ON HORSEBACK WE got to the Forward Engineering Quarters within two hours. It was perhaps the ugliest place I’d seen since Daretana, all cranes and ropes and muddy construction yards, or foundries belching vast rivers of smoke into the sky.
Miljin pulled a face as the air filled up with stinking fumes. “Fuck’s sakes,” he growled. “Makes you wonder why the leviathans even want to come ashore here anymore…” He nodded ahead. “There’s the medikkers’ wing. How many are we here to question?”
I’d told him this already, of course, but it seemed wise not to mention that. “Eleven people, sir,” I said.
“Eleven…And they’re all, ah, intimates with the dead?”
“Most are. Or were. Or rather, my master suspects they were, sir.”
“And we’re to wring all the stories out of these folk, and try to line them all up to figure out where the hell our ten dead Engineers went that got their guts all full of dappleglass.”
“Seems to be the shape of it, sir.”
“Best to divvy it up, then. I’ll take the last five, you take the top six. Then we compare notes.”
After we stabled our horses and entered the medikkers’ wing, I gave Miljin his five people to question. He squinted in the light of the lantern at the door, scribbling down the names on a strip of parchment with a length of ashpen. He had me repeat them a few times, then repeat which of the dead people they were associated with. I had never worked directly alongside someone in an investigation before, and Miljin certainly seemed to have a hefty reputation, but the sight of him muttering and shuffling through his papers filled me with unease.
“Are you sure you want to split up the list, sir?” I asked. “Would it be wiser to work together, maybe?”
“I know what I’m doing!” he snapped. Yet another sheaf of parchment slipped out of his hands, and he stooped to grab it. “Or are you suggesting I don’t?”
I watched as he shook the mud off his dropped parchment. “？’Course not, sir.”
“Then let’s get this over with.”
* * *
—
MY FIRST INTERVIEW was Princeps Anath Topirak, a medikker with the Apoth Iyalet. I stopped an attendant and asked about her whereabouts and the state of her injuries.
“Hurt in the collapse, sir,” the attendant said. “Rather serious. She’s recuperating down the hall, last room on the right.”
I went to the room and knocked on the closed door. No answer. I turned the knob, walked in—and stopped short.
I’d never been in a true medikkers’ bay before. As such, I was unprepared for what I found.
A single mai-lantern glimmered over a large, metal bathing cauldron situated in the center of the dark fretvine room. The cauldron was filled with a curious, whitish fluid that smelled strongly of old milk. Lying in the fluid was a tall Kurmini woman, her head resting back on the lip of the cauldron, her eyes shut, face pale and sweating. Though I couldn’t see far into the milky substance in the tub, she was surely naked beneath it.
This was startling enough, but more startling still was the contraption of rope and wires hanging overhead, which suspended her right arm above the waters—yet her arm lacked a hand. In its place was a pale pink stump, and clinging to the stump like barnacles on the hull of a ship were dozens of tiny black snails, greedily sucking away at her open wound.
I stared at the snails, horrified. Then I felt a fluttering in the backs of my eyes, and I remembered something my old dueling teacher Trof had once said in jest: And if any of you lose an arm or an ear by accident, don’t fret, children—the medikkers will slap sangri-snails on the wound until they can grow you a new one.
Well, I thought. I guess that’s what those look like, then. Another memory I’d never be able to get out of my head. I reminded myself to stay controlled and contained.
I opened my engraver’s pack, slid out a vial, and smelled it. This one was redolent of smoke and ash. I grimaced, walked to the foot of the tub, and cleared my throat.
Topirak didn’t move.
“Princeps?” I said.
Her brow creased ever so faintly. A clean face, handsome and even. Bruises all on one side, now turned the color of old tea. Her skin was gray, much like mine, but her nose was clearly the focus of her alterations: it was purpled and slightly larger than normal, with many veins behind the nostrils. A common grafting in the Apoths, I knew: the ability to smell a concoction or a wound and identify its state was critical in their Iyalet.