We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A Drop of Corruption, the second book in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan fantasy mystery series, out from Del Rey on April 1st.
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, a Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—vanishing from a room within a heavily guarded tower, its door and windows locked from the inside.
To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial detective, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.
Ana soon discovers that they are investigating not a disappearance but a murder—and one of surpassing cunning, carried out by an opponent who can pass through warded doors like a ghost.Worse still, the killer may be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud, where the Empire harvests fallen titans for the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.
Din has seen his superior solve impossible cases before. But as the death toll grows and their quarry predicts each of Ana’s moves with uncanny foresight, he fears that she has at last met an enemy she can’t defeat.
My lodgings were located in the middle of New Town, set among the many Iyalet offices managing the many imperial works in Yarrowdale. It was one of the more modest buildings, but pleasant enough, yet as I approached, I noticed the porter boy standing outside, pacing and fretting in the lane.
When he spied me he scurried over, his face flushed. “Signum!” he called. “Signum, sir, are… are you Iudex? Can you help me, please, sir?”
“Perhaps?” I said, perplexed. “What’s this about?”
“It’s, ah, the other Iudex officer, sir.”
Instantly, my heart sank. “Oh. What’s she done?”
“She’s on the patio, you see, and the… the smell, sir. She’s eating, but… but the smell of it, it’s awful, and I don’t know what to do!”
I sighed. “Please lead the way.”
I followed the porter around the side of the building. The wind rose ever so slightly, and I caught the powerful, noxious aroma of rotting sea life. We rounded the edge, and I came to a stop.
A flagstone patio was laid out on the hill, overlooking the bay, complete with wicker chairs and table. It must have been a merry sight once, but no longer, for it had been turned into a graveyard of oyster shells.
Nearly half of the patio was obscured by piles of glistening carapace and crust and nacre, the pools of the oysters’ cloudy liquor baking in the waning afternoon sun. I could hardly begin to count them; they had to be from several hundreds of oysters, at least. The heaps of shells rose gently to curl about the tea table in the center of the patio, almost like an embankment, and it was there, beside a soaking sack of unshucked shellfish, that my commanding officer Immunis Ana Dolabra sat hunched, plying another mollusk with a dull knife.
“They’re all starting to turn,” whined the porter beside me. “We’ve already had complaints from the officers in the other quarters! The patio shall reek for days if we don’t clear it up soon, but she won’t stop or move elsewhere, and the things she has said to me, sir ”
I watched as Ana pried open the shell, freed the flesh from within, tipped it into her mouth with a slurp, and tossed the shell over her shoulder. Though my stomach had mostly recovered, this sight— along with the aroma of such fetid sea life—set it rumbling again.
Ana’s pale head shot up. She sniffed, then slowly turned to face me—though she could not see me, for her eyes were bound up in a thick red blindfold. As usual.
“Din!” she said merrily. “You’re back!
“I am, ma’am,” I sighed. I dismissed the boy, then stepped about the heaps of shells, my boots crunching on the flagstones, until I came to stand behind her. “But, ma’am, the proprietors have asked me t—”
She raised a finger. “First! Tell me, Din—how far a trek is it down to the sea?”
I eyed the coastline. “A few leagues. Maybe less. But wh—”
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A Drop of Corruption
“I have a request,” she said. “I would like to see if you could go down to the waters there, preferably to a spot far from seaweed, and fetch me a pail of seawater.” She grinned so wide the corners of her mouth almost touched her ears. “I’m tasting the city, you see. The region. The seas.”
I scratched my eyebrow with a thumbnail, awaiting the rest of it. “Are you, ma’am.”
“Oh, yes. The oysters absorb what’s about them as they grow, you know. I can taste where they’re from.” She wielded the dull little knife with all the deftness of a midnight murderer and popped open another shell with a wet click, the liquor running down her fingers. “All it needs is a little salt. If you were to take a pail of seawater and slowly boil it, we would be left with the purest sea salt. And what a thing it would be, to taste the flesh of the sea itself, seasoned with its own salt! It’s too poetic for us not to. Yes?”
“I did not think your appetite for oysters was so tremendous, ma’am.”
“Oh, I’m not actually hungry, Din. Really, it’s that each oyster is different. You can taste in each one which reef they came from, which side they grew upon, which waters they flourished within. They are like melodies of the ocean itself rendered in flesh.” She tilted her right ear to the coast. “Just listen to it. I’ve never been so close to the sea… All about me the world is bright with patterns. I can hear the heartbeat of the ocean in the wax and wane of the waves. I can feel the wind unspooling from its wild tangles out over the waters. And now I taste those waters, and all that dwelt in them.” She grinned savagely as she pried the lump of gray flesh from the bottom of the shell. “I wonder… is this the closest I’ll come to tasting a leviathan’s flesh? Did these oysters absorb a hint of their essence?” She noisily sucked it back. “For I’ve heard whispers that some parts of the titans are edible, if properly bled…”
I grimaced. Though I did not know the manner of Ana’s cognitive alterations—and indeed, she’d always been irritatingly coy about what they were—she’d always shown a predilection for pattern spotting that far surpassed obsession. From ancient history to masonry to the speckling of colors in the human eye—and now, apparently, oysters—Ana was perpetually hungry for new, obscure information to dissect and analyze, so much so that she often went about blindfolded, claiming that to perceive too much of the world made it difficult to focus on what she found interesting.
“Would you be ready for my reports of the day, ma’am?” I asked loudly.
She flicked the spent oyster shell away, and it went clattering over the heaps. “My, my. You seem impatient. Has your day not proceeded well?”
I grimaced as I thought of the little roll of parchment in my pocket. It felt like I was carrying around a bombard charge with a lit fuse. “No,” I said. “It has not.”
“You mean you did not relish the experience of sailing upriver for six days through rough weather,” she said, grinning, “all to come here and peer at clammy corpses? Our home is wherever the dead are found in difficult or delicate circumstances, Din. You should feel quite at ease here! Tell me—what is the situation? Shall our predicament be difficult, or delicate?”
“I’d say both, ma’am,” I said. “But at the moment, it seems more difficult than delicate.”
Her brow furrowed. “Truly? I didn’t read the wrong orders, did I? It’s the Treasury man, yes? Found dead in a canal?”
“That is only somewhat correct, ma’am. But yes.”
Her brow’s furrows grew until they became small hills. “I would have thought this would be simply a delicate case, given that it’s a Treasury man dead. Yet you say the death is also difficult? Do you not have any concept of how it was done?”
“None,” I said. “The man apparently vanished from his rooms. There is no motive, nor culprit, nor anything of use. Just a bloodstain in a bed, and little more.”
She nodded, head cocked. “Hum! Well. Perhaps this isa good one. How exciting.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve and stood. “You know, you are not a stupid person, Din.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, pleased.
“Or, rather, not an unusually stupid person.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, far less pleased.
“You often quickly catch a whiff of what’s going on, even if you don’t yet have the full picture. It’s only when you’re really very befuddled that I know the work might offer some mild entertainment.” She stuck her arm out. “Come! Take me back to my rooms and let us discuss this. And bribe that irritating little porter child however much it takes to have him clean all this shit up.”
I led Ana back to her rooms, which were arranged as she always preferred: all windows tightly shut, her bed in the far corner, her countless books stacked beside it, her musical instruments laid against the wall—she was favoring a Pithian lyre during this trip— and a tea set and iron stove dominating the center of the chamber.
I shut the door behind her. She removed her red blindfold, blinked her wide, wild yellow eyes, and pushed back her bone-white forelock as she looked around. “This room is a little too big, Din,” she said. “It shall take me time to grow acclimated.”
“Would you like me to cover the windows with rugs, ma’am? That could block out more light.”
“No, no. The light isn’t the issue, but the size… Too much for me to look at. But I shall manage.” She paced a wobbly circle and waved to the teapot. “I asked the porter to procure me the roots of some Yarrow sprinklefoot—I’m told the leaves add an interesting aroma to the tea. Might you oblige me a cup? You can brief me on our intriguing pile of human parts as you do so.”
I slid the appropriate vial from my engraver’s satchel, sniffed at the fragrance of nectar, and began speaking as I went about brewing her a pot of tea, my eyes shivering as I regurgitated every aspect of everything I’d seen that day. Ana listened, blindfolded again to focus, yet she sat not on a chair or on her bed but sprawled on her side on the floor, one long, pale digit tracing the curl of the fretvine surface: a curiously girlish pose, despite her somewhat older age.
It was very late when I finished my report. I could glimpse the pale moon peeking through the gaps in the windows, and the sounds of the port had died away, drowned in the rumble of the seas. I had to flick the mai-lantern in the corner to awaken the grubs within and set them glowing, and soon a soft blue light filled the room.
Ana sat still for a long while, the now-cool cup of tea clutched in her hand. Then she began rocking back and forth: a telltale tic that she was thinking hard.
“I begrudgingly admit,” she finally proclaimed, “this murder is more promising than the last couple we’ve dealt with.”
“Then you do think this was murder here in Yarrow, ma’am?”
“Oh, certainly,” she said. She turned over to lie on her back. “It is most definitely murder. Our dear dismembered Sujedo did not have a fit of the heart, tumble into the tides, and get eaten by wandering turtles. I think he was killed, and I think the manner in which it was done tells us a great deal.”
Ana tossed back the tea, then threw the cup aside and held her hands up, fingers splayed, like a troubadour about to begin a tale-telling. “Imagine it! Imagine Sujedo seated on a canal barge, floating upriver. An arrow from the brush would have been quick, grisly, and—apparently!—not uncommon for this place. Or as he disembarked from the barge and made his way into town—someone could have bumped into him and put a blade in between his ribs while no one saw. That would have been easy, too. Or, as I think you know well, perhaps one could serve the man a slice of dried fish, laced with poison undetectable through the powerful flavor of the aged meat ”
I glared at her. “Your point is taken,” I said. “Death would be an easy thing to deliver in a place like this—is that it?”
“Of course. If the point of all this was the man’s assassination, there would be simpler ways of getting it done! Methods that would have assured his death and still offered safety to the murderer. So— why choose this?” She rubbed her hands together like she was about to tuck into a meal. “I feel akin to the disappointed maiden during her first night in the marital bed—the more I pull at what I find, the more I find to my liking! Let us begin, then.”
Excerpted from A Drop of Corruption, copyright © 2025 by Robert Jackson Bennett.
