The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)(31)

“Think we’re close to the sea walls now, ma’am,” I said.

“Already?”

“Yes, ma’am. I should be able to see them out the eastern-facing window soon enough.”

“Describe them to me the second you do. I would much like to have them in my mind to puzzle over.”

The carriage rattled along. The jungle fell back like a curtain, revealing a wide green plain swimming with mist; and there, far in the distance, the shore.

I pulled out a spyglass I’d brought, pressed it to my eye, and peered east.

A towering, slate-gray cliff, running underneath the red-stained sky like a frame below a painting, its stone wet and gleaming and crawling with vines and growth; and there, in one long, vertical seam in the cliff, a hint of movement: some insect, I thought, crawling from base to top in a slow, labored procession.

My eye trembled as I focused on it. I realized it was not an insect but instead a tiny box, wrought of wood, being hauled up on a set of strings. As it reached another notch in the gray cliffs, the box stopped, and even tinier figures emerged.

Horses. Four of them, all hauling a shining steel bombard from the box.

I blinked, staring into the spyglass. The tiny box was not tiny at all: it was a lift, made for hauling troops and armaments up the vast expanse of the sea walls.

I lowered the spyglass and stared at the walls in the distance, dumbfounded.

“Well?” said Ana. “Do you see them? What are they like?”

“The walls,” I said slowly, “are very, very big, ma’am.”

I described it to her as best I could. I was no spatiast, so I ran out of words for big very quickly, trying to express this tremendous spine of stone and earthworks running along the seas. I glassed their tops and spied at least two dozen mammoth bombards arranged there, most pointed out to sea—but some pointed in. Just in case something broke through, I supposed.

“Some of the bombards can be wheeled about by horses,” Ana explained. “For the truly giant ones, some segments of walls have rails running along their tops, to make it easier for horses to haul them about.”

“How big are those, ma’am?”

“Five to six times as long as you are tall, Din, if you were to stand beside them. The forging of such bombards is immensely difficult. Like so much of what the Empire does, they are achievements of complexity—imagine the systems, the management, the coordination it takes not only to marshal resources and knowledge and facilities to make these remarkable things, but to make them by the hundreds, and ship them to the walls every wet season!”

“And…how tall are the leviathans, again?”

“Some are as tall as the walls. Most are slightly taller.”

I tried to conceive of it, to project an image of such a thing onto the landscape beyond. I began to feel slightly ill at the thought.

“Have you ever seen one, Din?” asked Ana. “Or a piece of one, a bone or a segment of chitin?”

I shook my head.

“Din,” she said tersely, “I am blindfolded, so if you’ve nodded your head, I’ve no fucking idea.”

“No, ma’am, I have not.”

“Mm. It’s a remarkable experience…a tooth as long as two men laid end over end. A claw the size of three carriages. The city of Ashradel actually has a leviathan skull from the old days as part of its citadel. It’s about as big as a small fort, I’m told. Quite the sight. How astonishing it is to know that the leviathans grow bigger every wet season.”

“I thought that was a rumor.”

“They don’t like to put numbers to it,” she said. “Numbers would make everyone worry.”

I stared out the window, shaken. “Have you ever seen a living one, ma’am?” I asked.

“Oh, sadly no. Only bits of dead ones. When the Legion fells them and they sink into the sea, they send ships afterward to try to haul the carcass to ports for study. Chop it up, peel it like an onion. Dangerous work, given their toxic blood, but so many suffusions and grafts are based on their unique abilities. I’ve had the chance to survey only a few such specimens.” She grinned. “I asked the Apoths once if I could eat some of the flesh, but they said no. I’ve never quite forgiven them for that…”

As we approached Talagray the world about us filled up, the fields suddenly swarming with Legionnaires and Engineers and horses, all hauling materials or hastily constructing earthworks on the soaking plains. I even saw slothiks—the altered, giant sloths used for hauling momentously huge loads—which I’d never seen in Daretana. Many of the soldiers were augmented in ways I’d never witnessed: people with large, black eyes, or enormous, curiously pointed ears, or huge, hulking men eight or nine span tall, carrying blocks of stone like they were bales of hay. I described this last sort to Ana as we passed.

“Cracklers,” she said. “Or crackle-men. Chaps who’ve been grafted so they grow so much muscle they need new bones added to their skeletons to support it all. They make odd little clicking sounds as they walk about—hence the name.”

“Sounds rather monstrous,” I said.

“So might a boy whose brain swims with tiny beasts, making it so he can’t forget anything. It’s tough being a crackler—most don’t live past fifty—but the Empire needs them, and venerates and honors them, and pays them well.” Another grin. “That’s the nature of Khanum, eh? Safety and security for strangeness. Many are willing to make the deal.”