I snuffed at the mint vial and glanced around the room, engraving it within my memory. Books and silks and tapestries and paintings were all about me—but so were many casks and barrels of wine, and many silver ewers. One of them glittered at me, encrusted with emeralds and emblazoned with the Haza symbol: a single feather standing tall between two trees.
I returned to the door. Fayazi gazed back at me. “Have you found anything, Signum?” she asked.
“I’ve seen many things, ma’am,” I said, “but I don’t know yet if any are significant.”
Something in her face twitched strangely. “He didn’t ask for me, you know.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When he died. When he was in pain. He rang for his servants, but…he did not call for me. I had no idea it’d even happened, until I awoke. They all let me sleep, untroubled, and I awoke to this. Perhaps…perhaps it’s all still a bad dream.”
The axiom reached out and took Fayazi’s arm. “Do not speak so, mistress,” she said. “He was unwell.” She shot me a glare as if I’d provoked these comments. “You can take no lessons from such a death, mistress.”
Fayazi nodded, her face smoothing out and returning to its blank, unreadable state. “What next, Signum?” she asked.
“Show me where he bathed, please,” I said.
* * *
—
THEY TOOK ME down the hall and out onto a parapet of the main building, where a tall, white bathing house awaited us. I studied it as we approached, eyeing the thick shootstraw pipes running down the main building’s walls, which brought water in from somewhere above. A tank mounted on the roof, I guessed.
But most notably, the entire bathing house appeared to be built of fernpaper panels. More than twenty of them, by my count. And all white and pure as snow.
Fayazi’s guards opened the door to the bathing house, and I entered. The space within was dominated by a complex bathing apparatus built of brass and bronze pipes. The hot water was fed in from above, I reckoned, and then distributed into a circular set of tall spigots that were accompanied by a small crank. When one turned it, the apparatus would feed water up through the spigots to rain down upon the huge circular, white-tiled tub about them.
“The steam room, he called it,” said Fayazi, standing at the door. “It was what soothed his joints. They had many grafts to help him with his age—applied through an awful process, inserted into the bones of his thighs—but he always said hot water helped most.”
I touched one of the bronze handles, thinking.
“We considered acquiring some of the more extreme vitality suffusions from the Empire, you know,” Fayazi continued behind me. “The ones used by the imperial conzulates, for example. But the side effects seemed unwelcome.” She watched me. “Are you familiar with the conzulates, Signum?”
I knew of conzulates—they were the only rank higher than prificto, and essentially directed the Iyalets—but I knew nothing of their nature. I shook my head.
“Conzulates never age, and never stop growing,” said Fayazi quietly. “They grow and grow and grow. Some get to be about as big as houses—and just about as mobile—before they’re released from their service and given the sword. When taking that into consideration, steam seemed a much more preferable choice…” She paused. “You don’t think the air in here is still tainted, do you?”
I ignored her and walked around the tub, noticing how the edge had been stained here and there with rings of red and yellow. Wine, I supposed, from many cups or casks or ewers placed there during long baths. I traced one ring with my finger.
“Well?” demanded Fayazi. “Do you?”
I walked to the far wall and stooped and studied the lining between the fernpaper panels. The seam was filled with a dark paste—still soft.
“It likely would be dangerous in here still,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at her. “Unless the air had been vented out, taking the spores with it.”
Fayazi was silent at that.
“Were the fernpaper panels in here replaced, ma’am?” I asked.
“No,” she said simply. “Not recently, to my knowledge.”
“Are you sure? This seam is soft and new, and removing any panels would allow the air to circulate.”
“The lady has spoken her mind,” said the axiom sharply. “And she said no. You know more of this contagion than we do. How should we comprehend its behaviors?”