The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)(32)
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THE CARRIAGE RATTLED on, and Talagray emerged from the mist ahead. At first the city looked like a long row of low cairns, each one cylindrical and tapered, separated by wide gulfs; but then we rounded a hill and I saw they were not cairns but fretvine towers, with wide bases and narrow tops, like dozens of clay ovens freshly made and set out to dry. Being wrought of fretvine, they bloomed here and there, tiny tufts of sparkling orange or frail green. They were all bedecked in mai-lanterns, rings and rings of glimmering blue lights, so much so that the city looked like some spectral night sky.
Then I noticed the fortifications: though the city had no walls on the western side, the eastern side sported massive ramparts and earthworks, and everywhere they were covered in bombards, all pointed east. I realized that this was where all the soldiers about us were going, adding to the massive artillery placed between the eastern plains and the city.
I described it to Ana.
“Yes…it’s a utility city, Din,” she said. “Run by the Legion and built to service the sea walls, and it in turn is built along its own walls, a city trapped in the shade of ramparts and bombards. The bombards you see won’t do much to a titan, mind. They’re mostly there to slow it down, give everyone in the city time to escape to the third-ring wall.”
“Why’s it all so oddly spaced, ma’am?” I asked.
“Quakes. My understanding is they don’t build many structures above five or six stories, and almost all are fretvine and fernpaper. When the leviathans emerge from the depths of the seas, the whole city trembles like it’s built on the skin of a drum.” She leaned her head out the window, smiling as the wind played with her bone-white hair. “A poet once wrote about making love when the earth shook in Talagray…It sounded like quite the spectacle.”
We rumbled closer and closer, the great wall of the city rising up on our left, the bombards looming overhead. Everywhere I looked there were armored veterans far more experienced than I could ever hope to be—and all of them, and all of the city, existed for one purpose: to do as much damage to a leviathan as possible before it got to the third-ring wall.
“We’re getting close, ma’am,” I said hoarsely.
“You sound,” she said, “a touch shook there, Din.”
“I think it’d be mad if I didn’t, ma’am. The only comfort I have is knowing you’re accustomed to things like this.”
She frowned. “Accustomed? Hell, Din, I’ve no idea what I’m fucking doing.”
“I…I had thought, ma’am,” I said, “that your career in the Iudex had taken you across the Empire?”
“Well, sure, but breaches in the sea walls? Dead leviathans? This is all totally new boots to me, as the old maid says.” She pressed her hand against the wall, grinning as she felt the vibrations of the carriage. “We must analyze it for what it is—a new phenomenon, with its own idiosyncrasies and aberrations, all articulating a larger design. And that’s your job, Din. To go and see. Exciting, isn’t it?”
The mammoth gates of Talagray opened, and we trundled through.
CHAPTER 11
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I KNEW FROM THE maps that at the center of the city sat what was called the Trifecta: the offices of the Legion, Iudex, and Engineering Iyalets, around which the other offices gathered like a small constellation. Our Legion driver piloted us toward it, navigating the churning traffic running about the fretvine towers. It was hard to catch the nature of the city from within the carriage, but it felt an improvised place: slapdash fernpaper houses fluttering about us like flocks of fragile moths, with fernpaper signs on leaning poles denoting smithies, boardinghouses, sotbars. The only permanent thing seemed to be the roads and foundations, wrought of stone and brick. All else was impermanent and haphazard. A sketch or a doodle of civilization, perhaps, hastily done on a canvas of soaking stone.
Finally the Trifecta came into view: three tall, conical fretvine towers, each sealed with mossclay and arrayed with the black, blue, or red colors of their Iyalet.
“Keep your eyes open,” Ana said to me. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Trying to take it all in as best I can, ma’am.”
“Bother less with the sights,” she said, “and more with the people. You’re going to be with a lot of elite officers soon, Din. They won’t ask you to talk much, but you need to watch them. Watch what they look at, what disturbs them, and get it all for me. I want to know who we’re working with.”
“Is it vialworthy, ma’am?” I said, grabbing my engraver’s satchel.
“Of course! Pick a glass and stick it up your damn nose quick!”
We rumbled into the courtyard of the Trifecta. A small group of people were gathering in wait for us before the Iudex building, no more than a half-dozen Engineers, Apoths, and officers in Iudex dark blue.
I studied the Iudex officers most as we pulled up. There were two of them: one a tall, thin, gray-faced man whose breast bore the two bars signifying he was the investigator; and there, beside that heraldry, the eye within a box, indicating he was an engraver, like me. Next to him was a grizzled brick of a man with enormous shoulders, six span tall and six span wide, squinting at us as we pulled up. This man had evidently been altered for strength, so much so he could quite likely cleave a person in two. Upon his breast I spied a twinkle: the bar and the flower, indicating he was an assistant investigator.