Page 48 of A Trade of Blood

“Well, I haven’t had to operate upon ahumancadaver since my Apoth initiations. It’s quite likely I’ll make a frightful fucking mess of it.” A lazy, dreamy smile. “So if I’m really going to butcher a gentryman’s daughter, chap, it’s best if the corpse is infected—that way I can burn it and hide my clumsy craftsmanship, eh?”

—

Evening began fallingwhen I was halfway back to Lacanthim proper. I cursed myself for my insistence on hiring the cheapest of horses, as the poor nag couldn’t carry me at a full gallop for longer than a half league, and I did not encounter any faster carriages or destriers who could return me quicker. And though I needed to act swiftly now, I was unwilling to cause a poor creature suffering on account of it. Thus we trundled on together.

The road turned and we climbed a long, low, shallow hill. Then I looked north and sawit.

“Whoa!” I whispered to the nag. “Whoa! Stop there…”

The little horse gladly halted, huffing and snorting. I squinted to ensure I was truly seeing this.

The dark, old forest stretched out before me. I was some miles away from the tree line, so I didn’t feel the discomfiting buzz of its pheromones. But under the darkening skies the white boles of those trees had the look of bones to me, cast amid a purple ocean—and there, in one of the deepest, highest stretches, one tree was glowing.

No, not just glowing. Flashing. Fluttering.

I stared at it, incredulous, yet it seemed to be true: the tree some two leagues north of me was shimmering with a spectral, pale, yellow-green light that shone from deep within it. The light flickered in a curious, rhythmic pattern, on again and off again, as if mai-worms were lining every branch—but I had never seen mai-worms give off such luminescence, or light up an entire tree.

“By hell,” I murmured. “Seriv was right.”

I watched the flickering, spectral light for a long while, and sniffed at my vial to engrave the memory carefully. For some reason the silence of the landscape was what disturbed me most: how unsettling it was to see such a phenomenon, and yet the dark, rolling world about me did nothing. I was alone, a tiny speck in the night.

Then, abruptly, the flashing stopped. The tree became one of many, lost in the shadows.

I watched the forest. There was no other flashing, no flickering of light. Yet here and there I could spy the tips of statues within the trees, and stranger monuments I couldn’t identify. I disliked how they looked in the starlight: it tricked the eye into thinking they were moving.

I patted the neck of my old nag, and we continued down the road to Lacanthim. She stepped a little faster now, as if she, too, was glad to put such sights behindus.

Chapter 14

The Orbiis office in Lacanthimwas not merely “rudimentary” but was in fact a set of unkempt stables with a very small medikker and surgery bay at the back. As was required for imperial medikker facilities, one chamber of the surgery bay was “secured” and was set behind walls of thick, warped glass. It was instantly clear from the chamber’s pristine look that it hadn’t been used in weeks.

When I described this to Ana, she chuckled nastily where she sat beside me and said, “Probably don’t have much use for secured chambers here! I am sure they mostly deal with diarrhetic mules or some such. This must be the most exciting thing to happen in this grubby little goddamn place in ages.”

The corpse of Zansay Burav was laid out upon the surgery table behind the glass, stripped of all clothing, her pale gray eyes now slightly sunken. Her skin had grown mottled and discolored from pooling blood. As distasteful as this was to me, Commander Tauri didn’t seem to mind, and hummed to himself as he bustled about like a cook in his kitchens.

First he cut Zansay Burav’s hair with a pair of shears, then daubed her scalp with lather and shaved it with a razor. It seemed a difficult task, for the chamber was lit by a single measly mai-lamp, and Commander Tauri wore a full warding suit and helm to protect himself from any contagion. He had to keep regripping the razor in his sweaty gloves and tapping the glass orbs of his warding helm to shake loose the condensation to see.

Once he finished, the commander set down his razor and began his final treatments. First he hung some dozen or so telltale plants from the ceiling, each bound in tiny cages. Then he laid out small vats of soil about Zansay Burav’s shaved head and anchored the vats to the table with heavy clamps. After this, he painted her pate with a purplish fluid, drawing lines about the seams of her skull. Last of all, he lit a small cup of reagent with a flare-pot, allowing a soft haze to fill the chamber. He then doused the flames and began to prepare the chamber for his departure.

“He won’t cut?” I asked, surprised, after I had described this to Ana.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Contagion autopsies are not done in person. Too much risk! A body might be playing host to something quite hostile. An abscess brimming with worms that come spilling out when breached…that sort of thing.”

My cheeks were beginning to ache from being maneuvered into expressions of extreme disgust.

“What he will do is instead enticethreadvineto do these tasks for him,” said Ana. “A type of fretvine, but one specifically for rending flesh and bone. I believe it is also used in the flensing halls of this canton. It will sprout from the soil he has laid down, seek out the reagent he has painted on her skull, bite into the bone there, and retract, splitting it apart. What he intends to achieve by doing this, I don’t yet know—but given that it is a neuro-fungus, I presume he must look directly at the brain and its tissues.”

I muttered something about being happy I had not yet dined.

Commander Tauri slipped out the door of the chamber. His two assistants—also bound in warding suits—promptly doused him with acrid reagents to kill all organic matter upon him. Then they did the same to each other: a slightly comic sight, these three people so assiduously lathering one another in their drooping, oily suits. Then they paced in circles, waving their arms about, before finally removing their helms and suits and approaching.

“I so dislike warding apparel,” Tauri remarked with a sigh. “If I can’t taste the air, it burdens my spirits terribly. But the job is done! The girl’s cadaver shall soon tell us the nature of the thing nowfestering in her skull.” He glanced back at Zansay. “How strange, that flesh can put such emotions in our mind. She was but carbon and water animated—and yet I can’t help but feel sad to see her there.”

“Yes, yes, a tragedy,” said Ana, indifferent. “But shall ripping the girl’s head open be enough, sir?”

He regarded Ana with a wary eye. “Ah! I see your immunis has arrived, Kol. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced…”

I speedily made introductions between the two of them, yet I noted that Tauri studied Ana’s blindfold with a great deal of interest.