The Tainted Cup

Signum Dinios Kol arrives alone at a Haza clan estate in Daretana to investigate the grotesque death of Commander Taqtasa Blas of Imperial Engineering. Blas has been killed in minutes, his body pierced and consumed by shootlike “trees” that burst from within him. Din, an altered “engraver” who can imprint a scene into flawless memory using scent cues, methodically records the room and searches the estate. He notes oddities—an ugly bloom among the growth, fernpaper walls blackened with mold, a dying kirpis air-shroom, and hints of heat and moisture out of place. Staff accounts say Blas complained of chest pain and breathing trouble shortly before the eruption, and the household’s tight control of reagents and keys seems to rule out a simple intruder.

Din reports to his superior, Immunis Ana Dolabra, a blindfolded, hypersensitive Iudex investigator who interrogates details to uncover hidden “patterns.” Ana identifies Din’s described bloom as dappleglass, a notorious suffused weed linked to the destroyed canton of Oypat and known to stain and rot fernpaper. From the heat, staining, and dead kirpis, she concludes Blas was deliberately exposed and likely had inside help. She summons key estate staff—housekeeper Madam Gennadios, servant Ephinas, and groundskeeper Uxos—and breaks the case: dappleglass was placed in the bath’s shootstraw pipes so steam would carry spores into Blas’s lungs. Cornered, Uxos attacks; Din subdues him, and Uxos confesses he let in a masked assassin in black wearing an Apothetikal warding helm, after being threatened and paid by a disfigured intermediary. Apothetikal teams later find a grass slip in the drains; Princeps Otirios theorizes it was weaponized dappleglass designed to activate with hot water and grow only inside living tissue.

Political pressure mounts when Captain Alixos Thalamis threatens Din over “complaints” from powerful people. Progress stalls in the wet season until Blas’s secretary, Rona Aristan, sends his schedule, revealing he was based in Talagray and visited the Hazas irregularly—meaning a killer likely tracked him there. Before Ana can secure formal authority, Talagray suffers disaster: a leviathan breaches the sea walls, and Commander-Prificto Desmi Vashta reveals the wall failure was enabled by internal sabotage. Ten Engineering officers died across a short window with the same tree-sprouting transformation, including two whose bloom destroyed a vital wall support. Under an emergency that suspends jurisdictional rules, Vashta sends Ana and Din to Talagray.

In Talagray, Ana joins Iudex investigator Tuwey Uhad’s secretive team, including assistant investigator Captain Tazi Miljin, Engineering Immunis Vasiliki Kalista, and Apoth Immunis Itonia Nusis. The victims’ movements show no obvious shared exposure, but Din’s interviews at the Forward Engineering Quarters reveal a pattern: several dead Engineers made secret overnight trips into Talagray eight nights before the breach. When a lover, Signum Sirgdela Vartas, is caught lying about Signum Ginklas Loveh’s whereabouts, he breaks and names an apparent surviving associate: Apoth Captain Kiz Jolgalgan. Searches of Loveh’s and Misik Jilki’s quarters uncover identical multi-vial reagents keys, suggesting access to a hidden warded gate. Din also recognizes a distinctive oranje-leaf-and-spice scent linked to “therapy oils” found near Blas—connecting the secret circle to Blas’s death.

Din secretly visits Rona Aristan to press her for answers and finds her house ransacked and Aristan murdered with a small drilled hole at the base of her skull. A hidden key behind a portrait of Blas leads Din to a signal house containing a fortune in talints, Aristan’s third-ring wall pass showing years of covert travel, and another (simpler) reagents key. Ana treats this as proof of broader corruption and stages an integrity test by planting the money and pass back with Aristan’s body to see if anyone steals from evidence. Meanwhile, fernpaper-order records lead Din and Captain Kepheus Strovi to a miller, Yonas Suberek, who fails to respond to inquiries. At Suberek’s mill they are ambushed by deserters; Din kills in close combat under the effects of clar-tea and remembered training. Inside, Suberek is found dead in the basement with the same drilled-skull puncture as Aristan, confirming a second murderer—distinct from the dappleglass poisoner—operating as a “cleaner.”

Ana recovers Suberek’s last written directions by taking a rubbing of his worktable and uses the complex reagents key along a gentry road; the gate it opens is the Hazas estate in Talagray. The revelation panics Uhad, Kalista, and Nusis: all three attended a Hazas party on the likely poisoning night. Commander-Prificto Vashta makes Ana lead investigator and authorizes a cautious approach to the Hazas, only for Fayazi Haza to arrive and report that her father, Kaygi Haza, died from the same plant eruption. Because Fayazi refuses to deal with Ana, Din is sent alone to the Haza halls to inspect Kaygi’s death circumstances and seek correspondence.

At the estate, Din confirms Kaygi died by dappleglass eruption and finds the poison’s carrier—a dark grass strip—still lodged at the rooftop hot-water tank, proving the planting occurred at the heat source. He deduces a forced servants’ passage entry and finds evidence the party’s reported “fire” was an engineered distraction. With only minutes in the rookery, Din discovers scribe-hawk traffic contradicting claims of full lockdown; unable to retain written Sazi labels, he finger-traces the plates and later reproduces them for Ana. The Hazas sent messages to Engineering Headquarters in Mitral, Bekinis, and Juldiz, and to Apothetikal Headquarters in Qabirga, and they received a message from the Haza Prime Hall in the First Ring—matching the same four cantons tied to Aristan’s travel and to Nusis’s account of political opposition during Oypat’s dappleglass crisis.

Din also finds signs of covert activity on the grounds: disturbed stones by an eastern sluice gate and a concealed person-length cache hole. Fayazi attempts to manipulate him, using a pheromonally altered plaizaier to extract details about Ana’s investigation, but Din resists and recognizes the same distinctive perfume previously linked to Jilki and Blas. Accusing Fayazi of lying about Engineers never visiting the estate, he is violently ejected—confirming the Hazas have been hosting and exploiting an officer circle. Ana concludes Fayazi is likely a frightened puppet of the senior Haza lineage rather than the mastermind, and she theorizes Jolgalgan infiltrated via the cache hole and servants’ routes, aided by a very strong collaborator who could manipulate the sluice gates.

As Ana separates the case into three threads—dappleglass poisonings, Kaygi’s older wrongdoing tied to Oypat, and drilled-head “cleanup” murders—she confirms Din has an extremely rare “memory in the muscles,” allowing him to perfectly repeat complex learned movements (lockpicking, combat techniques, precise copying). A field pursuit with an Apoth contagion crew led by Signum Kitlan tracks Militis Drolis Ditelus, the only Oypati crackler in Talagray’s Legion. Ditelus is found bleeding and delirious, raving about going “home” to Oypat before a lethal dappleglass bloom erupts from his chest. His trail leads to a ruined fortress housing an improvised dappleglass laboratory—and Captain Kiz Jolgalgan dead inside, suspended in growth, apparently killed by a containment failure. The lab is burned with phalm oil, but Ana argues the convenient “accident” does not resolve the larger conspiracy.

During a morale rite, the Banquet of Blessings, Din senses how quickly Talagray turns hollow victories into public reassurance. Then disaster strikes again: Nusis is found murdered in the Apoth tower with the same puncture wound as Aristan and Suberek. Ana opens Nusis’s safe and discovers the “reagents key” inside has been swapped for a near-match; Din can tell it is not the one he recovered, proving the true object was stolen before the killer arrived. Ana concludes the drilled-head assassin—rumored to be a Haza-built speed creature called a “twitch”—killed Nusis while trying to seize the real item, only to find it already replaced.

Ana summons Fayazi under heavy guard and forces a hearing with Vashta. She explains that Jolgalgan killed Blas and poisoned Kaygi via the estate’s boiler, and that ten Engineers died after drinking from Kaygi’s open wine ewer, which absorbed spores after his steam bath and then infected them at varying rates. Ana links Kaygi and Blas to a long-running network that, she claims, helped suppress and profit from a dappleglass “cure” during Oypat’s fall—pointing again to the four cantons Juldiz, Bekinis, Qabirga, and Mitral. She reveals her proof is a stolen cure sample disguised as the “reagents key,” and she identifies Fayazi’s “axiom” bodyguard as the twitch assassin responsible for the drilled-head murders. As Vashta orders an arrest, green flares announce the leviathan’s arrival; the twitch erupts into motion, slaughtering Legionnaires, escaping upward toward Ana’s rooms to seize the cure, and returning poisoned by Ana’s prepared dappleglass trap. Din, reading the twitch’s slowed movements, uses Miljin’s taught technique to trap her stiletto and kills her before her body blooms violently.

Evacuation chaos consumes Talagray as the leviathan makes landfall. Ana refuses to wait blindly and takes Din to an eastern rampart to witness the battle. Din confesses he cheated to pass the Iudex exams because he cannot reliably read and write, only to learn Ana always knew and chose him for his rule-breaking ingenuity. They watch the titan-killer bombard slay the leviathan; blue victory flares rise, and the walls hold.

In the aftermath, Vashta moves to dismantle Haza power, seizing Talagray holdings and detaining Fayazi, who cooperates by handing over communications implicating her elders. Din is promoted to Assistant Investigator, but Ana reveals the true mastermind: Immunis Tuwey Uhad. She argues the plot required inside Iyalet knowledge, that only an engraver could memorize and manipulate key details (including Nusis’s safe), and that Uhad used his position to steer the investigation, coordinate with Jolgalgan and Ditelus, and then engineer convenient “endings.” Uhad admits his motive as righteous zeal born of decades watching corruption, but Ana condemns the cost—hundreds dead—and orders Din to arrest him with engraver’s bonds. As Talagray mourns its fallen, Miljin leaves the Iudex for the Legion and gifts Din a mechanical scabbard, while Din shares a final, intimate farewell with Captain Kepheus Strovi. Din departs with Ana, who reveals her Daretana posting was a fabricated banishment arranged by the Iudex conzulate and offers Din a permanent role in her special division as they go to report what they uncovered.