Chapter 52: Corrupted Notation

By the time they reached Kronvaal, Severin’s fingers had stopped feeling wooden.

His left leg still lagged when he took stairs too quickly. Hans was worse at hiding his own damage. The two fingers that had refused to straighten beneath the graveyard now moved, but slowly, and he had buttoned his coat with one hand on the train.

Severin expected the infirmary, but Hans walked past it.

"Are you planning to tell me where we’re going?"

"I already did."

"All you said was the freight."

"Exactly. That’s where we’re going."

"Would it kill you to be more specific?"

Hans pushed through a narrow iron door. "It would."

The room beyond looked more like a workshop than anything Severin associated with the Order. Two long tables stood beneath hanging lamps. Shelves held stoppered bottles, shallow metal trays, small balances and boxes of tagged fragments. Papers had been pinned to a board along one wall.

Severin stopped just inside when he saw a blackened piece of timber on the nearest table, one iron corner brace still clinging to it.

For a moment he smelled coal smoke instead of lamp oil.

He remembered the locked wagon and Crowe beside him as they carried one of the marked crates over coal grit toward warehouse three.

The warehouse had burned months ago, but part of it was here.

A woman stood over a tray at the far end of the table. She was short, spare through the shoulders, with copper hair pinned back badly enough that several strands had escaped. A dark smoked lens covered one eye. Her sleeves were rolled above the elbows.

She held a strip of gray tissue between forceps.

A man beside the second table looked up from a page crowded with copied symbols. He was older, perhaps in his forties, with both eyes intact and dark hair beginning to thin at the temples. Ink marked two fingers, and the backs of his hands were tattooed. On the left, a circle and squared figure were worked into one another. On the right, a snake curved around itself and swallowed its own tail.

Hans closed the door behind them as the woman looked first at him, then at Severin.

"Which one of you is Hans Schultz?"

"That would be me," Hans said.

"You’re late."

"Excuse us. We just came from under a graveyard."

She smiled. "Good excuse."

Hans nodded toward Severin. "This is Severin Hale."

Her visible eye moved to his patch. "New cohort?"

"Yes. Nice to meet you."

"Brenna Becker." She put the tissue back into the tray.

The other man did not offer his hand.

"Hermes Trinity." He looked back down at the page. "Now that we know each other, can we continue?"

His accent was Dorvak, cleaner than Rafael Montoro’s, the only other Dorvak voice Severin had heard since coming to the temple.

Hans stepped closer to the tables. "Hale is the one I told you about. He worked the original shipment."

Hermes stopped turning the page, and Brenna set down her forceps. Both looked at Severin.

"Worked it how?" Hermes asked.

"I loaded the freight."

"Before the warehouse?"

"Before Hans burned everything."

"That wasn’t what I asked. Did you handle the crates themselves?"

"Yeah. Most of them."

Hermes pulled a chair away from the table with his foot. "Then stand here."

Severin looked at Hans.

Hans smiled faintly. "Told you."

The table had been divided into sections with paper tags. Charred timber occupied one end. Beside it sat iron fittings, scraps of packing material, several stoppered sample tubes and small folded packets. The tubes looked familiar.

Hans had filled tubes like those from the shipment before he burned the rest.

Severin pointed. "Those are the samples you took."

"We already know that," Brenna said.

"Oh. Good. Glad I could help."

Brenna almost smiled.

Hermes ignored both of them. He lifted one of the paper packets and tipped a grain of pale material onto a glass plate.

"These survived because your friend took samples before he burned the rest. Most of what remained in Blackhaven was chemically useless by the time it reached us."

"Friend is generous," Severin said.

Hans leaned against the table. "That hurts, Severin. I fed you."

"Then kidnapped me, and I almost died for it."

Hans shrugged. "I call it recruiting."

Hermes tapped the plate with a thin metal probe.

"Enough. Cut the bullshit and focus." Hermes tapped the plate again. "This isn’t packing salt. Some of it is ritual salt, and a few samples contain compounds you wouldn’t find in any legal civilian laboratory. Some preserve tissue. Others react badly enough that I wouldn’t transport them in the same crate without separating them."

"Could explain the chains," Severin said.

"It could."

Brenna moved another tray closer. "These came from the biological material."

Severin looked down at six pieces, none large enough to tell him what they had once belonged to. One had a pale membrane across it. Another was darker and dense, with a cut surface that still looked wet.

"Is that from the crates?"

"Yes. From what Hans removed."

"What the hell? It still looks fresh."

"That’s the problem."

Brenna pressed the tip of a probe into the darker piece. The tissue gave slightly, then returned.

"It was already dead when we recovered it, and it’s still dead. The problem is that it shouldn’t look like this. Some of the samples were treated to slow the decay."

Hermes spoke without looking up. "Which, by itself, isn’t remarkable."

Brenna gave him a flat look.

"Don’t look at me like that. I said by itself," Hermes said.

"You’ve been saying that all morning."

"Only because you keep trying to make it sound miraculous."

"I’m saying the chemistry doesn’t account for what happened to this tissue."

Hermes finally looked at her. "That I can agree with."

Severin glanced at Hans, but Hans made no move to interrupt.

Brenna picked up another sample. "This one was altered before preservation. The tissue structure is wrong."

"Wrong how?" Severin asked.

"Enough that I want the rest of the body before I pretend to know."

There had been no whole body in the shipment. Severin remembered the finger in one jar and gray tissue pinned open in another. Hans had also found something pale and jointed inside an oilcloth bundle.

Hermes spread several copied sheets across the table.

"The marks may be more useful."

Severin recognized Nitre immediately. Salt and Sulfur sat beside it, the same three signs Neumann had made him chase through reference books during training.

"I know those," Severin said, pointing to Nitre. "Unstable material. Keep it separated until you know what it is."

He pointed to the other two. "Salt for preservation. Sulfur for reactive work."

Hermes studied him for a moment. "Broadly correct. The forms themselves are legitimate. What we don’t know is what the missing marks changed."

"Neumann thought it might be private shorthand," Severin said. "Or a bad copy."

"Both are still possible," Hermes said. "We also don’t know who wrote the marks."

Severin glanced at Hans. "The cultist defended the shipment."

"He did," Hermes said. "That doesn’t mean he marked the crates."

Severin nodded.

Hermes drew the symbols again on a larger sheet shaped roughly like a crate face. Thin lines connected several of them.

"The surviving fragments suggest a sequence, but it doesn’t make much sense. I assumed the fire had destroyed enough of the pattern that we were putting the signs in the wrong places."

Severin compared the drawing with the charred boards.

On Hermes’s reconstruction, the divided circle sat near the center.

"Wait. That wasn’t there."

Hermes frowned. "The sign?"

"The place."

After a second, Severin pointed.

"That one was higher."

"How much higher?"

"Near the top brace."

Hermes glanced at Hans, who pushed away from the table.

"Get him a board."

They found an unused packing panel leaning against the wall. Hermes laid it flat and handed Severin a piece of charcoal.

Severin stared at the wood. "I don’t remember all of it."

"I would distrust you if you did," Hermes said. "Show me what you remember."

Severin drew the divided circle high on the panel. It looked worse than the copied version, but Hermes watched without comment.

"Which face of the crate?"

"The one facing the wagon."

"Are you certain?"

Severin hesitated.

Hans spoke from behind him. "Where was the freight number?"

Hans’s question helped Severin picture the crate between himself and Crowe beneath the warehouse lamps. Pike had checked each number at the warehouse door, and the painted marks sat beside it.

"Here." Severin tapped the panel beside the symbols.

Hermes looked from his finger to the copied fragments. "So this face was outward?"

"Yeah."

Hermes slid one of the copied scraps across the panel. "What about this?"

Severin studied it. "Lower. Near the seam."

"Left or right?"

"I don’t know."

Hermes placed it near the bottom without fixing a side, then moved to the next mark.

Some memories came quickly because the crates had been awkward to handle. Others returned only when Hans asked about the weight, the iron bands, which way they had turned the crate before loading it, or where Severin’s hands had been.

One mark came back only as a hooked stroke, and another he could not place at all.

"I saw that one," Severin said. "I think."

Hermes waited.

"Twice. Maybe three times."

Hermes nodded. "Then that’s what I’ll write."

By the time Severin stepped back, the board looked less orderly than Hermes’s reconstruction.

Hermes stared at it for a long time, then moved the copied symbols on his own sheet. He shifted one, studied the result, then moved another.

He reached for an old reference volume and opened it near the middle, running his finger down the index.

Severin could make out one of the Vhaldrik headings without asking Hans. He was fairly sure it said Preservation.

Hermes turned several pages as Brenna came around the table to look over his shoulder.

"You see it?"

"I see where my reconstruction went wrong."

Hans folded his arms. "Meaning?"

Hermes tapped two signs. "The signs themselves are ordinary historical notation. The problem is where they were placed."

"So the bad copy theory?" Severin asked.

"Possible." Hermes looked toward the bottles. "But if the work behind this shipment were simply incompetent, I’d expect mistakes in the chemistry too. I’m not seeing them. The compounds were prepared properly, and some of those containers were chosen for materials that would have ruined cheaper glass."

Brenna glanced at the tissue. "The flesh was treated deliberately too."

Hermes nodded. "Then either whoever copied the notation only understood part of it, or someone changed it for a reason we don’t understand."

"Corrupted," Hans said.

Hermes considered that. "Corrupted is fair. It still doesn’t tell us whether the changes were deliberate."

Severin looked at the board again.

The marks had frightened him when he knew nothing about them, but knowing a little was worse. At least before, he could tell himself they were nonsense.

Brenna returned to the tissue tray. "The preservation still bothers me."

Hermes shut the reference book. "Yes. You already mentioned that."

"Only because you keep avoiding it."

"I am not avoiding it. I just can’t... explain it."

Severin stared at him long enough for Hermes to notice.

"What? You expected a better answer?"

"Kind of."

"Well, get used to disappointment."

Hans laughed once, then covered his mouth.

Severin pointed toward the altered sample. "If they were preserving it, why change it too?"

Brenna looked at the tissue. "That is the better question."

"Do you have the better answer?"

"No."

Hermes leaned over the reconstructed panel. "Neither do I."

Severin studied the altered reconstruction. He still understood almost none of it.

He did not know what the marks meant together. He could not name half the compounds on the table. Brenna knew more about the flesh than he could follow, and Hermes could read symbols Severin had once treated as strange scratches on wood.

But neither of them had carried those crates into warehouse three.

Hermes marked Severin’s placements onto a clean sheet.

"Make sure you don’t leave Kronvaal without telling one of us."

Severin looked at him. "Are you planning to interrogate me again?"

"Repeatedly."

"Wonderful. I’ll keep that in mind."

A knock came at the door, and a clerk entered carrying a folded dispatch. He looked between the four of them before turning to Brenna.

"Pilgrim Becker?"

Brenna held out her hand, and the clerk gave her the paper.

"Medical request from the healing wing. They want an occult review."

Brenna unfolded it, her visible eye moving down the page.

Hans watched her expression. "What?"

She read another line before answering. "A corpse."

Severin waited as Brenna looked at the clerk.

"How long dead?"

"The physician says long enough that decay should be obvious."

"And?"

The clerk swallowed. "It isn’t."

Brenna looked back at the dispatch while Hermes stopped writing and Hans straightened from the table. Severin glanced once more at the preserved tissue in its tray.

She folded the report. "Where is the body?"