Page 153 of A Drop of Corruption

I looked at the book in my hand. My fingers gripped it so tight they had turned white.

Remade again.

The fretvine house creaked about me in the breeze. I reopened the book to the marked page and read the words again.

Pyktis’s last words emerged in my mind, and his desperate scream to Ana:You call me an abomination, but I know what you are! I have read it in your body, in your very movements! You disdain kings, butI know what you are!

I whispered aloud, “What you are.”

Memories came bubbling up within my mind, one after another.

I recalled what the augurs had told me in the Shroud: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.

Legs quaking, I slowly sat down on the floor.

Strange passions,I thought,and alien appetites.

My eyes shimmered, and I pictured Ana, sitting within a mound of oyster shells, her chin gleaming with their liquor as she said:You can taste in each one which reef they came from, which side they grew upon, which waters they flourished within. They are like melodies of the ocean itself rendered in flesh…

The augurs again, whispering: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.

Her face, twisted and stretched and bloodied in the shadows, her yellow eyes dancing in her skull:I see his game, his mind! I see all the warp and weft he spins about us, even now!

And then what Malo had said to me:I confess, there is a strange scent to that woman sometimes. One I don’t quite know…

Another memory. I had watched her play her lyres, here in this very room, and asked:When are you going to tell me what augmentations you have, Ana? And how it is you can do all you can do?

To which she’d cheerily responded:When I need to, you little shit, and no earlier!

I projected the memory on the empty floor before me. How she’d sat, how she’d lovingly held the lyres, how she’d cocked her head. Her pale skin, and snowy hair, and her familiar, predatory grin: too many teeth, and all too white.

“The day when the great Khanum can be remade again,” I said to myself quietly. And yet—what if that day had already come?

—

I raced backto the medikker’s bays. I was unsure what my goal was in doing so—for if her hints had all been true, she herself was incapable of telling me anything—but I knew I had to see her, to signal to her that I had understood, that I’d comprehended all her suggestions.

Yet when I returned, the medikkers shook their heads. “She sleeps now. You may look upon her, but she will not wake.”

I tottered into her rooms and gazed upon her lying in her cradle. They had removed her blindfold from her. For some reason it made her seem small and shrunken, this pale little thing wrapped up in gray blankets, like a seashell emerging from the dark sands of a beach.

I wished to ask her many things then. I wished to know what she was; how she had come to be this thing; why she toiled here, in the hinterlands of the Empire, applying justice in such broken places. But I dared not speak any of it aloud, for fear of being overheard.

She coughed in her sleep, a short, pained sound. I recalled more of her words then:The most passionate Iudex officers are the ones who’ve been harmed, you see…It puts a fire in them. Doesn’t make themgoodat what they do, necessarily, but it does make them…enthusiastic, let us say. Willing to suffer, and bear burdens others could not…

Willing to suffer, and bear burdens. She had been hinting at it even then, though I could not have comprehended then the nature of her suffering; nor could I even now, truth be told. Though she slept before me like a child, this frail white thing remained beyond me.

I gently lifted her blindfold from her nightstand and tucked it about her eyes again.

“For when you wake, ma’am,” I said softly.

Then I left.

Epilogue

The Watchman

Chapter 55