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.”