Page 110 of A Trade of Blood

I continued paging through it. I encountered tables and tables of reagent mixes, compounds, performances, temperatures. I comprehended none of them, but I knew the sight of them well. “It’s Burav’s journal, it…it accounts for how he made the damned thing!”

I rushed out to bring it to Tauri. I found that he had entered the dry fountain and was digging at the soil there with a dagger. He squatted there in the dark silt, glowering as the blade carved through the dust and crumbling earth. “No water…none atall.So how?”

“Sir!” I called. I held up the journal. “I think we might have found something of use.”

He dashed up to me, took the journal, and leafed through it. “Fucking hell…” he murmured. “The mad bastard wrote down everything he learned of how the web behaved! This must have been how he fashioned the agrarian web, thirty damned years ago! Look here, he makes a note saying, ‘Sleep is almost always affected by echoes of conditioned behavior within two days of the host hearing the awakening tones.’ That would have been damned handy to know, yes? I hope it has something more of use, though…Much of this we’ve already learned.”

“But he couldn’t have done the alterations and testing here, could he? I thought he had engineered it to work on the field cats.”

“Oh, true, true. I believe Burav found the web here—orsomethinghere—and isolated it in that cabin. He took his samples back to his family homestead and refined the specimen there, keeping a careful journal of all his efforts, just like any good Apoth would.”

“Then, decades later,” I said, “Jalin found the journal in his father’s vault in his mansion and returned here with it to do his own works. He likely needed to brew up more to infect the Armentas, and the others.”

Tauri’s face grew troubled. “Yes…but as to where Burilis Burav originally found it, or why it works upon the human mind, I cannot say. I thought perhaps it was a Daljeni creation—but the fountain is dry, and it has been for centuries.” He cast his eyes about at the crumbling, mildewed ruins. “Wherever it came from, Burilis Burav didn’t find the web in this place.”

Chapter 29

Ana had returned to herchambers at the Green Drover during our long trip through the altered forest, though she had taken much of Burav’s library with her. Dozens of precious, aging parchments had been hung from the walls about her, creating a crackling, dull brown tapestry with the occasional flash of orange from some artistic illuminator. As I trooped through the door still damp and reeking of decontaminants from the wash the Orbiis had put me through (“Must be thorough, Kol,” Tauri had remarked to me), she hardly looked up from the current object of her attentions: a moldy, disintegrating tome titledDhe Hisdorieas Sorrowed dhe Daljhene.

“Well?” she purred.

I staggered up to her, said, “Jalin’s dead. Slit his own wrists, ma’am,” and handed her Burav’s journal.

She tugged down her blindfold and peered at it. “And what is that?”

“Burilis Burav’s journal of altering the guiding web.”

“What!” she squawked. She snatched it out of my hands as if it was a collection of her own imprudent correspondence. “And you just found it in the middle of the damned woods?”

“In a tiny cabin laboratory in the woods, ma’am. Though it was in some kind of…Well. Crumbling Daljeni city.”

She gazed, open-mouthed, between the book and myself. “Well, don’t just stand there, you fool of a boy! Speak!”

With a groan of relief, I sat on the chair in the corner and didso.

I had expected Ana to beam with triumph as I described how all her intuitions had proven true, but instead her pale, skeletal face filled with dismay, and she turned the pages of the journal faster and faster, her enhanced fingers seeking out each curl of ink.

“So,” she said softly at the end of my report. “You have passed through lands long forgotten and looked upon ruins that drifted out of history into myth centuries ago…and yet you have found so little, Din. Jalin Burav left us almost nothing to pursue. There is no sign of who was blackmailing him. He did not leave a note like he did in the cache near the shrine of Gaddar. All we have is this journal…which is a riddle in its own right.”

“Is there anything of use in its pages, ma’am?” I asked.

“Oh, there is much here about Burav’s original experimentation, nearly three decades ago. He details his clinical method of killing dozens of drokha-cats and then sinking their rotting bodies in a great tank infected with the guiding web. And many details—precise temperatures, water densities, salinities, and concentrations of fungal detritus that must be present in the blood.” Her pinkened fingers followed one line of script like an ant scurrying along its trail to its colony. “There are some facts that are of mild interest. Cranial fruitings always occur precisely three days after death, for example. Nocturnal hallucinations transpire within forty-eight hours after conditioning. But nothing actionable, so to speak.” Her finger stopped moving. “It is what isnothere that is most interesting.”

“Which is…”

“There is no evidence, Din, whatsoever, that Burilis Burav ever trained the web to work upon humans. In fact, as far as I can tell, the wordhumandoesn’t appear even once in this text.”

I stared at the book, perplexed. “So if Burilis Burav didn’t train it to work on humans…then Jalin?”

“An anxious, traumatized boy with absolutely no Apothetikal training? I somewhat doubt it.”

“Then who, ma’am?”

She fell silent, head bowed. “I sense that this answer is, too, not actionable. Not in the near term, and not for the killer we seek.But…” She gazed at me, her yellow eyes bright in her grayish face. “If I can, I shall show you eventually, Din. You are owed that answer. For what is your duty besides to gaze upon truths most would prefer go ignored? Yet for now, I’ve no idea what to do. Rest, boy, and give me a moment to think on this.”

—

I went tothe Orbiis office before I ventured out to find Fotia. Tauri’s officers were hard at work cleansing all their tools—including the wheellock bombards and lypi lances—but Tauri himself came rushing out as I approached, his hair still wet from his own wash. “Did you show her the journal?” he asked. “What did she say?”