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WE EXITED THE CARRIAGE into the bright midday sun. Tall, pale trees lined the road and the hills, their white branches shivering as if listening to a secret. The grass below them was as dark as sable, and only when the rare blades of warm sunlight pierced the canopies and fell upon the tussocks did I see that the grass was a deep, dark green. The Haza lands stretched to the east and west about me, though this tapestry of bucolic beauty ended at a border of dark ribbon: the enclosure’s tall fretvine walls, penning us in.
I paused as I looked around, struck by the sight. It was the most beautiful place I’d seen in all the Empire. Even the breeze smelled sweeter here. It wasn’t until the guards helped Fayazi exit the carriage, and I caught a glimpse of her bone-white ankle, that I reflected that every blade of grass within this cloistered world might be as altered as its mistress.
“Is it to your liking, Signum?” asked Fayazi.
“It is wonderful, ma’am,” I said, and meant it. “How big are the grounds, if I may ask?”
I looked to her axiom, expecting her prompt calculations; but it was the engraver who answered. “It is twenty-three square leagues,” he said quickly, his eyes shivering in their sockets.
“And yet,” Fayazi said, “this land is worth but a fraction of our farmlands in the inner rings. A strange thing, no?”
We advanced up the main stone stairway, the house hanging before us on the hill like a storm cloud. It was tall and rambling, a complex place with ribs of white columns and huge expanses of glimmering stained glass. Balconies at every level. Copper drainpipes winding around the columns like tree snakes. Yet the higher walls were wrought of fernpaper.
My eye lingered on these. I wondered if any had come through Suberek’s mill.
I followed Fayazi’s coterie to the top of the stairs, but there I stopped. A sculpture hung over the front landing before us, huge and long and narrow, suspended by cables from rows of tall posts. Yet as I looked closer at it and took in its gray colorings, I realized it was not a sculpture, but a bone.
A claw. An enormous one.
“Two hundred years old, that is,” Fayazi remarked. “Cut from one of the final leviathans to freely wander the Path. They were smaller in those days.”
I stared at the claw. It was at least three times as long as I was tall. I could not imagine the size of the creature that had once borne it.
“Really,” I said. “Do you know how tall it was?”
There was an awkward beat.
“No,” Fayazi said, bored. “We do not. Now. What shall you wish to see first?”
I studied her. Eyes cold, watchful. Confident.
I thought of Ana’s one command: Get to their rookery, boy, and look about. Yet I sensed that to demand to see the Haza rookery now would raise suspicion.
I told myself—wait. Chip away at her confidence. The opportunity may arise soon enough.
I cleared my throat. “Show me where he died, please.”
* * *
—
FAYAZI’S COTERIE LED me through vast, vaulted hallways, the walls all wrought of fretvine so finely braided a Legion bombard shot might have bounced off them. Fayazi walked ahead through these yawning spaces like a pale ghost haunting some ruin, and I followed, sniffing my vial all the while. There was little sound besides the clank and rattle of her bodyguard’s armor.
The walls were covered by a long silken tapestry that ran the whole length of the building. Now and then a spear of daylight shot down from some hidden window, casting a ray upon the silken tapestry and illuminating a shimmering warrior with a spear, and a chitinous, slavering creature towering over him.
“My ancestry,” she said, waving at it. “My lineage is captured there in silk. The engraver can explain it all, if you are curious.”
I glanced about as we walked. Partially to capture it all in my memory, but partially to identify the exits and entrances of this strange space, should the worst occur.
Fayazi led me down a side passage leading to a winding stair, and there we climbed up and up, strobed by the lights from the stained glass circling about us, until we came to the fourth floor. We proceeded down another hall, but Fayazi stopped before a tall stonewood door, suddenly troubled.
“It lies there,” she said quietly. “I cannot look upon it again.”
None of her coterie offered to open the door for me. I approached, grasped the handle, and opened it.
It was dark within, but the smell of old blood was overpowering. I let my eyes adjust until I finally beheld one of the grandest rooms I’d seen in all my life: a huge, sprawling chamber piled up with treasures and fineries—and yet all seemed to fade in the presence of the twisted, towering growth protruding from the side of the room.
I walked to it carefully, yet I was now familiar with the sight of dappleglass: the curl of the roots, the thick clutches of leaves, and the tiny, sickly smells of the blooms. Like in Daretana, the shoots had both burst through the ceiling and eaten into the floor, and the wood flooring was dark and stained around it. Here and there I saw fragments of wood and clumps of dark moss. It had bloomed from old Kaygi Haza while he rested in bed, I guessed, its roots eating through the sheets and the moss and then into the flooring below; and then it had punched up, cracking through the very ceiling.
Fayazi’s voice floated in through the open door: “We cannot remove it. It has wound its way into the very fabric of the house. To remove it would mean completely demolishing the room.”
I asked her how it all happened, and standing at the door she gave me the full account: her father had been sleeping peacefully during the early morning of the seventh of the month; yet then, just before sunrise, he’d awoken and begun calling for help, saying he was in tremendous pain. His attendants had arrived just in time to witness the inevitable carnage: a trembling column of greenery erupting from just below his left collarbone, growing until the man himself was eaten alive. It was just as Commander Blas had died, then.
I snuffed at the mint vial and glanced around the room, engraving it within my memory. Books and silks and tapestries and paintings were all about me—but so were many casks and barrels of wine, and many silver ewers. One of them glittered at me, encrusted with emeralds and emblazoned with the Haza symbol: a single feather standing tall between two trees.
I returned to the door. Fayazi gazed back at me. “Have you found anything, Signum?” she asked.
“I’ve seen many things, ma’am,” I said, “but I don’t know yet if any are significant.”
Something in her face twitched strangely. “He didn’t ask for me, you know.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When he died. When he was in pain. He rang for his servants, but…he did not call for me. I had no idea it’d even happened, until I awoke. They all let me sleep, untroubled, and I awoke to this. Perhaps…perhaps it’s all still a bad dream.”
The axiom reached out and took Fayazi’s arm. “Do not speak so, mistress,” she said. “He was unwell.” She shot me a glare as if I’d provoked these comments. “You can take no lessons from such a death, mistress.”
Fayazi nodded, her face smoothing out and returning to its blank, unreadable state. “What next, Signum?” she asked.
“Show me where he bathed, please,” I said.
* * *
—
THEY TOOK ME down the hall and out onto a parapet of the main building, where a tall, white bathing house awaited us. I studied it as we approached, eyeing the thick shootstraw pipes running down the main building’s walls, which brought water in from somewhere above. A tank mounted on the roof, I guessed.