A Drop of Corruption

As Din and Ghrelin are led through the Shroud, Din watches Apoths prepare the shipment of reagents that will accompany the marrow. The undertaking is enormous, and the cost monumental, though Ghrelin comments that the largest cost of learning to transport the marrow is in the deaths of those who perished during experiments. Ghrelin shows Din the marrow, suspended in ossuary moss. The marrow moves and trembles irregularly. Ghrelin sees the marrow as signaling a new era for the Empire.

Din receives reminders about protocols for speaking with augurs, including not touching the glass that separates them from outsiders, not answering their questions, and not tapping. He and Ghrelin enter a small observation chamber. Ghrelin, who has begun feeling the effects of augury, speaks passionately about the methods used to manufacture glass.

The augurs enter, wearing clothing made from many sheets of musical notation attached together. The augurs immediately deduce from Din’s appearance that his visit was unplanned and thus must be due to some urgent disaster. The augurs are unsurprised that Pyktis lives, something they predicted. They inquire about Pyktis’s health, growing angry when Din refuses to answer. Din likens conversing with the augurs to working with Ana, which bolsters his confidence. The augurs are surprised at Din’s pronouncement that Pyktis “means great harm” (360). They fear that if they misjudged Pyktis, all their predictions are suspect.

The augurs consider Pyktis “the best and brightest” of their group (363). They cite his brilliance, though they observe that Pyktis offered only the barest information about himself, and even his closest colleagues never truly knew him. They observe that Pyktis cried during remembrance ceremonies for the dead and confided that his father expected him to die at the Shroud. Pyktis grew remote, vanishing for days within the Shroud. His colleagues likened this to a “madness” common to augurs, suspecting that Pyktis experienced suicidal ideation.

The augurs followed Pyktis to forestall any attempts at suicide. They once saw him apparently poised to jump from a high window; they saw a flash of metal in his hand. The augurs disagree over whether they consider the “accident” that preceded Pyktis’s faked death to be truly accidental or another attempt at suicide. The day of the “accident,” Pyktis asked for other working partners, leading one augur to contend that Pyktis “loved [them] while…while still planning his death” (368). Din realizes that Pyktis was not truly attempting to jump from the window; he was climbing down from it (as he did in Sujedo’s rooms). When the augurs traced his footsteps, weeks after Pyktis’s supposed death, they found his secret shrine.

The augurs produce figures that they took from the shrine. The figures are meaningless to the augurs, but Din recognizes them as resembling the statues of ancestors at the Yarrow king’s hall. Din realizes that Pyktis must be related to the Yarrow king; he has Rathras heritage, like the king’s line, and the metal the augurs saw is the silver associated with the king’s chosen heir. The augurs recognize that Din has solved the mystery and become irate when he refuses to divulge his discovery.

Din returns to Yarrowdale and undergoes decontamination procedures. When he is released, he meets Malo, who reports that Darhi has stolen a large sum of money and fled, incriminating himself as Pyktis’s contact in the Yarrow court. Carmak has given the Empire permission to seek Darhi in Yarrow territory. They join Ana and Thelenai so Din can relay his experiences on the Shroud and his realization about Pyktis’s connection to the Yarrow crown.

Ana contends that Pyktis was born to a Rathras mother and then taken to Rathras, where his birth was recorded—something that accounts for the discrepancy in the birth date in his file. She hypothesizes that the late king planned to have his son grow up in the Empire so that he could eventually come to Yarrowdale and sabotage the Shroud. The late king’s failing memory led him to forget this plan; when Pyktis turned to the king for aid, having failed to destroy the Shroud, he found that his father did not remember him. Pyktis created the identity of “the pale king, lord of the canals” to account for suddenly being cut off from the royal heritage he had been raised to expect (378).

Din, Malo, and the wardens are dispatched to see Darhi, who might know Pyktis’s whereabouts. Ana advises Din to look for blotley marks on Pyktis’s arm; Pyktis used the worms to withdraw Sujedo’s blood and inject it into himself, which let him bypass the Treasury’s blood-based wards. These will have left numerous marks on his body, like the ones that Din sports. Pyktis cut up Sujedo’s body to obscure these marks and therefore the clues to how he used Sujedo’s blood, but one remained on the discovered torso.

Many of the Yarrow palace guards were loyal to Darhi and fled with him, leaving the king’s hall eerily empty. Malo uses an Apoth device to “distill” a concentrated form of Darhi’s scent from his possessions. This she distributes to the wardens to seek him. They follow the scent, then take a stimulant to help them chase Darhi at high speed. They track him to an abandoned estate, where they mount a quick attack against Darhi’s guards. The naukari seize the chance to kill those who have enslaved them and help the Imperial forces kill Darhi’s guards. One naukari girl kills Darhi before he can provide information about Pyktis, but the reagents that Pyktis needed for his weapon are among Darhi’s things, much to Din and Malo’s relief. They find a welt-covered body that has been dead for several days, suggesting that Darhi killed Pyktis before Pyktis could kill him. (This proves false; the corpse belongs to Carmak, whom Pyktis has killed and impersonated.)

Din and Malo return the reagents to the Apoths in Yarrowdale. Ana is suspicious, wondering why Darhi would keep Pyktis’s body. Din contends that someone else may have killed Pyktis and that Darhi might have stolen the body accidentally while making off with the valuable reagents. She advises checking the reagents to confirm they haven’t been diluted. They find one such diluted box, indicating that at least one of Pyktis’s weapons is already loaded. Ana, seeking to make sense of the information they have that could lead them to the weapon, requests illegal psychoactive mushrooms and calf livers.

Ana ejects everyone but Din before she eats her strange liver and mushroom concoction. After eating it, she undergoes a strange transformation that makes her resemble “a skeletal thing” and speak with an unusually deep voice (406). She asks herself about Pyktis’s motivations, then about the common multiple births in the Yarrow king’s line. She pulls a tooth from Pyktis’s corpse and notes that it has been strengthened by Imperial treatments. She mutters about Pavitar’s dead dogs before returning to her senses. She summons Thelenai and orders Din to gather the wardens so they can return to the High City where Ana “shall lay the entire plot bare” (408).

As Ana, Din, and Malo approach the High City, they begin to see corpses of guards, indicating that Pavitar has taken over the High City. Ana cautions Din and Malo to watch for a red rocket, indicating that Thelenai has accomplished a mysterious task. (In the next chapter, Ana reveals that Thelenai discovered and disarmed Pyktis’s weapon.) Pavitar meets them; he reluctantly lets them in when they insist that they will only return the recovered treasure directly to Carmak.

Pavitar and Kardas are both shocked that Ana has brought Pyktis’s corpse to the High City. Carmak, however, is impressed that the Empire managed to locate Darhi so quickly. Pavitar doubts that Pyktis actually killed the late king; he believes that Darhi is the murderer. Malo reports that the wardens have seen the red rocket. Ana insists on playing a song on her double lyre, promising to “make this dead man talk” with her song (415). She produces the oathcoin to guarantee Carmak’s compliance.

Ana reports Pyktis’s Yarrow heritage and the king’s long-ago plot to have Pyktis grow up in the Empire and eventually destroy the Shroud. After his failed attempt to destroy the Shroud, Pyktis began working with Darhi. Pavitar protests throughout this explanation. Ana plays a discordant song that makes Carmak moan as if physically pained. Ana reveals that the song, which has no true pattern, was designed to reveal an augur; the man they assumed to be Carmak is the true Pyktis.

Ana explains that Pyktis and Carmak were twins. Pavitar insists that this cannot be true and tells Carmak (Pyktis) to show his lack of blotley welts to prove it, but Pyktis refuses. Pyktis leaps to his feet, no longer pretending to be Carmak, and attacks, as do several of his allies hidden in the crowd, but they are quickly defeated by Din, the wardens, and some Yarrow soldiers who have not been corrupted.

Ana explains that Pavitar’s dogs were killed to prevent them from recognizing that Pyktis’s scent is different from Carmak’s. Pyktis then used grafts to disguise himself as Carmak, killed Carmak, and used grafts in reverse to make his twin appear Imperial. He preserved Carmak’s body with ossuary moss, then retrieved it when he needed to fake “Pyktis’s” death. Pyktis poisoned the king’s cup, then waited for Pavitar to fill it and take it to the king, thereby poisoning his father. During Ana’s investigation into the king’s murder, Pyktis disguised himself as a guard and killed Gorthaus.

Ana explains that Pyktis’s true plan was to destroy the marrow in order to force the Empire to remain in Yarrow. He knew the Empire did not want to actually annex Yarrow, so he saw this as an opportunity to negotiate money from Khanum. Pyktis hid his weapon in the Yarrowdale docks, where the reagents ship would stop before going to the Shroud. They would load the weapon, disguised as supplies, onto the ship. Then, once the marrow was on board, Pyktis could trigger his weapon to destroy the marrow. He killed the smugglers in the woods specifically to frighten Thelenai into moving the marrow by ship. The red rocket indicated that Thelenai had found and disarmed the weapon.

Ana criticizes Pyktis for having such a “small-minded” plan that sacrificed many for personal enrichment, but Pyktis contends that his true plan emerged after he first met his father and realized the frailty of kings. Ana mocks this “simple nihilism” as being “terribly unimaginative” (429). Pyktis anticipates being arrested, but Ana points out that they are in Yarrow and that, by killing his father, Pyktis has violated Yarrow’s maxim about the sacredness of ancestors. Pavitar kills Pyktis, then weeps over Carmak’s body.

Ana opines that Pavitar will also face justice, as he will be forced to watch his beloved kingdom decline. She, Din, and Malo head to the docks, where Thelenai reports that the weapon has been disarmed. Thelenai turns herself in for arrest, admitting that she was truly motivated by pride, not by the desire to better the Empire, when she illegally led the augury project. Ana, overwrought by the strange drugs and challenging night, orders Din to take her to the medikkers for treatment.

Ana requests to be put into a five-day medically induced coma. Din and the medikkers both find this extreme, but comply. Before she falls asleep, Ana and Din discuss Pyktis. Ana finds his motivations “disappointing” and “petty.” Din feels some connection with Pyktis’s assessment that all people are tools in the machinations of kingdoms and empires. Ana contends that each person serves as a tool to help one another, not just kings and emperors. Ana reminds Din of the grafts that leave people unable to speak certain secrets, then directs him to a book as she falls asleep.

Din finds the book, the same one from which Pyktis quoted in his notes. The passage Ana highlighted notes the remaking of “the great and venerable line of Khanum,” the first people of the Empire (442). It describes a person like Ana, which makes Din suspect she is a member of this resurrected line, and that she has been left physically unable tell him the truth.

Din waits days for Ana to awake. Chaos reigns in Yarrow, which has collapsed politically. Many naukari use the opportunity to flee bondage. Malo disappears from Yarrowdale, and Din suspects she is helping shepherd naukari to freedom. Din receives a notice that Usini Lending Group has been suspended “due to ongoing Iudex investigation” (448). When Malo returns, several days later, she cheerfully denies helping the naukari, though both she and Din know she is lying. Malo remains uncertain about her future and whether she plans to go to the Empire.

Ana, now awake, watches the hydricyst (the boat that transports reagents) come into dock, along with Malo and Din. Ana and Din speak privately. Ana admits to helping the investigation into the Usini Lending Group. They briefly look out upon the water, something they cannot do in the Empire, as leviathans lurk in the ocean there. Ana comments that the Empire needs no greater authority than its largely absent Emperor. She offers that “the watchman” of the Empire must work to prevent people from believing that they are “of regal element” and therefore should become autocrats (454).

Din admits that he wishes to stay in the Iudex, something he thinks Kepheus (his love interest in The Tainted Cup) will understand, as Kepheus also values duty. Din and Ana plan to work together on future cases. Ana suggests recommending Malo to the Iudex. The pair watch the enormous hydricist together.