Page 62 of A Drop of Corruption

“After you pass your blotley test,” Malo said. “Tangis?”

Tangis reached into a cabinet in the side of the boat, slid out a large, heavy metal box, and opened it. Lying within on a bed of white salt were what looked like two dozen insect chrysalises, all brown and withered, each about the size of a finger. Tangis dug in the salt until he found a small wooden tube, and he uncapped it and slid out a little sponge, which he squeezed over each chrysalis, allowing a few drops of fluid to fall on them before repackaging the sponge in the tube.

Quickly the little chrysalises bloomed with a pale red color, and tiny, twitching legs emerged from their undersides. Tangis picked one up with his fingers, approached me, and said, “Roll your sleeve up, please, sir.”

I eyed the twitching little chrysalis. Now that it was close, I could see a suckerlike mouth at one end.

“Ahh—what the hell is that?” I asked.

“A blotley larva,” he said. “Type of highly altered, parasitic fly. Sucks your blood, yes—but they’reverysensitive. Even the slightest trace of contagion within you will kill them.”

I nodded grimly and extended my arm. “So if this thing dies on me, I don’t get to take my helmet off.”

“Just so. It’s a recent development here in Yarrowdale, sir. We’ve a lot more contagion to worry about than other places, you see. Especially the kind that sleeps in your blood unnoticed.” A sour smile. “It’s become one of our most popular exports.”

He stuck the little larva to the inside of my arm. There was a slight pinch, then a dull itch. I watched with grotesque fascination as a translucent cavity within the larva turned a deep crimson, yet the thing did not perish, but kept cheerily sucking away at me.

“So Din is clean, and only giving it a meal,” said Malo.

“How pleasant,” I said. “When will it stop?”

“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.” He delicately plucked it off. “But I shall stop it here.”

I rubbed my arm, where a painful, winking, red sore was forming. Tangis moved on, doing the same to the rest of the wardens, along with our four prisoners. All of us passed the gruesome little test, and we eagerly removed our warding helmets.

“It’s a miracle none of us are contaminated,” said Tangis. “I expect that device you spied only dispersed atinyamount of titan’s blood, sir, just enough to create the faintest dusting…but it was deadly enough.”

There was a dreadful silence at that. I rubbed at the blotley sore on my arm, which was growing steadily more irritated, then drank greedily from a cask of water, desperate to flood my body with moisture.

A cough from one of our prisoners: the man I’d disabled. He moaned and opened his eyes, then gazed around at us, horrified.

“Get him water, and get him up,” I told Tangis. “I’ll need him talking soon.”

—

It was notuntil early afternoon that our prisoner regained the strength to speak, sipping at Tangis’s cures and grafts and cringing every time the boat shifted. I sat with him and Malo in the stern. He was a skinny, pink-skinned thing, malnourished and miserable and dappled with rashes. Like all Yarrow folk, he had a green hue to his eyes and his teeth, which were just as rotten as those of the Yarrow court.

He spoke not a word of imperial standard, but only Pithian, so I leaned on Malo to translate yet again. Yet she warned me as we began: “These are woodfolk. Swamp-dwellers. They have known a grinding poverty and ignorance that you and I can hardly comprehend. They are considered crude even by the basest folk of the Yarrow realm, even lower thannaukari—servants, I mean. It may be difficult to understand such a person, even if I translate well.”

I rubbed at the welt on my arm as I wondered how to start. “What’s his name?” I asked.

She asked him, speaking rapidly in Pithian. He frowned at me mistrustfully, then answered. Malo made an irritated face, then said,“He wants us to call himLatha.It means ‘corpse.’ Because he says he is a dead man.”

“Why?”

She spoke to him, but he remained silent, frowning into his lap. “He won’t say,” she said. “But he did admit he is a member of the Kachu clan—a smuggling gang. One of the larger ones.”

I pondered that. I had no idea how to question someone so otherworldly to me. “Tell him who I am,” I said, “and tell him I’m from the Imperial Iudex, and no harm shall come to him under my protection.”

Malo snorted. “This idiot’s not going to understand that shit.”

“Tell him anyway. In case he’s smarter than he looks.”

She did so, speaking rapidly in Pithian. The man looked absolutely dumbfounded.

“Fine. Ask him what happened back there at the camp,” I said to Malo.

She translated. He was silent for a good while. Then he bowed his head and began weeping and mumbling. Malo did not lean close to listen, I noticed: her augmented hearing likely meant she didn’t haveto.