting the same horrid fate as Ditelus. “How…how likely is such a mistake to actually happen, though?” I asked.
“Very,” said Kitlan. “This is an improvised laboratory. None of this is to Apoth code. And they were handling a very, very dangerous contagion. There’s a reason why we built walls around Oypat, after all.”
I gazed in at the tower. “How much dappleglass could she have brewed in there?”
Kitlan shrugged. “Lots.”
“Is there any way to know if there’s more out there? Planted among the canton, waiting to bloom?”
“No way to tell here, I’m afraid.”
She returned to the tower. We watched her in silence.
“So—the second we get close to Jolgalgan,” said Miljin quietly, “she goes and fucks up and gets herself and her sole collaborator killed.”
Wind ripped through the barren ruins. The corpse within the tower danced and shivered in the trees.
“That feel right to you?” Miljin asked me.
I said nothing.