A Trade of Blood

While traveling toward Lacanthim in the canton of Sapirdad, Ana complains that the authorities award disproportionate honors for investigating murders of young women and members of the gentry rather than systemic wrongdoing. Their latest assignment involves both: the daughter of a powerful Burav landowning family has been killed, and Castus Armenta, a son of the rival clan, is imprisoned as the suspect. Din recalls the assignment's warnings that conflict between the families could produce widespread casualties and disrupt the supply and price of important imperial goods. Ana expects the murder itself to be simple and remains irritated by the journey.

As the carriage crosses immense bean plantations, Din observes that unusually human-handed drokha-cats harvest the crop and learns that much of it feeds enormous urhosi cattle. The intensive agricultural landscape is unfamiliar despite his childhood on the Plains of Tala. Near Lacanthim, armed Armenta drovers with cattle-ranching equipment blockade the road. Ana orders the carriage to cross the fields, promising to compensate for the damage, and they approach the Armenta position directly. Seeing no opposing force in the immediate vicinity, Ana infers that the two clans are likely holding one another in a standoff: the Buravs may attempt to kill their daughter's alleged murderer, while the Armentas want to prevent his execution or removal.

Din persuades Armenta drovers to let the Iudex carriage pass by implying that imperial justiciars could remove them, although Ana observes that he has exaggerated his authority. Across a narrow gap, armed Burav riders face the Armentas outside the Cat's Eye Inn. Their leader, Burilis Burav, identifies himself as Zansay's father and demands the prompt release of her body. His anxious son Jalin stands beside him. Burilis reports that Zansay had ostensibly gone to meet a friend, entered the inn under an assumed name, and was found mutilated after Castus ran from the room blood-covered. He believes the killing resulted from the families' long feud. Ana tells Burilis that justice will be administered without regard to rank and secures his agreement to withdraw his forces, although he intends to guard the roads against any Armenta attempt to remove Castus.

At the inn, the frightened proprietor Ithia initially claims the couple had never visited before. Din warns that evidence may expose her deception, and she admits that Zansay and Castus had secretly met in the same room under false names for thirteen months. She heard no struggle or screams before Castus fled around midnight. Ana questions why an obvious killer would announce himself so conspicuously. In the chamber, Din experiences an unfamiliar internal voice warning that the scene is wrong. He finds Zansay dead in an enormous, oddly confined pool of blood, her shoulder and abdomen cut with a finely serrated blade. There are no defensive injuries or signs of resistance; blood marks on her left palm and knee suggest movement after the bleeding began. He finds a knife sheath in her trunk and evidence of recent sexual activity. Ana reasons that Zansay may have deliberately lowered herself into the blood after being grievously wounded, rather than collapsing during a struggle. This remains a hypothesis, not an established explanation.

Ana explains that Din's new inner voice may reflect maturation of his Sublime engraver memories, which can begin reacting autonomously to familiar situations but are not always reliable. Din fears the premature onset of the cognitive decline associated with such augmentation. Ana also explains the wider economic stakes: urhosi cattle and their feed consume scarce valuable land, while imperial reliance on beef makes a violent struggle over agricultural holdings dangerous far beyond the two clans. She directs Din to ask Castus specifically what Zansay did after she was attacked.

On the way to the Lacanthim jail, Din struggles with Ana's explanation that his engraver abilities are maturing. He has served her for three years, yet at twenty-three he fears that the increasingly independent movements of his memories may be an early warning of the madness and shortened life associated with Imperial Sublimes. He acknowledges that Legionnaires and high imperial officials sometimes suffer still greater dangers, but this does not relieve his anxiety.

Din became an engraver partly to discharge his deceased father's debts and provide financial security for his grandmother and sisters. He receives routine bank notices showing that the money he sends home is withdrawn, but no personal correspondence from his family. He has not written to them either. He recognizes bitterness beneath his silence, feeling that he has sacrificed his own future without knowing how those he sought to help are living. He turns his attention back to the investigation, unable to resolve that concern.

At the Lacanthim jail, a lone Armenta defender faces a hostile group of Burav drovers while the local custodi princeps struggles to prevent violence. Din invokes the authority of the Iudex and his engraver's power to remember faces and testimony, forcing both factions to withdraw. The local commander, Princeps Atun Seriv, introduces the Armenta defender as Trikao Armenta, uncle to the captive Castus. Trikao explains that his sister Velona heads the family and has lost three of her four children in recent years. Two died by suicide, and another in a riding accident, leaving Castus the last surviving heir. Although outsiders speak of a curse, expensive medical and biological examinations have found no explanation.

Seriv explains the families' interdependence and rivalry. The Armentas prospered from Apothetikal alterations that created enormous urhosi cattle and acquired much of the canton, nearly eliminating the Buravs' holdings. More recently, new biological methods for growing cattle feed enriched the Buravs, who recovered their land. The families now control complementary aspects of the same industry but compete bitterly over property. Seriv shows Din the serrated flensing knife recovered from the inn, its blade consistent with Zansay's wounds.

Castus initially refuses to explain what happened, then admits that he cannot trust his own recollections. He and Zansay genuinely loved one another and planned to flee the feud. On their final night at the inn, Zansay inexplicably found a flensing knife in her bag. Later Castus heard an extraordinarily beautiful song that seemed to fill the surrounding world and evoke the smells and sensations of the flensing halls where he had worked. His recollection breaks; he next saw Zansay mortally cut yet calm, standing and then laying herself down in the blood. He remembers neither handling the knife nor making the cuts. Overwhelmed by horror, he fled toward an ancient forest shrine of the Daljen figure Gaddar, where he felt someone might be following him before the custodians captured him. Din learns that Castus's work gutting cattle involved the same pattern of sawing cuts found on Zansay. Castus fears his own guilt and expresses a wish to die rather than return to life without her. Din decides to inspect the place in the forest where he was apprehended.

Seriv escorts Din to the remaining ancient forest outside Lacanthim, whose dense, pale-trunked trees grow in hexagonal clusters and bear dark purple foliage. The forest is a surviving biological construction of the early Khanum people. According to local speculation, it protects the burial places of the extinct Daljen, revered as ancestors by wealthy Tala families. The trees emit a substance that produces powerful fear in approaching people and animals, making entry difficult. Seriv stresses that these explanations are incomplete and much of the forest's original purpose remains unknown.

Seriv says that unexplained lights have reportedly flashed deep in the forest for about three years, although he has never seen them and knows of no one entering. Near its edge, Din examines broken branches where the custodians found Castus after his flight from the inn. Their search may have destroyed traces of anyone who followed him, as Castus claimed. Seriv points out that a path leads toward the shrine of Master Gaddar, one of the old Daljen figures. Din finds no proof of either supernatural involvement or a second person, and the forest's disturbing influence drives him to leave.

Din reports Castus's testimony, the deaths of the Armenta heirs, and the forest's unusual properties to Ana at the Cat's Eye Inn. Instead of continuing to inspect the physical wounds, Ana requests her collection of pipes and woodwinds. She plays increasingly high notes while Din watches Zansay's corpse, explaining that farm drokha-cats harvest crops through a conditioned response induced by a neurological fungus called the guiding web, also known as revenant's mist. After dosing a cat with the fungus, trainers pair particular tasks with high-pitched musical cues, producing overwhelming urges to repeat those actions. Ana proposes that someone may have developed a human-infecting version of the web and used it to condition both the supposed murderer and the victim. This would explain Castus's sensory euphoria and missing memories, the butchery-like wounds, and Zansay's absence of resistance without yet identifying who engineered the crime.

The guiding web can produce limited responses after its host's death. Ana eventually finds a particular high pitch that causes Zansay's body to twitch, roll, raise its head, and sigh before collapsing, demonstrating that the corpse responds to the stimulus. She repeats the test before Seriv, who is horrified but accepts that the death was likely orchestrated through biological control rather than an ordinary lover's killing. Ana warns that similar conditioning could explain the other Armenta deaths, although this remains an inference. Seriv reveals that Burilis Burav himself developed the guiding web used by the agricultural drokha-cats, making the victim's father an obvious person to investigate, not a proven killer.

At the Green Drover inn, Ana tells Din and Seriv to keep their discovery confidential. They do not yet know how the human-affecting web is administered, how to detect infection reliably, or how many people may already have been conditioned. Revealing their suspicions could prompt the person responsible to activate additional victims by playing a sound that others cannot hear. Even Seriv may be vulnerable, and ordinary Apothetikal records or local medical officers may be compromised by obligations to the gentry.

Ana proposes involving the imperial Orbiis, agricultural specialists more independent of local family rivalries who understand fungal alterations and have criticized use of the guiding web. She instructs Seriv to find them discreetly and arrange an examination of Zansay's body, which she refuses to release to the Buravs until its strange condition is understood. She also wants to investigate the deaths of Castus's siblings rather than assume they were suicides or accidents. Seriv explains that Velona Armenta, mother of the deceased children, has investigated their deaths from a religious perspective, fearing punishment from the Daljen and other ancestral powers. Velona remains secluded at the family seat, Aimafall, and is pursuing dangerous fertility treatments to produce another heir. Ana sends Din to ask Trikao Armenta to arrange an interview with his sister, while Seriv searches for trustworthy Orbiis officers.

Din finds Trikao Armenta at the Crooked Horn tavern and attempts to discuss the family's earlier deaths. Trikao, still grieving, rejects speculation about a curse and refuses to expose his sister Velona to additional distress. Din decides that Trikao is unlikely to secure the requested audience and instead asks to speak to Trikao's son and the son's betrothed, both close friends of Castus.

A young woman then arrives riding a destrier with extraordinary skill. She calls Trikao Grandfather, and Din is shocked by the resemblance between her face and his own. They recognize one another as siblings: the rider is Fotia Kol, whom Din has not seen in years. Fotia is equally startled to find her brother investigating the murder of her friend Castus, and the chapter ends with their unexpected, uncomfortable reunion.

Din and Fotia struggle through an angry reunion after years of separation. She rebukes him for sending money without letters or visits, leaving the family uncertain whether he was even alive. He resents having traded his health and future for his relatives while discovering that she is engaged to a gentryman. Fotia explains that Ippeas, Trikao's son, will not inherit Velona's estates, so the engagement is not a shortcut to a great fortune. She found work taming horses and destriers, attracted the attention of Velona Armenta, and became a leading drover in her service. With her earnings and Din's payments, their grandmother and younger sisters moved from Daretana to better circumstances in the third ring. Din is surprised that they now live nearby.

Fotia and Ippeas, who soon arrives, say Castus genuinely loved Zansay and wanted to flee his increasingly unhappy household with her. The two alone knew about their secret relationship. Asked about the deceased Armenta children, Ippeas says Lyimo drowned without obvious preceding depression, Sagma hanged herself after becoming distraught, and Gevma died in a riding accident following weeks of sleepless, disturbed behavior. Din notices that the different deaths do not readily fit a single ordinary explanation. They also explain that Velona, convinced her family is under a curse, is subjecting herself to painful and risky fertility treatments to create another direct heir. Fotia offers to help Din and Ana obtain an audience with her.

Ippeas hesitates to marry Fotia because the family's reputation, his limited inheritance prospects, and the present feud make his future uncertain. Din tells them Imperial Sublimes normally do not marry or have children, prompting further discomfort. On his return, he recalls his difficult childhood, including his grandmother's harsh treatment of his problems learning to read and write and occasions when he hid from his siblings in his late mother's closet. The old memories reveal sources of shame and emotional separation that his perfect post-augmentation memory cannot resolve.

After Din reports his sister's unexpected position within the Armenta household, Ana reacts with surprise and criticizes him for failing to congratulate Fotia or offer support for her engagement. She then observes a connection Din overlooked: the first death among Velona's children and the earliest sightings of unexplained lights in the old Daljen forest both occurred about three years earlier. Ana does not treat that correspondence as proof of supernatural activity or a causal connection. She believes the clan feud, land ownership, and profit are more plausible human motives.

Ana distinguishes the surviving constructions of the ancient Khanum people from the scant historical knowledge of their societies. She discusses the extinct Daljen tribe and the enduring figure of the emperor, who remains hidden within the imperial Sanctum. Din privately considers his earlier discovery that Ana herself possesses recovered or reconstructed Khanum-level abilities and has been conditioned so that trying to speak of their origins causes her pain. He wonders why those ancient people vanished and why Ana was made in their image. Ana resolves to visit Velona and then consult the Orbiis about the victim's biological condition.

Din and Ana travel through the enormous, biologically altered Armenta cattle estates to Aimafall. The great urhosi herds show the intensive treatment required to produce their enormous bodies, while the prosperous but oppressive household is filled with mounted animal trophies and reminders of the family's dead children. Trikao resents Din's attempt to bypass him by involving Fotia, but Ana insists on speaking with Velona herself. Fotia guides them through the house, describes her employer's deteriorating health, and shows a family portrait of Lyimo, Sagma, Gevma, and Castus.

They encounter Coral, Velona's pet drokha-cat, whose behavior is managed by high-pitched conditioning tunes. Her physician, Osumlik, is frustrated because Velona has withheld the pipe he normally uses to summon the animal. Ana challenges him over the dangers and questionable medical justification for fertility treatments in a woman over sixty; he insists he must respect his patient's wishes. Velona's private chambers contain air-purifying mosses, religious offerings, and intrusive medical equipment that administers treatments to her weakened body. Though physically ill, Velona remains forceful. She immediately criticizes Din for abandoning his family and hurting Fotia, then signals that she is ready to discuss the deaths of her children and possible unnatural causes.

At Aimafall, Velona Armenta discusses the family's inherited belief that the ancient Daljen watch over the land and punish forbidden conduct. She associates the successive deaths of her children with the Daljen, especially the shrine of Gaddar, and has kept extensive records of the circumstances. Lyimo, her eldest, was found drowned in a pond after walking out at night and standing motionless by the forest. Sagma suffered vivid dreams of being unable to leave her dressing room and repeatedly getting dressed before she was found hanged in that room, fully clothed. Gevma reported similarly distressing dreams of being trapped and unable to move, then died in a riding accident. Lyimo had not reported the same dreams. Velona regards these events as a supernatural curse rather than evidence against Burilis Burav, although Ana and Din recognize a possible pattern of compelled, repeated behavior. Velona remains intent on producing a replacement heir despite painful fertility treatment and the risk to her health.

Physician Osumlik demonstrates a trained drokha-cat, Coral, which jumps and then dances in response to tones from his flute even while visibly frightened. The demonstration reinforces the parallels between audible commands, the guiding web, and the family's apparently involuntary acts. Ana privately questions Fotia about the family's burial customs. Rather than exposing graves without preparation, Ana learns that the deceased heirs lie in sealed coffins in a family sepulcher, and asks Fotia about access to Sagma's undisturbed dressing room. Ana insists that her inquiries remain secret. She suspects a deliberate biological mechanism behind the deaths, but has not yet established who delivered it or whether every death shares that cause.

Din seeks the Orbiis specialists whom Ana wants to examine Zansay's body, meeting Commander Raudoti Tauri, a perceptive and outwardly distracted officer whose team tests the environment through augmented senses. Their branch applies biological and engineering expertise to monitoring the imperial landscape and has a critical relationship with the agricultural guiding web. After questioning Din, Tauri recognizes that the Iudex may be investigating a human version of the fungal conditioning mechanism. Tauri initially stresses that ordinary guiding-web strains require large ingested doses to affect people, while an organism adapted to particular hosts might act differently.

The commander warns that a fatal web infection can eventually produce black fungal stalks near the ears of the corpse, releasing material and creating a public-health risk. On learning that Zansay's remains have been kept at the local custodi office, Tauri insists they be moved under controlled conditions to the Orbiis surgical facility for examination. Din relays the orders and secures cooperation rather than leaving the corpse in public custody. On his return through the area, he personally sees a rhythmic light flashing from within the ancient forest. This confirms that the reported phenomenon exists, not what produces it or whether it is connected to the murders.

Tauri conducts a controlled examination of Zansay's remains while Ana, Din, and other investigators observe through a protective arrangement. A biological threadvine opens the skull, and modified telltale organisms react to tissue and fluid samples. Tauri explains that the wild guiding web spreads through certain animals, drives infected hosts toward water, eventually kills them, and produces fungal structures that propagate the organism. The domesticated agricultural version was trained through successive fungal cultures and animal hosts to respond to musical commands. This makes a strain conditioned to control humans conceivable, although Tauri stresses that achieving it might have required cultivation using many human bodies.

Repeated sounds establish the host's response to a task; later cues can awaken and trigger that response. Without appropriate control and medication, infected hosts may unconsciously rehearse their tasks in disturbed sleep and finally die. These symptoms resemble the Armenta heirs' dreams. Tauri describes an Orbiis test for sufficiently concentrated fungal contamination, but warns that early infection can evade detection and a temporary suppressive drug will not itself reverse established behavioral conditioning. Tauri also discloses that Burilis Burav formerly worked for Orbiis before leaving under suspicion decades earlier, then developed the agricultural guiding web. That connection makes him important to the inquiry but does not prove culpability.

The autopsy reveals dangerous black fungal growth within Zansay's head. Tauri's observations suggest she acquired the infection through substantial, repeated doses over time, possibly from food or drink. The organism can survive heat, so cooked food cannot be ruled out. Ana realizes that the infection must have been cultivated and administered well before the killing and wants to confront Burilis immediately. She, Din, and Seriv hurry to the Burav property, only to discover a large fire engulfing the estate. The chapter ends without establishing who started it or whether Burilis survived.

Din helps fight the blaze at the Burav mansion through the night. Firefighters save the grounds but cannot prevent the house's destruction. The servants' testimony suggests that almost the entire extended Burav family attended memorial rites for Zansay, and no family members initially appear among the survivors. Jalin Burav, who lived away from the main household, is eventually found critically burned and injured after jumping from an upper window. A kitchen maid describes a bearded Tala man in drover's clothes who approached the northern servants' entrance before the fire and fled when it began, raising suspicion of an Armenta connection without identifying the culprit.

Ana observes that the building's highly fire-resistant vine structure should not have burned so rapidly without an accelerant, perhaps a reagent used to clear fields in earlier decades. She declines to exclude the Burav family merely because its members were victims. When Din recounts the lights he saw flashing in the ancient forest, she asks him to reproduce their exact rhythm, suspecting a deliberate coded signal. A badly burned valet, Kiva Kozder, then provides the first firsthand account of the deaths: thirteen Buravs and some servants suddenly stopped moving during the memorial ritual, ignored attempts to rescue them, and emitted faint, terrified cries as the blaze spread from below. Jalin appeared afterward and tried to pull his father to safety, sending Kozder away. Kozder had been absent during part of the previous month and did not share the nightmares reported by Burilis, Daqi, and another servant, whose dreams involved being trapped inside the house. Din concludes that the web had been used to condition an entire household, but how the fire was started and who arranged it remain unresolved. He summons Tauri for emergency containment and investigation.

Tauri's Orbiis team responds to the destruction of the Burav estate as a possible epidemic. A test strip turns orange in water from the main house's well, demonstrating guiding-web contamination; people who lived in the mansion test positive, while many who lived in separate quarters do not. The distinction appears to explain why Jalin, who maintained his own cottage, escaped the behavioral command, although his exact infection status requires testing. Din and Seriv test negative at that moment, but Tauri cautions that exposure and infection can develop over days. Quarantine and checks of the interconnected water system begin. Ana suspects that the same plot may target both feuding families, but stresses that the identity of the conspirators remains uncertain.

Jalin, suffering severe burns while medikkers apply healing mites and splints, insists he tried repeatedly to save his family and asks Ana to kill him; she refuses and orders a guard. Searching Jalin's separate cottage, Din finds tranquilizing and mood-altering medicines, sympathetic artwork depicting cattle, and a drawing of a fruiting tree marked with the Daljeni sign of Gaddar. Din's increasingly autonomous engraver memories again intrude, this time in a familiar woman's voice. Tauri's structural survey of the burned mansion reveals an intact, concealed steel vault with an exceptionally complex four-tumbler lock and a Kurmin motto that Ana translates as a clue she cannot immediately solve. Its contents remain unknown.

Ana suggests the old forest may be designed to keep something inside rather than merely prevent entry. Tauri is visibly guarded by her question and agrees to speak privately later. Meanwhile Ana deciphers the flashing Din saw: a rudimentary cipher based on Legionnaire signal code repeatedly sends the word 'calm.' Its vantage point can be seen from both the Armenta and Burav properties, supporting her suspicion of communication between conspirators and that an operative at the Burav house panicked. She also reasons that the unidentified Tala visitor lacked the large amount of accelerant needed for the fire and may have been its intended victim. At the Crooked Horn, Din discovers that the visitor is Ippeas Armenta, his sister Fotia's betrothed.

Under questioning, Ippeas admits that an anonymous urgent letter delivered by scribe-hawk promised evidence clearing Castus of Zansay's murder. It included intimate details of Ippeas and Fotia that seemed to authenticate its supposed Burav-servant author, and a reagent key for the estate's servants' gate. He destroyed the letter as instructed and secretly went to the mansion around midnight. Near the northern servants' entrance he encountered a drunken valet who mistakenly addressed him as Burilis Burav and wondered why he had gone on another forest excursion without his usual lantern and smoke-making equipment. Alarmed, Ippeas fled; he then saw the fire and returned to rescue a collapsing kitchen maid before escaping. That maid was the witness who described the supposed intruder.

Ana concludes that the letter was probably intended to bring Ippeas into the fatal blaze rather than enable an ordinary arson attack, further implicating a plot against members of the Armenta family. His escape and rescue of the servant complicate the public accusation. He denies recent nightmares and cannot explain why someone would target him when he has no claim to inherit Velona's estate. An Orbiis test nevertheless turns orange, confirming that Ippeas has contracted the guiding web; whether he has yet been behaviorally conditioned is not proved. Ana orders him held in a protected cell for his safety and asks Tauri to examine the Armenta estate. The drunk servant's comment suggests that Burilis had access to the forest using lanterns and smoke, despite its reputation as impassable. Ana also tells the exhausted Din to sleep in a cell at the station, anticipating that Fotia will soon demand answers about her fiancé.

After sleeping at the custodi station, Din hears Castus express despair and fear that he will never be free of the crimes connected with Zansay's death. Din tells him that being infected does not mean he has been abandoned, though the identity and number of perpetrators remain uncertain. Fotia arrives to visit Ippeas and angrily confronts him for believing an anonymous message and putting himself at risk. The argument reveals how deeply she fears for him and how much the spreading accusations threaten their future. Din discloses what his investigation has found in hopes of gaining the couple's help.

Fotia's guiding-web test stays green, but Ippeas's previous test was positive. Din explains that medication can suppress progression and that the absence of recent nightmares suggests Ippeas might not yet have undergone behavioral conditioning. Fotia remains alarmed that the attackers can both poison and attempt to kill him. When Ippeas recalls Castus's report of an unseen follower near Gaddar's shrine after the murder, Fotia recognizes a possible geography-based explanation. The glade lies in the narrowest strip of old forest between Lacanthim and the Burav lands. If the killers knew a route through its seemingly impassable trees, someone seen near Castus might have been crossing between town and the estate, not pursuing him. Fotia offers to guide Din to the shrine by destrier, advising him to bring mint extract and cloths to reduce the trees' disturbing effects.

Fotia takes Din to a public path cut through the old forest and explains that its frightening scent can be partly suppressed by mint extract. The passage, maintained for Daljen pilgrims, reaches the glade containing an ancient, strangely proportioned statue called Master Gaddar. Fotia reflects that the Khanum and their surviving works are historical realities, even if modern worshippers disagree about their divinity. Din recognizes a resemblance between the elongated head of the statue and the figure of the emperor on a fifty-talint coin, though neither the statue's exact original identity nor its implications are established. The visit also allows Din to tell Fotia that he accepts her relationship with Ippeas after witnessing the man's courage.

Searching the glade, Din finds footprints beyond its apparent boundary and notices a patch where tree limbs bend away from one another rather than interlocking. Tauri arrives with masked Orbiis personnel, clears the site, and uses smoke from a specialized reagent thurible to make the engineered branches open into a hidden path. He explains that such gates were built into the forest and that Orbiis possesses the secret means of opening them. Din connects this device to the drunk servant's description of Burilis's lantern and smokes. Farther inside, the party discovers a deliberately concealed trunk containing more elaborate musical pipes, a dated vial of contaminated water, and an instruction book whose tunes include an awakening signal, separate conditioning melodies, and an unexplained entry labeled 'lysis' with the warning 'not immediate.' The package appears to have been prepared for another operator, supporting the existence of multiple participants. A loose note contains an explicit threat of punishment and rejection of a promised forgiveness, indicating conflict or coercion among those involved. Its writer and intended recipient remain unknown.

Tauri and Din return from the forest to find Ana sharing an intensely spiced meal with Fotia. They explain the hidden path and the cache of musical cues, contaminated water, and a hostile note. Ana infers that at least two operators were involved and that the more experienced one may have instructed another under a promise of forgiveness, though neither the author of the note nor the identity of the partners is yet established. The label 'lysis' might signify a destructive or curative command; Ana cannot decide. No Armenta well has yet tested positive. She examines Burilis Burav's service history, which shows that he joined the imperial biological service when the Armentas' engineered cattle had impoverished his family, then transferred to the Orbiis and gained authority over the ancient forest. He systematically opposed assignments of officers familiar with modified trees. After leaving, he claimed to have discovered an unusually useful strain of guiding web in an oxbow lake that conveniently vanished in a flood. Its adaptation to agricultural drokha-cats helped the Buravs recover their wealth because the Empire needed labor amid population losses and augmentation-related infertility. Ana suspects his origin story is false and that the locked vault holds evidence about the fungus and forest.

Pressured by Ana, Tauri reveals that the old forest protects an imperial Touched Site, a prohibited and dangerous place with an immense, perfectly dark, flat stone plug behind a wall. The Orbiis monitors the site but does not know what the ancient Khanum sealed beneath it. Ana notes that the Daljen vanished before the rest of the ancient civilization declined, without claiming that the sealed place caused their extinction. Tauri and Fotia describe the brutal family treatment of Jalin and his particular mistreatment by Lyimo Armenta. Ana asks Fotia to investigate Sagma's death: controlling a person to construct and use a noose is more complex than conditioning a cat to repeat a simple movement, and a single fatal act cannot itself be rehearsed. Fotia agrees to make discreet inquiries among the Armenta household while Din and Tauri prepare for a hazardous assignment.

Trikao meets Fotia and Din in Lacanthim, worried that his son Ippeas has been imprisoned for the Burav fire. Din assures him that Ippeas is being protected rather than accused, but public hostility toward the Armentas has grown severe. Outside the jail, Trikao admits that his oath to serve sister Velona and preserve the family's cattle business has damaged his relationship with his own son. He traces the prestige of imperial meat production to an ancient feast celebrated by a conquering emperor and wonders whether the families sacrifice their children to fulfill inherited obligations. Din recognizes a connection with his own bodily sacrifices as an imperial Sublime. Trikao considers fleeing with Ippeas but Din doubts this will make him safe.

Screams erupt from the jail's infirmary, where Castus has complained of severe head pain. Din finds Seriv bleeding, Fotia terrified, and a medikker fleeing. Castus's guiding-web infection has burst into a huge fungal growth from his head. He is attacking the medikker and then Din with a serrated medical blade, mechanically repeating cattle-flensing movements despite severe wounds. Din is forced back through the cramped rooms until he distracts Castus with his coat, severs his knife hand, and finally cuts through his neck, stopping his movements. Tauri arrives to sterilize the area and treat possible spore contamination. Din realizes the forest cache's unexplained 'lysis' tune may have triggered the fatal growth, but neither he nor Fotia saw a pipe-player nearby, and the exact timing and perpetrator are unknown.

With Tauri's personnel disinfecting the custodi station, Ana explains the possibility that the unusual guiding web can force even a fatally injured host to repeat a learned task. Trikao, whose nephews and niece died in separate incidents, is horrified to learn that the family may have been subjected to the same process. Ana requests permission to open the sealed Armenta tombs to search for fungal growth and evidence of how those deaths occurred. The family's religious hope that properly preserved bodies might someday be restored makes this a grave transgression, but Trikao agrees in his capacity as seneschal because the surviving heirs remain in danger. Tauri will lead the examination with Din as engraver, though he appears distressed at the direction of the winds and the location of the sepulcher.

As they return, Ana remains frustrated by the Burav vault's complicated combination. She points out an odd detail in the symbols: the digit one on the tumblers is a bare vertical stroke without the normal adornment. She also reminds Din that the 'lysis' booklet specified the effect was not immediate, so a culprit need not have played the triggering tune near the jail when Castus began to change. She explicitly considers Tauri as one possible player because of his knowledge of the web and hatred of cattle production, while acknowledging that many others may have had access to the jail. She warns Din about becoming personally involved with the perceptive commander, referring to secrets of Din's own life that he hopes to protect.

Din travels with Tauri's Orbiis team to the Armenta sepulcher and encounters the nearby flensing halls, where enormous cattle are killed and mechanically disassembled and their remains discarded in gigantic foul-smelling pits and piles of bones. Tauri's unease intensifies as the wind brings the smell toward him. The family preserves its dead in specially grown vine cocoons containing caskets. Opening Gevma's and Sagma's graves reveals thick black fungal stalks surrounding their heads, confirming guiding-web infection in both. On Sagma's neck, Din discovers a much narrower and smoother bruise than the injury a conventional hanging rope would leave, suggesting another means of strangulation. Lyimo, whose death preceded the others, shows only modest fungal growth. Tauri suggests the infection may have been immature when he died, as if the first attack was mishandled. Din notices a small punch-like bruise and adjacent shallow puncture beside Lyimo's shoulder blade, an injury his independently responding engraver memories insist he has encountered before but cannot yet identify.

After the bodies are placed in Orbiis containment, Din asks Fotia to pursue the circumstances of Sagma's supposed hanging. The return journey exposes Tauri's severe reaction to the slaughtering grounds. He reveals that his Orbiis augmentation plugs into a large atmospheric sampling structure called a plumaret and causes him to experience the environmental condition of the whole region, including the waste of its cattle industry. His despair requires careful management; he admits using the prohibited mood stimulant urlev-puff. He and Din share an understanding of the price paid by living things for imperial luxuries, and Din feels an attraction he is cautious about acknowledging. Tauri's reference to gentry rings suddenly clarifies Din's memory: the puncture on Lyimo's back resembles the sharp hawk crest on a Burav tughra ring. Jalin is the only Burav Din has observed habitually wearing one. When they rush to question the grievously injured Jalin, they discover he has escaped from his medikker facility despite the risk of death or further injury.

Din reports Jalin's disappearance and the forensic ring evidence to Ana, who agrees that Jalin likely killed Lyimo but accepts that the initial evidence is circumstantial. Her new reading of Daljen texts gives her an explanation for the vault's unusual lock. At the burned Burav estate, Tauri explains that trackers followed Jalin into the secret old-forest routes, where ordinary scent tracking fails. His team has also confirmed that the Armenta household wells are clean, although Velona and Trikao are infected like Ippeas, while Fotia and the workers test negative. This selective pattern remains unexplained. Ana turns the vault tumblers to reproduce Master Gaddar's symbol, using two round letters and two bare vertical ones. The mechanism opens. She reasons that Jalin understood the symbol's significance, which helps connect him to the family's hidden knowledge.

The unexpectedly large fortified vault contains ancient Daljen books and artifacts, research materials, and wine rather than conventional wealth. Its libraries and contents have survived the fire. A middle-aged woman lies inside, surrounded by opened wine pots and evidence of severe heat and dehydration. At first she appears dead, but she suddenly wakes, draws a letter opener, and threatens Din and Tauri in a drunken panic before collapsing again. Her identity, what she was hiding from, and what the vault records reveal are unresolved at the chapter's end.

Medikkers treat the woman recovered from Burilis's vault for heat injury, severe intoxication, and dehydration. Din catalogs the ancient Daljen writings, small sculptures, and hidden Orbiis forest-access devices. He also finds many pots of wine from Choros Ayak, identified by a small flower stamped into the cork. Velona had reported that her eldest son Lyimo received a case of the same prized vintage shortly before his death. Ana regards it as a plausible vector for his initial guiding-web exposure, though the chemical condition of the wine has not yet been directly proved. Seriv, back on his feet after treatment, recognizes the survivor as Madi Istelia, Burilis Burav's longtime housekeeper. After a premature attempt to question her causes her to faint, Din elicits a fuller account.

Istelia describes Jalin's extreme childhood fear, loneliness, and abuse under Burilis, particularly forced work in the flensing halls despite his compassion for the animals. Lyimo Armenta cruelly bullied him. After Lyimo's death, Jalin grew increasingly disturbed, abused mood reagents, disappeared toward the old forest, and once said someone owned his soul. On the night of Zansay's memorial, Jalin had affectionately thanked Istelia and apologized, then went upstairs; she escaped the spreading blaze by entering the vault with a combination she had long known. Her testimony allows Ana to reconstruct a tentative sequence: Jalin may have made an early, imperfect attempt to use web-contaminated wine against Lyimo, then physically drowned him when the conditioning failed, leaving the impression of his ring. Ana thinks a more sophisticated second killer subsequently directed the murders of Sagma, Gevma, and the attack that conditioned Castus and Zansay. She suspects Jalin played certain triggering notes under coercion, then panicked when his sister's body was withheld, burned the family's house and attempted to lure Ippeas into it. These remain her explanatory deductions rather than independent confessions. Because Burilis's vault holds an unusual collection of Daljen-site research and missing pages, Ana proposes that Jalin used his father's notes to discover a particular location within the forest. Tauri draws a map from memory, and Ana begins matching it against the writings to locate the fugitive.

Tauri insists that Din rest before joining an Orbiis search for Jalin in the forest, warning that its disorienting engineered trees have caused officers to disappear. During the ride, he regrets having spoken so bitterly about imperial cattle production. Din does not condemn him and speaks instead of maintaining some place within imperial service where constructive work can still occur. Their attraction and mutual recognition remain implicit as Tauri leaves for his station.

Fotia finds Din to report on Ana's request concerning Sagma. The Armenta drovers say that the rope used in the apparent hanging was removed and discarded soon after the body was found. The finder was a former stableboy named Arthinio, who resigned following the incident and went to work for the Buravs, apparently fearing for his own safety. Fotia is searching for him as a possible witness. Din privately describes the evidence pointing toward Jalin and the prospective journey into the forest, carefully identifying Ana's conclusions as provisional. Fotia says Ippeas remains anguished by the deaths and their family's trade; she compares his concerns with Jalin's and questions whether their lives of service to great households can be escaped. She and Din acknowledge how their difficult shared childhood drove both toward new obligations and confront the long costs of Din's self-sacrifice. She urges him to return safely from the forest, unwilling to lose him after their recent reunion.

Before dawn Din joins Tauri's Orbiis expedition, which carries bombards and newer lypi lances capable of inflicting paralyzing pain but also dangerous seizures and heart complications. In the Burav vault Ana identifies three Daljen figures in Burilis's records: Qul, Kurbanthik, and Master Gaddar. She distinguishes the sealed site described as the Cup of Heaven, which she associates with the Orbiis Touched Site, from Naos-Minra, a smaller Daljen temple with better-preserved geographical directions. Using Tauri's forest map and the old landscape references, she provides a route past the Hand of Gaddar and the shrine of the soft spines to Naos-Minra, where she thinks Jalin may have fled. The historical names and locations are her working interpretation, not evidence of Jalin's presence.

Ana then privately asks Din to stay and takes dangerous psychotropic mushrooms. The drugs appear to help her speak despite a painful, consensual constraint on discussing her knowledge of the ancient Khanum. She describes how refugees in the leviathan-ravaged valley became altered, how the Daavir and Daljen founded the early Empire, and how the agricultural Daljen disappeared abruptly rather than gradually succumbing to infertility. She believes competing Daavir destroyed them, removed their history, and concealed their lands beneath the altered forest. Din recognizes the implication of a suppressed massacre, but their explanation remains a suspicion rather than a verified account. Ana warns him that the forest may contain the physical evidence of a great historical crime.

Din and four Orbiis personnel follow Tauri through the altered forest in single file, their protective masks and smoke-generating thurible holding open narrow seams between the shifting trees. Din sees ancient teknasma whose unnatural dimensions disrupt his perception, then reaches the immense Hand of Gaddar. A small figure held in the stone palm bears a phrase Din translates as an exhortation to make a wandering mind bloom. Tauri fears the words refer to the same domination of the mind as the guiding web, although the statue itself proves no connection. Beyond it the party finds a reagent-cleared trail leading into the ruins of Naos-Minra, an old town or temple complex where Burilis Burav apparently worked. The path ends at a dry stone fountain.

At the fountain they discover Jalin Burav seated motionless in medikker clothing. He has slit the veins in his wrists and died beside the emptied basin; there are no evident signs of struggle. Tauri's testing paper stays green against Jalin's mouth, establishing that Jalin himself was not carrying the guiding web. A nearby cabin contains an improvised Apoth laboratory, web-positive fluid, digging tools, and Burilis Burav's dated journal from 1099 describing the alteration of the fungus. Din and Tauri infer that Burilis worked here before adapting the web for field cats and that Jalin later returned to the site. The journal records the fungus's effect on conditioning and later dreams, but the dry fountain and absence of an obvious original source leave unanswered where Burilis first obtained it or why its current form can command humans.

Din reports Jalin's death and delivers Burilis's journal to Ana, who has covered her Green Drover room in Daljen documents. The journal describes extensive experimentation on dead drokha-cats and the water-based conditions necessary to modify their guiding web. It notes that fungus-fruiting follows death after a predictable interval and that a conditioned host may begin having nocturnal memories or hallucinations within forty-eight hours. Yet there is no reference to humans anywhere in Burilis's account. Ana therefore rejects the assumption that his recorded experiments explain how a fungus capable of controlling human beings originated, and she doubts that the poorly trained, traumatized Jalin invented that capability. Although the journal helps establish Burilis's work, it has not revealed the second murderer or the underlying source of the web.

Din tells Tauri of Ana's findings. Tauri grows despondent at the possibility that the murders may remain unsolved and the local cattle industry will continue without change. He invites Din to meet him at a bathhouse, and their mutual attraction becomes explicit despite Ana's warning about becoming involved with the commander. Meanwhile Seriv says Fotia is still searching for Arthinio, who found Sagma's body, and Ippeas remains deeply distressed. Din chooses to go to the baths instead of returning to his own room. The attendant directs him to a private chamber Tauri has reserved, where Tauri is waiting. The nature and consequences of their meeting are left to the next section.

Din sleeps deeply after becoming intimate with Tauri in his quarters. In a vivid dream he finds himself alone and partially undressed in his own chamber at the Green Drover, although he remembers spending the night elsewhere. An unfamiliar, beautiful song sounds outside his window. He cannot move his legs, and the imagined room becomes insubstantial when he tries to understand how he arrived there. His exceptionally organized engraver memories speak to him and recall Castus describing a song before the night of Zansay's death, along with Tauri's account of how conditioned cats repeat learned movements during sleep. Din understands that he is experiencing an artificially imposed memory of paralysis rather than a current physical location.

A shadowy figure with an emotionally familiar scent begins to appear on the dream bed, but Din wakes in Tauri's actual room before identifying the figure. Alarmed, he requests a web-test strip from Tauri and touches it to his mouth. The paper immediately turns bright orange, confirming that Din is infected. Because nocturnal disruption follows conditioning, the dream also suggests that he has already heard and responded to a control melody, although he does not yet know who played it or why he was chosen.

Din and Tauri immediately bring the orange testing paper to Ana. She has them test the water in Din's Green Drover room, which is also positive, and orders targeted checks of the Green Drover, the Crooked Horn, and the Prancing Calf. These are establishments where investigators and members of the Armenta family have stayed or attended gatherings. Ana tests positive herself. She argues that the culprit did not need to contaminate each victim separately: the web must establish itself in a water source and accumulate through repeated ingestion, so a planner could infect selected high-status visitors by directing them to particular inns. When Tauri and Seriv return, the three specified wells are infected and the adjoining wells are clean, establishing intentional selective contamination. Fotia was spared because she usually lived with drovers rather than staying in those guesthouses.

Ana rebukes Din for becoming involved with Tauri, who possessed technical access and opportunity and remains one plausible suspect. She calculates that Din's dream arose about forty-eight hours after his conditioning, placing the conditioning melody on the night of Castus's fungal transformation. She distinguishes Din's resistance from immunity: his heavily augmented engraver memory can recognize that a conditioning song is forcing him back into a stored event, reducing the effect of the compulsion. Din describes a personification of his memory that he does not yet wish to identify. Ana wants Fotia's account of Sagma's supposed hanging. Seriv retrieves her, and she reports Arthinio's crucial observation: the material removed from Sagma's neck was a ribbon, not an ordinary rope. Sagma customarily tied ribbons around her neck while dressing, a familiar routine that could be conditioned before being reenacted around a waiting noose. Ana recognizes a previously overlooked clue to the second killer's identity and writes a letter to Velona Armenta claiming to possess incriminating evidence. She requests lypi lances and prepares a controlled trap at the Green Drover, though the actual plan remains partly undisclosed.

At night Din watches the streets from his Green Drover bedroom while custodi observers use concealed lamps in two nearby inns to signal suspicious approaches. When several flashes indicate the target is coming, Din rushes outside and finds officers holding a young man carrying a cat-control pipe. The youth has never been seen by Din and seems unable to speak or choose his movements. Din realizes he is probably an infected herder compelled to walk with the instrument, not the actual murderer. The officers pursue supposed escape routes, but Din reconsiders an earlier signal from the opposite street and recognizes the youth may have been sent to lure the guard force away from the tavern.

As Din turns back upstairs to warn Ana, a melody overtakes him. He experiences his earlier conditioned memory of standing motionless in his Green Drover room, this time with overpowering pleasure attached to remaining still. His engraver recollections produce a figure he recognizes as his mother, who died years before, and help him distinguish his past memory from his current position. By deliberately recalling other impressions of the tavern through smell, he weakens the musical compulsion enough to move painfully. He sees Trikao Armenta, disguised in a custodi-like cloak and carrying a sword and cat pipe, ascend the stairs toward Ana. Trikao realizes Din can see and partly resist and decides he must kill both investigator and assistant. Before he can strike, Ana emerges behind him and uses a lypi lance, leaving him convulsing in pain. Wax in Trikao's ears explains how an infected operator could play the melody without being compelled by it. Din remains shocked that Ana could move normally despite the web and music; she does not yet explain her resistance.

At the canton custodi station Ana tells Ippeas and Fotia that two people committed the murders: Jalin Burav and Trikao Armenta. She reconstructs a sequence in which Trikao followed his nephew Lyimo and saw Jalin try to compel him to drown with music before physically forcing him under water. Trikao allowed the murder and used what he witnessed to blackmail Jalin into sharing the human-guiding fungus and its pipe commands. Resentful of his sister Velona's inheritance and of his own son Ippeas's position as a mere drover, Trikao then selectively contaminated gentry inns, arranged visits, and conditioned the remaining children. Sagma's death depended on her habitual practice of tying a ribbon around her neck while dressing, paired with a hanging noose Trikao had prepared outside. Other deaths were staged to resemble unrelated accidents. After learning Castus and Zansay meant to flee together, Trikao used Castus's already conditioned flensing motions to make him kill Zansay. That would lead to Castus's prosecution and the discovery of fruiting web on Zansay's body, exposing the Buravs while leaving the seneschal unsuspected. Trikao also played the destructive delayed lysis cue against Castus and, unnecessarily, conditioned Ana and Din. Ana believes Jalin attempted to kill Ippeas in the mansion fire to injure the man who controlled him. These explanations are presented as Ana's reconstruction, supported by evidence and Trikao's exposed conduct, not as the full contents of a recorded confession.

Ana reveals that the plan has partly succeeded despite its exposure: Velona amended her legal succession arrangements after Castus died, making Ippeas sole heir to the vast Armenta lands. Ippeas is devastated by his father's actions, and Fotia tries to protect him from Ana's exhaustive account. At the guarded medical ward Trikao, gravely injured by the lance, asks to see Ippeas and insists he acted for his son's benefit. Din reports that Ippeas refuses to visit and intends, when he inherits, to sell the Armenta holdings to many separate families and farmers, ending the family's monopoly. Trikao is distraught that his son has rejected the future he murdered to obtain. Returning with Din, Ana avoids explaining why Trikao's tune never controlled her and tries to prepare a misleading explanation for Tauri. Tauri presses them about the web's original source, which neither the human killer nor Burilis's journal has established. Ana says she believes it is hidden in the old forest and proposes another expedition.

After Trikao's arrest, Orbiis personnel cleanse the infected wells and Apoths administer treatments to the people exposed to the web. Din and Tauri continue their relationship while the collapse of the Burav and Armenta houses unsettles Lacanthim's cattle business. Ana directs them back toward the forest's smaller ruined temple, reasoning that the digging tools found in Burilis Burav's cabin indicate a buried water source. She leaves the party at Master Gaddar's shrine and tells Din that Tauri must witness the discovery rather than merely hear her theory. North-northeast of the old dry fountain, Din and Tauri find an excavation concealed behind a hill, aligned with the sealed Orbiis Touched Site. They descend through a cramped old water tunnel into an enormous underground lake beneath the dark capstone. Its water tests positive for guiding web.

In the darkness they discover roughly a dozen human corpses, extraordinarily old and with massive fungal growths, still mechanically stirring the lake with poles. A further fungus-controlled dead figure plays a stringed instrument; one worker then obeys a musical command to carry a cup of infected water toward Din and Tauri. Beneath the surface lies a vast accumulation of human bones. They retreat through the tunnel and escape the forest. The evidence leads them to identify the original Daljen use of the fungus as the enslavement of human beings for agricultural labor, with animation persisting beyond bodily death. Tauri then realizes the ancient altered Khanum must have resisted the web they controlled, and links this to the fact that Ana did not respond to Trikao's song. He demands to know what Din knows of her nature. Din refuses to reveal Ana's secrets, and Tauri angrily ends their intimacy and leaves him at the forest edge.

Din walks to Master Gaddar's shrine and reports the underground lake to Ana. She acknowledges that she expected him and Tauri to witness the evidence and says Tauri now possesses information that could challenge the Empire's extensive reliance on animals conditioned by guiding web. Yet she doubts that the Orbiis or other institutions will willingly release the truth, and she cannot say whether the cattle industry will end, reform, or continue as before. She also recognizes that Tauri has begun to suspect her connection to the first imperials. Ana argues that exposing her identity could undermine his opportunity to act on the disturbing discovery, but does not confirm precisely who or what she is. She explains that the Daljen regarded ordinary humans as useful inferiors and used web control for forced agricultural service. The Daavir subsequently erased and concealed the Daljen's works, but Ana corrects Din's earlier assumption that they destroyed the Daljen out of moral revulsion: she portrays the Daavir as practical people who understood that a society built on enslavement would eventually fail. What path they took instead remains unanswered.

Ana offers Din two weeks' leave to help Fotia and Ippeas begin a life apart from Lacanthim. Din fears returning to his family home because his increasingly personified engraver memories have taken the likeness and voice of his mother, who died long ago. He questions Ana about whether these memory figures change over time, but keeps the identity to himself. Walking away to find a carriage, he recalls Ana saying that she saw nothing particularly strange about Master Gaddar's inhuman statue and that she has experienced difficulty encountering her own family. He connects these remarks with Fotia's speculation about the emperor's centuries-long seclusion and wonders whether Ana has met the emperor or is related to him. Din does not confront her. These are his unanswered conjectures, and the novel closes without confirming Ana's identity, the emperor's condition, Tauri's future actions, or the fate of the web-based cattle trade.