“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.”
* * *
—
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.