I watched as the dappleglass consumed him, until he was little more than a giant puppet held aloft in the towering shoots. I heard the cries and the calls of the Apoths about me, but I had no mind to listen. There between two slender shoots I could spy a sliver of his face, his sad eyes staring into shadow.
“Must have been infected for some time,” Kitlan said. “His crackler’s body contained it until it…it…”
I kept staring at his tears. Watched how they gathered at his chin, growing into a pregnant pink drop, before tumbling off into the leaves.
“From where?” said Miljin’s voice beside me.
“Wh-what, sir?” I said dully. I turned to see his furious eyes watching me through the glass bubbles of his helm.
“He was coming from somewhere,” bellowed Miljin, “but from where?”
I looked north, in the direction Ditelus had been walking from. With a flutter to my eyes, I summoned the image of the map we’d seen at the Legion outpost.
“The old fortress,” I said. “It’s that way.”
“Then come on!” said Miljin. He turned his horse about and started north.
“We have to burn the contagion, sir!” said Kitlan. “It’s protocol!”
“Then leave some boys to follow protocol and fucking come on!” he bellowed over his shoulder.
* * *
—
KITLAN LEFT TWO Apoths to burn the body. Then we rode north with her and the rest until we finally spied it: a little clutch of structures leaning against one of the giant hills, just west of an open stretch of yellow-grassed fields.
We approached it slowly and quietly. The place was hardly more than a ruin, the fretvine and stonewood fortifications blasted apart or upended nearly everywhere, its many tottering towers and structures leaning about like a jaw full of broken teeth. There were curious ripples and crests in the soil about it, all radiating from the giant hill behind. I guessed that when the leviathan had fallen however many decades ago it had broken all the world below, before finally being eaten by grasses and trees like the other carcasses.
We entered the ruins on the western side. It felt like riding through a giant child’s broken toys, or some stretch of coast where shipwrecks were washed ashore. Nothing I saw seemed whole, except for a tall, crooked tower that leaned in the center of the wreckage.
Miljin caught my gaze and nodded. We led Kitlan and the three other Apoths through the maze of tumbledown structures until we finally approached the tower. It was tall, and whole—but the door, unlike everything else in this place, was well-maintained. Wood solid and dark, the rope handle white and new. Iron hinges free of rust.
I stared at the door, wondering what, or who, was behind it.
“Kitlan,” said Miljin quietly. “You want me to open that door or you?”
She didn’t answer. She just dismounted, tossed the reins of her horse to one of the other Apoths, and advanced. She placed a hand on the rope, took a deep breath, and pulled the door open.
I couldn’t see inside, but Kitlan stared through the doorway. Then she turned away, disgusted.
The door fell open, I glimpsed within.
A clutch of shoots nearly filled the interior tall tower. Leaves slender and dark green, dappled with blooms of white and purple. And there, suspended in the clutch of shoots, a figure: a woman, dead and rotting, her eyes dark and her yellow hair gleaming in the midday sun.
* * *
—
MILJIN AND I stood aside and watched as the Apoths came and went from the crooked tower. They were taking samples, they said, cataloging all the reagents and specimens found within, along with all the Apoth’s tools.
“She had quite the array,” said Kitlan, taking stock. “Fermentation chamber. Purification dome. Casks of suspension fluids. Suffusion feedstock. Phalm oil for any reagents gone awry. And tank after tank of plants…All of them the same kind.”
“Dappleglass,” I said.
She nodded her helmeted head. “This is where it happened. This is where they made it. Secreted out all this gear and got to work brewing up her poisons.”
“And we’re sure it’s her?” said Miljin. “That body in there is Jolgalgan?”
Kitlan walked to the pile of cataloged material, sorted through it, and returned with a sheaf of paper. It was a wall pass, like Aristan’s, permitting the bearer to pass from the Outer Rim of the Empire into the third ring. Though it was hard for my accursed eyes to read through the glass bubbles of the helmet, I could still barely make out the name JOLGALGAN written in the corner.