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: