We continued walking along the gentry road. Tall walls ran on either side of us, fencing off the gentrylands. Each one was paired with a main gate—a common construction of wood and iron—as well as a reagents gate, allowing servants to come and go at any hour. I approached these carefully, my reagents key held out. They were amazing constructions in their own right, often made of twisted roots or flowering fungi or coils of vines, all awaiting the proper key, and the proper signal.
But not the one I bore. Though we walked along the gentry road until the sun broke free of the horizon, none of the reagent gates opened to me.
“Odd to say this failure brightens my mood,” muttered Miljin. “I hope we walk this street and find naught at all.”
Then Strovi spoke, in a strangled voice: “There is one gate remaining.”
Miljin looked at him, puzzled. Then his expression gave way to horror. “Titan’s taint. I pray it isn’t…”
I saw the gate ahead. It was enormous and towering, a huge, curious, coiling root that plugged up the opening in the wall, layered with tendrils of bright yellow vines and dotted with green growths.
I approached it slowly, the Engineers’ reagents key held out before me. The vines trickled, twitched. The massive root trembled. And then, as if it were a living knot, the whole thing slowly unwound, falling away, leaving the entry clear, and through the rounded gap I glimpsed dark green hills, and there in the distance a many-gabled house that was nothing short of palatial, standing amid tall, white-trunked trees that shone in the light of the dawning sun.
How familiar it felt. Almost the same as that day in Daretana when I had gone to see Blas’s body.
My eye fell upon the bird-perch gate before the house, and the insignia painted there: a feather standing between two tall, white trees.
My eyes fluttered. I had engraved that sight within my memory mere weeks ago.
It felt the same as that day in Daretana, I realized—because in many ways it was the same.
“By hell,” muttered Strovi. “The halls of the Hazas…The Engineers were meeting there?”
“Of all the fucking places,” Miljin said grimly, “it just had to be this one.” He spat on the ground. “That damned house sees more important people than the Senate of the Sanctum. We are about to go dallying in the affairs of the mighty, friends.”
But though they seemed surprised, I found I was not. It all felt very obvious, now that I thought of it.
I recalled what Ana had said to me just after arresting Uxos: Blas was in bed with the Hazas…and the Hazas definitely have a foothold in the capital of the canton, in Talagray. If we follow this all the way, it may take us there.
“She knew,” I said.
“What?” said Strovi.
“She knew where it had happened,” I said. I turned and strode away, and the reagents gate closed behind me. “She has known all along.”
CHAPTER 23
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THE INVESTIGATION ROOM IN the Iudex tower hadn’t gotten any cleaner in the last few days. If anything, it had gotten filthier, the reek of pipe smoke overpowering, the very air quaking with the fumes of clar-tea. As I staggered back into the room it hardly felt better than the fernpaper mill, shadowy and swimming with corpse-stink.
Uhad, Nusis, and Kalista all looked up at me as I reentered. Only Ana did not, lounging in her chair with a cup of wine in her lap, her expression brimming with barely restrained satisfaction. I hoped she could feel the glare I gave her.
“Well, Signum?” sighed Uhad. “Did you find anything?” His shivering eyes danced over me, then Miljin, then Strovi, taking in our expressions. “I rather think you did…”
I bowed and said, “Would you like the whole testimony, sir?”
“Of course.”
I started speaking, summoning up each memory, each turn in the road, each gate we tried—rather slowly, since I had not anchored the experiences with a scent—until I finished my tale.
But as I finished, the atmosphere in the room changed, and the three immuni—red, blue, and purple—all reacted.
Nusis’s usual helpful smile flickered, then melted, replaced by a look so grave it was like I was reporting her own death. Uhad put his cup of tea down far too hard, spilling the steaming black fluid over Kalista’s pile of parchments. Kalista herself coughed in the middle of a puff of her pipe, then spasmed, spilling the smoking weed over the table, where it died with a hiss in the spilled tea.
Then all was still. The only sound was the drips of tea on the floor. Ana’s triumphant smirk slowly faded as well, and she swiveled her head around as the silence continued.