Page 34 of A Drop of Corruption

“It is a head,” she said. “Andonlya head. It has no secret plagues or contagion within it. A relief, I suppose! But…it is not Sujedo’s head.”

“As I thought,” I said. “Being as that head still had its jawbone. Any idea when we’ll discover whose it is?”

“We already know. It apparently belonged to an Apoth princeps. A Princeps Traukta Kaukole. He died about two years ago.”

My mouth fell open in surprise before I realized how they must have identified the victim so quickly. “Ah. Fellow had a banded tooth?”

“Oh, yes. Here in Yarrowdale, we make sure to track all the bits of our people as best as we can.”

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 how did this Kaukole die?” I asked.

“He was assigned to the management of an Apoth barge that shipped out of here—but the barge vanished en route, along with the entire crew. We never found the barge, nor any sign of their bodies. We eventually marked them all as dead.” She spat bitterly onto the bricked pathway leading to the bank. “We assumed smugglers were behind it. One of their first attacks before they became more violent.”

“And our impostor…took the man’s head, and preserved it for two years?” I asked, mystified.

“So it seems!”

“Only to leave it here for us to find, while robbing the bank?”

“So it seems! And he used a very specific art to preserve it, a method of dehydration commonly practiced by we Apoths. But I’ve no idea why he would do such a thing, or indeed do any of it at all! Unless he does it to send a message, stating that he is a smuggler himself, and…he now takes credit for this man’s death? And perhaps many others?”

“Like a hunting trophy,” I said quietly. “Except the prey he hunts is us?”

Malo made a gesture at the sky, beseeching the attention of one of the elder pantheons. “How I dislike the reversal.”

“The note it held. Did I read that right?”

“I assume you did,” said Malo. “It said—For those who sip from the marrow, Te siz imperiya.”

I turned this over. I had no idea what the first words about the marrow meant, but the final three words were in Old Khanum, an ancient language almost no one spoke anymore, as nearly all the Khanum had gone extinct ages ago; yet they seemed to echo the Emperor’s common dictum,Sen sez imperiya,which roughly translated toYou are the Empire,the ancient motto empowering all imperial citizens to make the Empire their own in their own way.

But this message was an inversion of that. Not the standardYou are the Empire,but rather…

“Iam the Empire?” I said out loud.

Malo laughed bleakly. “Apparently!”

“A skull with words in its mouth,” I said. “Stating that it is the Empire…It’s a message, too, clearly. But I can’t make sense of it.”

“If you can make sense of this, Kol, it would make me think you have a worm in your brain.” She lay back on the brick pathway.

“What will you do with the head?” I asked.

“Once we are done testing it, we shall treat it as a body of one fallen in war. We’ll place it in a gilded box, with signs and offerings of reverence from his commanding officers and Iyalet, and have it sent home to his family. They will have already received his lands and dispensation, given that we declared him dead long ago. As if that could ever be enough. Yet still—I am half-tempted to curse you, Kol.”

“Pardon?”

“You have come here and not onlynotsolved the murder of Sujedo—you have revealed more crimes that may be far worse! The only thing we can think to do is haul in every smuggler and jungle ruffian we know and see what they can tell us about this Kaukole’s death—or any movements of this bank robber, should he truly be a smuggler. Though given what we have seen of him so far, I am not optimistic that we shall learn much.” She yawned. “Perhaps Tufwa is a good drawer. Maybe he can sketch his likeness…”

I looked at Malo sympathetically. All her brash barbarism had melted away, and now she was little more than an exhausted girl sprawled in this empty courtyard. Only a little younger than me, but she seemed at that moment very young.

I held out my pipe. “Care for a puff? Might help.”

“Gods, no.” She made the sound of hawking something up and spitting it out. “Though this day is ill fated, I will not resort to smoke. Inhaling fumes is terrible for you. I shall keep to my hina root.”

“Makes your teeth black.”