She pulled on her blindfold, grinning. There was something unsettlingly predatorial about her grin: too many teeth, and all too white.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “Everything you’ve engraved within that pretty little skull of yours, Dinios Kol. Go.”
I opened my engraver’s satchel, slid out the vial of lye aroma, uncorked it, and inhaled deeply. Then I felt a fluttering behind my eyes, and I started talking.
CHAPTER 3
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WHEN IT CAME TO the human body, the Imperial Apothetikals preferred two methods of alterations: there were grafts, which applied a single alteration, a short burst of growth—say, granting a person increased stamina, better immunities, clearer vision, or stronger bones; and then there were suffusions, which were far more invasive and—most important—changed you permanently and irreversibly, along with all the children you might have after. （If your suffusion let you have any, that is. They usually did not.）
This meant the Empire always had better soldiers than most other fighting forces, certainly. But the beating heart of the Empire were the Sublimes: the cerebrally suffused and augmented set who planned, managed, and coordinated everything the many Iyalets of the Empire did.
Each type of Sublime was different. There were axioms, the people whose minds had been altered to process calculations inhumanly well; linguas, suffused to be inhumanly skilled at speaking and reading and writing in countless languages; spatiasts, altered to possess an inhumanly accurate comprehension of space, making them stunningly good drawers and map makers; and then a few other odd sorts you only saw very rarely.
These suffusions weren’t pleasant—many shortened the lives of those who took them, by years if not decades, and they almost always rendered people sterile—but Sublimes were irreplaceable. It took every bit of cunning and planning to survive what came from the seas to the east each wet season.
Most sought-after were the engravers, like myself, who had been suffused to remember all they saw, acting as living libraries of information. This was the enhancement I used as I described my investigation to Ana: remembering everything, describing all I’d seen, regurgitating every piece of spoken speech in the exact same tone I’d heard it said to me. Everything I’d captured during my time in that mansion I now gave to Ana, over the course of nearly four hours.
When I was finished talking it was just past sunset. A single mai-lantern in the corner began to glimmer as the little worms within awoke, began to eat their food pellets at the bottom, and started to glow. There was no sound but the solitary, mournful song of some distant jungle bird.
Ana took a sudden breath, sucking in air like she was waking from a deep sleep, and exhaled. “Right,” she said. “Very good. I have a few questions, Din…”
She asked me many strange things then. How many steps did it take me to cross the entirety of the house? Was Gennadios left-or right-handed? Did Uxos have any prominent scars on his hands? Had I spied any recently disturbed soil at the edges of the estate walls, the moist underside of the mulch churned up by a passing boot, perhaps?
With each question I caught the scent of lye, felt the fluttering in the backs of my eyes, and then the answers fell from my lips with all the grace of a nauseous belch: eighty-nine steps; Gennadios had placed her right hand atop her left in her lap, indicating she was right-handed; Uxos had two thin white scars on the back of his right thumb knuckle, and though his finger knuckles had been bloodied, that had been due to the cracking of calluses there; and no, I’d seen no churned-up mulch except for a bit that had been disturbed by a thrush.
Finally Ana went silent. Then she said, “Thank you for all that, Din.” Her fingers flittered in the folds of her dress. “The Haza family…You’re not familiar with them.”
“I know they’re rich, ma’am. Know they own a lot of stuff in the inner rings of the Empire. Yet that is the run of it.”
“Mm. They are gentryfolk. Which means they own the most valuable thing in all of the Empire.” Her hand flashed forward, and she pinched a clod of dried mud off my boot and crumbled it into dust. “Land. Takes a lot of dirt to grow all the plants and animals and reagents to make the Empire’s many alterations. Just incomprehensibly huge agricultural works, sprawled across the second and third rings of the Empire. This means the ears of the Empire are more attuned to the voice of gentry, and such folk don’t necessarily feel like they need to obey all of our laws all of the time—which can make it hard when they’re tangled up in suspicious shit like this.”