Page 59 of A Drop of Corruption

“Yes. The type and amount of piping, the nature of the glass…those are all things they make.” Malo glanced at me through her helm. “You think thatthingdid this? That, what, it bubbled like a teapot, and then just…”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps it is like bombard powder. But instead of showering everything around it with shrapnel, it…changes things. Horribly.”

I narrowed my eyes at the distant device—it was a good two hundred span away—but I thought I could see something placed upright on the ground before it, facing away from us: a large, heavy sheet of some kind, hanging from two sticks shoved deep into the earth. Like a piece of laundry hung out to dry, or perhaps…

“A sign,” I murmured.

“What?” said Malo.

I searched the edges of the clearing. My vision was terrible through the glass of my helm, but I spied a small gap in the far western end and pointed at it. “Malo—do you see that?”

She squinted. “Yes. I see…a hole in the growth. Another one—one we didn’t make.” She turned to me. “Someone else has been here?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I think they went to that device—afterall this changed.” My eye lingered on the sheet hanging before it. “They left something for us there. Tangis—is it safe to move about in here?”

“Hell no,” said Tangis. “Qudaydin kanidoes burn itself out, so the transmutations eventually stop. Then there’s a moment of peace, before all the warped organisms begin…ah, cross-pollinating, so to speak. Then you can get contagion. A grass that grows on the skin, or a mite that infests the eye, and then the brain…Since we don’t know when this transmutation took place, I can’t say how safe it is now.”

“Yes,” I said, irritated. “But since we’re alreadyinhere, Princeps, and exposed to this—would walking about be any more or less dangerous?”

A bleak shrug. “Walk if you please, sir.”

“Malo,” I said. “I’ll need your eyes.”

Grumbling, Malo followed me as we stalked the edge of the clearing until we could see the sheet placed before the device. Malo’s eyes being better, she made sense of it first, and gasped and stopped.

“It’s him!” she whispered.

I pulled my spyglass from my pocket, stuck it to the glass bulb of my helm, and squinted at the sign placed in the grass.

It was not a sheet, but a large piece of hide, scraped thin, and it was not covered in writing but rather a grid of bizarre symbols, twenty-five little black circles with many strokes crossing their edges. Though they looked random to my eyes, each one had been so carefully painted onto the board that it was clear they’d been made with great intent.

I studied each symbol, engraving them in my thoughts. A code, surely, just like the tapping. While I did not have the mind to decipher it, perhaps Ana could.

There were words written at the top of the hide, above the symbols. The handwriting was achingly familiar, the same as the note we’d found in the bank. Yet this one read:

And all the world a savage garden, mindless and raging

I stared at the words. They felt unearthly and threatening in this cursed place.

“Malo,” I said hoarsely, “does any of that make sense to you?”

“Hell no,” Malo said. “But do you have it in that head of yours?”

“I have it.”

“Then let us flee this place, and quickly. I will have to send up a flare when we are close to the city. For we must burn all of this, and all that was ever here.” She cast one more glance around the clearing. “And good riddance to it, I will say.”

Chapter 24

We hurried to return tothe boat, though nowwe panted and staggered, oppressed by the heat of our helms. Malo, Tangis, and I took up the rear position, and for a long while we walked without saying a word. Then Malo dropped back to me, her green eyes sharp and searching behind her helm. “What does this all mean, Kol?”

“We’re hardly ten span away from that madness,” I said. “You think I should know?”

“Your immunis solved Sujedo’s disappearance in hours—and while she is far away, you are close. How did our impostor achieve that horror?”

“I can say little now. But…I feel like those smugglers knew him, trusted him, when he did this thing. I think theylethim do it.”

“Lethim kill them? We found those vine-people frozen as if running away—and within the clearing, they had their arms raised in fear.”