Page 91 of The Tainted Cup

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 openedit.

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 ithad punched up, cracking through the very ceiling.

Fayazi’s voice floated in through the open door: “We cannot remove it. It has wound its way into the very fabric of the house. To remove it would mean completely demolishing the room.”

I asked her how it all happened, and standing at the door she gave me the full account: her father had been sleeping peacefully during the early morning of the seventh of the month; yet then, just before sunrise, he’d awoken and begun calling for help, saying he was in tremendous pain. His attendants had arrived just in time to witness the inevitable carnage: a trembling column of greenery erupting from just below his left collarbone, growing until the man himself was eaten alive. It was just as Commander Blas had died, then.

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 MEdown 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 ashouses—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 isstilltainted, 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?”