A Trade of Blood

Dinios Kol and Ana Dolabra travel to Lacanthim to investigate the murder of Zansay Burav, a gentry girl whose death has brought the Burav and Armenta clans to the brink of armed conflict. Castus Armenta, Zansay’s secret lover and an Armenta heir, has been jailed after fleeing the Cat’s Eye Inn covered in blood. Ana and Din force their way through the standoff and examine the room, where Zansay lies horribly cut open but with no signs of struggle. The wounds resemble flensing work, yet the body’s position, the silence of the room, and the absence of defensive injuries suggest something more controlled than an ordinary murder.

Din questions Castus, who confirms that he and Zansay had met secretly for months and planned to flee together. He remembers a hidden knife, an overwhelming song, and then a gap in consciousness before finding Zansay dead. Afterward he fled toward the old Sapirdad forest, feeling pursued. Din and Princeps Atun Seriv inspect the forest, whose altered trees inspire unnatural dread and are tied to Daljen legends, rumored lights, and old shrines. The evidence there is compromised, but Castus’s story deepens the possibility that some outside force shaped his actions.

Ana proves the mechanism by testing Zansay’s corpse with high-pitched instruments. The dead body reacts, revealing infection by the guiding web, a fungus used to condition drokha-cats to obey tones. Ana theorizes that both Zansay and Castus were infected: Zansay made to remain still, Castus conditioned to butcher and flee. Seriv reveals that the guiding web was developed locally by Burilis Burav, Zansay’s father, transforming the case from a clan killing into a conspiracy involving human conditioning. Ana orders secrecy and brings in the Orbiis, whose commander, Raudoti Tauri, understands fungi and altered landscapes.

Meanwhile, Din’s inquiry into the Armentas becomes personal when he discovers that his estranged sister, Fotia Kol, is betrothed to Ippeas Armenta. Through Fotia, Ippeas, and the grieving matriarch Velona Armenta, Din and Ana learn that three Armenta heirs died in recent years: Lyimo drowned, Sagma apparently hanged herself, and Gevma died in a riding accident. Velona believes a Daljen curse is destroying her line, but Ana suspects staged deaths. Velona’s household also reveals pipes that control drokha-cats, dangerous fertility treatments meant to produce more heirs, and recurring dreams of being trapped, a symptom that matches Castus’s account and later becomes central to identifying web conditioning.

Tauri performs an autopsy on Zansay and confirms a powerful web infection that fruits from corpses and likely requires repeated dosing. He explains that a human-effective strain would require horrifying cultivation, possibly in waters associated with human dead. As Ana prepares to confront Burilis, the Burav estate burns. Most of the Burav family dies after everyone inside freezes in place during memorial rites, softly screaming as if trapped in dreams. Jalin Burav, Burilis’s son, survives badly burned. Tauri confirms that the Burav well was poisoned with guiding web, proving mass infection. A hidden janarti steel vault is found in the ruins, and Ana deciphers its riddle as the symbol of Master Gaddar.

Clues begin dividing the crimes between more than one culprit. Ippeas admits he was lured to the Burav estate by an anonymous letter and tests positive for infection, though he seems unconditioned. A drunk valet’s remarks indicate Burilis had been secretly entering the forest with lanterns and smokes. Fotia deduces a hidden route near Gaddar’s glade, and Din and Tauri discover a concealed forest seam. Within it they find a cache containing human-control pipes, contaminated water, conditioning instructions, and a mysterious tune labeled LYSIS. A bitter note suggests one conspirator resents another, confirming a broader plot.

Ana reconstructs Burilis’s past: he had served in the Orbiis, gained access to the altered forest, and later introduced the guiding web after claiming to have found it in a vanished oxbow. The Burav vault contains Daljen texts, forest-entry reagents, Choros Ayak wine linked to Lyimo’s infection, and Madi Istelia, Burilis’s housekeeper, alive but drunk and hidden. Madi describes Jalin’s lifelong misery, his hatred of the flensing halls and cattle suffering, and his confession that he was “owned.” Ana concludes that Jalin first used tainted wine and web-conditioning against Lyimo, failed to make the death look natural, and drowned him himself. Later, someone more controlled exploited Jalin and the web to continue the killings.

Jalin flees into the forest. Ana uses Burav’s Daljen studies to map his probable destination, Naos-Minra, a “little temple” near deeper forbidden sites. Din, Tauri, and Orbiis officers enter the seams, pass mind-warping Daljen works, and find Jalin dead by suicide at a dry fountain. Testing shows he is free of the web, indicating that his final act was deliberate. Nearby they discover Burilis’s old Apoth-like lab and a journal describing animal experiments with the web, but no human training. This means Burilis refined the fungus but was not the source of its human-directed use.

The danger reaches Din personally when, after spending the night with Tauri, he dreams of being immobilized by a beautiful song and wakes to test positive for infection. Ana has Tauri and Seriv test Lacanthim’s tavern wells and confirms that the Crooked Horn, the Prancing Calf, and the Green Drover were deliberately seeded, infecting regular visitors over time while sparing those who rarely drank there. Fotia then brings the decisive clue about Sagma: she was not hanged with a rope, but with her own neck ribbon. Ana recognizes this as proof of a killer close enough to condition routine behaviors and stage apparently unrelated deaths.

Ana baits the culprit with a letter to Velona claiming to possess incriminating evidence. During the trap at the Green Drover, a conditioned Tala boy carrying a cat pipe serves as a decoy, drawing custodi away. The true attacker is Trikao Armenta, Ippeas’s father. He infiltrates disguised as a custodus and uses the web’s song to paralyze Din, but Din resists through his engraved memories. Ana, prepared for the move, strikes Trikao with a lypi lance. She later explains that Trikao discovered Jalin’s role after Lyimo’s death, coerced him, poisoned select inns, and used tailored conditioning to remove Armenta heirs so Ippeas would become sole heir. He infected himself and protected his ears so he could operate the pipes. Ippeas rejects the legacy, vowing to sell and dissolve the Armenta holdings.

Although the murder conspiracy is solved, the origin of the human web remains unknown. Ana leads Din and Tauri back toward the forest. Beneath the dry fountain, they find a tunnel to an underground lake connected to the sealed Touched Site. The water tests positive for web, and fungus-crowned dead bodies churn it endlessly under the command of eerie tones, with human bones visible below. The discovery reveals the web’s ancient horror: a system for making the dead labor forever. Tauri realizes Ana’s Khanum-like nature may make her immune and breaks trust with Din. At Master Gaddar’s shrine, Ana frames the lake as part of Daljen domination and imperial concealment, warning Din about the temptation to reduce people to tools. She grants him leave to help Fotia and Ippeas, while Din privately suspects Ana has deeper ties to the emperor and to the Empire’s buried secrets.