She saw the driveway Aktamu had described, still full of the cars he'd seen days before. Whoever had gathered recently at this house, they seemed to have taken up residence here. Above this driveway, a massive porte cochere, itself the size of a London townhouse. The wings of the house ended in rounded sandstone towers.
Everything about this place appeared to be medieval in design: its blunt volumes, its general austerity. But the sandstone was too clean and new to be from that period. The estate was one of the many Gothic revivals that had sprouted up throughout the country during the last century.
What that suggested about the inhabitants, aside from a desire to convey a bit of menace, Bektaten was not yet sure.
She commanded the cat to circle the house's perimeter, passing walls veined with manicured ivy. In the rolling grounds beyond, outlying buildings were shrouded in shadows and thickets of trees. But beyond those trees, she could just make out the shadow of a lonely, three-story stone building sitting atop a gentle slope. It looked like a smaller version of the Tower of London. She'd seen drawings of it in the Victorian guidebooks of England's great country estates. Those books referred to it as the Cage, and they described it as having been built in the Middle Ages, designed so noblewomen could peer out its upper windows and watch their men hunt stag on the slopes below.
Perhaps she would explore it later if she had the chance, but first she had to learn who lodged inside this vast house.
She looked for a perch or an open window, found only a healthy full-grown ash tree kissing one of the house's side walls.
She imagined the cat climbing, and the cat began to climb.
The first ledge offered a view down into a massive Gothic drawing room. A succession of severe, pointed arches made up the ceiling.
It was a cool night, but not so cool as to justify the inferno roaring in the marble fireplace, its mantel carved with some sort of battle scene she could not make out from this height. Tapestries covered the soaring walls; their images of stag hunts seemed to flicker in the candlelight thrown by the massive chandelier.
There was some sort of gathering in the room below. Whatever this group, it had the makings of a gay assembly but the expressions of those present were somber, serious. Focused. They were finely dressed, these people. The majority of them were pale skinned. And all of them were blue eyed. And it was that particular shade, that telltale shade. All of them, she could now safely assume, were immortals. But she did not recognize a one.
Were they fracti? Did they have any connection to Saqnos at all?
For a while, she watched them from this safe perch, and then a man she didn't recognize entered the room through one of its swinging doors, a great bundle of rolled-up papers tucked under one arm.
He called the group to attention with verbal commands alone.
He was not poised to present anything so formal as a toast. He did not even smile at those present. His deeply lined face did not seem capable of smiling, and his mane of bristly salt and pepper was parted into two wings that seemed to contain the same tense energy as the rest of him. Then he began to unroll the papers he had brought, spreading them out across a round card table in the center of the room.
The table's chairs had all been pushed back earlier. This allowed the group to close in around this new display.
And then the door swung open again. A white woman entered, blue eyed, and dressed in a flowing tea gown that matched the dark, muted colors of the room. She was trailed by a towering giant of a man in evening dress and then a more spry and significantly shorter gentleman, also in a black jacket with a white dress shirt and bow tie. Those already present stood more erect at the sudden entry of these three.
The door swung open again.
Saqnos.
Did she shake at the sight of him? Did her lips quiver?
Impossible to know these things, for she had given herself entirely over to the angel blossom's connection. And she did not want to know. She wanted only to see, to learn. To not be waylaid by the shock of her old lover, the man whose betrayal had set the course of both their destinies. Any profound emotional upset might disturb the connection between her and Bastet, and so she had no choice but to contain it. To focus. And to look for a way inside the house.
She compelled Bastet along ledge after ledge. At last, they found a half-open window, and she sent Bastet hurrying across the Oriental carpet in an opulent bedroom, across stone floors and down a grand staircase, until the voices of the people in the drawing room became gently audible.
It was not the best way for a cat trying to avoid detection while entering a room, blind and without a sense of where the people inside were standing.
But Bektaten had no choice. The door was about to swing shut behind a new arrival. She forced Bastet to race through the gap. Then she commanded her to seek out the nearest vein of shadow and slink slowly along its length while she got her bearings.
A large burgundy sofa concealed the cat, she realized, which was why the man speaking had not missed even a word.
A few careful steps later, the cat was peering around the sofa's edge.
The man who'd brought the papers was leading this presentation. He reminded her of an ancient Roman she had once taken as a lover. Killed in battle. And she had not cared much for him after a while because he had so often made clear that it was the darkness of her skin that aroused him and little else. But it was a rare thing for an immortal to find a lover who could match one's appetite, and so she had made use of him for as long as she could stand his cooing talk about her ebony beauty. Fate had done away with him in the end, as it had so many she had loved and lain with, sending her back to her cherished immortals.
To dwell on memories of him now was a distraction and nothing else; a distraction from another man, actually present in the room, whose countenance inspired in her a storm of feelings she feared she would not be able to control.
Saqnos.
He was the only one seated. The group had parted, giving him a line of sight to the round table and the man addressing them all in a tone best described as brittle.
"And here is the Roman temple, built in the nineteenth century by the father of the present Earl of Rutherford. It's a rather small structure. But it will suit our purposes perfectly as it sits atop an old underground tunnel dating back to some earlier civil war. Today there is a wooden trapdoor in the temple floor, providing access to the tunnel. It is covered with the thinnest of stone tiles, yet undetectable. A Roman statue stands beside it. This temple stands on the western lawn. And if the accounts we've managed to collect from their friends are accurate, the house and the western lawn are the only two places where the Savarells have chosen to entertain in the past. And so--"