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.”