Page 73 of A Trade of Blood

I grunted, dismayed, and touched my temple.

“What is it?” asked Fotia.

“I…don’t know,” I muttered. “Or I do, actually. I am remembering something. But I don’t know what.”

“Oh? I thought your kind remembered everything perfectly.”

“I do. But usually I have to think of the memory and summon it, often with scent. More and more, I…I am finding that a few of my memories try to jump out to me of their own accord.”

“Is that normal?”

I did not answer. I forced myself to look at the faded face of Master Gaddar and silently asked—Who are you?

My memories trembled in my head. Then a sensation leaked into my fingers: the feel of something clasped in my hand, or many somethings, small and round and flat and cold.

“A coin?” I said softly and began rummaging in my pocket.

I pulled out a handful of talint coins. It wasn’t until I began to peer at them that I realized what my memories had been respondingto.

Each imperial talint coin showed the etched visage of the emperor, of course—but the fifty-talint coin was always different. The basics were present upon it: the long face of the emperor, the austere eyes, the ever-present imperial credo below,Sen sez imperiya.Yet in the casting for this specific coin, I’d always felt there was something different about the emperor’s physiology.

His skull was too long, especially at the dome, which rose both too high and too narrowly at the back parietal section. His jawbone was slightly distended, the mandible dipping lower than it ought. And his eyes were a little too sunken, as if the brow had overgrown them.

I fished out the fifty-talint coin, then held it up so it was alongside the features of Master Gaddar. “There’s a resemblance there, yes?” I said softly.

Fotia peered at it. “Oh…so there is. Something about the shape of them. Something not quite…”

She did not say it, but I sensed the word:human.

“No one’s seen the emperor in over two hundred and fifty years,” murmured Fotia. “Hasn’t said a word or stuck his head out of his Sanctum since he went in. But—Iwonder…in there, does he look like that strange thing? Or is he even stranger now?”

I put the coin away and thought of Ana, so small and bent. Not for the first time, I wondered—what gifts had been woven into her flesh? Was it a seed, perhaps? And would it one day sprout, and bloom into something terribly alien?

I shook myself. “Let’s check the trees for signs of our killer—if they came this way, that is.”

—

Together we walkedthe edge of the glade, sniffing our kerchiefs and peering into the leaning spokes of white trees.

“I’ve no idea what I’m looking for, though,” I said softly as wepaced. “Would the trees devour any sign of passage? And, more, how would they get through the forest at all?”

“I’ve no idea, either,” said Fotia. “For all I know about this bastard, they float off the ground like an eidolon. Or perhaps some of the trees are false, and vanish at a tou—”

I stopped short, eyes narrowed, my gaze fixated on one patch of shadow in the trees.

“What is it?” asked Fotia.

I pointed into one gap in the trees some ten span deep, and said, “There.”

Fotia squinted. “There what? I don’t see a thing.”

“A footprint. Ithink.Two of them, perhaps…though there are about a hundred branches between us and that spot. It would tear a fellow to pieces trying to get there—unless you had some way of getting past them. Do you see it?”

“You can see all that in the leaves? Where’d you learn that skill?”

“A fellow officer, in Yarrow. She taught me many uglier things than that.”

“She?” said Fotia wryly. “I’ve no doubt she did.”