Page 51 of A Trade of Blood

“Meaning, we can make a cure, but it shall take time. While we wait, we do have the same treatments we give the cats—it can restrain the fungus but not cure it.”

Ana laughed lowly. “So the poor bastards won’t die from the fungus, but they will still cut their own throats at the whistle of the killer’s pipe?”

“Yes,” said Tauri. “If they are conditioned to do so, that is true.”

She glowered for a moment. “Then we test first. But we must test carefully.”

“Yes. It’d be damned tricky to test so many wells and waters without starting a panic—orwithout the objections of the local gentry. They don’t like us Orbiis doing a damned thing on their lands, though we’ve a mandate to do so.”

Ana paused. “But speaking of the gentry, sir…Din here informed me that you asked some very pointed questions about Burilis Burav when he first told you of the death. Why might that have been?”

“That is true…” said Tauri. “I suspect you haven’t had the time to research him yet. If you had, you might not have trusted me enough to come to me.” He took a quick breath. “Because Burilis Burav was once a member ofmyorder.”

“What!” squawked Ana. “Burav wasOrbiis?”

“Indeed.”

She whirled on me. “Din! You didn’t say anything about that!”

“Because I didn’t know, ma’am,” I said, flustered. My eyes shimmered as I pulled up my memory of meeting Burav on our first day here. He had gestured to his greatly augmented face and told me—Iserved my time in the Imperial Iyalets myself, as an Apothetikal.“Burav commented he’d served the Apoths, not the Orbiis.”

“So he was, originally,” said Tauri. “But the Orbiis pulls officers from both the Apothsandthe Engineers, as it takes the arts of each to maintain the stability of the cantons. That’s why our uniforms are striped in the colors of each order, you see.”

“When did he serve under you, sir?” asked Ana.

“Oh, not under me! He was here thirty years ago—so, sometwenty before I ever stepped foot in this canton. In fact, I’ve never met the man. Yet many elder officers say that when he left us, he did so under a cloud of suspicion and dislike—though none have ever claimed enough to constitute an actual crime. And just after he left the Orbiis, he suddenly proclaimed that he had developed a most marvelous innovation…”

“The agrarian web,” I said.

“Correct. We have all found it rather unsettling.” He eyed Zansay’s corpse warily. “Now you see why I suspected he might want his daughter’s corpse returned speedily! If he knew she was infected…”

“Then he’d also know she’d fruit!” hissed Ana. “A clear signal to anyone that she had the web in her!”

“Which he would very much want tohide,” said Tauri. “As to how or why this could be done to his own daughter, I cannot say. But I’m not surprised by it.”

“Why not, sir?” I asked.

A strange expression crept over the commander then. He looked still at Zansay’s pale corpse, but there was a deadness to his gaze, as if she wasn’t a human being but a twist of tissue upon his dissection tray.

“The cattle families are peddlers of flesh,” he said softly. “Their lives are measured in the slashing of knives and the creaking of bloodied scales. They bicker and fight for many reasons, but one surely is that they no longer quail at the sight of gore. What’s the difference between a killer and a murderer? Personally, I cannot sa—”

Then Zansay Burav’s skull burst open.

—

I lacked wordsfor the sight of it. It was as if someone had pumped air into a leather sack until it split at its seam. Her skull parted along the lines that Tauri had painted on it, and as it did so, many thick, black, glistening curls came pouring out, as if her parietal plate was a door and these curls were guests trying to rush inside to avoid a downpour.

I stared in horror and disgust. They were unmistakably fungalstalks, somewhat akin to what one might find growing on the underside of a fallen tree trunk on a walk in the woods. Yet these moved so quickly, so hungrily, as if eager to escape their prison. They boiled out of her skull, rising a full span into the air; then they slowed in their ascent; then their surfaces grew slightly hazy and shimmering.

Tauri and his people watched this monstrosity with an interested eye. “A very sizable postmortem fruiting! It is not mature, however. If it were, you’d see a powder in the air, and the telltale plants would be rioting…” He leaned closer to the glass, studying the tiny telltale plants hanging from the ceiling. Some had changed colors, some had perished, and some hadn’t changed at all. “An interesting set of signals,” Tauri said softly. “I’ll study it more, but for now…like the other breeds, it seems this variety of the guiding web must be cultivated in fresh water first. It offers no danger if you merely breathe in the spores. The interstitial phase must reach maturity in order for it to be a threat to the host. But the concentration moss I hung there—it suggests it takes agood bitof consumption for the fungus to be able to cultivate a human. Repeated doses, delivered over time. A single drop in a cup of wine won’t do, for example. Yet it is a resilient thing…those browning leaves, right there! They indicate that the spores would survive great temperatures.”

“So someone could bake the thing into a fucking cake, and it’d still be effective?” asked Ana.

“So the telltales say. As to how the fungus behaves when it isinthe body, the telltales can’t attest. But—it is a very vigorous variety of the web. Unusually powerful. And quite, quite deadly. I expect that if a host wasn’t forced to act out their own demise, they were surely doomed.”

Ana gritted her teeth for a moment. “Given that Zansay required a steady dose of the fungus in order for it to infest her, then I am given to think that the source of her infection was there on the family grounds. And given Burilis Burav’s curious behavior, it makes me think many things…”

“You think she might have been poisoned under his supervision, ma’am,” I said.