The Tainted Cup, page 28
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?”
CHAPTER 30
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ANA AND MILJIN LISTENED grimly in her chambers as I recounted what I’d seen in the halls of the Hazas. I sniffed at my vial of mint aroma and went through every detail, sparing nothing, reciting all I’d seen from the moment I’d stepped into their carriage—except for my fumbling attempt to review the Hazas’ correspondence in their rookery. That I would leave for last.
When I finished we sat in silence in the arbitration chambers of the Iudex tower. The only sound was the creak and sigh as the building flexed about us in the night breeze.
“You did well, boy,” said Ana quietly. “Well to look and see as you did…And well to resist Fayazi’s temptations.” She shook her head, disgusted. “What a tool cynicism is to the corrupt, claiming the whole of the creation is broken and fraudulent, and thus we are all excused to indulge in whatever sins we wish—for what’s a little more unfairness, in this unfair world? Wise you were, Din, to shut your ears to it.” She went still for a moment, then said, “Now. Repeat Fayazi Haza’s first set of questions for me, please.”
I took a breath, then echoed: “Have you found something? Has Dolabra found something? Anything?”
“I see…And the second set of questions?”
Again, I echoed: “What does your immunis know of my father? What has he done? What does she know about him and Taqtasa Blas?”
“Yes…and that moment, before you went to see the walls—she offered you food, but you did not take it,” said Ana. “Correct? And then she…”
I nodded. “She looked terrified. Frightened of something, like she’d done something wrong. But I didn’t know what, ma’am. Yet she looked the same when I saw her last, when she came to stand at the top of the stairs.”
Ana was silent again for a long, long time. Then she said simply, “And the bit you overheard her saying, Din? To her mysterious visitor, before she tried to tempt you?”
I summoned up some more energy and echoed those as well, mimicking Fayazi’s snide cadence: “…do any of this if you tell me nothing. 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…”
Miljin chuckled morosely. “Your impression of that dreadful woman, boy, is quite something…”
“Hm,” said Ana. Again her fingers flittered in the folds of her dress. “A third…a third what? Third murder? A third poisoner, or poisoning? We do not yet know enough to imagine. But one thing grows apparent…I don’t think Fayazi Haza knows, either.”
I sat there limply, too exhausted to react. But Miljin’s brows furrowed until they nearly eclipsed his eyes. “She doesn’t know…what?” he said.
“Apparently anything!” said Ana. “While it’d be convenient for her to be the spider at the center of this web, I actually don’t think Fayazi Haza knows a goddamn thing about what went on between her father and Blas. She might not know any more than we do, in fact.”
“Truly, ma’am?” he said. “That seems preposterous. I mean—she’s a Haza!”
“She’s the daughter of the third prime son of the lineage,” said Ana. “Which is not, genealogically speaking, an elite leadership position within the clan. And she’s been stuck out here on the Outer Rim, standing in the back rooms while her father ran the show—and it seems he kept many secrets from her. She now suspects we have figured out those secrets, but we have not. Not yet, at least. It’s very strange. She sounds so clumsy, so erratic…Like she was told to find things out, but was not told enough to comprehend what she found.” She chewed on her lip for a moment. “I think Fayazi is a puppet.”
“For who?” said Miljin.
“Why, the rest of her family, of course.”
“The rest of the Hazas?” asked Miljin. “Aren’t they one and the same?”
“Oh, no. The Hazas are a far bigger operation than what we see here in Talagray—and Fayazi is in a rather tough spot within that operation. Her father died, and she was suddenly put into power in his place. However, I suspect she quickly came to realize that her father was running secret little schemes for the family, ones she hadn’t been privy to—and, worse still, letters then came pouring in from the family proper, deeper in the Empire. Orders. Directives. Commands. Commands that probably told her nothing, other than what to do, not to ask questions…and to look for something here in the canton. Something important that they’re worried we’ve found. Perhaps this mysterious third. Fayazi is now probably sweating under all those silvery robes—and worried that if this truly goes south, it’ll be she who hangs, and none of her illustrious kin.”
