Page 125 of A Drop of Corruption

“It pained him,” said the woman. “So great was his pain that I asked him of it. He said to me—Does your family think you shall die in this place?I said I did not know, but I assumed they had accepted my fate, whatever it was to be. I had chosen to serve, after all. He thought on this, and then said—My father expects me to die here.I said that could not be so, no father could truly expect such a thing. But then he…” A pause in her tapping. Then: “He grew angry. He grew soangryat this comment, and he withdrew, and we could not find him.”

“He disappeared?” I asked.

The woman issued a single set of taps: “Yes.”

“But the Shroud is a contained place, yes?” I asked.

The man tapped in response: “Contained, yes, but also enormous, especially here on the inner layer. When we two searched for him, we found nothing. He returned to us, eventually. Yet he was cold and aloof, and we feared to ask of it.”

The woman: “After that, this behavior became more frequent. He would disappear to some place within the Shroud, some place we could not find. When he returned, he would be moody and distant. We could not comprehend it.”

The man limply tapped upon his board, and Ghrelin slowly translated: “We thought the culprit was the end of his term. Too much augury. Too much time on the Shroud. The mind breaks down.”

The woman: “It is why we serve only three years. The personality undergoes shifts. Often dangerous ones. It is like the Khanum of old, or so they say.”

I frowned at that, for in all I’d ever been taught, the Khanum had been depicted as wise and blessed.

“How is it like the Khanum?” I asked. “They were the first imperials. Why do you say they were as dangerous as Pyktis?”

The augurs again exchanged an inscrutable look.

The woman tapped, and Ghrelin, now panting with exhaustion, translated: “Do you know of how Sublimes such as you were made in mimicry of the grand and ancient Khanum? Possessing a portion of their cognitive powers—memory, calculation, spatial conceptualization, and so on—but no more than thatoneportion? For we can duplicate little of what the first imperials were.”

“I do,” I said.

The man said: “But this is not the whole of it. The Khanum of old could enter a…afugue.An elevation of their minds to the highest levels, calling upon all their faculties. This made them capable of incomprehensible brilliance, feats of intellect even we cannot decipher.”

The woman: “Thisis what augury is. It is an attempt to replicate this powerful elevation. We have only found a way for it to work withaxioms, however, and no other Sublime. And it is limited in the same ways.”

The man then: “For the Khanum of old grew incomprehensible as they aged. The more brilliant they became, the more mad they grew, and inarticulate. They spoke languages no one knew—if they spoke at all.”

The woman: “Augury does thissame thing,but over a much shorter period—only three years, and the third year can be treacherous. It is tempestuous and wild. That is when those of our order exhibit the most paranoias, the most erraticism.”

The man smiled weakly and tapped out: “But it could be far worse. There are whispers of other attempts to replicate the Khanum, to remake the emperor’s bloodline anew. These efforts produced beings wild and savage, and full of strange passions and alien appetites. None of them lived past a year, we are told.”

I shuddered in my suit and tried to focus on the investigation. “And you think Pyktis was suffering a madness like this?”

The woman slowly tapped out a response: “We did, yes.”

“Why?” I asked.

The man’s response was quick. Swallowing, Ghrelin translated: “Because we came to believe he was contemplating self-termination.”

“You mean…”

The woman: “Suicide. Yes.”

—

The man began tapping,and Ghrelin—very weak now—translated: “We smelled it in the wind. And in sensing this, perhaps we…we hastened his choices.”

“We tried to follow him during the last of these vanishings,” said the woman. “We used all of our arts to decipher the pattern of his movements, the possible places he could slip away to.”

“And…then we found him,” said the man. “We came upon him standing in a tall, open window on one of the upper floors, facing one of the high courtyards of the inner layer.”

The woman, head bowed: “As if to jump. To send himself plummeting to his death.”

The man: “A desperate thing, as if to escape.”