Page 117 of A Drop of Corruption

Ghrelin said nothing.

“Does it, sir? Am I right?”

“You are,” he said. “I take it you, like many on the shore, haveassumed it was shifting in the breeze, like a flag or a standard?”

I was speechless for a moment, transfixed by the thing’s undulations. “I knew it was a living thing,” I said. “But not…quite so alive as this.”

“Yes,” he said. “The Shroud is one organism, Kol, one being. It is one we have created. There is no other like it in this world. We had to make it so, to stem back the bloods of the leviathans.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this, sir?” I asked.

“I believe I did,” he said, bemused. “I told you the Shroud was based upon the tissues of a leviathan. But perhaps I did not make the ramifications of this clear.”

We pounded on. The world tipped and turned again, and the prow of the cargo ship leaned to the right, making a large curve, then back to the left, toward the Shroud.

From this angle I could see that the green sheath was not perfectly symmetrical: the northeastern side of it stretched out, making me think of a gentrywoman’s elaborate gown, fitted with a trailing veil. I thought I could spy enormous chains reaching down from some high, hidden mechanism, linked to the corners of the sweeping portion of the sheath. I imagined the chains retracting, lifting this edge of the Shroud high like the hem of a dress, so that ships could tow in…something.

Something enormous, surely. Something that would lie in the waters there like the spirit maiden from the old tales, floating in her pool, awaiting a kiss to return her to the waking world; yet this maiden, I knew, would be something very different. Something monstrous beyond mention.

“People worshipped them as gods once,” said Ghrelin quietly. “I think of that whenever I make this voyage.”

The great, glimmering skin of the Shroud loomed ahead. My body was slick with sweat, my mouth thick and heavy.

“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, theincomprehensible.”

The wall of the Shroud ahead trembled, like the skin of a drum. Then it split and, shuddering tremendously, it began to draw back. The foamy sea came rushing in to fill it, and I was struck with terror, imagining it to be a mouth. Suddenly I was sure that the Shroud was no imperial creation but rather a leviathan in hiding, this monstrous thing that now opened its maw to consume us.

But then I saw chains at the end of the corners of the split wall of skin, and I realized there was some mechanism inside, shifting back the curtain of Shroud like one might a drawbridge, allowing us within: a smaller version of the massive sheath intended for the titans, perhaps.

“But then we found a way to kill them,” whispered Ghrelin beside me. “Slaughter them and haul their flesh and bones so far from where they once wandered, to…here.”

We passed through the veil, and I beheld the structure within.

It was not a conventional building or a fortress, and though I spied many braids of tissues and tendons about it, neither was it an organism, precisely. Rather, it was a mixing of both, an uncanny, churning, shuddering flower of brick and flesh, bronze and ligament, bone and stone and coiling wood. 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.

And toiling on every layer were tiny, glimmering dots: people, I realized, bound up in crimson algaeoil suits. There were hundreds of them, and I was reminded not of Engineers or officers as much as I was of ants, frantically attempting to strip a chunk of carcass; yet the people did not break or tear the construct, but rather built, and healed. They appeared to be feeding the citadel, mending it, suffusing it with grafts, patching up its wounded flesh, stitching shut any rents or tears, or sealing the hulls where they had rusted or split.

We built this,I thought.We have built this unnatural thing, and it hasbuilt us in turn.

The ship sloshed on through the waters, the green veil now behind us, a small pier awaiting ahead.

I heard Ghrelin’s voice continue beside me, whispering, “So I wonder now. I wonder—what does that make us?”

“I…I beg pardon, sir?” I asked.

I turned and saw him smiling sadly at me through the glass of his helm. “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?”

The veil of the Shroud closed with a gentle sigh, and all the world turned to green.

Chapter 44

I kept staring up atthe giant, flowering citadel above as we approached; so much so that it was quite the surprise when the entire ship was hosed down with reagents so acrid they made the air shiver, and I could hardly see three span in front of my face.

All fell to movement and chaos as the dripping workers unloaded the cargo. Ghrelin and I worked our way around them until we climbed a set of steps. I glanced back only once to see that the world beyond was a shimmering, green smear, as if I saw the horizon through the thickest of tinted glass.

Four guards awaited us at the top of the stairs, each bound in algaecloth and wearing warding helms. “Immunis Ghrelin?” asked one—a militis, judging by the markings on their suit. “And Signum Kol?”

We nodded, and the four guards saluted.