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:
Llit?a ?an yar?aaq?u urkuquna ?an?ana yun?ay?niyuq 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:
Alti?ti yar?aaq?u urkuquna t’iqra?kan?kiaq?u 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.