Page 17 of A Drop of Corruption

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…Whatdoyou know about all that fucking nonsense, Din?”

I hesitated, unsure what she wished me to say. “I know Yarrow is a tribute state, ma’am—one the Empire both does and doesnotquite run.”

“And?”

“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. A very tricky, very ghastly, very deadly business.” Shecocked her head. “Ah! I meant to ask—I assume you have seen it, Din?”

“Seen…?”

“TheShroud,of course! You have seen it out in the waters?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Describe it for me, please. I am most eager to hear of it.”

I reluctantly did so, describing the great, green, fluttering form floating out in the bay, and the hint of a citadel hidden in its depths, though as I spoke the entire thing began to feel less like a structure and more like some great parasite, attached to the horizon and bleeding the whole of the world.

“How fascinating,” Ana whispered when I finished. “A design both amazing and horrid—but it is also invaluable, as it gives us the alterations we need to keep the leviathans back each wet season.” She sprawled out on the floor again. “Allow me to enlighten you on the situation, Dinios. For history, as always, has predetermined much of the circumstances here.”

I sighed, nodded, but said nothing. When Ana talked history, asking questions simply made things last longer.

—

“The truth isthat we are all here, Din,” Ana began, “allof us—including the extremely dead Sujedo—because of a quirk ofgeography.The currents of the Eastern Seas, you see, render it impossible for our ships to haul dead leviathans southward. And to the north, the Spine of Sarisav makes accessing the deltas of the Great River Asigis with such a burden impossible. So, just over ninety-two years ago, the emperor began looking about for a new port city on the eastern coast…and decided there was only one option—the Bay of Yarrow, tucked away in the Pithian Hills. At the time, it was a crude backwater, run by petty, vicious tyrants calling themselves kings. And when the Empire came parading in, and the emperor’s mighty agents requested to palaver with the king of Yarrow, well…the king, along with everyone else in the Empire, likely thought them mad.

“The Empire negotiated for peaceful imperial rights within Yarrowdale,” she continued. “The right to build, the right to conduct trade. The king of Yarrow demanded a huge ransom, and got it—though he also agreed that in one hundred years, the region would comedirectlyunder the rule of the Empire and become a formal canton. Perhaps it seemed an easy deal at the time. The king did not wish to fight the Empire, and one hundred years probably felt like an eternity to folk leading such short, brutal lives.” She grinned savagely. “And he waslucky,of course. If it had been the early days of the First or Second Empire, when the race of the grand Khanum was strong and populous, they’d have simply marched in and torn him and his forces to pieces!”

My skin crawled, but I said nothing.

“Yet then,” said Ana, “neither the king of Yarrow nor anyone else predicted what the Empire would do over the next decades…For then we brought the Engineers, and the slothiks, their great beasts of burden. And we carved tunnels and channels through the Pithian Hills…until we made the Great Canals, connecting the Bay of Yarrow to the Great River Asigis, thus tapping all the wealthy markets of the inner Empire.”

“Ah. So then the deal didn’t look nearly as good?” I asked.

“Oh, it got evenworse.For back in those days, no one dreamed that the Empire would eventually slaughter leviathans so efficiently. Yet once we learned those arts and developed a way to render miracles from the titans’ flesh, the Bay of Yarrow became the natural home for such works.”

“The Shroud,” I said quietly.

“Exactly. Now the value of the city isastronomical.And in less than a decade it shall all be transferred over to the Empire itself! And the king, well…he wouldverymuch 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.”

“But can’t the Empire simply take the realm whenever we wish? Could the Yarrow king really be a threat?”

“On the field of battle? Not at all. But the Yarrow king still commands the loyalty of his landowners in the west, which gives him some strength of arms—and their forces would assuredlynotfight a pitched battle! They know the terrain, the jungles, the rivers. And worse, we have many grand and delicate things to defend here. The Apoth works, the Shroud, the canals…We spend piles of treasure and blood every year justmaintainingthem, so that they in turn maintain the Empire. It chills the heart to imagine what would happen if any of this was exposed to combat!”

“So the murder of Sujedo…”

“Yes, the abduction and murder of a Treasury negotiator sent here to make sure the damned deal is proceeding as plannedisrather alarming. Is this some ploy of the king’s? If so, why target Sujedo? What would his death accomplish? We do not know. Thus, we must proceed delicately—but quickly.”

—

“Do you haveany ideas how it was done, then, ma’am?” I asked. “Or who is behind it?”

“For the latter, no,” Ana said, tilting her head. “But for the former—somewhat! To begin with…that piece of iron you found, Din. Do you still have it?”

I took it from my pocket and held it out to her. She removed her blindfold and snatched the piece from me, turning it over in her hands, and even sniffed it.

“No one spotted Sujedo with it,” I said. “And no one knows where it came from. It seems to be nothing so far.”