The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)(81)

“Don’t say such things, ma’am,” whispered her axiom. “It is not as bad as all that.”

Fayazi shuddered, as if the woman’s words disturbed her. Yet then the emotion was swallowed in her face, and she became as cold and beautiful as polished silver once again.

“My father knew what the Empire was,” said Fayazi quietly. “He knew it very well.” Then she sat forward. “We are here.”





CHAPTER 27


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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.