Rotten Oysters

“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.

[...]

“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.”

- A Drop of Corruption, Chapter 7 pgs. 52-54