A Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan, #2)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

I stared at the severed pieces, my nostrils swimming with the odor of the moss, and now the stench of rot. The sour fish in my belly rolled over yet again. I turned, staggered to the drain in the floor, knelt, placed my hands on either side, and vomited directly down it, coughing so mightily my whole body began to ache. “There it is,” said Malo appraisingly. “You seem very practiced! That is the most precise vomit I have ever seen.” I resumed my position over the drain and retched again.

I took in the shape of the remains, their color, the way they had been contorted; how the bones had been broken, how the skin had curdled, the wend and weft of the flesh. As my memory had been enhanced to be perfect, these awful sights would remain with me until I died. But such was my lot in service to the Empire. I dabbed at my mouth with a handkerchief.

“I think what most Yarrow folk do,” she said simply. “I think it was the king’s agreement, made with the Empire for the king’s lands long ago.” “Are they not your lands, too?” A trim smile. “Spoken like one who has never known a king.”

How have you already managed to bed another? Have you even been here a full day?” I felt heat in my cheeks as I unlocked my door. “I am going to change my clothing, Signum,” I said firmly. “I will be back shortly.” “You will also want to wash your undercarriage,” she said. “You do not need a warden’s nose to smell all that.” She sniffed again. “But do I find that scent familiar? Was it someone I know?” I shut the door with a snap.

“Yes! Are you so ignorant of your imperial history, Din? The bastard quotes the emperor himself!” “He does?” I said, puzzled. “I thought the statement was Sen sez imperiya, rather than—” “Oh, damn it all!” she fumed. Then she cleared her throat and appeared to recite from memory: “And thus the emperor said to his advisers, ‘We have seen many empires fall, for they did not extend past the breath of their emperors. They decayed, and grew unjust. If I wish this new empire to last, I should not declare to my people that I am the Empire. Rather, I should say to them, You are the Empire. And with that blessing, they shall make a realm for the ages.’

“They did not react at all, ma’am. Which I found very curious. In fact, I almost felt like their reaction was…” “Rehearsed?” she proposed. “Exactly so.” “Then they knew the question was coming. I dislike that immensely, Din.” A mad grin crossed her face. “But! At least now we know that Ghrelin and the Apoths here are pursuing a rather conventional brand of obstruction.” “As…opposed to an unconventional brand, ma’am?”

“I have witnessed folk altered in such a fashion. Merely nearing the unmentionable subject causes them significant pain. I did not note such pain in Ghrelin.” She flicked a hand, dismissing the subject. “It was a random aside. Ignore it for now—but do remember it, Din.” I blinked, thoroughly bewildered by this, for I always engraved all she ever said. I wondered why she’d said it at all, but then, Ana often said many mad things.

A long silence, broken only by the crash of the distant waves. “He was saying all that?” I said faintly. “Yes. Unconsciously, perhaps, like he was trained to let every thought in his brain spill down his arm to his fingers to be tapped out. How deliciously ridiculous, yes?”

I suspect you shall come to realize what many Iudexii eventually learn—that though the Legion defends our Empire, it falls to us to keep an Empire worth defending.”

“What!” squawked Ana. “You want to go on some kind of goddamned boat ride down some god-awful river?” I shook water off my straw cone hat as I leaned against her bedroom door. “I think it’ll be decidedly less pleasant than you make it sound, ma’am, but that’s the spill of it.”

“What shall we do for the dead?” I asked Malo. “Do? Nothing,” she said. “It does not feel right to leave them to rot.” “If we were to dig them graves, the forest would still spoil it,” she said. “Better to give them over to the trees and the vines. That is their world, anyway.”

A hiss, a rush of stinking smoke, and a streak of red fire roared up and crossed the sky. The captured smugglers screamed in terror while the wardens watched, grim and implacable. Then all dissolved to hell. Barges of Apoths came pouring out of the city, and soon we were surrounded by people bound up in warding suits, not a smallspan of skin exposed. They bellowed questions at us as they loaded us off into their barges, waving telltale plants about us like thuribles at a blessing.

I sat, ate, and drank. Another day in Ana’s employ, I thought, though this one was unusually humiliating. I attempted to calculate how many such days I’d have to tolerate until my father’s debts were paid, and quickly gave up. Through noble vessels such as I, the emperor’s justice was made.

“Is it not obvious, Din?” Ana snapped. “Thelenai has been operating her own little trial run of an enormously advanced, unapproved graft that augments axioms until they can predict almost anything. That’s the secret they’ve been hiding from us! She’s done a very good job of keeping it off the books—until now, because one of her altered axioms has apparently gone stark raving mad! And now we have a preposterously brilliant madman skulking about the jungle—and he is using those powers of prediction for slaughter and sabotage. That is how he’s done all this—and that is why we cannot catch him!” She sat back, furious and fuming. “Well. Well! This is going to be a fucking tricky one, and no mistake!”

“And now a brilliant, murderous madman knows it,” said Ana faintly. “And that is what he was telling us, with the sign he left in the warped clearing. He was flaunting that he’d figured it all out.” She scratched her head and muttered, “Well, fuck.”

But a prideful creature can talk themself into believing that every deed they do is legitimate. Thus, they both giddily and greedily spin their own doom.”

“Well…the king is obliged to grant any oathcoin boon asked of him, true. But once he has done so, the king may then have the person who asked killed or tortured, if he thinks the demand was too great, or too impertinent.” “He’d…he’d have them executed?” I asked, shocked. Malo shrugged. “He is king. There is no law saying he cannot do so. He is the law, for he is the crown.”

“Did he wish us to act on the evidence he left for us, and send us barreling down the wrong path? Or does he signal a crime already done, and wish us to react wrongly to it? I don’t know.” “Shall we always subject ourselves to such doubts as we pursue this bastard?” asked Malo, frustrated. “Oh, probably.” Ana smiled. “Infuriating, isn’t it?”

A stony silence filled the room when I finished. “It seems we are now in the business of court intrigue!” said Ana. She wrinkled her nose. “How trite.” At that, Malo turned about, opened the door, walked to the porch railing, and vomited into the yard.

“Perhaps,” said Ana. “But is he a villain, or simple political swine? It is often hard to tell those two apart.”

“Darhi…Feh!” spat Pavitar. “No. He has always been the Empire’s thing. He seeks trade, and wealth. As we say—Ika aḍakohsa la’i ika siki da parasi. He has a purse for a scrotum, and coins instead of balls.” “What a colorful colloquialism.

I quickly counted up the coins. “This comes to…three hundred talints? She betrayed the Empire and risked the noose for the price of a fine horse, and no more?” Malo picked up a coin and eyed it. “That, or your immunis was right—once she’d made one deal, they had enough to blackmail her into more service. Which makes sense. They often favor threats above gifts.” “They? Criminals, you mean?” “No.” She handed the coin back to me. “Kings, and those who rule with them. But perhaps there is little difference between the natures of such men and criminals.”

I am not a citizen of the Empire. And even if they did get me out, where would I go? I’ve never been beyond the borders of these fetid swamps. But this pain feels small, knowing how many others will be damned to useless toil on the land of some noble or another, for all their miserable lives.”

Justice is not a terribly satisfying task, is it? The Engineer can see a bridge span a river, and marvel at what they made. The Legionnaire can look upon the carcass of a leviathan, and know they’ve saved countless lives. And the Apoth can watch a body mend and heal and change, and smile. But the Iudex…we are not granted such favors.”

“This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist.

It was not a conventional building or a fortress, and though I spied many braids of tissues and tendons about it, neither was it an organism, precisely. Rather, it was a mixing of both, an uncanny, churning, shuddering flower of brick and flesh, bronze and ligament, bone and stone and coiling wood.

Ana nodded slowly, then tsked. “I see…Simple nihilism, then. How terribly unimaginative.

“Both the kings and the thieves, the angels and the utter bastards, are all inevitably quite human. Though that should not let our hand be any softer when justice is delivered!”

To serve is a tremendously humbling thing. How easy it is to mistake glory and fame for duty! But duty is thankless, invisible, forgettable—but oh, so very necessary.”

“It is good to place oneself before the vast expanse of this world,” said Ana. “The ocean cannot tell the difference between a rich man and a poor one, nor one full of happiness, or despair. To those waves, all are so terribly small.”

“That though a person’s mind may be shaped differently, their hearts and souls are all too human. That makes them strong—but it also makes them weak. And petty. And predictable.” She flourished a hand, like an actor performing a monologue. “I simply wonder—who shall that watchman be?”