I looked over my shoulder at the closest guard trailing at me. He stood atop a small knoll, scowling in my direction.
I whistled at him and waved. “Hey!” I said.
His scowl deepened.
“I’ve got a question for you.”
He didn’t move.
“You can stand there and watch me whistle some more,” I said, “or you can just come over.”
He glared at me for a moment, then stomped over, careful not to get his fine boots in the water. “What?”
“What’s this gate for?” I asked.
“For when the river floods after storms, of course,” he said.
“Does it always stay like this?”
“No. They raise and set the gates to let the water through, then lower them when the flood’s done.”
I looked up at the massive sluice gate. “How do they lift it, though?”
“There’s a pulley at the top. They run a rope through it, fasten it to a slothik, and have it haul the gate up.”
“And when’s the last time they had to lift it?”
“How am I supposed to know?” he snapped at me. “Weeks, maybe months. Are you done?”
“No,” I said. I turned and walked away eastward, and he swore quietly as he followed.
* * *
—
IT WAS NEAR dark when I got to the eastern sluice gate. It was almost exactly like the first, except its riverbed was rockier, the stones poking through the mud like the backs of beetles sleeping in the soil.
Yet a few seemed different: the stones had been overturned, their stained, muddied sides facing up.
“Hum,” I said quietly.
I looked in the direction of the house, thinking. Then I walked in a straight line from the eastern sluice gate, checking the landscape to my left and right for sign of any disturbance.
Then I spotted something: an oval of yellowed grass, there below one of the pale trees.
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.