AS WE WALKED I peppered Fayazi and her Sublimes with questions about her father’s correspondence. Had there been anything unusual? Any packages that had been laid aside? Any letters or correspondence from unusual places? Part of this was to maintain my story as to why I wished to see the rookery, but I also wanted to learn as much about Kaygi Haza’s correspondence as I could, even if it was now burned.

But their responses were short, clipped, and inarguable: “No,” or “Certainly not,” or “Not that I recall.” Nothing useful whatsoever, and the axiom eventually stopped answering altogether.

Finally we came to the rookery, a tall, circular tower built into the northwest side of the estate. I smelled the place before Fayazi’s Sublime opened the door for me: the musk of straw, the roil of humidity—and, of course, the ripe, acrid scent of birdshit.

The engraver opened the door and beckoned me inside. I looked up as the shadowy tower yawned above me, the sunlight filtering in through the slots along the side of the roof high above. The darkness was rippling with clicks and troks from the birds, who were nestled in wooden cubbies lining the walls in a spiral.

“There is a desk here,” said Fayazi’s engraver, gesturing to the corner, where an ornate desk of white wood sat beneath a small roof of green cloth—to prevent it from being shat upon, I guessed. “It was here that the master would read and answer critical letters immediately. But it is empty now. We considered burning the desk as well, but…”

“It is an heirloom,” said Fayazi. “From the Khanum days. Older than this very canton, certainly.”

I stared at the desk, thinking. If there were no letters here to review, then what was there to see?

I looked up at the birds nestled above. I could not see the birds themselves, but occasionally I caught the gleam of a bright, amber eye peering out between the wooden bars of the doors. The cubbies appeared to have been installed in pairs, little sets of two running up and down the walls, with little bronze plates installed beneath them. Interesting.

“How do they work?” I asked the engraver.

“Work?” said the engraver. “They’re altered. That’s how they work.”

“Yes, but—how do you manage them? What’s the process, please?”

He sighed. “They’re trained in pairs, one in each location. One for incoming, one for outgoing, as it were. Each bird has been suffused to possess not only great stamina and speed, but also a great memory for the map of the earth. And each pair has exactly one destination they’ve been trained to fly back and forth to.”

“How are they trained to do so?”

“Each bird has a deficit of a compound in its body—one that’s necessary for them to live—and each pair is trained to learn that they can only receive those compounds at these two specific locations. Usually in a bit of sukka melon. The bird completes the journey and is then given a sukka melon as a reward. It all becomes very mechanical.”

I looked up at the cubbies above, listening to the quiet troks.

“The plates underneath each pair of cubbies indicates this fixed destination?” I asked.

“Yes?” said the engraver.

“And the bird devoted to this location…”

“It is always housed on the cubby on the left.”

“So the birds from the other locations—should any arrive with an incoming message—would be housed on the right, before being sent back.”

“Correct.”

I thought about this. “And if both birds are here, then you’ve received a message recently,” I said. “And if both birds are gone, then you’ve sent a message recently.”

The engraver now looked slightly troubled. “Well…yes. I suppose that’s true.”

“And if you locked the estate down after Kaygi Haza’s death, then there should have been no new scribe-messages missing or arrived.”

“Yes…?”

I watched him. The man’s face flickered, just a little. A lie, perhaps.

“Then I’ll check them for any sign of tampering,” I said, approaching the winding stairway up. “And be right back down. It should only take a moment.”

I climbed the shit-spattered stairs, my boots crunching with every step, and approached the first pair of cubbies set in the wall.

Fayazi’s voice floated up to me: “Go quickly, Signum. I said five minutes, and I meant it. If you wish to see our lands, they are vast, and I did not intend for you to spend the night…”

“Understood, ma’am,” I called back.

---

—

I CAME TO the first set of cubbies. A pair of amber eyes looked back at me. It was difficult to see in the shadows, but the scribe-hawk within was a long, beautiful, slender dark bird, crouched in the straw with rinds of melon curled about it. It troked? curiously at me as I knelt before it, as if unsure what I was.

The cubby beside it was empty. This, I reckoned, meant no messages had recently been sent to its destination, nor received.

I looked down at the little bronze plate below the cubbies. It was written in a curving, sloping text that made my eyes ache to look at it. I furrowed my brow, forcing my eyes to read—the letters kept dancing and shivering before me—and finally I saw that it said:

Llitȡa ñan yarȡaaqñu urkuquna ñanȴana yunᶈayᶈniyuq kay.

I stared at the intricate text, utterly flummoxed, my mind working desperately to make sense of what I’d read.

I took my eyes away, then looked back. Instantly, the letters faded back into meaningless scribbling. I had to focus to get them to make sense again.

“Ahh,” I said aloud. “What…what language are these plates in, please?”

“They are in Sazi,” answered Fayazi’s voice. “The language of my people in the first ring of the Empire. Do you know it, Signum? I rather doubt it…It’s most tricky to learn, I understand…”

I stared off into the tower, trying not to breathe hard.

I did not know this language, of course. I could barely read it, and some of the letters were wholly alien to me—which meant I certainly could not read it aloud.

Which meant I could not engrave it in my memory and could not bring it back to Ana.

I shut my eyes and tried to focus, summoning up the memory of the words I’d just read. Yet in my memory, all I could see were delicate scritches and scratches in the plate, a trembling pile of nonsense where there should have been words.

I opened my eyes and whispered, “Shit.”

“Is something wrong, Signum?” drawled Fayazi’s voice. “Did you find something?”

I felt cold sweat breaking out over me and continued climbing the stairs.

I wondered what to do. I had come here hoping to learn something about the Hazas’ communications; and though I hadn’t found what I’d wanted, I could still learn where they’d been sending their communications, and perhaps when; and that might tell us something.

But now I saw I could not. I could not, because I could not read any of these plates, because of my damned eyes, and my damned brain, which had never been able to learn how to engrave the words I read.

My heart fluttering within me, I mounted the steps. I passed one pair of cubbies with one bird; then another; and then, finally, one pair with no scribe-hawks at all.

A sent message, surely. And there, written on the plate below, was the name of the place the message had been sent to.

I gazed at the plate, trying to focus. I finally got the words to make sense, and saw they read:

Altiȵti yarȡaaqñu urkuquna t’iqraᶆkanȡkiaqñu chaika.

I gazed into the words, my face trembling, my head pounding. I felt a bright pain behind my eyes. Fayazi Haza said something below, but I ignored her, and tried my hardest to engrave the words in my mind, to keep them, to draw their symbols on my very soul.

I shut my eyes. Instantly, the words were lost, the memory dissolving like sea foam upon the sand.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered.

I opened my eyes and tried to whisper the words aloud, fumbling through the mad jumble of consonants.

“What’s that?” demanded Fayazi. “What are you saying? What are you doing up there, Signum? Your time is nearly up.”

“One moment,” I said in a strangled voice.

This would not work. I was going to be thrown out of her house if I kept up with this.

I stared at the plate, thinking.

I could not say the sounds, I realized. But perhaps I could draw the words—later.

I took my vial of mint and snuffed at it heavily to ensure this moment was anchored in my mind. Then I placed my finger to the first letter, my fingernail slotting into the engraving in the bronze, and then let the groove guide my finger…

“Signum?” called Fayazi angrily.

I traced one letter, then another, then another.

“Signum Kol,” snapped Fayazi. “I must insist we go, now.”

I finished tracing the letters, hoping that the movements rested heavy in my memories, and moved on to the next pair of cubbies.

“Almost done,” I said hoarsely. “Just have to check the rest.”

There were four others: three pairs of cubbies with no birds, and one pair of cubbies with two birds—that meant four sent messages in total, and one received. At each pair I sniffed my vial and traced the words on the plate with my finger, praying that my body remembered the movements if nothing else.

As I finished the last one, I felt a hand on my shoulder, the fingers hard as iron. I turned, surprised, to see the axiom standing behind me, her skeletal face staring into my own.

“You are done here,” she said softly. “As the lady said.”

Shaking, I stood, brushed myself off, and descended the stairs, the axiom following behind me.

What a thing, what a thing, I thought as I trotted back down. What a thing it was, that I had to encrypt this memory and smuggle it within myself, translated into movement so my mind could keep it—though I had no idea if I’d been successful. Perhaps I would return to Ana, try to trace those letters upon some parchment for her, and discover I was drawing utter nonsense.

And then she would know, I realized. She would know of my affliction, and my lies, and I’d be found out and discharged, if not jailed.

My stomach sank as I approached the bottom of the stairs. What had I just gotten myself into?

I came to the door, sweaty and weak from all my attempted reading. Fayazi and her engraver studied me with a look of faint disgust upon their faces.

“Are you all right?” said Fayazi. “Or did you actually stumble across any contagion up there?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said hoarsely. “Now—the walls, ma’am?”

Her cold amethyst gaze searched my face. “Yes,” she said. “Follow, and we shall take you.”

I did so, treading along after the axiom and the engraver—but Fayazi walked behind me, and whenever I glanced over my shoulder, she was watching me very closely.

---

—

WE EXITED ONTO the back grounds of the estate, where a wide patio of white stone awaited us. Though I felt weak, I was again stunned by the sights: here huge bright-orange-leafed trees stretched high overhead, shimmering like they were aflame, and all along the edge of the patio stood enormous slender, curved sculptures of pale green. They were nearly forty span high, almost taller than the house—but then I felt a fluttering in my eyes, and I recognized them. I had seen these once, on the Plains of the Titan’s Path.

“These are…bones, again,” I said quietly. “Ribs.”

“Correct,” said Fayazi. “From a little one. Too hard to move the bigger bits these days—at least over land. Tell me—what do you expect to find at my walls, Signum?”

My eye lingered on the curling arrangement of gleaming ribs. A gruesome sight, I felt. “I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “It may be the poisoner has a preference—they prepare early and come early. Last time they communicated to the staff at your household by throwing a yellow ball over the walls.” I gazed at the walls in the distance. “That likely won’t be the case here, given how tall the ones here are…But walls come first in their mind, perhaps.”

“Fascinating,” she said. She waved a hand to her trailing retinue of servants. “That will take some time, though. You must partake of some refreshments before you examine them, Signum.”

A servant strode forward to me, a wide copper plate in her hand. Placed upon it was an assortment of candied fruits, nuts, and dried flesh that had been cunningly spiraled through some artful butchery I’d never seen before.

My stomach reacted instantly to the sight. I had not eaten in hours, and desperately desired to taste these treasures. But I remembered what Ana had told me: take nothing, eat nothing, drink nothing.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” I said. I bowed. “I appreciate the effort. But I will not partake.”

Fayazi surveyed me coldly. “It is rude to refuse. Are you aware of this?”

“It is rude for me to be here,” I said. “My entire presence is rudeness. I can only appreciate your goodwill and apologize.”

She looked at me a moment longer; and for a moment I thought I saw a strange expression steal over her face: something akin to pure, mad terror. She glanced sidelong at her two Sublimes, who stood behind her, watching me.

Fayazi Haza, I realized, was very frightened of something. And I did not think it was me.

Yet then the expression faded, and Fayazi laughed, a high sound like pewter bells tinkling. “If you’re sure…I do think you’ll need your energy later. Go off, then, and do your spying about, Signum. I will be most curious to see what you will find.”

I bowed again and strode off toward the walls, but her words weighed upon me. Something was wrong with Fayazi Haza, I was sure. But what, I could not yet tell.