The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

Hence why some called engravers “glass sniffers.”

I allowed a quick glance at her. She was a tall, thin woman in her late forties or fifties—it

the Hazas really are a bunch of rotten bastards.

slipping on her blindfold to see me out.

“You’re saying someone weaponized a contagion?”

I'll even pay the small fortune to have it sent by scribe-hawk.

The wet season is simply too chaotic. Nobody’s going to care about one murder,

troupe of plaizaiers to come balance atop your delicates?”

“Beacon’s up,” I said hoarsely. “A titan’s made it past the walls

The engravers among us proved helpful: we remembered the policy for this, where to go and what to do,

“A breach is a terrible thing, Din. We’re all in danger now, for the rest of the wet season.”

This man had evidently been altered for strength, so much so he could quite likely cleave

something wrong with that, Din?” “Besides your consistent use of wildly inappropriate language, ma’am?”

And their reasons all tasted, I thought, rather like bullshit.

instead of committing robbery, I made tea.

am reluctant to assume maliciousness when incompetence is a better explanation

“Erupting from within due to a sudden vegetal growth is, I concede, pretty fucking unusual,”

I felt a strange bubbling at the bottom of my brain, as if it were cooking in a pot.

“This is why people are so loath to talk before an engraver . . . They never forget a fucking thing you say!

trembling column of greenery erupting from just below his left collarbone, growing until the man himself was eaten alive.

my damned brain, which had never been able to learn how to engrave the words I read.

“Memory in the muscles,” explained Miljin. “You learn how to move and you remember it,

“This is Talagray, Immunis. Nothing is ever certain here.

“Civilization is often a task that is only barely managed.

I will do what I do best.” She sat on the bed. “I will think.

blood from her torso, like water from a decorative fountain.