CHAPTER 29
I WALKED THE GROUNDS of the Haza estate as the afternoon shifted into early evening, snuffing at my vial. I was trailed all the while by Fayazi’s guards, who followed me like I was some imprisoned gentryman wandering his enclosure, but I ignored them as I studied the high fretvine walls.
The walls were enormous, nearly as high as the house. The idea of anyone trying to climb them or throw anything over was preposterous. The only thing I found of interest was the small stream that ran across the property, entering at the western wall and exiting at the east. I came to where it passed through the western walls first, and found it was protected by a sluice gate: a complex construction of steel and stone that slid up and down in the walls on huge metal tracks. The bottom half of the gate was woven steel, permitting the river water to run through. I crouched and peered at it, studying how the bottom of the gate sank into the muddy riverbed.
I looked over my shoulder at the closest guard trailing at me. He stood atop a small knoll, scowling in my direction.
I whistled at him and waved. “Hey!” I said.
His scowl deepened.
“I’ve got a question for you.”
He didn’t move.
“You can stand there and watch me whistle some more,” I said, “or you can just come over.”
He glared at me for a moment, then stomped over, careful not to get his fine boots in the water. “What?”
“What’s this gate for?” I asked.
“For when the river floods after storms, of course,” he said.
“Does it always stay like this?”
“No. They raise and set the gates to let the water through, then lower them when the flood’s done.”
I looked up at the massive sluice gate. “How do they lift it, though?”
“There’s a pulley at the top. They run a rope through it, fasten it to a slothik, and have it haul the gate up.”
“And when’s the last time they had to lift it?”
“How am I supposed to know?” he snapped at me. “Weeks, maybe months. Are you done?”
“No,” I said. I turned and walked away eastward, and he swore quietly as he followed.
—
IT WAS NEAR dark when I got to the eastern sluice gate. It was almost exactly like the first, except its riverbed was rockier, the stones poking through the mud like the backs of beetles sleeping in the soil.
Yet a few seemed different: the stones had been overturned, their stained, muddied sides facing up.
“Hum,” I said quietly.
I looked in the direction of the house, thinking. Then I walked in a straight line from the eastern sluice gate, checking the landscape to my left and right for sign of any disturbance.
Then I spotted something: an oval of yellowed grass, there below one of the pale trees.
I walked to it, knelt, and studied it. It was a rounded, oblong patch of dying grass, about five span long, nearly as long as a person was tall. I poked at its center, wriggled my fingers into its soil, and felt something hard below. Then I poked at the edges, found the edge of the hard surface, grabbed it, and pulled it up.
It proved to be an oval piece of stonewood that the turf had simply been placed atop. The sod sloughed off of it like dead skin as I pulled it away. Below was a shallow hole in the ground about five span long and two span deep, yet the soil at the bottom had been pressed flat. I felt the edges, my fingers probing the earth, but I could find nothing here except the soil.
Yet something, once, had surely been hidden here. One wouldn’t go to the trouble of making such a length of wood and mounting soil on it for nothing.
The guards rushed up beside me and stared into the hole. “What’s that?” demanded one.
I said, “Looks like a hole.”
“How’d you find that?” he said.
“I was walking around,” I said, “and used my eyes to see it.”
They cursed and walked away. I wondered if Ana’s insolence was rubbing off on me.
I sat back on the grass, gazing into the hole. I felt something poking me in my coat pocket, and reached in and found the remnants of the shootstraw pipe I’d shared with Captain Strovi.
I turned it over in my hand. How long ago that felt now. I stuck it in my teeth and chewed on it, my mouth flooded with the tingling, numbing warmth of the tobacco. For some reason the taste helped me think.
I was unsure what to make of all this. My study of the rookery had been just short of a total failure. My tour of the walls had produced only a few stones overturned at the sluice gate, and this odd hidden hole here, but nothing else. I still had no idea how the killer—this Jolgalgan, I still assumed—had brought the contagion in, nor did I understand how she had navigated the dark servants’ passageways without being found. Nor could I comprehend how the dappleglass in the water tank had managed to kill ten Engineers nearly a week later. Nor did I even know exactly what in hell the ten dead Engineers had been doing at the halls of the Hazas, as Fayazi steadfastly denied they’d ever been here at all.
But the light was dying in the sky now, and I did not wish to stay at this place any longer. The darker it grew in the lands of the Hazas, the more vulnerable I felt.
“Take me back, please,” I said to the guards.
—
WE MADE OUR way back through the queerly manicured forest in the half dark, me chewing on the shootstraw pipe the whole way. Its tip was nearly dissolved now, but it was the only comfort in this strange place, which grew even stranger as night came on, the smooth, rolling hills cheeping with creatures whose sounds I did not recognize.
Yet as we approached the house, Fayazi’s engraver crossed the lawn, stopped the guard leading me, and whispered to him. After a quick, furtive discussion, the guard redirected me toward the western side.
“That way,” he said, pointing with one thick hand toward the back of the house.
“I thought I was to leave,” I said.
“Go that way,” he said again.
“What’s that way?”
“The lady wishes to speak to you once more,” explained the engraver. “In more pleasant environs.”
I glared at him, but relented, and walked on, the engraver following behind me.
We walked nearly the perimeter of the halls, the trees about us dancing with glimmering mai-lanterns. Eventually we came to a large ballroom of sorts, built into the back of the house, with small round windows all shuttered, though their cracks shone with golden light.
I heard a voice within the ballroom—slightly raised, as if in argument. I slowed my pace, trying to listen.
It was Fayazi Haza’s voice, shrill and angry. She was arguing with someone, but whoever it was spoke so quietly I could not hear them respond. For a good while I could barely comprehend Fayazi; but then I came to one shutter that stood slightly ajar, and I heard her voice leaking through.
I plucked a vial from my satchel—one I had not used, smelling of lavender—and surreptitiously dropped it in the grass.
I stopped walking and turned about, feigning confusion. “I dropped something, sir,” I said to the engraver. “My vial. It was right here in my satchel…”
He huffed for a moment, then searched the dark grass with me. My search brought me closer to the open shutter; and once I was below it, I paused to listen. Though I could hear Fayazi, the person she was speaking with was still so quiet I could not make them out.
“…do any of this if you tell me nothing,” Fayazi was saying. “A third? Third what? What are they to find? What do they seek?…Oh, you keep saying that! I did not ask for any of this, you know. You don’t understand what it was like, being here. If he wished me to lead, he would have given me some line. Yet here I stay, tied up like a mad dog…”
The engraver’s hand flashed out above me, snapping the shutter closed. He glared down at me, then held out my vial. “I found this,” he said coldly. “Kindly buckle your bag tighter.”
I bowed to him, took the vial, then followed him on about the edge of the house. The voices within, I noticed, had gone silent.
He led me to a door in the back of the house, then opened it and waited for me. He stayed behind as I entered into a long, low, elegant chamber, lit by mai-fruit trees in bronze pots standing here and there. A small table sat in the center of the room, bedecked with food, and on one side sat Fayazi Haza, dining and sipping from a silver goblet of wine. She had changed clothes: whereas before her form had been mostly obscured by her robes, she now wore a dress that tied around her neck, revealing her pale arms and shoulders. Her very image seemed to bend the light about her, making her appear gauzy and surreal.
She looked up at me, and gave me a small, sad smile, and said, “How went the walls, Signum?”
I hesitated, liking this none at all. I glanced around. The room seemed empty except for her guards. I wondered who she’d been talking to.
The guard behind me grew close, ushering me forward. I relented and approached. Fayazi seemed to grow lovelier with each step, until the very air felt like it shimmered about her.
“Well?” she asked. “What did you find at the walls?”
I took the shootstraw pipe out of my mouth, looked down at my feet, and tried to keep my head about me. “Didn’t find much, ma’am,” I said. “Sorry to say.”
“Yet I’m told,” she said, “you tarried at our river gates. Did you find something there?”
“I found water, ma’am,” I said, “and rocks, and not much else.”
A fluttering of her eyes. Yet it felt queerly affected now, like a stage actor playing a role not much rehearsed. Something was wrong.
“And you discovered a hole of some kind,” she said. “A hidden one. One some interloper must have dug in the grounds. Is that correct?”
“Seems it was hidden. But I don’t know who made it. Can’t see sense in it yet. I will have to report back first.”
I held her gaze—for what I’d said was true, though it was not the whole truth. Finally she took a dainty bite of flesh from the tines of her fork. “Sit. And eat.”
“Apologies, ma’am, but I must get back to Talagr—”
“Don’t be silly. Sit. And eat.”
I glanced around once more and saw that the engraver and the axiom were now sitting in chairs along the wall. Both watched me jealously, as if offended their mistress would deign to give me any attention. I wondered where they had come from—had my senses been so muddled by Fayazi’s augmentations that I had not noticed them enter?
I sat at the table, but I decided I would not eat. I couldn’t even identify all the food in front of me, neither the fruits nor the flesh, though my belly ached with hunger and it all smelled enchanting. I put my pipe back in my mouth and chewed on it, and the taste of the tobacco dulled my hunger.
Fayazi took a wing of some roasted fowl and delicately sawed off a strip of dark meat. “Do you know,” she said, “I think you’re going to find this killer, Signum Kol. I really do.”
I said nothing.
“None of my other people here put anything together so quickly,” she said. “None of them thought to check the servants’ passageways.” She shot a glare at her Sublimes. “You have a keen mind. A pity, I think, to spend it on such gruesome matters as this. And it’s a pity you can view only our halls here in Talagray.”
I said nothing.
She drank deeply from her wine. Her lips were crimson now, her teeth a dull purple. “At our halls in the first ring, you know,” she said, “we have a whole skeleton of a titan. It hangs in our entryway, squatting over our visitors as they pass through our thresholds. Have you ever seen one, Signum Kol?”
“I’ve seen a carcass at a distance, ma’am. But no more.”
“No two are alike, you know. They have different bone structures, different numbers of legs. Different colors. I have spoken much with the Apoths about them.” She leaned close. I leaned away. “Did you know that some have the faces of men? Not atop their shoulders—for most leviathans have no shoulders—but hidden away, in their underbellies. Giant visages peering out at the world with wide, blind eyes, their mouths working silently and madly. Like some accidental growth. The Apoths cannot explain it. No one can. Nor does anyone know where the leviathans truly come from, or why they come ashore. Before the Empire they used to wander inland, rampaging here and there in the wet season, before laying down their bodies to rot in the Valley of the Khanum, warping all that grew around them…” She set down her goblet, then threaded her ivory fingers like a bridge and rested her sharp chin atop their knuckles. A practiced gesture, I thought—yet it worked, for I found it lovely. “And perhaps that’s all they wish to do these days. Perhaps we should let them. Throw down the walls and let them go a-wandering…”
She watched me closely. I said nothing.
“It may happen anyway,” she said softly. “They grow bigger and bigger every year. Each wet season, the Empire must remake the walls, and design new bombards, and come up with new grafts and suffusions to hold them back. And each year, we barely scrape by. And though no one says it, the Engineers are quietly, quietly remaking the third-ring walls of the Empire, to the west. For if the sea walls fall, and Talagray and the east fail, then, well…Then the third-ring walls will become the new sea walls, won’t they?” She lifted her head off her hands and took another sip of wine. “And when that happens…Why, it would be a good thing to have a place to land within the inner rings of the Empire. To have friends in more fertile lands. For then all the Iyalets shall be as motes upon the wind, and there shall be no order.”
She waited for me to say something, but I could think of nothing to say to this.
“Does that make sense to you, Signum?” she asked.
“It does, ma’am,” I said. For it did, at least, make sense—a cynical sense, but sense it was.
“Then why don’t you tell me,” she said, slowly and carefully, “what your immunis has found out thus far. Tell me how the investigation goes. For we are friends, are we not?”
I stared into her violet eyes. Took in the way her silver hair piled on her snowy shoulders. How heady the air was here, how strange. All felt perfumed, yet I could smell no scent but the food.
I tore my gaze away and glanced at the two Sublimes, watching me like I was a wounded hind on their hunting lands. “Afraid I can’t do that, ma’am,” I said.
“Why not?” asked Fayazi.
“It’s against policy to discuss investigations with anyone uninvolved, ma’am.”
“But are we not friends, Signum Kol?”
I did not answer.
Something went cold in her gaze then: she had made up her mind about something. She held up a finger and bent it, but the meaning of this gesture was baffling to me.
“You are Iyalet for the money, yes?” she asked.
I said nothing.
“You became a Sublime to support your family,” she said. “To move them farther into the Empire, surely. That’s why so many serve. Yet how many months has it been since you’ve seen them? How long since you’ve gotten a letter from them? Do they even know how you suffer so? What you’ve done? What you’ve become?”
I felt my pulse quicken in my ears. My breath was suddenly hot and quick. I wasn’t sure why, but everything felt chilly and tremulous, like I was suffering a fever.
I glanced at the Sublimes, who still watched me. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. Something was wrong. I wondered if I’d been poisoned, yet I knew I had not tasted of her table.
“There is a path for you,” Fayazi said, “that would allow you to walk home, free and unburdened, with all the fortune to save them. I could show you that path. And you would be free to walk it. But in the moment—right now—are you not owed a respite from all this?”
“A…a respite?” I said. My voice was barely a whisper.
“Yes,” said Fayazi. She smiled. Her face was so sympathetic, so understanding. “You who have suffered indignity after indignity…are you not owed the joys of the Empire, too? And there are joys, Kol. This I know.”
I felt a hot flush in my belly. I was gripping the sides of the table. Sweat was pouring down my temples. Then a throb in my loins, a deep, painful ache, and suddenly I was so aroused it pained me.
I tore my eyes away from Fayazi, ashamed and bewildered.
Then I noticed the shadow on the floor and realized someone stood behind me. I turned to look at them.
It was a girl—or so she seemed to my eyes—watching me with a sad gaze. She was about my age, well-kept and pretty, barefoot with dark eyes and short hair. She wore a silken red scarf about her neck and a red dress hanging from her shoulders; yet it was little more than two sheets of silk cloth, one covering her front and one covering her back, revealing the bare edge of her hip and her breast.
And I desired her. Inexplicably, suddenly, passionately. She was not as beautiful as Fayazi, not so carefully manicured, but there was something in her bearing, her gaze, in her mere presence that made her so alluring to me that I almost felt I might die.
Then I noticed something strange: a swelling at the girl’s armpit—a slight, purple-hued nodule from an alteration.
I looked into her face and saw the same violent tint at the corner of her jawline, just above her scarf.
I then knew what she was: a plaizaier, a court dancer. A being pheromonally altered for the delights of others. Ana had mentioned such a thing to me, but I had never thought I’d meet one in all my life.
My body ached for her. I wanted nothing more than to grab her, to taste her, to take her, to know every fold and bend of her. Yet my teeth bit down on the shootstraw pipe in my mouth, and I swallowed, flooding my throat with the hot tickle of tobacco; and then, as if I was pulling my head free of a spider’s web, I turned back to face Fayazi.
“I just,” I said quietly, “wish to go, ma’am.”
“Does she not please you?” asked Fayazi. “We have others. Male, if you wish.”
I said nothing. The whole of my body seemed to be boiling over with hot blood.
“What a world it is, Signum,” said Fayazi, “where you are forced to change yourself, break yourself, all for a little scrap of money.” She leaned forward once more. The smell of her was intoxicating. “Are you not owed respite from this?”
The shadow of the court dancer hung on my shoulder like a leaden weight.
“There can be no wrongdoing,” Fayazi said, “in an Empire so broken.”
“I just wish to go,” I said again.
Fayazi gestured to the plaizaier, who walked closer to me. I turned my face away.
“You were wrong, you know,” Fayazi said. “I am a friend to many, Dinios Kol. But never have I met someone so deserving of my friendship as you.”
The plaizaier began to use the front of her dress as a fan, raising it and rippling it toward me, washing me in her scent. A strangely sweet musk, I noticed, redolent of oranje-leaf and mulling spice. My heart was racing, and my loins ached so much I wished to scream.
“Have you found something?” demanded Fayazi suddenly. She stood. “Has Dolabra found something?”
I swallowed. I could see the plaizaier raising the front of her dress and fanning it again; and there, amid the flicker of red, a glimpse of her body, and a winking tuft of pubic thatch.
I tried to keep my eyes on Fayazi. That was when I noticed an odd smudge of white on the side of the gentrywoman’s dress, almost like paint.
Trembling, I looked at Fayazi’s bare arm. Was that paint I spied there? And beneath it, the dark cloud of a bruise—perhaps in the shape of fingertips? Even in that mad moment, I struggled to make note of it.
“What does your immunis know of my father?” said Fayazi, louder. “What has he done?”
Suddenly the axiom was beside her. “Calm, mistress,” she hissed. “Calm…”
“What does she know about him and Taqtasa Blas?” Fayazi demanded.
All dissolved to chaos then. I ignored it all and bit down on the pipe, furious and confused, incensed to be denied control over my own senses.
And then I felt it—a fluttering in my eyes as a memory awoke.
I knew that smell: oranje-leaf and spice. I had smelled it on the scarf of the dead Princeps Misik Jilki, in the Engineering quarters, the day after I’d first come to Talagray.
And I had smelled it in Daretana, too: from Commander Blas’s oil pot.
All three smells were exactly the same.
I gritted my teeth and turned my face to Fayazi Haza. “Y-you l-l-lied to m-me,” I said, forcing the words through my clenched mouth.
A furrow in Fayazi’s smooth brow. “What?”
“S-Signum M-M-Misik Jilki,” I said. “She was h-here. Sm-melled like…like this. I know. Oranje-leaf and s-spice. After she’d been t-touched by the same oils and p-perfume as your…your court dancers here.” I grinned madly. “She f-felt their skin. Knew their flesh. Maybe in…in this same r-room. Didn’t she? Her along w-with…all the others.”
The axiom retreated to the walls, dark eyes watching warily like I’d drawn steel.
“What are you talking about?” spat Fayazi.
“D-did they smell j-just like Commander Blas?” I leaned forward. “For he had a taste f-for the aroma, too, didn’t he? He c-came to like it. That’s wh-why he had a…p-pot of his own.”
Fayazi stared at me, stunned.
“You lied to m-me,” I whispered. “They c-came here. Frolicked with y-your court dancers. And th-then they were y-yours. But…b-but wh-what did you get from them, ma’am? What did you get from all those d-dead Engineers?”
Fayazi looked to her Sublimes. When they said nothing, she flicked a hand at her court dancer, who withdrew to the shadows of the room. Then she snapped: “Get him out of here. Get him out of here and get him gone!”
Then I was ripped backward out of my seat.
—
MY HEAD SPUN as the two guards marched me through the darkness of the landscape outside. I had never been handled by a person altered for strength, but the second the guards touched me I was like a small child struggling against a parent, my limbs pinned back and my flailing quickly and effortlessly contained. My elbow screamed in pain as one of them bent my arm too far. I cried out, telling them to release me, but they ignored it.
Finally we came to the landing under the claw of the leviathan, and the guards released me. “Down!” one snarled at me. “Down the stairs and into the carriage, damn you!”
I shambled down the steps and crawled into the back of a waiting carriage. The guard slammed it behind me and said to the driver, “Dump him off at the gates, but don’t take him any farther.” Then the carriage started forward, and we were off.
I peered back at the halls of the Hazas as we took off down the estate road, my head still spinning. Yet I saw someone had come to the top of the steps, and now stood below the massive leviathan’s claw: a silvery figure, white and ghostly, looking down on me.
I locked eyes with Fayazi Haza. She seemed utterly transformed in that moment, her eyes wide and terrified and desperate in the dark, like she was a prisoner I was abandoning in her cell. Then her Sublimes ran to her, and her axiom took her by the arm once more, pulling her back, and she was lost in the darkness.
The gates of the Hazas opened, the carriage slid to a stop, and then the door fell open. “Out!” barked the driver.
I did as he bade, but as I stepped down I saw there was a small crowd of people waiting for me: Legionnaires, two of them clutching mai-lanterns; and there, at their front, stood Captain Miljin.
“Easy, boy,” he said. He took me by the shoulder. “Are you all right? Are you whole?”