Page 60 of A Drop of Corruption

“Yes, but if someone had tried to set up that reagent-weapon in a smuggler’s camp, and if theyknewit was a weapon, would they have let him? That device was complex. It took time to assemble. And time to work, for I imagine it had to boil and trigger a reaction. But they didn’t expect it, or comprehend it. Some were exposed to it and did not know, I think. They breathed it in, then took up posts in the trees, or…or walked down to the river before being affected.”

“Like the man we found in the water.”

“But then it reached a critical point. Everything around it began to change, very rapidly. Some fled, but they did not get far.” My eyes searched the dark trees. “He meant to kill them, I think. All of them, all at once.”

“And the sign he left?” said Malo. “What could those markings mean?”

“The likely answer is,” I said slowly, “he did not leave it for us.”

“Then who?”

My eyes fluttered, and I recalled the anxious face of Immunis Ghrelin.

“Someone with a fondness for codes,” I said. “We need Ghrelin and Thelenai to start telling us the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“An Apoth safe is robbed. The thief takes his prize into the jungle—and there he creates a weapon akin totitan’s blood? One that instantly kills half a hundred people? If that’s what is being stored and secretly shipped out of Yarrowdale in common pots, it’ll raise no end of hell when people find ou—”

I froze midstep, staring into the brush.

“What is it?” Malo asked.

I stood perfectly still, studying a shock of ferns blooming just off the path. There was a break in the middle, as if someone had trod upon it. But something in my mind told me it should not be so.

My eyes fluttered, and I reviewed my memories of first walking this path. I found my memory of that same fern when last I’d seen it as we’d approached the clearing, but it had been whole and unbroken then. And I had been last in line, so I knew that neither the wardens nor Tangis had touched it.

I began to walk again. “Walk,” I said casually to Malo. “And walk free, if you can.”

“Why?” she said.

“Don’t look around,” I said. “Just keep walking with me.”

I studied more of the greenery about us as we followed the other wardens. Here and there I spied broken branches or bent leaves where I knew I should not.

“We are not alone here,” I said quietly to Malo. “The helms you wear have blinded you to it.” I placed my hand on the grip of my sword. “I see leaves broken about us, and bends in the ferns.”

Yet Malo turned to look at me, startled. “Like someone walked this path after us?”

“Yes, and they may be watching us sti—”

“No!” she said. Then, roaring: “No, you fool, not us! The boat,the boat!”

She cried something in Pithian to her wardens and ran past them, and together they all drew their short swords and bows and charged off toward the river. Tangis shouted some question at me, but I had no mind for it: once again, my hand unlocked the grip of my sword, and I pulled my blade free and chased after them.

Then I heard it: the cries and screams of battle, floating through the trees. I realized Malo feared that the smugglers would attack not us but our boat, which was far more vulnerable, and then we might be stuck here, lost in this warped forest.

I sprinted into the brush, squinting through the foggy eyepieces of my warding helm, all the jungle turned to a smear of leaf and shadow. And then, without warning, there were figures among the trees: men, scrawny and green-eyed and green-mouthed, rising from the undergrowth and wielding short swords and spears. I realized we must have run up on them as we charged. They turned and fell upon us, shrieking like mad things.

Then all dissolved to din and chaos. The wardens broke up, split apart, melting into the jungle to engage our opponents. Somehow in the whirl of screams and leaves, I found myself separated, then saw that I was surrounded by three attackers: one on my right, two on my left.

I took stock of them. They were untrained, weary, dehydrated: I could tell by their movements, by the boniness of their wrists, the cracking skin about their lips. Yet though they were weak, they did not hesitate. One of the men on my left leapt over a clutch of ferns and thrust his short sword at me. I watched the rusty blade shoot toward me, and a voice spoke in my mind, calm and controlled.

These may be the only witnesses we have to what happened. Disable, don’t kill.

Instantly my memories of my training poured into my muscles, and I was moving, dancing back, parrying his thrust while shifting away from the man on my right. I waited for the first attacker to thrust again and circled to the left, setting up my play.

He moved in, but his sword arm was weak and his grip feeble. I batted his thrust away easily, exposing his lower body. My blade bit out at the flesh above his right knee, severing the ligaments, then slashed his shoulder—I took a guess that his right was his dominant arm—and he fell to the ground, screaming.