Page 137 of A Drop of Corruption

We pulled the body out of the chest and placed him on the road. He had perished of a stab wound, I saw, just under his heart and placed between the ribs: an expertly given wound if ever I’d seen one. His face was distinctly Rathras, with a thin nose and rather small eyes, though his eyes were faintly green, and he had a rather starved look to him, much like one might expect from a man who’d been surviving in the wilderness for months on end.

But more, he looked exactly like the drawing Malo and I had studied: the sketch of the man who had come to the Treasury bank and opened the Apoth’s box.

Malo sniffed the air. “Been dead about two days,” she pronounced. “Perhaps more.”

I stayed silent, my mind whirling.

“Could…could it truly be him?” asked Malo.

I knelt and pulled his shirt up to his collar. There, in ghostly imprints all across his belly and chest, were dozens of rounded, puckered welts, the imprints of tiny insects that had once fed upon his flesh—or, perhaps, leaked stolen blood into his veins.

“Blotley welts,” I said quietly.

“Fucking hell,” said Malo. “Exactly as your immunis said. He set many blotleys to Sujedo, then to himself, to draw the proper bloods into his flesh. By the bloody eyes of the fates…it looks like Darhi finally got hold of our friend Sunus Pyktis and killed him before this devil betrayed him in turn! What a shameful way for his miserable life to end. At least it is done—true?”

I gazed at the corpse and said nothing.

Chapter 49

An imperial barge and severaldozen Apoth MILITII awaited us at the bend of the River Tarif, at the edge of the Elder West, having come when they’d seen the rocket in the sky. They escorted us and all we’d secured into the city, and as we traveled I gave them my report, which they quickly recorded and sent to Prificto Kardas by scribe-hawk. “He speaks with the prince now at the High City,” said a militis to me. “Yet his talks shall soon change! I wager we have all his realm’s fortune aboard our vessel.”

Once we returned to Yarrowdale we brought the entire hoard into one of the preparation rooms of the fermentation works: the very chamber where I’d been so thoroughly dosed before my trip to the Shroud, in fact. There Thelenai and Ana both awaited us, and Thelenai watched fretfully as the wardens laid out each crate, listening as I breathlessly recounted all we’d experienced.

When I finished, there was a long silence. Pyktis’s corpse lay in the open Yarrow chest before Ana. The wardens sat beside the long-sought six crates of fertilizer, weary but triumphant. I stood at the edge of the room, feeling far less victorious, for as I’d spoken, Ana’s blindfolded face had twisted in a way I found distinctly unsettling.

Thelenai stared down on Pyktis’s body. “How strange it is, to feel sorrow at the sight of this man,” she whispered. “He is a creature I made, in a way. Yet all this time he’d been secretly made by another, and bent wholly toward my destruction. How we would have loved and adored him if he’d come to us honestly! For his genius was great,and we would not have cared from whence it came. All fruits of flesh are equal in the eyes of the Empire.” She turned to Ana, who still sat in silence, a deep glower on her face. “What do you proclaim, Dolabra? It seems a great triumph, to find all we sought and all our enemies dead, and all at once.”

I winced; for that, I knew, was precisely what troubled her now.

Finally Ana spoke: “Why keep the body?”

“Pardon?” said Thelenai.

“Why would Darhi keep Pyktis’s body?” Ana demanded. “Why package it up so?”

We all looked at the corpse and thought on that.

“I do not know,” said Thelenai. “Perhaps his hatred of the man was that great.”

“You think he was going to…dosomething to it, ma’am?” said Malo.

“Again, I do not know,” said Thelenai, affronted.

“Or,” I said, “perhaps…Pyktis was killed by another, ma’am?”

Ana’s head snapped up to gaze sightlessly upon me. “Oh? Say more, Din.”

“W-well,” I said. “Someone might have killed Pyktis and stored his body in the chest in the Yarrow vaults, packaged as if it were a pile of gold. If Darhi’s aim was to steal all he could and flee, he might not have known he’d just stolen a body as well, just like he might not have comprehended the value of the grafts he’d stolen.”

“So…you suggest yetanotherkiller?” said Thelenai uncertainly. “A killer of Pyktis, who stored his body in this chest? I cannot comprehend that…but I confess, I have little appetite to pursue it. The clear conclusion is that the man in possession of the body is the one who killed him. Indeed, the same man who had a tremendousreasonto kill him—Satrap Darhi. For you believed Pyktis was killing his old allies one by one, true?”

Ana was silent.

“And even if someone else killed him,” said Thelenai, “how troubled are we that Pyktis is slain, given that we have secured the reagents he so needed?”

Ana’s next words were like the snapping of a steel blade: “Have we?”

The wardens fell to muttering and drew symbols in the air.