"A Drop of Corruption"

[fiefoe]

Robert Jackson Bennett's second installment in the Ana and Din series puts a kingdom next to the empire and reminds us why things can always be worse. Din's relationship with Captain Strovi was so healthy and sweet that it's almost cruel for the author to keep them apart like this.

• “Well, we don’t get any Legionnaires for protection out here. We are far from the Empire proper, and there are no leviathans this far north. Yet it makes a crude sense, does it not? For what are human beings, if not walking bags of valuable reagents and compounds?”
• “It has always been called ossuary moss—though it is not truly a moss but a predatory fungus. It lives in hollows in the earth, lining the chambers there, waiting for creatures to fall in. When they do, the moss stings them, paralyzing them, and slowly grows to swallow them, like a cocoon. That’s when the truly fun stuff happens.” She grunted as she shifted the brick. “It secretes a fluid, cleaning the organism of the many pestilences that cause rot. Almost like curing it, really, so it can then consume all the tissues, with no waste.
• She did so, gingerly turning the jawbone and the fragment of torso like they were fine crockery I had a mind to purchase.
• “That is one term for it,” she conceded. “The craftsmen of the old courts grew these towers from a type of sand, full of tiny bugs. You could add things to the sand, put it in a mold, and the bugs within would make it harden into that shape. But the stone did not age well. Didn’t settle right. And many things leaned.”
• Now—step fast. We are in a dangerous area. I don’t want anyone seeing your very pretty face, assuming you’re a rich man who paid for the shaping of it, and knifing you for your talints.”
• * “The Usini Lending Group manages much credit within the Iyalets,” Poskit said, still in that saccharine tone. “It is our prerogative to maintain awareness of where our clients are stationed at any given moment.” <> Of course, I thought. The one institution that was more capable than the Iyalets themselves, naturally, were the Empire’s moneylenders.
• As I trudged through the streets of Yarrowdale, my heart felt shadowed. If my father’s new debts were to follow me about the Empire like a ghostly lamia from the children’s tales, then my dream of a new service would remain just that: a dream, and nothing more.
• * “Are they not your lands, too?” <> A trim smile. “Spoken like one who has never known a king.”
• In an instant, she shed her air of dreamy reflection, and her face twisted into an expression of poisonous condescension. “Business!” she scoffed, and ripped the blindfold from her head. “Business, yes! But business long done! That pot of shit soup has been bubbling for years now…
• “And…that puts us in a spot, for it produces the most valuable reagents in all the Empire.” <> “Quite correct! Squeezed from dead leviathans out in the bay like juice from an aplilot, then rendered in countless Apoth facilities on the shores.
• * “Exactly. Now the value of the city is astronomical. And in less than a decade it shall all be transferred over to the Empire itself! And the king, well…he would very much like to back out of the deal his great-great-grandfather made. He wishes to extort more money, more resources, more agreements from the Empire. Which means every day is a fucking temper tantrum with him! Goddamn autocrats. They really are hardly better than shit-stained children.”
• * I thought of my brief service in Talagray, and the Legionnaires I had known there. One soldier burned bright in my mind: Captain Kepheus Strovi, with whom I’d spent only a handful of days, yet in my augmented mind it felt akin to a lifetime. <> I placed my hand on my mossbed and let my eyes flutter in my skull. My thoughts sang with the touch of him, the smell of him.
• To others, the dance might have seemed artful, yet to me, it was routine. I had memorized this method over the past year as I’d moved from place to place: much like picking a lock, some combination of these gestures and exchanges worked to win the right attentions. Or perhaps that was not quite it: perhaps I was more like a man dabbing bloods and scents upon his flesh as he stood before a darkened wood, waiting for some predator within to pounce on him and spirit him away.
• Afterward: when all was spent, and the shuddering grew still, and the sweaty limbs atop my own grew cool. Only then I could hold them and make the world small for me. <> No more debts or moneylenders. No more bodies and blood. No more trivial little people burdened with hearts both vicious and dull. Only then, perhaps, the absence of Kepheus would burn a little less bright, and all would be small and controllable.
• “None of the rest of my delegation fell ill. But Sujedo was, ah…a very inner ring sort of person. “Meaning…” “Meaning,” drawled Malo, “the fellow was softer than a jellied egg.”
• But just in case you’ve got someone else’s spit in your mouth, we also ask for piss. Less likely to have someone else’s piss in their belly. Then we apply reagents to the samples, swab it on the balmleaf substrate for the safe, and it’s done. All this means that box should have been one of the most secured things in all of Yarrow.”
• A banded tooth was a false molar that had been grown in a reagents tank with a unique striping pattern running across the enamel. When an officer received such a tooth, the pattern was assigned to their name, so if their corpse was ever discovered in the future, it could be speedily identified.
• * And now—this! A fucking note! I feel we needn’t bother looking at faces to find this man, Din! Just keep an eye out for the fellow with testicles large enough to cause back deformities, and we shall have our culprit!”
• “I disdain it. I disdain it so, all this fucking spectacle! Nothing irks me more than a showy murderer, as if their wretched deeds were some mystical marvel!”
• “Perhaps. For in a way, do we not all sip from the titan’s marrow, in one fashion or another?”
• * A nervous smile from Ghrelin, yet he shot a searching glance at Thelenai, as if to confirm that his smile did not bring reproach. It was in this small gesture that I suddenly felt I had the feel of them: Thelenai was the grand and steely queen of this realm, and he was her scurrying counselor, rushing to invent laws to match her will.
• I hope I was not untoward in assuming you might want this.”
  The commander brought the parchments before Ana, bowed, and returned to his seat. Ana sat for a moment, nonplussed to have one of her requests for information not only exactly predicted, but quickly met.
  “Oh,” she muttered. She plucked at the parchments like they were a dish she had not ordered.
• “I have witnessed folk altered in such a fashion. Merely nearing the unmentionable subject causes them significant pain. I did not note such pain in Ghrelin.” She flicked a hand, dismissing the subject. “It was a random aside. Ignore it for now—but do remember it, Din.”
• She shut the book with a snap. “Ah. I will go ahead and assume, then, that you are not familiar with the Adherents of the Sallow Fields?” <> I waved wearily. “Assume away.”
• Instead, they tap—rapping three fingers in a rhythmic, mathematical alphabet, upon boards they hang about their necks. It’s a tricky way to talk—they have to wait one at a time to tap out their messages, otherwise it gets very hard to hear.
• “Yes. Unconsciously, perhaps, like he was trained to let every thought in his brain spill down his arm to his fingers to be tapped out. How deliciously ridiculous, yes?” <> “I find all these mentions of doom somewhat less than delightful, ma’am,” I said weakly.
• “Two Apoths, both of them tapping. And both of them, apparently, are geniuses, of a sort…for one served on the Shroud itself, and indeed built the veil that surrounds it, while the other pulled off a theft of frankly absurd complexity. Then there is the mention of marrow, and their reaction to it. And we know the impostor did not steal healing grafts…So, what if what was in that box had something to do with the Shroud, or this marrow?”
• “It is for me,” she said. She shot me a sharp look. “But I wonder if it’s enough for you. Mostly because your current method of emotional management is obviously not working!”... And while I do not know where your spiritual serenity lies, I am pretty sure it isn’t in another person’s bed, or ass, or whatever the hell it is you keep getting up to in the evenings!”
• “Oh, don’t bother with discretion now!” she said. “You’ve all the prudence of an inebriated cow! I’m half surprised people don’t gossip that you are a whore for hire, and I your pimp! It’d all be very amusing, if the reason for your consternation weren’t so obvious!”
  “And what reason do you think that is, ma’am?” I demanded, flustered.
  “It is that you believe we do little significant in our work!” Ana thundered. “And thus, you dream of transferring to the Legion!”
• I suspect you shall come to realize what many Iudexii eventually learn—that though the Legion defends our Empire, it falls to us to keep an Empire worth defending.”
• “How excellent. Did you know that the lyre duet is one of the ancient arts of Yarrow, Din?”... “Yes. Some say it reflects the dominance of twins and triplets in the royal lineage here—a rather fascinating biological quirk. Led to some very interesting issues with inheritance,
• The Yarrow of old still thrives in the west of here, living under the rule of the king. There the nobles and chief men have inherited many elder things. They have inherited lands from their fathers, and the oaths of loyalty that their fathers made to the king…and they have inherited people. Naukari. The ones bound to serve.”
• “Then you may go. Have the Apoth quartermaster send me food, three chamber pots, and enough quiridine pellets to soak up the stench.” Another melancholic chord. “I’ll let you empty them when you return.
• These are wardens. These are people who spend days in the swamp waiting to shoot smugglers with many arrows. I would no more assume they are an example of Yarrow folk than I would assume a rabid dog is a common pet.”
• Malo stared. “You…you did not even get that, Kol? By the titan’s taint, what kind of man are you? Some kind of fricatrat, making your rounds?”
• Malo was so amused by this that she translated it for her fellow wardens, who whooped and chuckled huskily. It made for a strange sound: they had trained so strenuously as hunters, apparently, that they even knew how to avoid laughing aloud.
• 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.
• yet the bodies had somehow unraveled, turning into wild storms of fishbones, or bundles of warped leathers, or boiling, spidery clouds of gossamer threads, with clutches of teeth suspended in their glistening heads. <> I stared about in horror. It was dark within the dome of growth, yet shafts of hazy, amber sunlight came stabbing through in places, shivering with the wind and sometimes illuminating some new horror at the edges of the shadow, or giving those close to me the illusion of movement. It was as if this little leafbound bubble of the world had gone utterly insane.
• “A blotley larva,” he said. “Type of highly altered, parasitic fly. Sucks your blood, yes—but they’re very sensitive. Even the slightest trace of contagion within you will kill them.”... “It won’t,” said Tangis. “This is an altered, unnatural creature, created for this one purpose. It can’t survive in the wild anymore. It can’t even eat properly. If I let it go long enough, it’ll actually start leaking your own blood back into you.”
• “Algaeoil,” I said. “Saliva. Mucus. And…sweat?” <> “And also the aroma of the little glue they use for the helms’ eyepieces,” Ana said, pleased. “Figured you were sniffing that throughout your ordeal. Now you’ve a scent. So, talk, child! Talk, and talk quick!”
• * “We fear the elements, and plague, and the wrath of the leviathans. Yet if we are to see clear-eyed, we would admit that the will of men is as unforgiving as these. How many chieftains and champions have wrought just as much sorrow as the wet seasons? We must govern thoughtfully, then, and manage such passions wisely—for if these folk have their way, we shall return to nature primordial, and be as beasts, and all the world a savage garden, mindless and raging.”
• “The first quote we found included an inversion of the imperial creed—I am the Empire—taken from a quote where the emperor worried his realm would grow selfish and unjust, and fall. And this one is an inversion of the emperor’s vision—for Daavir feared the will of cruel men making all the world a savage garden... “Exactly,” Ana said. “My feeling is that this man suggests he has rather unpleasant feelings about the Empire’s presence here!
• “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 marrow itself? What if we could bathe it in nutrients and maintain it so it kept producing the blood well after the titan has died?”...  “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.”
• “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 are plagued by mental afflictions as we grow old and lead short lives. With an abundance of kani, we could change even that.”
• By carefully injecting the organ with an advanced strain of oli 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 this means the marrow, too, is always different,” said Thelenai. “Biologically different in shape, density, nature…so each extraction had to be different. We needed a way of reading the randomness. Only then could we succeed.”... “What we needed,” she said finally, “was a different way of looking at it. A different type of mind. That is why we produced augury. And that changed everything.”... “They were instrumental in our progress,” said Thelenai. “The physiology of the leviathans is so unpredictable, so dangerous, and so random—only the augurs could make sense of it.”
• The augurs read things into the slightest inflection, or word choice, or hesitation. So, on the Shroud…they do not speak aloud, but rather tap to communicate, in a very old code. This method is much less affected by nuance.”
• * Ana impatiently flapped a hand. “And if the marrow was successfully attacked? If, say, Pyktis again used his titan’s blood weapon and managed to penetrate all your defenses about the marrow, there upon the Shroud?”
  A taut silence.
  “Then…then the marrow would act like…a fissure in the earth dripping lava, layer upon layer,” whispered Thelenai. “Releasing more blood, and more alterations.”
• “And…these colleagues are also augurs,” said Ana, “which means they, too, possess hypersensitive abilities of prediction and analysis?”... “Ones that would be enormously useful if they were put to the task of analyzing Pyktis?”
• “Thelenai I shall have to handle in good time,” said Ana grudgingly. “I am sure she thinks she did the right thing—that healing so many in the future was worth inflicting pain on a few in the present—but secretly, she did it for the same reason so many regents crumble.”... “Pride,” answered Ana. “She wrote a story in her mind, with herself as hero, clad in the trappings of triumph. It’s possible the greatness she has accomplished here could have been done with no deception, and thus less disaster. But a prideful creature can talk themself into believing that every deed they do is legitimate. Thus, they both giddily and greedily spin their own doom.”
• “You…you asked us to prepare our uniforms,” I said, “because you had already anticipated the next murder.” <> “I would have thought that fucking obvious!” thundered Ana. “We knew Pyktis had produced poison, there in his den! We knew he had an oathcoin, suggesting he’d been to the High City before! And we knew he’d likely seen the smokes in the jungle and would know that we’d found his macabre little display! Thus, he has begun the next bit of his game!
• To begin with, the bells did not stop tolling for over three hours, which meant all discussions in Yarrowdale had to be bellowed at close distance in order to be heard.
• “It seems we are now in the business of court intrigue!” said Ana. She wrinkled her nose. “How trite.”
• While this made housing and construction easy enough, it also meant that the art of stonework quickly became the domain of the wealthy and the powerful; for while resources were plentiful in the Empire, labor was eternally expensive.
• Perhaps that was what drove my astonishment: the sheer sense of age of this place. All the towers felt like they’d been here for centuries, and all the soldiers looked like warriors from some archaic saga. Though much of the Empire was indeed old, few of its structures were, for buildings were constantly being cut down and regrown whenever needed. And if a structure was old—like the sea walls, or the ring walls—then it was often an unsightly, forbidding spectacle. <> This place, however, felt beautiful and eternal. A stunning sight to a person like me, from an improvised Empire that often felt so blandly bureaucratic.
• “And if his guilt is proven,” said Pavitar to Ana indignantly, “will you fight our application of justice? Shall you try and steal him away, though he killed our king?” <> Ana shrugged. “If I deem he truly is the murderer of your king, then I see no reason why he cannot be killed here! A dead man cannot be greatly bothered by who owns the patch of earth he swings over—true?”
• His people were distraught, yet he did not perish. Pavitar claimed this was yet more sign of his guilt, but…even then, I felt the Empire would employ better poisoners than this.”
• some of my people haven’t ever even seen a drawn sword, do you know this? They’re axioms, number-readers! They quaked like children awoken by an owl!”
• “Exactly,” said Ana. “The killer had a personal connection to that one, so he felt compelled to hide him deeper. Once we knew this, we found the killer quickly—the dead child’s uncle,
• With the marrow secured, we could develop many methods of creating all the titan’s blood we need, deep in the safety of the inner rings. No more Shroud, no more canals, no more barges.” She scratched her chin. “So…you weren’t negotiating the final imperial adoption of the realm of Yarrow, were you? You were secretly negotiating our withdrawal from this place.”
• * The prificto shifted uncomfortably. “If I could banish all the evils of the world, child, know I would do it. But it is not our purpose to wade into the affairs of other cultures and scold them into decency.”
• * “But there is a silent agreement of how oathcoins work. You return it to the man who gave it to you for a favor. You could go above him, to a higher lord or even the king—but only if the need is great, and the favor does not bring insult. Otherwise, you would be in tremendous peril. But Dokha…he was a very good boy. Very selfless, you see.”
  “He asked for your freedom?” I guessed.
  “He did,” said Malo. “The freedom of all the naukari who were below the age of ten. And they made us watch as they killed him for it. Struck his head from his shoulders as if it were a piece of clay, then sank his corpse to the bottom of one of our holy lakes.”... It is how my folk so eagerly cling to the poisoned relics of throne and chain.
• But to me, your plans taste like the fantasies of a young man, attempting to invent a way out. We are small things, Kol. We are given no charity in this world.”
• Ana arched her eyebrows at that. “Ohh? Am I to believe, Din, that you now compare your own struggles with those wardens and naukari of Yarrow? That your own stymied hopes of transferring to the Legion make you akin to abandoned warriors and entrapped slaves?
• * “This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the Iudex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it.
• I was at the shore. The sky was slate-gray and mutinous, the dawning sun a narrow blade of riotous red in the east. I clambered out of the carriage and stumbled along the jetty to the waiting cargo ship, trying to coordinate my arms and legs to move aright. I was lost inside my body, which was lost inside the suit, and the whole of me was lost on this wandering stripe of rocky coast.
• The Shroud was not a tent, I realized, nor a structure of gauze or moss, as I’d previously imagined; rather, it was thicker, fleshier, more gelatinous, less akin to fabric or vines and more like some colossal growth of seaweed rising from the waters. Nor was it all one piece, but layered like a flower’s petals, each roll of its husk coiled about the next, its viridine flesh shot through with veins of dark green bubbles. <> And it moved. It rippled and shifted, billowing in one long, undulating flex from end to end, over and over. It was so strange, and beautiful, and artful; yet there was a subtle terror to it, and to look upon it set something crawling behind my eyes.
• “People worshipped them as gods once,” said Ghrelin quietly. “I think of that whenever I make this voyage.”... “And I cannot blame them,” Ghrelin continued. “These giant, inexplicable things, thundering ashore, bringing so much death and strangeness with them. That’s what faith and the divine is, isn’t it? A line stretching from little beings like us, to the ineffable, the incomprehensible.”
• A bright, tremulous wall of pale flesh would subside into a wall of dull, brown brick, only to then be followed by a hull of plated steel, with tiny, glassy windows stubbling its surface; and all about it were looping pipes and vessels, some wrought of bronze, others of flesh, like tracts of ropy intestine, carrying fluids up and down the hide of the tremendous thing.
• * “What does it mean,” he said, “when the line that once connected us to the inscrutable and ineffable instead coils about, forms a great loop—and then comes back to us?”
• my suit now so hot it felt like I was being braised within a bladder.
• I wondered what to do. Then I realized: all this felt rather familiar, didn’t it? Didn’t I know very well how to deal with a person so ravenous for information? <> I said, “Aren’t you wise enough to determine the answers by what I cannot say, as opposed to what I can?”
• The man, wistfully, dreamily: “To serve with him was akin to loving a person made of glass. So difficult to perceive. So still, so cold, so hard to the touch.”
• And then there was the truth I’d spied in that awful place, which boiled in my mind like a hot ball of iron dropped into a cooling bucket. I had to be rid of it, for otherwise it might burn me up.
• * I believe his father the king plotted this long ago—a plot to place a Yarrow loyalist deep within the Empire’s workings here, with the eventual goal of sabotaging the Shroud itself! He would use one of his own children to stab at its heart, like marring the heartwood of a great tree. With this act, he would damage the Empire most terribly, and unravel its influence over his kingdom.” She raised her blindfolded eyes to the ceiling. “It was, I think, a suicidal mission. Pyktis himself said his father expected him to die on the Shroud, after all... “So much so that I think the king forgot he’d ever put such a secret plan in place to begin with, thirty-some years ago! Thus Sunus Pyktis washed ashore, a prince who’d not only failed in his one and only duty, but a prince completely forgotten by the realm he’d lived to serve! A rather tragic thing, is it not? He returned to his country as a man with no nation and no identity to call his own. So he invented a new one—the pale king, lord of the canals.”
• saw a way to cleverly misuse the horrid little things. He stole a crate of them from an Apoth barge, stuck countless larvae on Sujedo, let them drink their fill, then stuck them on his own body! He left them there long enough so that they leaked Sujedo’s blood into him—and that allowed him to just walk into the vault like he belonged there!”
• “Here is your path now, child. First, you pursue Darhi. Question him, for we must find either Pyktis or the stolen reagents! By achieving either, all our threats shall be ended.”
• * “Apophenia,” she said again. “The affliction of spying meaning and patterns in randomness. The augurs struggle with it, yet…I feel it is this state he aimed to induce in me. He bombards me with so much evidence and motives and mysteries that my mind cannot function! It is as if he knows my very nature.”
• Ana raised the knife; but my horror was entirely wrong, for rather than slashing at the flesh, she wedged the blade between the corpse’s teeth and wiggled it back and forth, until a tooth came free with an awful crunch. Then she dropped my knife and turned the tooth over and over in her fingers, like a witch reading her scrying stone.
• “Don’t you see?” said Ana. “The augurs of the Shroud are unusually vulnerable to music. And I just happen to have composed a percussive song that is uniquely irritating to an augur—always suggesting order yet dissolving before it coheres! A song to drive an augur mad, in other words, no matter how iron their will. And so it has.” She grinned. “For that man in that throne is not the prince. He is an augur. He is, in fact, none other than Sunus Pyktis himself!”
• “He bound the dead Prince Camak up in moss and stored his brother’s body away, waiting for the perfect time to fake his death again. For if the trick worked once, it could certainly do so a second time!
• “You fed Darhi’s greed, and his avarice,” Ana said to Pyktis. “An easy thing, for a snake like him! You even knew he’d eventually betray you. But then you arranged the trail just so. It was you who hid the oathcoin in your den, knowing that Darhi was so free with them! And you knew we’d eventually identify Gorthaus as the traitor, and she would name Darhi as the architect of all of this. Honestly, what fools we’d be if we thought it was anyone but Darhi behind it all!” She stuck a finger out at him. “But it was you, of course, and not Darhi, who killed the king.”
• “If the marrow was destroyed,” said Ana, “then you knew the Empire would have to stay in Yarrow for years longer. The Empire lacked the will to fully adopt the region—you’d already put that together ages ago—but they’d be more than happy to keep paying the court to keep things just as they were. And oh, you’d make sure the Empire would pay you a fortune.”...  “And, of course, it also explained your macabre campaign of terror—you wanted to terrify Thelenai into taking a desperate measure. All this business of heads and warped smugglers…all of it was a story you fed us, to make Thelenai panic and move the marrow by ship, far away from here.
• But even if he’d lived, the goal would have been achieved anyway—for how could we believe such a liar when he claimed he was not the killer of the body found in his litter? You’d win either way. We would think all the villains captured or killed, and all was safe—and we would relax, and relent.
• * “Kings.” Pyktis shuddered. “For so long I was told they were wondrous fathers, farsighted rulers touched by the divine. The natural rule of strength, of crown, of throne—a noble thing, unlike the Empire, so unnatural and invented. But when I looked upon my father, I saw they are just…men. Little men with muddy, ugly little minds, who fall to common corruptions just like anyone.” His face twisted. “Just like everyone in the Empire. Just like Thelenai.”... “She is just like him, do you know that?” he asked. “She made tools of us, asking us to sacrifice ourselves, to risk our lives and minds for her own little treasure. You all do. The Empire weeps so grandly, and bedecks the dead with gold and lands, but…it is still the same as my father. You call it serving. But you are slaves, and your masters shall never know any consequence.”
• * said Pyktis bitterly. “It is the same in all nations of the earth. You are either a slave or a master. I had my chance. I made my choice.” <> Ana nodded slowly, then tsked. “I see…Simple nihilism, then. How terribly unimaginative. With you being so brilliant, Pyktis, I thought your motivations might wind up being a bit more interesting!
• “Both the kings and the thieves, the angels and the utter bastards, are all inevitably quite human. Though that should not let our hand be any softer when justice is delivered!”
• but I committed great crimes in doing so. I kept the augury a secret and worked mightily to hide it from the Senate of the Sanctum. Because of this choice, dozens are dead, and the entire Empire might have unraveled. I would not wish for any other Apothetikal to follow in my steps, or grow so prideful and careless as I. And…I feel I do not deserve to see the bright future I have made.” She gazed west, toward the High City. “I, perhaps, am more like Pyktis and his father than a true imperial servant. And I should not taint the world to come with my touch.”
• * “Why, it’s the…the crushing disappointment of it all. The investigation ends. It’s all over now. No more riddles, no more need for imagination. And all was so small, at the end. It was for money, and land, and brutal, petty nihilism. Honestly, how…how tremendously disappointing.”
• “For while one common man is no equal to a Khanum, a great host of them working in agreement, and describing all they see and know, may not only match my kin, but exceed them in their deeds. Thus, with laws and strictures, and offices and election, and the changing of coin and the scribblings of many ledgers, shall a new Empire be fashioned.
• “It is good to place oneself before the vast expanse of this world,” said Ana. “The ocean cannot tell the difference between a rich man and a poor one, nor one full of happiness, or despair. To those waves, all are so terribly small.” <> “Being an imperial from the Outer Rim,” I said, “I need little help in feeling such a thing, ma’am.”
• * “Kings, of course. Perhaps we wished to make the ancient and divine mortal, to render the infinite in flesh and form. How reassuring that would be! And yet, a fool’s game, as we have so thoroughly learned here... We need no more kingly stuff than that! Not from the emperor, nor the kings of Yarrow…” She slowly turned her blindfolded face to me. “Nor anyone else.” <> I studied her and felt countless meanings hidden in these words. It was like so many great imperial things: so much was mystery, while the rest was politely unspeakable.
• I bowed my head. I felt my heart almost burst with tension from so many things going unsaid in that moment. Was she what I suspected her to be? Was she asking, however indirectly, for me to watch over her, and ensure that her own mind did not go awry, just as had happened to Pyktis? Was this the role she had planned for me all this time?

//Because all the characters in this story—like all of humanity, apparently—have a little blank spot in their heads that says, “Kings. What a good idea.” The idea is powerful, and seductive, and should not be underestimated. To be a civilization of any worth, however, means acknowledging the idea—and then condemning it as laughably, madly stupid.