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.”
“Did I not meet your expectations in this regard, ma’am?” I asked, worried.
“Oh, no, no. You did fine, Din. I mean, if I’d been in your boots, I’d have found that fucker of a housekeeper’s wine cup and dumped in a thimble of ground glass. But really, for your first murder investigation, you did phenomenal—walking up to a Haza estate and interrogating each witness is not something many people would have managed so well.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, pleased.
“In fact, Din, I’d say you have the exact right appetite for bland, bloody-minded drudgery that makes an assistant investigator excel.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, far less pleased.
“And it’s no fault of yours that you’re unable to determine the truth of what happened. The Apothetikals of this canton are apparently so stupid they must think a pair of trousers to be a fascinating puzzle.” She slid her blindfold off. Her eyes were dancing in their sockets so fast that their pupils almost became a blur. “A sweet, sickly bloom…white, purple, and yellow, and growing from the flesh of a man…Tell me, Din. Do you know the canton of Oypat?”
I summoned the map of the Empire in my mind: a tremendous, spoked wheel within a spoked wheel, with the Empire’s curving walls acting as the felloes, and the roads acting as the spokes. But though I’d engraved all the cantons of the Empire within my memory, I didn’t know Oypat.
“I…do not, ma’am,” I said.
“Not surprising,” she said. “The canton fell victim to a contagion about eleven years ago. Some clever Apoth there sought to make cheap parchment, and suffused a type of grass to grow very, very quickly…It was called dappleglass—a simple weed similar to shootstraw. It grew from tiny, sporelike seeds, and it had a white flower with a yellow and purple interior, and a rather unpleasant aroma. Yet then the dappleglass grew far too quickly. It invaded every patch of soil within the canton of Oypat, killing off most of the wildlife, and when it ran out of soil, the grass figured out how to grow within the wood of the homes and structures there, and even on the sides of trees. But the most alarming thing was what happened to the people who happened to bathe in the rivers downstream of this grass.”
“Did…did it grow inside the people, ma’am?” I asked.
“Correct, Din. Very good! Most of the growths could be surgically removed, but others…Well. They weren’t so lucky. The spores of the plant even tried to grow on fernpaper walls and doors, which, as you accurately noted, are pretty resistant to such things. Mostly they blackened and moldered to prevent the spores from taking root. Just having dappleglass near a fernpaper panel made it grow black dots within hours. But…” She stood and began pacing up and down her little house. “I have never heard of dappleglass growing so murderously quickly before. Nor being able to destroy ceilings and walls. That is different…and much deadlier.”
“Have you seen this plant before, ma’am?” I asked.
“Seen it? Absolutely not.” She gestured at the books about her. “I read about it, obviously. But I’m sure this is it.”
“So…what is your conclusion, ma’am?” I asked. “How was Commander Blas exposed to this dappleglass?”
“Oh, intentionally,” she said. “That is how.”
A taut silence.
“You mean…”
“I mean, I am about eighty percent sure that Commander Taqtasa Blas was assassinated. Probably not by someone within the house, but with the help of someone within the house.”
“Truly?” I said. “You think that just from what I told you, ma’am?”
“Certainly,” she said. “What you told me is more than enough. In fact, it’s so obvious that I’m worried this all might turn out a little boring…Can you not see it? The blackened fernpaper, the rotted kirpis shroom, and the insufferable heat?”
“Afraid I can’t see a thing, ma’am.”
“It’s there,” she said. She waved a hand, dismissive. “You just have to look at it right. Here are our next steps, Din.” She took out a slip of paper and started scribbling on it. “I want you to take this to the Haza house in the morning. This is a formal writ of summons. Use it to bring the oldest servant girl, the housekeeper, and the groundskeeper here, to my quarters, for me to speak to personally. Tell them it’s a routine request. And be ready to listen. You’re my engraver. You remember what that means, Din? You are the living legal embodiment of our investigation. All that’s between your ears is considered actionable evidence within the Iudex of the Empire. So—listen. And bring your engraver’s bonds.”