Page 64 of A Drop of Corruption

I fought a shiver. “How did the king curse them? Does he have any suspicions about what happened?”

Again, Malo asked. “He thinks the king might have gone to…bless them,” she translated. “Give them the medicines and magics of the emperor. But he thinks the smokes became an evil thing instead. The pale king had blessed them before, made them strong andhealthy. He’d made some…some tool to suck at? He compares it to a cow’s udder, full of smoke?”

“A percolator,” I said, surprised. “This king made one for them, I suppose. They must have thought he was making the same thing back there in the camp. Ask him where we can find this pale king now.”

She spoke rapidly in Pithian, and Latha hesitated a long while before answering. “He doesn’t know,” she said. “The king would often appear in the night, then vanish just as suddenly. Such was his skill that they almost thought he was a warden, if not a ghost. But…there was a place where they sometimes found him.” She narrowed her eyes as she listened. “A…shrine? The king would dwell there, among the stones. They would come to seek his counsel. At times he would emerge and speak. Others, he would be absent or stayed hidden.”

“Ask him where this shrine is.”

She did so and listened keenly as he answered. “The Midlow,” she said finally. “A stretch of jungle flooded over from the canals, and very swampy. But also not far from here.”

“Then we should go,” I said, “and see for ourselves—yes?”

“We can do so. But whatever waits for us there, we cannot stay long. We must report the clearing back to my superiors, so they can dispose of it. It would be a foolish thing to find a place so corroded and leave it to fester.”

—

We entered the Midlowas late afternoon came on. The sky turned to riotous red with whorls of hazy, peachy pinks. Then the rivers changed to pools, then swamps, and the trees grew heavy with moss, the waters trembling as tiny, black beasts danced in their depths. Finally forms of pale stone emerged from the dark wood, slabs and wedges and huge, curling shelves. I recognized them not as natural rock but the filyra-stone that the Engineers mixed from powder and lime, forming strange, smooth shapes uncommon to the wild.

“They were once dams,” Malo explained. “Made while the canals were dug many years ago.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“When the canals were done and the dams were no longer needed, the Empire pulled them down and let the waters go free again. Now here they sit.”

I gazed at the curious, coiling stone sculptures as we passed through the swamp, feeling as if we were not in the wild but some dripping graveyard, piled with fallen monuments. Even the moss-laden trees had the look of grieving widows wandering the tombs in lace gowns. Then Latha pointed ahead with a trembling finger, whispering directions to Malo: a strangely timorous little psychopomp.

A form emerged from the gloom: a broad arch of filyra-stone, rising from a clutch of trees. It had the look of the bow of a giant ship that had run aground on the muddy shores.

Latha whispered a word. “That’s it,” translated Malo. Sabudara pulled on the seakip reins, and our vessel slowed to a halt. For a great while the wardens simply studied the stone arch and sniffed the air and glanced about: checking for any sign of our quarry, I guessed, or traps.

Then Malo nodded to Sabudara, and the two of them climbed down and entered the muddy waters. They made not for the stone arch but for the network of trees to its east, and there they stepped lightly from root to root, approaching the place silently. I lost them in the gloom, and together we all waited, listening and watching the curling mist.

Then a rough shout: “It is safe. He is not here. Come.”

A warden flicked the reins, and we approached slowly. The site I’d glimpsed was not merely an arch of stone, I saw, but a small island, surrounded by a wide bank of mud and many intertangled reeds. The filyra-stone arch lay nestled against a rocky hillock, and this formed a wedge of space between the two, creating a wide, shallow cavern. I was vaguely reminded of the lid of an eye, cracking open to peer out at the world.

Yet it was undoubtedly a place of some significance, for all about the opening of the cavern stood many stone cairns, each carefullycreated, many rising as high as my shoulder. Some stacks had been connected to form a narrow arch: a fiendishly impressive bit of engineering whose art I could not divine. It all seemed a spectral sight, ruins within ruins in this dismal place.

I leapt down onto the muddy shores, and Malo emerged from the mists. “There is not much here that I see yet,” she said. “No reagents, no records, no anything. There is a seat, and many of these eerie stone sculptures, but nothing else.”

The cavern yawned open before me. Now that I was close, I saw that most of the gap was veiled with nets of reeds and vines. Positioned in between the two curtains, in the direct center of the cavern, was a set of thick slabs of stones, stacked and arranged in a form that could only have been a chair.

Not a chair, I realized. A throne.

“A pale king,” I said softly. “And there he sat and gave his commands to all who listened. Yet we shall still search it all, true?”

“Of course.” Malo called to her wardens in Pithian, and they clambered down the boat and vanished into the mists about us.

I wandered the totems and cairns about the cavern, searching all I saw while the wardens did the same. The cairns stood upright from some marvelous manipulation of physics—an Imperial Engineer could have hardly done better—and many were covered with vines, which looped about the stacks in brambly bunches.

Yet the vines were adorned with more than leaves. Some had ribbons tied to their twists. Others had bones or even talints or charms threaded about them. A few sported drawings, done on hide or crude parchment, rolled up and stuffed within their curls.

I plucked one out and studied it in the dim light: it appeared to be a drawing of a man, standing within circles, with arrows and blades bouncing off their edges. A plea for sacred protection, perhaps.

“They worshipped him as a god,” said Malo.

“So it seems,” I said. I replaced the drawing, unsure why I did so.