A Betrayal in Winter

A Betrayal in Winter

To Kat and Scarlet

This book and this series would not be as good if I hadn't had the help

of Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass, Yvonne Coates, Sally Gwylan,

Emily Mah-Tippets, S. M. Stirling, Terry England, Ian "I regellis, Sage

Walker, and the other members of the New Mexico Critical Mass Workshop.

I also owe debts of gratitude to Shawna McCarthy and Danny Baror for

their enthusiasm and faith in the project, to James Frenkel for his

unstinting support and uncanny ability to take a decent manuscript and

make it better, and to 'lbm Doherty and the staff at Tor for their

kindness and support of a new author.

And I am especially indebted to Paul Park, who told me to write what I fear.

""]'here's a problem at the mines," his wife said. "One of your

treadmill pumps."

Biitrah Machi, the eldest son of the Khai Machi and a man of fortyfive

summers, groaned and opened his eyes. The sun, new-risen, set the

paper-thin stone of the bedchamber windows glowing. Iliarni sat beside him.

"I've had the boy set out a good thick robe and your seal hoots," she

said, carrying on her thought, "and sent him for tea and bread."

Biitrah sat up, pulling the blankets off and rising naked with a grunt.

A hundred things came to his half-sleeping mind. It'r a pump-the

engineers can fix it or Bread an,-1 tea? Ain I a prisoner? or Take that

robe off, dove-let's have the mines care for themselves fora morning.

But he said what he always did, what he knew she expected of him.

"No time. I'll cat once I'm there."

"Take care," she said. "I don't want to hear that one of your brothers

has finally killed you."

"When the time comes, I don't think they'll come after me with a

treadmill pump."

Still, he made a point to kiss her before he walked to his dressing

chamber, allowed the servants to array him in a robe of gray and violet,

stepped into the sealskin boots, and went out to meet the bearer of the

had tidings.

"It's the I)aikani mine, most high," the man said, taking a pose of

apology formal enough for a temple. "It failed in the night. They say

the lower passages are already half a man high with water."

Biitrah cursed, but took a pose of thanks all the same. Together, they

walked through the wide main hall of the Second Palace. The caves

shouldn't have been filling so quickly, even with a failed pump. Some

thing else had gone wrong. He tried to picture the shape of the Daikani

mines, but the excavations in the mountains and plains around Machi were

numbered in the dozens, and the details blurred. Perhaps four

ventilation shafts. Perhaps six. He would have to go and see.

His private guard stood ready, bent in poses of obeisance, as he came

out into the street. Ten men in ceremonial mail that for all its glitter

would turn a knife. Ceremonial swords and daggers honed sharp enough to

shave with. Each of his two brothers had a similar company, with a

similar purpose. And the time would come, he supposed, that it would

descend to that. But not today. Not yet. He had a pump to fix.

He stepped into the waiting chair, and four porters came out. As they

lifted him to their shoulders, he called out to the messenger.

"Follow close," he said, his hands flowing into a pose of command with

the ease of long practice. "I want to hear everything you know before we

get there."

They moved quickly through the grounds of the palaces-the famed towers

rising above them like forest trees above rabbits-and into the

black-cobbled streets of Machi. Servants and slaves took abject poses as

Biitrah passed. The few members of the utkhaiem awake and in the city

streets took less extreme stances, each appropriate to the difference in

rank between themselves and the man who might one day renounce his name

and become the Khai Machi.

Biitrah hardly noticed. His mind turned instead upon his passionthe

machinery of mining: water pumps and ore graves and hauling winches. He

guessed that they would reach the low town at the mouth of the mine

before the fast sun of early spring had moved the width of two hands.

They took the south road, the mountains behind them. They crossed the

sinuous stone bridge over the Tidat, the water below them still smelling

of its mother glacier. The plain spread before them, farmsteads and low

towns and meadows green with new wheat. Trees were already pushing forth

new growth. It wouldn't be many weeks before the lush spring took root,

grabbing at the daylight that the winter stole away. The messenger told

him what he could, but it was little enough, and before they had reached

the halfway point, a wind rose whuffling in Biitrah's ears and making

conversation impossible. The closer they came, the better he recalled

these particular mines. They weren't the first that House Daikani had

leased from the Khai-those had been the ones with six ventilation

shafts. "These had four. And slowly-more slowly than it once had-his

mind recalled the details, spreading the problem before him like

something written on slate or carved from stone.

By the time they reached the first outbuildings of the low town, his

fingers had grown numb, his nose had started to run from the cold, he

had four different guesses as to what might have gone wrong, and ten

questions in mind whose answers would determine whether he was correct.

He went directly to the mouth of the mine, forgetting to stop for even

bread and tea.

HIAMI SAT BY THE BRAZIER, KNOTTING A SCARF FROM SILK TIIREAD AND

LIStening to a slave boy sing old tunes of the l- mpire.

Almost-forgotten emperors loved and fought, lost, won, and died in the

high, rich voice. Poets and their slave spirits, the andat, waged their

private battles sometimes with deep sincerity and beauty, sometimes with

bedroom humor and bawdy rhymes-but all of them ancient. She couldn't

stand to hear anything written after the great war that had destroyed

those faraway palaces and broken those song-recalled lands. The new

songs were all about the battles of the Khaiem-three brothers who held

claim to the name of Khai. Two would die, one would forget his name and

doom his own sons to another cycle of blood. Whether they were laments

for the fallen or celebrations of the victors, she hated them. They

weren't songs that comforted her, and she didn't knot scarves unless she

needed comfort.

A servant came in, a young girl in austere robes almost the pale of

mourning, and took a ritual pose announcing a guest of status equal to

Hiami's.

"Idaan," the servant girl said, "Daughter to the Khai Machi."

"I know my husband's sister," Hiami snapped, not pausing in her

handwork. "You needn't tell me the sky is blue."

The servant girl flushed, her hands fluttering toward three different

poses at once and achieving none of them. Hiami regretted her words and

put down the knotting, taking a gentle pose of command.

"Bring her here. And something comfortable for her to sit on."

The servant took a pose of acknowledgment, grateful, it seemed, to know

what response to make, and scampered off. And then Idaan was there.

Hardly twenty, she could have been one of Hiami's own daughters. Not a

beauty, but it took a practiced eye to know that. Her hair, pitch dark,

was pleated with strands of silver and gold. Her eyes were touched with

paints, her skin made finer and paler than it really was by powder. Her

robes, blue silk embroidered with gold, flattered her hips and the swell

of her breasts. To a man or a younger woman, Idaan might have seemed the

loveliest woman in the city. Hiami knew the difference between talent

and skill, but of the pair, she had greater respect for skill, so the

effect was much the same.

They each took poses of greeting, subtly different to mark Idaan's blood

relation to the Khai and Hiami's greater age and her potential to become

someday the first wife of the Khai Machi. The servant girl trotted in

with a good chair, placed it silently, and retreated. Hiami halted her

with a gesture and motioned to the singing slave. The servant girl took

a pose of obedience and led him off with her.

Hiami smiled and gestured toward the seat. Idaan took a pose of thanks

much less formal than her greeting had been and sat.

"Is my brother here?" she asked.

"No. There was a problem at one of the mines. I imagine he'll be there

for the day."

Idaan frowned, but stopped short of showing any real disapproval. All

she said was, "It must seem odd for one of the Khaiem to be slogging

through tunnels like a common miner."

"Men have their enthusiasms," Hiami said, smiling slightly. Then she

sobered. "Is there news of your father?"

Idaan took a pose that was both an affirmation and a denial.

"Nothing new, I suppose," the dark-haired girl said. "The physicians are

watching him. He kept his soup down again last night. That makes almost

ten days in a row. And his color is better."

"But?"

"But he's still dying," Idaan said. Her tone was plain and calm as if

she'd been talking about a horse or a stranger. Hiami put down her

thread, the half-finished scarf in a puddle by her ankles. The knot she

felt in the back of her throat was dread. The old man was dying, and the

thought carried its implications with it-the time was growing short.

Biitrah, Danat, and Kaiin Machi-the three eldest sons of the Khaihad

lived their lives in something as close to peace as the sons of the

Khaiem ever could. Utah, the Khai's sixth son, had created a small storm

all those years ago by refusing to take the brand and renounce his claim

to his father's chair, but he had never appeared. It was assumed that he

had forged his path elsewhere or died unknown. Certainly he had never

caused trouble here. And now every time their father missed his howl of

soup, every night his sleep was troubled and restless, the hour drew

nearer when the peace would have to break.

"How are his wives?" Hiami asked.

"Well enough," Idaan said. "Or some of them are. The two new ones from

Nantani and Pathai are relieved, I think. They're younger than I am, you

know."

"Yes. They'll be pleased to go back to their families. It's harder for

the older women, you know. Decades they've spent here. Going back to

cities they hardly remember ..."

Hiami felt her composure slip and clenched her hands in her lap. ldaan's

gaze was on her. Hiami forced a simple pose of apology.

"No. I'm sorry," Idaan said, divining, Hiami supposed, all the fear in

her heart from her gesture. Hiami's lovely, absent-minded, warm, silly

husband and lover might well die. All his string and carved wood models

and designs might fall to disuse, as abandoned by his slaughter as she

would be. If only he might somehow win. If only he might kill his own

brothers and let their wives pay this price, instead of her.

"It's all right, dear," Hiami said. "I can have him send a messenger to

VOL] when he returns if you like. It may not he until morning. If he

thinks the problem is interesting, he might be even longer."

"And then he'll want to sleep," Idaan said, half smiling, "and I might

not see or hear from him for days. And by then I'll have found some

other way to solve my problems, or else have given tip entirely."

Hiami had to chuckle. The girl was right, and somehow that little shared

intimacy made the darkness more bearable.

"Perhaps I can be of some use, then," Hiami said. "What brings you here,

sister?"

To Hiami's surprise, ldaan blushed, the real color seeming slightly

false under her powder.

"I've ... I wanted 13iitrah to speak to our father. About Adrah. Adrah

Vaunyogi. He and I ..."

"Ah," Hiami said. "I see. Have you missed a month?"

It took a moment for the girl to understand. I Ier blush deepened.

"No. It's not that. It's just that I think he may be the one. He's from

a good family," Idaan said quickly, as if she were already defending

him. "They have interests in a trading house and a strong bloodline and..."

Hiami took a pose that silenced the girl. Idaan looked down at her

hands, but then she smiled. The horrified, joyous smile of new love

discovered. Hiami remembered how once it had felt, and her heart broke

again.

"I will talk to him when he comes back, no matter how dearly he wants

his sleep," Hiami said.

"Thank you, Sister," Idaan said. "I should ... I should go."

"So soon?"

"I promised Adrah I'd tell him as soon as I spoke to my brother. He's

waiting in one of the tower gardens, and ..

Idaan took a pose that asked forgiveness, as if a girl needed to be

forgiven for wanting to he with a lover and not a woman her mother's age

knotting silk to fight the darkness in her heart. Hiami took a pose that

accepted the apology and released her. Idaan grinned and turned to go.

Just as the blue and gold of her robe was about to vanish through the

doorway, Hiami surprised herself by calling out.

"Does he make you laugh?"

Idaan turned, her expression questioning. Hiami's mind flooded again

with thoughts of Biitrah and of love and the prices it demanded.

"Your man. Adrah? If he doesn't make you laugh, Idaan, you mustn't marry

him."

Idaan smiled and took a pose of thanks appropriate for a pupil to her

master, and then was gone. Hiami swallowed until she was sure the fear

was under control again, picked up her knotwork and called for the slave

to return.

THE SUN WAS GONE, THE MOON A SLIVER NO WIDER THAN A NAIL CLIPPING. Only

the stars answered the miners' lanterns as Biitrah rose from the earth

into darkness. His robes were wet and clung to his legs, the gray and

violet turned to a uniform black. The night air was bitingly cold. The

mine dogs yipped anxiously and paced in their kennels, their breath

pluming like his own. The chief engineer of House Daikani's mines took a

pose of profound thanks, and Biitrah replied graciously, though his

fingers were numb and awkward as sausages.

"If it does that again, call for me," he said.

"Yes, most high," the engineer said. "As you command."

Biitrah's guard walked him to the chair, and his bearers lifted him. It

was only now, with the work behind him and the puzzles all solved, that

he felt the exhaustion. The thought of being carried back to the palaces

in the cold and mud of springtime was only slightly less odious than the

option of walking under his own power. He gestured to the chief armsman

of his guard.

"We'll stay in the low town tonight. The usual wayhouse."

The armsman took a pose of acknowledgment and strode forward, leading

his men and his bearers and himself into the unlit streets. Biitrah

pulled his arms inside his robes and hugged hare flesh to flesh. The

first shivers were beginning. He half regretted now that he hadn't

disrobed before wading down to the lowest levels of the mine.

Ore was rich down in the plain-enough silver to keep Machi's coffers

full even had there been no other mines here and in the mountains to the

north and west-but the vein led down deeper than a well. In its first

generation, when Machi had been the most distant corner of the Empire,

the poet sent there had controlled the andat Raising-Water, and the

stories said that the mines had flowed up like fountains under that

power. It wasn't until after the great war that the poet Manat Doru had

first captured Stone-Made-Soft and Machi had come into its own as the

center for the most productive mines in the world and the home of the

metal trades-ironmongers, silversmiths, Westland alchemists,

needlemakers. But Raising-Water had been lost, and no one had yet

discovered how to recapture it. And so, the pumps.

He again turned his mind back on the trouble. The treadmill pumps were

of his own design. Four men working together could raise their own

weight in water sixty feet in the time the moon-always a more reliable

measure than the seasonally fickle northern sun-traveled the width of a

man's finger. But the design wasn't perfect yet. It was clear from his

day's work that the pump, which finally failed the night before, had

been working at less than its peak for weeks. That was why the water

level had been higher than one night's failure could account for. There

were several possible solutions to that.

Biitrah forgot the cold, forgot his weariness, forgot indeed where he

was and was being borne. His mind fell into the problem, and he was lost

in it. The wayhouse, when it appeared as if by magic before them, was a

welcome sight: thick stone walls with one red lacquered door at the

ground level, a wide wooden snow door on the second story, and smoke

rising from all its chimneys. Even from the street, he could smell

seasoned meat and spiced wine. The keeper stood on the front steps with

a pose of welcome so formal it bent the old, moon-faced man nearly

double. Biitrah's bearers lowered his chair. At the last moment, Biitrah

remembered to shove his arms back into their sleeves so that he could

take a pose accepting the wayhouse keeper's welcome.

"I had not expected you, most high," the man said. "We would have

prepared something more appropriate. The best that I have-"

"Will do," Biitrah said. "Certainly the best you have will do."

The keeper took a pose of thanks, standing aside to let them through the

doorway as he did. Biitrah paused at the threshold, taking a formal pose

of thanks. The old man seemed surprised. His round face and slack skin

made Biitrah think of a pale grape just beginning to dry. He could be my

father's age, he thought, and felt in his breast the bloom of a strange,

almost melancholy, fondness for the man.

"I don't think we've met," Biitrah said. "What's your name, neighbor?"

"Oshai," the moon-faced man said. "We haven't met, but everyone knows of

the Khai Machi's kindly eldest son. It is a pleasure to have you in this

house, most high."

The house had an inner garden. Biitrah changed into a set of plain,

thick woolen robes that the wayhouse kept for such occasions and joined

his men there. The keeper himself brought them black-sauced noodles,

river fish cooked with dried figs, and carafe after stone carafe of rice

wine infused with plum. His guard, at first dour, relaxed as the night

went on, singing together and telling stories. For a time, they seemed

to forget who this long-faced man with his graying beard and thinning

hair was and might someday be. Biitrah even sang with them at the end,

intoxicated as much by the heat of the coal fire, the weariness of the

day, and the simple pleasure of the night, as by the wine.

At last he rose up and went to his bed, four of his men following him.

They would sleep on straw outside his door. He would sleep in the best

bed the wayhouse offered. It was the way of things. A night candle

burned at his bedside, the wax scented with honey. The flame was hardly

down to the quarter mark. It was early. When he'd been a boy of twenty,

he'd seen candles like this burn their last before he slept, the light

of dawn blocked by goose-down pillows around his head. Now he couldn't

well imagine staying awake to the half mark. He shuttered the candlebox,

leaving only a square of light high on the ceiling from the smoke hole.

Sleep should have come easily to him as tired, well fed, half drunk as

he was, but it didn't. The bed was wide and soft and comfortable. He

could already hear his men snoring on their straw outside his door. But

his mind would not be still.

They should have killed each other when they were young and didn't

understand what a precious thing life is. That was the mistake. He and

his brothers had forborne instead, and the years had drifted by. Danat

had married, then Kaiin. He, the oldest of them, had met Hiami and

followed his brothers' example last. He had two daughters, grown and now

themselves married. And so here he and his brothers were. None of them

had seen fewer than forty summers. None of them hated the other two.

None of them wanted what would come next. And still, it would come.

Better that the slaughter had happened when they were boys, stupid the

way boys are. Better that their deaths had come before they carried the

weight of so much life behind them. He was too old to become a killer.

Sleep came somewhere in these dark reflections, and he dreamed of things

more pleasant and less coherent. A dove with black-tipped wings flying

through the galleries of the Second Palace; Hiami sewing a child's dress

with red thread and a gold needle too soft to keep its point; the moon

trapped in a well and he himself called to design the pump that would

raise it. When he woke, troubled by some need his sleepsodden mind

couldn't quite place, it was still dark. He needed to drink water or to

pass it, but no, it was neither of these. He reached to unshutter the

candlebox, but his hands were too awkward.

"There now, most high," a voice said. "Bat it around like that, and

you'll have the whole place in flames."

Pale hands righted the box and pulled open the shutters, the candlelight

revealing the moon-faced keeper. He wore a dark robe under a gray woolen

traveler's cloak. His face, which had seemed so congenial before, filled

Biitrah with a sick dread. The smile, he saw, never reached the eyes.

"What's happened?" he demanded, or tried to. The words came out slurred

and awkward. Still, the man Oshai seemed to catch the sense of them.

"I've come to be sure you've died," he said with a pose that offered

this as a service. "Your men drank more than you. Those that are

breathing are beyond recall, but you ... Well, most high, if you see

morning the whole exercise will have been something of a waste."

Biitrah's breath suddenly hard as a runner's, he threw off the blankets,

but when he tried to stand, his knees were limp. He stumbled toward the

assassin, but there was no strength in the charge. Oshai, if that was

his name, put a palm to Biitrah's forehead and pushed gently back.

Biitrah fell to the floor, but he hardly felt it. It was like violence

being done to some other man, far away from where he was.

"It must be hard," Oshai said, squatting beside him, "to live your whole

life known only as another man's son. To die having never made a mark of

your own on the world. It seems unfair somehow."

Who, Biitrah tried to say. Which of my brothers would stoop to poison?

"Still, men die all the time," Oshai went on. "One more or less won't

keep the sun from rising. And how are you feeling, most high? Can you

get up? No? That's as well, then. I was half-worried I might have to

pour more of this down you. Undiluted, it tastes less of plums."

The assassin rose and walked to the bed. There was a hitch in his step,

as if his hip ached. He is old as my father, but Biitrah's mind was too

dim to see any humor in the repeated thought. Oshai sat on the bed and

pulled the blankets over his lap.

"No hurry, most high. I can wait quite comfortably here. Die at your

leisure."

Biitrah, trying to gather his strength for one last movement, one last

attack, closed his eyes but then found he lacked the will even to open

them again. The wooden floor beneath him seemed utterly comfortable; his

limbs were heavy and slack. There were worse poisons than this. He could

at least thank his brothers for that.

It was only Hiami he would miss. And the treadmill pumps. It would have

been good to finish his design work on them. He would have liked to have

finished more of his work. His last thought that held any real coherence

was that he wished he'd gotten to live just a little while more. He did

not know it when his killer snuffed the candle.

HIAMI HAD THE SEAT OF HONOR AT THE FUNERAL, ON THE DAIS WITH THE Khai

Machi. The temple was full, bodies pressed together on their cushions as

the priest intoned the rites of the dead and struck his silver chimes.

The high walls and distant wooden ceiling held the heat poorly; braziers

had been set in among the mourners. Hiami wore pale mourning robes and

looked at her hands. It was not her first funeral. She had been present

for her father's death, before her marriage into the highest family of

Machi. She had only been a girl then. And through the years, when a

member of the utkhaiem had passed on, she had sometimes sat and heard

these same words spoken over some other body, listened to the roar of

some other pyre.

This was the first time it had seemed meaningless. Her grief was real

and profound, and this flock of gawkers and gossips had no relation to

it. The Khai Machi's hand touched her own, and she glanced up into his

eyes. His hair, what was left of it, had gone white years before. He

smiled gently and took a pose that expressed his sympathy. He was

graceful as an actor-his poses inhumanly smooth and precise.

Biitrah would have been a terrible Khai Machi, she thought. He would

never have put in enough practice to hold himself that well.

And the tears she had suffered through the last days remembered her. Her

once-father's hand trembled as if uneased by the presence of genuine

feeling. He leaned hack into his black lacquer seat and motioned for a

servant to bring him a bowl of tea. At the front of the temple, the

priest chanted on.

When the last word was sung, the last chime struck, bearers came and

lifted her husband's body. The slow procession began, moving through the

streets to the pealing of hand bells and the wailing of flutes. In the

central square, the pyre was ready-great logs of pine stinking of oil

and within them a bed of hard, hot-burning coal from the mines. Biitrah

was lifted onto it and a shroud of tight metal links placed over him to

hide the sight when his skin peeled from his noble bones. It was her

place now to step forward and begin the conflagration. She moved slowly.

All eyes were on her, and she knew what they were thinking. Poor woman,

to have been left alone. Shallow sympathies that would have been

extended as readily to the wives of the Khai Machi's other sons, had

their men been under the metal blanket. And in those voices she heard

also the excitement, dread, and anticipation that these bloody paroxysms

carried. When the empty, insincere words of comfort were said, in the

same breath they would move on to speculations. Both of Biitrah's

brothers had vanished. Danat, it was said, had gone to the mountains

where he had a secret force at the ready, or to Lachi in the south to

gather allies, or to ruined Saraykeht to hire mercenaries, or to the

Dai-kvo to seek the aid of the poets and the andat. Or he was in the

temple, gathering his strength, or he was cowering in the basement of a

low town comfort house, too afraid to come to the streets. And every

story they told of him, they also told of Kaiin.

It had begun. At long last, after years of waiting, one of the men who

might one day be Khai Machi had made his move. The city waited for the

drama to unfold. This pyre was only the opening for them, the first

notes of some new song that would make this seem to be about something

honorable, comprehensible, and right.

Hiami took a pose of thanks and accepted a lit torch from the

firekeeper. She stepped to the oil-soaked wood. A dove fluttered past

her, landed briefly on her husband's chest, and then flew away again.

She felt herself smile to see it go. She touched the flame to the small

kindling and stepped back as the fire took. She waited there as long as

tradition required and then went back to the Second Palace. Let the

others watch the ashes. "Their song might be starting, but hers here had

ended.

Her servant girl was waiting for her at the entrance of the palace's

great hall. She held a pose of welcome that suggested there was some

news waiting for her. Hiami was tempted to ignore the nuance, to walk

through to her chambers and her fire and bed and the knotwork scarf that

was now nearly finished. But there were tear-streaks on the girl's

cheeks, and who was Hiami, after all, to treat a suffering child

unkindly? She stopped and took a pose that accepted the welcome before

shifting to one of query.

"Idaan Machi," the servant girl said. "She is waiting for you in the

summer garden."

Hiami shifted to a pose of thanks, straightened her sleeves, and walked

quietly down the palace halls. The sliding stone doors to the garden

were open, a breeze too cold to be comfortable moving through the hall.

And there, by an empty fountain surrounded by bare-limbed cherry trees,

sat her once-sister. If her formal robes were not the pale of mourning,

her countenance contradicted them: reddened eyes, paint and powder

washed away. She was a plain enough woman without them, and Hiami felt

sorry for her. It was one thing to expect the violence. It was another

to see it done.

She stepped forward, her hands in a pose of greeting. Idaan started to

her feet as if she'd been caught doing something illicit, but then she

took an answering pose. Hiami sat on the fountain's stone lip, and Idaan

lowered herself, sitting on the ground at her feet as a child might.

"Your things are packed," Idaan said.

"Yes. I'll leave tomorrow. It's weeks to "Ian-Sadar. It won't be so

hard, I think. One of my daughters is married there, and my brother is a

decent man. They'll treat me well while I make arrangements for my own

apartments."

"It isn't fair," Idaan said. "They shouldn't force you out like this.

You belong here."

"It's tradition," Hiami said with a pose of surrender. "Fairness has

nothing to do with it. My husband is dead. I will return to my father's

house, whoever's actually sitting in his chair these days."

"If you were a merchant, no one would require anything like that of you.

You could go where you pleased, and do what you wanted."

"True, but I'm not, am I? I was born to the utkhaiem. You were horn to a

Khai."

"And women," Idaan said. Hiami was surprised by the venom in the word.

"We were born women, so we'll never even have the freedoms our brothers do."

Hiami laughed. She couldn't help herself, it was all so ridiculous. She

took her once-sister's hand and leaned forward until their foreheads

almost touched. Idaan's tear-red eyes shifted to meet her gaze.

"I don't think the men in our families consider themselves unconstrained

by history," she said, and Idaan's expression twisted with chagrin.

"I wasn't thinking," she said. "I didn't mean that ... Gods ... I'm

sorry, Hiami-kya. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry ..."

Hiami opened her arms, and the girl fell into them, weeping. Hiami

rocked her slowly, cooing into her ear and stroking her hair as if she

were comforting a babe. And as she did, she looked around the gardens.

This would be the last time she saw them. "Thin tendrils of green were

rising from the soil. The trees were bare, but their bark had an

undertone of green. Soon it would be warm enough to turn on the fountains.

She felt her sorrow settle deep, an almost physical sensation. She

understood the tears of the young that were even now soaking her robes

at the shoulder. She would come to understand the tears of age in time.

They would be keeping her company. There was no need to hurry.

At length, Idaan's sobs grew shallower and less frequent. The girl

pulled back, smiling sheepishly and wiping her eyes with the back of her

hand.

"I hadn't thought it would be this had," Idaan said softly. "I knew it

would be hard, but this is ... How did they do it?"

"Who, dear?"

"All of them. All through the generations. How did they bring themselves

to kill each other?"

"I think," Hiami said, her words seeming to come from the new sorrow

within her and not from the self she had known, "that in order to become

one of the Khaiem, you have to stop being able to love. So perhaps

Biitrah's tragedy isn't the worst that could have happened."

Idaan hadn't followed the thought. She took a pose of query.

"Winning this game may be worse than losing it, at least for the sort of

man he was. He loved the world too much. Seeing that love taken from him

would have been had. Seeing him carry the deaths of his brothers with

him ... and he wouldn't have been able to go slogging through the mines.

He would have hated that. He would have been a very poor Khai Maehi."

"I don't think I love the world that way," Idaan said.

"You don't, Idaan-kya," Hiami said. "And just now I don't either. But I

will try to. I will try to love things the way he did."

They sat a while longer, speaking of things less treacherous. In the

end, they parted as if it were just another absence before them, as if

there would be another meeting on another day. A more appropriate

farewell would have ended with them both in tears again.

The leave-taking ceremony before the Khai was more formal, but the

emptiness of it kept it from unbalancing her composure. He sent her back

to her family with gifts and letters of gratitude, and assured her that

she would always have a place in his heart so long as it beat. Only when

he enjoined her not to think ill of her fallen husband for his weakness

did her sorrow threaten to shift to rage, but she held it down. They

were only words, spoken at all such events. They were no more about

Biitrah than the protestations of loyalty she now recited were about

this hollow-hearted man in his black lacquer seat.

After the ceremony, she went around the palaces, conducting more

personal farewells with the people whom she'd come to know and care for

in Nlachi, and just as dark fell, she even slipped out into the streets

of the city to press a few lengths of silver or small jewelry into the

hands of a select few friends who were not of the utkhaiem. There were

tears and insincere promises to follow her or to one day bring her hack.

Hiam] accepted all these little sorrows with perfect grace. Little

sorrows were, after all, only little.

She lay sleepless that last night in the bed that had seen all her

nights since she had first come to the north, that had borne the doubled

weight of her and her husband, witnessed the birth of their children and

her present mourning, and she tried to think kindly of the bed, the

palace, the city and its people. She set her teeth against her tears and

tried to love the world. In the morning, she would take a flatboat down

the 'Fidat, slaves and servants to carry her things, and leave behind

forever the bed of the Second Palace where people did everything but die

gently and old in their sleep.

Maati took a pose that requested clarification. In another context, it

would have risked annoying the messenger, but this time the servant of

the Dai-kvo seemed to be expecting a certain level of disbelief. Without

hesitation, he repeated his words.

"The Dai-kvo requests Maati Vaupathai come immediately to his private

chambers."

It was widely understood in the shining village of the Dai-kvo that

Maati Vaupathai was, if not a failure, certainly an embarrassment. Over

the years he had spent in the writing rooms and lecture halls, walking

the broad, clean streets, and huddled with others around the kilns of

the firekeepers, Maati had grown used to the fact that he would never be

entirely accepted by those who surrounded him; it had been eight years

since the Dai-kvo had deigned to speak to him directly. Maati closed the

brown leather book he had been studying and slipped it into his sleeve.

He took a pose that accepted the message and announced his readiness.

The white-robed messenger turned smartly and led the way.

The village that was home to the [)a]-kvo and the poets was always

beautiful. Now in the middle spring, flowers and ivies scented the air

and threatened to overflow the well-tended gardens and planters, but no

stray grass rose between the paving stones. The gentle choir of wind

chimes filled the air. The high, thin waterfall that fell beside the

palaces shone silver, and the towers and garrets-carved from the

mountain face itself-were unstained even by the birds that roosted in

the eaves. Men spent lifetimes, Nlaati knew, keeping the village

immaculate and as impressive as a Khai on his scat. The village and

palaces seemed as grand as the great bowl of sky above them. His years

living among the men of the village-only men, no women were

permitted-had never entirely robbed Nlaati of his awe at the place. He

struggled now to hold himself tall, to appear as calm and self-possessed

as a man summoned to the Dai-kvo regularly. As he passed through the

archways that led to the palace, he saw several messengers and more than

a few of the brown-robed poets pause to look at him.

He was not the only one who found his presence there strange.

The servant led him through the private gardens to the modest apartments

of the most powerful man in the world. Maati recalled the last time he

had been there-the insults and recriminations, the Daikvo's scorching

sarcasm, and his own certainty and pride crumbling around him like sugar

castles left out in the rain. Maati shook himself. There was no reason

for the I)ai-kvo to have called him back to repeat the indignities of

the past.

There are always the indignities of the future, the soft voice that had

become Maati's muse said from a corner of his mind. Never assume you can

survive the future because you've survived the past. Everyone thinks

that, and they've all been wrong eventually.

The servant stopped before the elm-and-oak-inlaid door that led, Maati

remembered, to a meeting chamber. He scratched it twice to announce

them, then opened the door and motioned Maati in. Maati breathed deeply

as a man preparing to dive from a cliff into shallow water and entered.

The Dai-kvo was sitting at his table. He had not had hair since Maati

had met him twenty-three summers before when the Dai-kvo had only been

Tahi-kvo, the crueler of the two teachers set to sift through the

discarded sons of the Khaiem and utkhaiem for likely candidates to send

on to the village. His brows had gone pure white since he'd become the

Dai-kvo, and the lines around his mouth had deepened. His black eyes

were just as alive.

The other two men in the room were strangers to Maati. The thinner one

sat at the table across from the Dai-kvo, his robes deep blue and gold,

his hair pulled back to show graying temples and a thin whiteflecked

heard. The thicker-with both fat and muscle, Maati thought-stood at

window, one foot up on the thick ledge, looking into the gardens, and

Maati could see where his clean-shaven jaw sagged at the jowl. His robes

were the light brown color of sand, his boots hard leather and travel

worn. He turned to look at Maati as the door closed, and there was

something familiar about him-about both these new men-that he could not

describe. He fell into the old pose, the first one he had learned at the

school.

"I am honored by your presence, most high Dai-kvo."

The Dai-kvo grunted and gestured to him for the benefit of the two

strangers.

"This is the one," the Dai-kvo said. The men shifted to look at him,

graceful and sure of themselves as merchants considering a pig. Maati

imagined what they saw him for-a man of thirty summers, his forehead

already pushing hack his hairline, the smallest of pot bellies. A soft

man in a poet's robes, ill-considered and little spoken of. He felt

himself start to blush, clenched his teeth, and forced himself to show

neither his anger nor his shame as he took a pose of greeting to the two

men.

"Forgive me," he said. "I don't believe we have met before, or if we

have, I apologize that I don't recall it."

"We haven't met," the thicker one said.

"He isn't much to look at," the thin one said, pointedly speaking to the

Dai-kvo. The thicker scowled and sketched the briefest of apologetic

poses. It was a thread thrown to a drowning man, but Nlaati found

himself appreciating even the empty form of courtesy.

"Sit down, Maati-cha," the Dal-kvo said, gesturing to a chair. "Have a

bowl of tea. There's something we have to discuss. Tell me what you've

heard of events in the winter cities."

Maati sat and spoke while the Dai-kvo poured the tea.

"I only know what I hear at the teahouses and around the kilns, most

high. There's trouble with the glassblowers in Cetani; something about

the Khai Cetani raising taxes on exporting fishing bulbs. But I haven't

heard anyone taking it very seriously. Amnat-Tan is holding a summer

fair, hoping, they say, to take trade from Yalakeht. And the Khai Machi ..."

Maati stopped. He realized now why the two strangers seemed familiar;

who they reminded him of. The Dai-kvo pushed a fine ceramic bowl across

the smooth-sanded grain of the table. Maati fell into a pose of thanks

without being aware of it, but did not take the bowl.

"The Khai Machi is dying," the Dal-kvo said. "I Iis belly's gone rotten.

It's a sad thing. Not a good end. And his eldest son is murdered.

Poisoned. What do the teahouses and kilns say of that?"

"That it was poor form," Maati said. "'t'hat no one has seen the Khaiem

resort to poison since Udun, thirteen summers ago. But neither of the

brothers has appeared to accuse the other, so no one ... Gods! You two

are ..."

"You see?" the Dai-kvo said to the thin man, smiling as he spoke. "No,

not much to look at, but a decent stew between his ears. Yes, Maati-cha.

The man scraping my windowsill with his boots there is Danat Machi. This

is his eldest surviving brother, Kaiin. And they have come here to speak

with me instead of waging war against each other because neither of them

killed their elder brother Biitrah."

"So they ... you think it was Otah-kvo?"

"The Dai-kvo says you know my younger brother," the thickset

man-Danat-said, taking his own seat at the only unoccupied side of the

table. "Tell me what you know of Otah."

"I haven't seen him in years, Danat-cha," Maati said. "He was in

Saraykcht when ... when the old poet there died. He was working as a

laborer. But I haven't seen him since."

"Do you think he was satisfied by that life?" the thin one-Kaiin- asked.

"A laborer at the docks of Saraykeht hardly seems like the fate a son of

the Khaiem would embrace. Especially one who refused the brand."

Maati picked up the bowl of tea, sipping it too quickly as he tried to

gain himself a moment to think. The tea scalded his tongue.

"I never heard Otah speak of any ambitions for his father's chair,"

Maati said.

"And is there any reason to think he would have spoken of it to you?"

Kaiin said, the faintest sneer in his voice. Maati felt the blush

creeping into his cheeks again, but it was the Dai-kvo who answered.

""There is. Otah Machi and Maati here were close for a time. They fell

out eventually over a woman, I believe. Still, I hold that if Otah had

been bent on taking part in the struggle for Machi at that time, he

would have taken Maati into his confidence. But that is hardly our

concern. As Maati here points out, it was years ago. Otah may have

become ambitious. Or resentful. There's no way for us to know that-"

"But he refused the brand-" Danat began, and the Dai-kvo cut him off

with a gesture.

"There were other reasons for that," the Dai-kvo said sharply. "They

aren't your concern."

Danat Nlachi took a pose of apology and the Dai-kvo waved it away. Maati

sipped his tea again. 't'his time it didn't burn. To his right, Kaiin

Machi took a pose of query, looking directly at Maati for what seemed

the first time.

"Would you know him again if you saw him?"

"Yes," Maati said. "I would."

"You sound certain of it."

"I am, Kaiin-cha."

The thin man smiled. All around the table a sense of satisfaction seemed

to come from his answer. Maati found it unnerving. The Daikvo poured

himself more tea, the liquid clicking into his bowl like a stream over

stones.

"'T'here is a very good library in Machi," the Dai-kvo said. "One of the

finest in the fourteen cities. I understand there are records there from

the time of the Empire. One of the high lords was thinking to go there,

perhaps, to ride out the war, and sent his hooks ahead. I'm sure there

are treasures hidden among those shelves that would be of use in binding

the andat."

"Really?" Maati asked.

"No, not really," the Dai-kvo said. "I expect it's a mess of poorly

documented scraps overseen by a librarian who spends his copper on wine

and whores, but I don't care. For our purposes, there are secrets hidden

in those records important enough to send a low-ranking poet like

yourself to sift though. I have a letter to the Khai Machi that will

explain why you are truly there. IIc will explain your presence to the

utkhaiem and Cehmai 'Ivan, the poet who holds Stone-Made-Soft. Let them

think you've come on my errand. What you will be doing instead is

discovering whether Otah killed Biitrah Machi. If so, who is hacking

him. If not, who did, and why."

"Most high-" Maati began.

"Wait for me in the gardens," the Dal-kvo said. "I have a few more

things to discuss with the sons of Machi."

The gardens, like the apartments, were small, well kept, beautiful, and

simple. A fountain murmured among carefully shaped, deeply fragrant pine

trees. Maati sat, looking out. From the side of mountain, the world

spread out before him like a map. He waited, his head buzzing, his heart

in turmoil. Before long he heard the steady grinding sound of footsteps

on gravel, and he turned to see the Dai-kvo making his way down the path

toward him. Maati stood. He had not known the Dai-kvo had started

walking with a cane. A servant followed at a distance, carrying a chair,

and did not approach until the Dai-kvo signaled. Once the chair was in

place, looking out over the same span that Maati had been considering,

the servant retreated.

"Interesting, isn't it?" the Dai-kvo said.

Maati, unsure whether he meant the view or the business with the sons of

Machi, didn't reply. The Dai-kvo looked at him, something part smile,

part something less congenial on his lips. He drew forth two

packets-letters sealed in wax and sewn shut. Maati took them and tucked

them in his sleeve.

"Gods. I'm getting old. You see that tree?" the Dai-kvo asked, pointing

at one of the shaped pines with his cane.

"Yes, most high."

"There's a family of robins that lives in it. They wake me up every

morning. I always mean to have someone break the nest, but I've never

quite given the order."

"You are merciful, most high."

The old man looked up at him, squinting. His lips were pressed thin, and

the lines in his face were black as charcoal. Maati stood waiting. At

length, the Dai-kvo turned away again with a sigh.

"Will you be able to do it?" he asked.

"I will do as the Dai-kvo commands," Maati said.

"Yes, I know you'll go there. But will you be able to tell me that he's

there? You know if he is behind this, they'll kill him before they go on

to each other. Are you able to bear that responsibility? Tell me now if

you aren't, and I'll find some other way. You don't have to fail again."

"I won't fail again, most high."

"Good. That's good," the Dai-kvo said and went silent. Maati waited so

long for the pose that would dismiss him that he wondered whether the

Dai-kvo had forgotten he was there, or had chosen to ignore him as an

insult. But the old man spoke, his voice low.

"How old is your son, Maati-cha?"

"Twelve, most high. But I haven't seen him in some years."

"You're angry with me for that." Maati began to take a pose of denial,

but checked himself and lowered his arms. This wasn't the time for court

politics. The Dai-kvo saw this and smiled. "You're getting wiser, my

boy. You were a fool when you were young. In itself, that's not such a

bad thing. Many men are. But you embraced your mistakes. You de fended

them against all correction. That was the wrong path, and don't think

I'm unaware of how you've paid for it."

"As you say, most high."

"I told you there was no place in a poet's life for a family. A lover

here or there, certainly. Most men are too weak to deny themselves that

much. But a wife? A child? No. There isn't room for both what they

require and what we do. And I told you that. You remember? I told you

that, and you ..

The Dai-kvo shook his head, frowning in remembered frustration. It was a

moment, Maati knew, when he could apologize. He could repent his pride

and say that the Dai-kvo had indeed known better all along. He remained

silent.

"I was right," the Dai-kvo said for him. "And now you've done half a job

as a poet and half a job as a man. Your studies are weak, and the woman

took your whelp and left. You've failed both, just as I knew you would.

I'm not condemning you for that, Maati. No man could have taken on what

you did and succeeded. But this opportunity in Machi is what will wipe

clean the slate. Do this well and it will be what you're remembered for."

"Certainly I will do my best."

"Fail at it, and there won't be a third chance. Few enough men have two."

Maati took a pose appropriate to a student receiving a lecture.

Considering him, the Dal-kvo responded with one that closed the lesson,

then raised his hand.

"Don't destroy this chance in order to spite me, Maati. Failing in this

will do me no harm, and it will destroy you. You're angry because I told

you the truth, and because what I said would happen, did. Consider while

you go north, whether that's really such a good reason to hate me."

THE OPEN WINDOW LET IN A COOT, BREEZE THAT SMELLED OF PINE AND RAIN.

Otah Mach], the sixth son of the Khai Machi, lay on the bed, listening

to the sounds of water-rain pattering on the flagstones of the

wayhouse's courtyard and the tiles of its roof, the constant hushing of

the river against its banks. A fire danced and spat in the grate, but

his bare skin was still stippled with cold. The night candle had gone

out, and he hadn't bothered to relight it. Morning would come when it came.

The door slid open and then shut. He didn't turn to look.

"You're brooding, Itani," Kiyan said, calling him by the false name he'd

chosen for himself, the only one he'd ever told her. Her voice was low

and rich and careful as a singer's. He shifted now, turning to his side.

She knelt by the grate-her skin smooth and brown, her robes the formal

cut of a woman of business, one strand of her hair fallen free. Her face

was thin-she reminded him of a fox sometimes, when a smile just touched

her mouth. She placed a fresh log on the fire as she spoke. "I half

expected you'd be asleep already."

He sighed and sketched a pose of contrition with one hand.

"Don't apologize to me," she said. "I'm as happy having you in my rooms

here as in the teahouse, but Old Mani wanted more news out of you. Or

maybe just to get you drunk enough to sing dirty songs with him. He's

missed you, you know."

"It's a hard thing, being so loved."

"Don't laugh at it. It's not a love to carry you through ages, but it's

more than some people ever manage. You'll grow into one of those pinched

old men who want free wine because they pity themselves."

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to make light of Old Mani. It's just ..."

He sighed. Kiyan closed the window and relit the night candle.

"It's just that you're brooding," she said. "And you're naked and not

under the blankets, so you're feeling that you've done something wrong

and deserve to suffer."

"Ah," Otah said. "Is that why I do this?"

"Yes," she said, untying her robes. "It is. You can't hide it from me,

Itani. You might as well come out with it."

Otah held the thought in his mind. I'm not who I've told you I am. Itani

Noygu is the name I picked for myself when I was a child. My father is

dying, and brothers I can hardly recall have started killing each other,

and I find it makes me sad. He wondered what Kiyan would say to that.

She prided herself on knowing him-on knowing people and how their minds

worked. And yet he didn't think this was something she'd already have

guessed.

Naked, she lay beside him, pulling thick blankets up over them both.

"Did you find another woman in Chaburi-Tan?" she asked, halfteasing. But

only half. "Some young dancing girl who stole your heart, or some other

hit of your flesh, and now you're stewing over how to tell me you're

leaving me?"

"I'm a courier," Otah said. "I have a woman in every city I visit. You

know that."

"You don't," she said. "Some couriers do, but you don't."

"No?"

"No. It took me half a year of doing everything short of stripping bare

for you to notice me. You don't stay in other cities long enough for a

woman to chip through your reserve. And you don't have to push away the

blankets. You may want to be cold, but I don't."

"Well. Maybe I'm just feeling old."

"A ripe thirty-three? Well, when you decide to stop running across the

world, I'd always be pleased to hire you on. We could stand another pair

of hands around the place. You could throw out the drunks and track down

the cheats that try to slip away without paying."

"You don't pay enough," Otah said. "I talk to Old Mani. I know what your

wages are.

"Perhaps you'd get extra for keeping me warm at nights."

"Shouldn't you offer that to Old Mani first? He's been here longer than

I have."

Kiyan slapped his chest smartly, and then nestled into him. He found

himself curling toward her, the warmth of her body drawing him like a

familiar scent. Her fingers traced the tattoo on his breast-the ink had

faded over time, blurring lines that had once been sharp and clear.

"Jokes aside," she said, and he could hear a weariness in her voice, "I

would take you on, if you wanted to stay. You could live here, with me.

Help me manage the house."

He caressed her hair, feeling the individual strands as they flowed

across his fingertips. There was a scattering of white among the black

that made her look older than she was. Otah knew that they had been

there since she was a girl, as if she'd been born old.

"That sounds like you're suggesting marriage," he said.

"Perhaps. You wouldn't have to, but ... it would be one way to arrange

things. That isn't a threat, you know. I don't need a husband. Only if

it would make you feel better, we could ..."

He kissed her gently. It had been weeks, and he was surprised to find

how much he'd missed the touch of her lips. Weeks of travel weariness

slipped away, the deep unease loosened its hold on his chest, and he

took comfort in her. He fell asleep with her arm over his body, her

breath already soft and deep with sleep.

In the morning, he woke before she did, slipped out of the bed, and

dressed quietly. The sun was not up, but the eastern sky had lightened

and the morning birds were singing madly as he took himself across an

ancient stone bridge into Udun.

A river city, Udun was laced with as many canals as roadways. Bridges

humped up high enough for barges to pass beneath them, and the green

water of the Qiit lapped at old stone steps that descended into the

river mud. Otah stopped at a stall on the broad central plaza and traded

two lengths of copper for a thick wedge of honey bread and a bowl of

black, smoky tea. Around him, the city slowly came awakethe streets and

canals filling with traders and merchants, beggars singing at the

corners or in small rafts tied at the water's edge, laborers hauling

wagons along the wide flagstoned streets, and birds bright as shafts of

sunlight-blue and red and yellow, green as grass, and pink as dawn. Udun

was a city of birds, and their chatter and shriek and song filled the

air as he ate.

The compound of House Siyanti was in the better part of the city, just

downstream from the palaces, where the water was not yet fouled by the

wastes of thirty thousand men and women and children. The red brick

buildings rose up three stories high, and a private canal was filled

with barges in the red and silver of the house. The stylized emblem of

the sun and stars had been worked into the brick archway that led to the

central courtyard, and Otah passed beneath it with a feeling like coming

home.

Amiit Foss, the overseer for the house couriers, was in his offices,

ordering around three apprentices with sharp words and insults, but no

blows. Otah stepped in and took a pose of greeting.

"Ah! The missing Itani. Did you know the word for half-wit in the tongue

of the Empire was itani-nah?"

"All respect, Amiit-cha, but no it wasn't."

The overseer grinned. One of the apprentices-a girl of perhaps thirteen

summers-whispered something angrily, and the boy next to her giggled.

"Fine," the overseer said. "You two. I need the ciphers rechecked on

last week's letters."

"But I wasn't the one . . . ," the girl protested. The overseer took a

pose that commanded her silence, and the pair, glowering at each other,

stalked away.

"I get them when they're just growing old enough to flirt," Amiit said,

sighing. "Come back to the meeting rooms. The journey took longer than

I'd expected."

"There were some delays," Otah said as he followed the older man hack.

"Chaburi-'Ian isn't as tightly run as it was last time I was out there."

"No?"

"There are refugees from the Westlands."

"There are always refugees from the Westlands."

"Not this many," Otah said. "There are rumors that the Khai ChaburiTan

is going to restrict the number of Westlanders allowed on the island."

Amiit paused, his hands on the carved wood door of the meeting rooms.

Otah could almost see the implications of this thought working

themselves out behind the overseer's eyes. A moment later, Amiit looked

up, raised his eyebrows in appreciation, and pushed the doors open.

Half the day was spent in the raw silk chairs of the meeting rooms while

Amiit took Otah's report and accepted the letters-sewn shut and written

in cipher-that Otah had carried with him.

It had taken Otah some time to understand all that being a courier

implied. When he had first arrived in Udun six years before, hungry,

lost and half-haunted by the memories he carried with him, he had still

believed that he would simply be carrying letters and small packages

from one place to another, perhaps waiting for a response, and then

taking those to where they were expected. It would have been as right to

say that a farmer throws some seeds in the earth and returns a few

months later to sec what's grown. He had been lucky. His ability to win

friends easily had served him, and he had been instructed in what the

couriers called the gentleman's trade: how to gather information that

might be of use to the house, how to read the activity of a street

corner or market, and how to know from that the mood of a city. How to

break ciphers and re-sew letters. How to appear to drink more wine than

you actually did, and question travelers on the road without seeming to.

He understood now that the gentleman's trade was one that asked a

lifetime to truly master, and though he was still a journeyman, he had

found a kind of joy in it. Amiit knew what his talents were, and chose

assignments for him in which he could do well. And in return for the

trust of the house and the esteem of his fellows, Otah did the best work

he could, brokering information, speculation, gossip, and intrigue. He

had traveled through the summer cities in the south, west to the plains

and the cities that traded directly with the Westlands, up the eastern

coasts where his knowledge of obscure east island tongues had served him

well. By design or happy coincidence, he had never gone farther north

than Yalakeht. He had not been called on to see the winter cities.

Until now.

"There's trouble in the north," Amiit said as he tucked the last of the

opened letters into his sleeve.

"I'd heard," Otah said. "The succession's started in Machi."

"Amnat-"Ian, Machi, Cetani. All of them have something brewing. You may

need to get some heavier robes."

"I didn't think House Siyanti had much trade there," Otah said, trying

to keep the unease out of his voice.

"We don't. That doesn't mean we never will. And take your time. There's

something I'm waiting for from the west. I won't be sending you out for

a month at least, so you can have some time to spend you money. Unless ..."

The overseer's eyes narrowed. His hands took a pose of query.

"I just dislike the cold," Otah said, making a joke to cover his unease.

"I grew up in Saraykeht. It seemed like water never froze there."

"It's a hard life," Amiit said. "I can try to give the commissions to

other men, if you'd prefer."

And have them wonder why it was that I wouldn't go, Otah thought. He

took a pose of thanks that also implied rejection.

"I'll take what there is," he said. "And heavy wool robes besides."

"It really isn't so bad up there in summer," Amiit said. "It's the

winters that break your stones."

"Then by all means, send someone else in the winter."

They exchanged a few final pleasantries, and Otah left the name of

Kiyan's wayhouse as the place to send for him, if he was needed. He

spent the afternoon in a teahouse at the edge of the warehouse district,

talking with old acquaintances and trading news. He kept an ear out for

word from Machi, but there was nothing fresh. The eldest son had been

poisoned, and his remaining brothers had gone to ground. No one knew

where they were nor which had begun the traditional struggle. There were

only a few murmurs of the near-forgotten sixth son, but every time he

heard his old name, it was like hearing a distant, threatening noise.

He returned to the wayhouse as darkness began to thicken the treetops

and the streets fell into twilight, brooding. It wasn't safe, of course,

to take a commission in Machi, but neither could he safely refuse one.

Not without a reason. He knew when gossip and speculation had grown hot

enough to melt like sugar and stick. There would be a dozen reports of

Otah Mach] from all over the cities, and likely beyond as well. If even

a suggestion was made that he was not who he presented himself to be, he

ran the risk of being exposed, dragged into the constant, empty, vicious

drama of succession. He would sacrifice quite a lot to keep that from

happening. Going north, doing his work, and returning was what he would

have done, had he been the man he claimed to be. And so perhaps it was

the wiser strategy.

And also he wondered what sort of man his father was. What sort of man

his brother had been. Whether his mother had wept when she sent her boy

away to the school where the excess sons of the high familes became

poets or fell forever from grace.

As he entered the courtyard, his dark reverie was interrupted by

laughter and music from the main hall, and the scent of roast pork and

baked yams mixed with the pine resin. When he stepped in, Old Mani

slapped an earthenware bowl of wine into his hands and steered him to a

bench by the fire. There were a good number of travelers-merchants from

the great cities, farmers from the low towns, travelers each with a

story and a past and a tale to tell, if only they were asked the right

questions in the right ways.

It was later, the warm air busy with conversation, that Otah caught

sight of Kiyan across the wide hall. She had on a working woman's robes,

her hair tied back, but the expression on her face and the angle of her

body spoke of a deep contentment and satisfaction. She knew her place

was here, and she was proud of it.

Otah found himself suddenly stilled by a longing for her unlike the

simple lust that he was accustomed to. He imagined himself feeling the

same satisfaction that he saw in her. The same sense of having a place

in the world. She turned to him as if he had spoken and tilted her

head-not an actual formal pose, but nonetheless a question.

He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life

worth living.

CEHMAI TYAN'S DREAMS, WHENEVER THE TIME. CAME TO RENEW HIS LIFE'S

struggle, took the same form. A normal dream-meaningless, strange, and

trivial-would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight

of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was

walking in a street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked,

when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind

had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted

the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.

Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown

robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked

stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air

fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs

felt softer than grass against Cehmai's bare feet. And the andat was

waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it-black

basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone

disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent's

pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a

windstorm sounded.

"Again?" the poet asked.

Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board,

recalled the binding-the translation that had brought the thing across

from him out of formlessness-and pushed a black stone into the empty

field of the hoard. The game began again.

The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai's work. It had been

done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had

figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding-the fluid lines of play

and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit

seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his

fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru's had once

touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted

his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held

when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across

from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat

held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part

because the binding had also made StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.

The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-Soft

glowered down on its failing line.

"You're going to lose," Cehmai said.

"I know," the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant

rockslide-another evocation of flowing stone. "Being doomed doesn't take

away from the dignity of the effort, though."

"Well said."

The andat shrugged and smiled. "One can afford to be philosophical when

losing means outliving one's opponent. This particular game? You picked

it. But there are others we play that I'm not quite so crippled at."

"I didn't pick this game. I haven't seen twenty summers, and you've seen

more than two hundred. I wasn't even a dirty thought in my grandfather's

head when you started playing this."

The andat's thick hands took a formal position of disagreement.

"We have always been playing the same game, you and I. If you were

someone else at the start, it's your problem."

They never started speaking until the game's end was a forgone

conclusion. That Stone-Made-Soft was willing to speak was as much a sign

that this particular battle was drawing to its end as the silence in

Cehmai's mind. But the last piece had not yet been pushed when a

pounding came on the door.

"I know you're in there! Wake up!"

Cehmai sighed at the familiar voice and rose. The andat brooded over the

board, searching, the poet knew, for some way to win a lost game. He

clapped a hand on the andat's shoulder as he passed by it toward the door.

"I won't have it," the stout, red-checked man said when the opened door

revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a

copper tore of office. Not for the first time, Cehmai thought Baarath

would have been better placed in life as the overseer of a merchant

house or farm than within the utkhaiem. "You poets think that because

you have the andat, you have everything. Well, I've come to tell you it

isn't so."

Cehmai took a pose of welcome and stepped back, allowing the man in.

"I've been expecting you, Baarath. I don't suppose you've brought any

food with you?"

"You have servants for that," Baarath said, striding into the wide room,

taking in the shelves of books and scrolls and maps with his customary

moment of lust. The andat looked up at him with its queer, slow smile,

and then turned back to the board.

"I don't like having strange people wandering though my library,"

Baarath said.

"Well, let's hope our friend from the Dai-kvo won't be strange."

"You are an annoying, contrary man. He's going to come in here and root

through the place. Some of those volumes are very old, you know. They

won't stand mishandling."

"Perhaps you should make copies of them."

"I am making copies. But it's not a fast process, you know. It takes a

great deal of time and patience. You can't just grab some half-trained

scribes off the street corners and set them to copying the great hooks

of the Empire."

"You also can't do the whole job by yourself, Baarath. No matter how

much you want to."

The librarian scowled at him, but there was a playfulness in the man's

eyes. The andat shifted a white marker forward and the noise in Cehmai's

head murmured. It had been a good move.

"You hold an abstract thought in human form and make it play tricks, and

you tell me what's not possible? Please. I've come to offer a trade. If

you'll-"

"Wait," Cehmai said.

"If you'll just-"

"Baarath, you can be quiet or you can leave. I have to finish this."

Stone-Made-Soft sighed as Cehmai took his seat again. The white stone

had opened a line that had until now been closed. It wasn't one he'd

seen the andat play before, and Cehmai scowled. The game was still over,

there was no way for the andat to clear his files and pour the white

markers to their target squares before Cehmai's dark stones had reached

their goal. But it would be harder now than it had been before the

librarian came. Cehmai played through the next five moves in his mind,

his fingertips twitching. Then, decisively, he pushed the black marker

forward that would block the andat's fastest course.

"Nice move," the librarian said.

"What did you want with me? Could you just say it so I can refuse and

get about my day?"

"I was going to say that I will give this little poet-let of the

Dai-kvo's full access if you'll let me include your collection here. It

really makes more sense to have all the books and scrolls cataloged

together."

Cehmai took a pose of thanks.

"No," he said. "Now go away. I have to do this."

"Be reasonable! If I choose-"

"First, you will give Maati Vaupathai full access because the Dai-kvo

and the Khai Machi tell you to. You have nothing to bargain with.

Second, I'm not the one who gave the orders, nor was I consulted on

them. If you want barley, you don't negotiate with a silversmith, do

you? So don't come here asking concessions for something that I'm not

involved with."

A flash of genuine hurt crossed Baarath's face. Stone-Made-Soft touched

a white marker, then pulled back its hand and sank into thought again.

Baarath took a pose of apology, his stance icy with its formality.

"Don't," Cehmai said. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to he a farmer's wife

about the thing, but you've come at a difficult time."

"Of course. This children's game upon which all our fates depend. No,

no. Stay. I'll see myself out."

"We can talk later," Cehmai said to the librarian's hack.

The door closed and left Cchmai and his captive, or his ward, or his

other self, alone together.

"He isn't a very good man," Stone-Made-Soft rumbled.

"No, he's not," Cehmai agreed. "But friendship falls where it falls. And

may the gods keep us from a world where only the people who deserve love

get it."

"Well said," the andat replied, and pushed forward the white stone

Cehmai knew it would.

The game ended quickly after that. Cehmai ate a breakfast of roast lamb

and boiled eggs while Stone-Made-Soft put away the game pieces and then

sat, warming its huge hands by the fire. There was a long day before

them, and after the morning's struggle, Cchmai was dreading it. They

were promised to go to the potter's works before midday. A load of

granite had come from the quarries and required his services before it

could be shaped into the bowls and vases for which Machi was famed.

After midday, he was needed for a meeting with the engineers to consider

the plans for House Pirnat's silver mine. The Khai Machi's engi neers

were concerned, he knew, that using the andat to soften the stone around

a newfound seam of ore would weaken the structure of the mine. House

Pirnat's overseer thought it worth the risk. It would be like sitting in

a child's garden during a mud fight, but it had to be done. Just

thinking of it made him tired.

"You could tell them I'd nearly won," the andat said. "Say you were too

shaken to appear."

"Yes, because my life would be so much better if they were all afraid of

turning into a second Saraykeht."

"I'm only saying that you have options," the andat replied, smiling into

the fire.

The poet's house was set apart from the palaces of the Khai and the

compounds of the utkhaiem. It was a broad, low building with thick stone

walls nestled behind a small and artificial wood of sculpted oaks. The

snows of winter had been reduced to gray-white mounds and frozen pools

in the deep shadows where sunlight would not touch them. Cehmai and the

andat strode west, toward the palaces and the Great "rower, tallest of

all the inhuman buildings of Machi. It was a relief to walk along

streets in sunlight rather than the deep network of tunnels to which the

city resorted when the drifts were too high to allow even the snow doors

to open. Brief days, and cold profound enough to crack stone, were the

hallmarks of the Machi winter. The terrible urge to he out in the

gardens and streets marked her spring. The men and women Cehmai passed

were all dressed in warm robes, but their faces were bare and their

heads uncovered. The pair paused by a firekeeper at his kiln. A singing

slave stood near enough to warm her hands at the fire as she filled the

air with traditional songs. The palaces of the Khai loomed before

them-huge and gray with roofs pitched sharp as axe blades-and the city

and the daylight stood at their backs, tempting as sugar ghosts on

Candles Night.

"It isn't too late," the andat murmured. "Manat Doru used to do it all

the time. He'd send a note to the Khai claiming that the weight of

holding me was too heavy, and that he required his rest. We would go

down to a little teahouse by the river that had sweetcakes that they

cooked in oil and covered with sugar so fine it hung in the air if you

blew on it."

"You're lying to me," Cehmai said.

"No," the andat said. "No, it's truth. It made the Khai quite angry

sometimes, but what was he to do?"

The singing slave smiled and took a pose of greeting to them that Cehmai

returned.

"We could stop by the spring gardens that Idaan frequents. If she were

free she might be persuaded to join us," the andat said.

"And why would the daughter of the Khai tempt me more than sweetcakes?"

"She's well-read and quick in her mind," the andat said, as if the

question had been genuine. "You find her pleasant to look at, I know.

And her demeanor is often just slightly inappropriate. If memory serves,

that might outweigh even sweetcakes."

Cehmai shifted his weight from foot to foot, then, with a commanding

gesture, stopped a servant boy. The boy, seeing who he was, fell into a

pose of greeting so formal it approached obeisance.

"I need you to carry a message for one. To the Master of'I'ides."

"Yes, Cehmai-cha," the boy said.

"Tell him I have had a bout with the andat this morning, and find myself

too fatigued to conduct business. And tell him that I will reach him on

the morrow if I feel well enough."

The poet fished through his sleeves, pulled out his money pouch and took

out a length of silver. The boy's eyes widened, and his small hand

reached out toward it. Cehmai drew it back, and the boy's dark eyes

fixed on his.

"If he asks," Cehmai said, "you tell him I looked quite ill."

The boy nodded vigorously, and Cehmai pressed the silver length into his

palm. Whatever errand the boy had been on was forgotten. He vanished

into the austere gloom of the palaces.

"You're corrupting me," Cehmai said as he turned away.

"Constant struggle is the price of power," the andat said, its voice

utterly devoid of humor. "It must be a terrible burden for you. Now

let's see if we can find the girl and those sweetcakes."

"They tell me you knew my son," the Khai Machi said. The grayness of his

skin and yellow in his long, hound hair were signs of something more

than the ravages of age. The Dai-kvo was of the same generation, but

Maati saw none of his vigor and strength here. The sick man took a pose

of command. "Tell me of him."

Maati stared down at the woven reed mat on which he knelt and fought to

push away the weariness of his travels. It had been days since he had

bathed, his robes were not fresh, and his mind was uneasy. But he was

here, called to this meeting or possibly this confrontation, even before

his bags had been unpacked. He could feel the attention of the servants

of the Khai-there were perhaps a dozen in the room. Some slaves, others

attendants from among the highest ranks of the utkhaiem. The audience

might be called private, but it was too well attended for Maati's

comfort. The choice was not his. He took the bowl of heated wine he had

been given, sipped it, and spoke.

"Otah-kvo and I met at the school, most high. He already wore the black

robes awarded to those who had passed the first test when I met him. I

... I was the occasion of his passing the second."

The Khai Machi nodded. It was an almost inhumanly graceful movement,

like a bird or some finely wrought mechanism. Maati took it as a sign

that he should continue.

"He came to me after that. He ... he taught me things about the school

and about myself. He was, I think, the best teacher I have known. I

doubt I would have been chosen to study with the Dai-kvo if it hadn't

been for him. But then he refused the chance to become a poet."

"And the brand," the Khai said. "He refused the brand. Perhaps he had

ambitions even then."

He was a boy, and angry, Maati thought. He had beaten Tahi-kvo and

Milah-kvo on his own terms. He'd refused their honors. Of course he

didn't accept disgrace.

The utkhaiem high enough to express an opinion nodded among themselves

as if a decision made in heat by a boy not yet twelve might explain a

murder two decades later. Maati let it pass.

"I met him again in Saraykeht," Maati said. "I had gone there to study

under Heshai-kvo and the andat Removing-the-Part-ThatContinues. Otah-kvo

was living under an assumed name at the time, working as a laborer on

the docks."

"And you recognized him?"

"I did," Maati said.

"And yet you did not denounce him?" The old man's voice wasn't angry.

Maati had expected anger. Outrage, perhaps. What he heard instead was

gentler and more penetrating. When he looked up, the redrimmed eyes were

very much like Otah-kvo's. Even if he had not known before, those eyes

would have told him that this man was Otah's father. He wondered briefly

what his own father's eyes had looked like and whether his resembled

them, then forced his mind back to the matter at hand.

"I did not, most high. I regarded him as my teacher, and ... and I

wished to understand the choices he had made. We became friends for a

time. Before the death of the poet took me from the city."

"And do you call him your teacher still? You call him Otah-kvo. That is

a title for a teacher, is it not?"

Maati blushed. He hadn't realized until then that he was doing it.

"An old habit, most high. I was sixteen when I last saw Otah-cha. I'm

thirty now. It has been almost half my life since I have spoken with

him. I think of him as a person I once knew who told me some things I

found of use at the time," Maati said, and sensing that the falsehood of

those words might be clear, he continued with some that were more nearly

true. "My loyalty is to the Dai-kvo."

"That is good," the Khai Machi said. "Tell me, then. How will you

conduct this examination of my city?"

"I am here to study the library of Machi," Maati said. "I will spend my

mornings there, most high. After midday and in the evenings I will move

through the city. I think ... I think that if Otah-kvo is here it will

not be difficult to find him."

The gray, thin lips smiled. Maati thought there was condescension in

them. Perhaps even pity. He felt a blush rise in his cheeks, but kept

his face still. He knew how he must appear to the Khai's weary eyes, but

he would not flinch and confirm the man's worst suspicions. He swallowed

once to loosen his throat.

"You have great faith in yourself," the Khai Machi said. "You come to my

city for the first time. You know nothing of its streets and tunnels,

little of its history, and you say that finding my missing son will be

easy for you."

"Rather, most high, I will make it easy for him to find me."

It might have been his imagination-he knew from experience that he was

prone to see his own fears and hopes in other people instead of what was

truly there-but Maati thought there might have been a flicker of

approval on the old man's face.

"You will report to me," the Khai said. "When you find him, you will

come to me before anyone else, and I will send word to the Dai-kvo."

"As you command, most high," Maati lied. He had said that his loyalty

lay with the Dal-hvo, but there was no advantage he could see to

explaining all that meant here and now.

The meeting continued for a short time. The Khai seemed as exhausted by

it as Maati himself was. Afterward, a servant girl led him to his

apartments within the palaces. Night was already falling as he closed

the door, truly alone for the first time in weeks. The journey from his

home in the Dai-kvo's village wasn't the half-season's trek he would

have had from Saraykeht, but it was enough, and Maati didn't enjoy the

constant companionship of strangers on the road.

A fire had been lit in the grate, and warm tea and cakes of honeyed

almonds waited for him at a lacquered table. He lowered himself into the

chair, rested his feet, and closed his eyes. Being here, in this place,

had a sense of unreality to it. To have been entrusted with anything of

importance was a surprise after his loss of status. The thought stung,

but he forced himself to turn in toward it. He had lost a great deal of

the Dai-kvo's trust between his failure in Saraykeht and his refusal to

disavow Liat, the girl who had once loved Otah-kvo but left both him and

the fallen city to be with Maati, when it became clear she was bearing

his child. If there had been time between the two, perhaps it might have

been different. One scandal on the heels of the other, though, had been

too much. Or so he told himself. It was what he wanted to believe.

A scratch at the door roused him from his bitter reminiscences. He

straightened his robes and ran a hand through his hair before he spoke.

"Come in."

The door slid open and a young man of perhaps twenty summers wearing the

brown robes of a poet stepped in and took a pose of greeting. Maati

returned it as he considered Cehmai Tyan, poet of Mach]. The broad

shoulders, the open face. Here, Maati thought, is what I should have

been. A talented boy poet who studied under a master while young enough

to have his mind molded to the right shape. And when the time came, he

had taken that burden on himself for the sake of his city. As I should

have done.

"I only just heard you'd arrived," Cehmai Tyan said. "I left orders at

the main road, but apparently they don't think as much of me as they

pretend."

There was a light humor in his voice and manner. As if this were a game,

as if he were a person whom anyone in Machi-or in the worldcould truly

treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone-it

was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat I)oru had translated

into a human form all those generations ago. This widefaced, handsome

boy could collapse every bridge, level every mountain. The great towers

of Machi could turn to a river of stone, fast-flowing and dense as

quicksilver, which would lay the city to ruin at his order. And he made

light of being ignored as if he were junior clerk in some harbormaster's

house. Maati couldn't tell if it was an affectation or if the poet was

really so utterly naive.

"The Khai left orders as well," Maati said.

"Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is

acceptable with your apartments?"

"I ... I really don't know. I haven't really looked around yet. 'Ibo

busy sitting on something that doesn't move, I suppose. I close my eyes,

and I feel like I'm still jouncing around on the back of a cart."

The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of selfconfidence

and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally

reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion

beside the fire, legs crossed under him.

"I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning,"

Cehmai said. "The man who guards the library is ... he's a good man, but

he's protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the

ages."

"Like a poet," Maati said.

Cehmai grinned. "I suppose so. Only he'd have made a terrible poet. He's

puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the

keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people

in the city can read. If he'd ever been given something important to do,

he'd have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if

I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to

you, I expect he'll be fine. It's that first negotiation that's tricky."

Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.

"There's no call to take you from your duties," he said. "I expect the

order of the Khai will suffice."

"I wouldn't only be doing it as a favor to you, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said.

The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn't seem to

notice his reaction. "Baarath is a friend of mine, and sometimes you

have to protect your friends from themselves. You know?"

Maati took a pose that was an agreement and looked into the flames.

Sometimes men could be their own worst enemies. That was truth. He

remembered the last time he had seen Otah-kvo. It had been the night

Maati had admitted what Liat had become to him and what he himself was

to her. His old friend's eyes had gone hard as glass. Heshai-kvo, the

poet of Saraykeht, had died just after that, and Maati and Liat had left

the city together without seeing Otah-kvo again.

The betrayal in those dark eyes haunted him. He wondered how much the

anger had festered in his old teacher over the years. It might have

grown to hatred by now, and Maati had come to hunt him down. The fire

danced over the coal, flames turning the black to gray, the stone to

powder. He realized that the boy poet had been speaking, and that the

words had escaped him entirely. Maati took a pose of apology.

"My mind wandered. You were saying?"

"I offered to come by at first light," Cehmai said. "I can show you

where the good teahouses are, and there's a streetcart that sells the

best hot eggs and rice in the city. Then, perhaps, we can brave the

library?"

"That sounds fine. Thank you. But now I think I'd best unpack my things

and get some rest. You'll excuse me."

Cehmai bounced up in a pose of apology, realizing for the first time

that his presence might not be totally welcome, and Maati waved it away.

They made the ritual farewells, and when the door closed, Maati sighed

and rose. He had few things: thick robes he had bought for the journey

north, a few hooks including the small leatherbound volume of his dead

master's that he had taken from Saraykeht, a packet of letters from

Liat, the most recent of them years old now. The accumulated memories of

a lifetime in two bags small enough to carry on his hack if needed. It

seemed thin. It seemed not enough.

He finished the tea and almond cakes, then went to the window, slid the

paper-thin stone shutter aside, and looked out into the darkness. Sunset

still breathed indigo into the western skyline. The city glittered with

torches and lanterns, and to the south the glow of the forges of the

smith's quarter looked like a brush fire. The towers rose black against

the stars, windows lit high above him where some business took place in

the dark, thin air. Maati sighed, the night cold in his face and lungs.

All these unknown streets, these towers, and the lacework of tunnels

that ran beneath the city: midwinter roads, he'd heard them called. And

somewhere in the labyrinth, his old friend and teacher lurked, planning

murder.

Maati let his imagination play a scene: Otah-kvo appearing before him in

the darkness, blade in hand. In Maati's imagination, his eyes were hard,

his voice hoarse with anger. And there he faltered. He might call for

help and see Otah captured. He might fight him and end the thing in

blood. He might accept the knife as his due. For a dream with so vivid a

beginning, Maati could not envision the end.

He closed the shutter and went to throw another black stone onto the

fire. His indulgence had turned the room chilly, and he sat on the

cushion near the fire as the air warmed again. His legs didn't fold as

easily as Cehmai's had, but if he shifted now and again, his feet didn't

go numb. He found himself thinking fondly of Cehmai-the boy was easy to

befriend. Otah-kvo had been like that, too.

Maati stretched and wondered again whether, if all this had been a song,

he would have sung the hero's part or the villain's.

No ONE HAD EVER SEEN IDAAN'S REBELLIONS AS HUNGER. THA'1' HAD BEEN their

fault. If her friends or her brothers transgressed against the etiquette

of the court, consequences came upon them, shame or censure. But Idaan

was the favored daughter. She might steal a rival girl's gown or arrive

late to the temple and interrupt the priest. She could evade her

chaperones or steal wine from the kitchens or dance with inappropriate

men. She was Idaan Machi, and she could do as she saw fit, because she

didn't matter. She was a woman. And if she'd never screamed at her

father in the middle of his court that she was as much his child as

Biitrah or Danat or Kaiin, it was because she feared in her bones that

he would only agree, make some airy comment to dismiss the matter, and

leave her more desperate than before.

Perhaps if once someone had taken her to task, had treated her as if her

actions had the same weight as other people's, things would have ended

differently.

Or perhaps folly is folly because you can't see where it moves from

ambition into evil. Arguments that seem solid and powerful prove hollow

once it's too late to turn back. Arguments like Why should it be right

for them but wrong for me?

She haunted the Second Palace now, breathing in the emptiness that her

eldest brother had left. The vaulted arches of stone and wood echoed her

soft footsteps, and the sunlight that filtered though the stone shutters

thickened the air to a golden twilight. Here was the bedchamber, bare

even of the mattress he and his wife had slept upon. There, the workshop

where he had labored on his enthusiasms, keeping engineers by his side

sometimes late into the night or on into morning. The tables were empty

now. Dust lay thick on them, ignored even by the servants until the time

came for some new child of the Khaiem to take residence ... to live in

this opulence and keep his ear pricked for the sound of his brother's

hunting dogs.

She heard Adrah coming long before he stepped into the room. She

recognized his gait by the sound of it, and didn't call. He was clever,

she thought bitterly; if he wanted to find her, he could puzzle it out.

Adrah Vaunyogi, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, father of her children

if all went well. Whatever well meant anymore.

"There you are," Adrah said. She could see his anger in the way he held

his body.

"What have I done this time?" she demanded, her tone carrying a sarcasm

that dismissed his concerns even before he spoke them. "Did your patrons

want me to wear red on a day I chose yellow?"

The mention of his hackers, even as obliquely as that, made him stiffen

and peer around, looking for slaves or servants who might overhear.

Idaan laughed-a cruel, short sound.

"You look like a kitten with a bell on its tail," she said. "There's no

one here but us. You needn't worry that someone will roll the rock off

our little conspiracy. We're as safe here as anywhere."

Adrah strode over and crouched beside her all the same. He smelled of

crushed violets and sage, and it struck Idaan that it had not been so

long ago that the scent would have warmed her heart and brought a flush

to her cheeks. His face was long and pretty-almost too pretty to be a

man's. She had kissed those lips a thousand times, but now it seemed

like the act of another woman-some entirely different Idaan Machi whose

body and memory she had inherited when the first girl died. She smiled

and raised her hands in a pose of formal query.

"Arc you mad?" Adrah demanded. "Don't speak about them. Not ever. If

we're found out ..."

"Yes. You're right. I'm sorry," Idaan said. "I wasn't thinking."

""There are rumors you spent a day with Cchmai and the andat. You were

seen.

"The rumors are true, and I meant to be seen. I can't see how my having

a close relationship to the poet would hurt the cause, and in fact I

think it will help, don't you? When the time comes that half the houses

of the utkhaiem arc vying for my father's chair, an upstart house like

yours would do well to boast a friendship with Cehmai."

"I think being married to a daughter of the Khai will be quite enough,

thank you," Adrah said, "and your brothers aren't dead yet, in case

you'd forgotten."

"No. I remember."

"I don't want you acting strangely. Things are too delicate just now for

you to start attracting attention. You are my lover, and if you are off

half the time drinking rice wine with the poet, people won't be saying

that I have strong friendship with him. They'll be saying that he's

cuckolding me, and that Vaunyogi is the wrong house to draw a new Khai

from."

"So you don't want me seeing him, or you just want more discretion when

I do?" Idaan asked.

That stopped him. His eyes, deep brown with flecks of red and green,

peered into hers. A sudden memory, powerful as illness, swept over her

of a winter night when they had met in the tunnels. He had gazed at her

then by firelight, had been no further from her than he was now. She

wondered how these could be those same eyes. Her hand rose as if by

itself and stroked his cheek. He folded his hands around hers.

"I'm sorry," she said, ashamed of the catch in her voice. "I don't want

to quarrel with you."

"What are you doing, little one?" he asked. "Don't you see how dangerous

this is that we're doing? Everything rests on it."

"I know. I remember the stories. It's strange, don't you think, that my

brothers can slaughter each other and all the people do is applaud, but

if I take a hand, it's a crime worse than anything."

"You're a woman," he said, as if that explained everything.

"And you," she said calmly, almost lovingly, "are a schemer and an agent

of the Galts. So perhaps we deserve each other."

She felt him stiffen and then force the tension away. His smile was

crooked. She felt something warm in her breast-painful and sad and warm

as the first sip of rum on a midwinter night. She wondered if it might

be hatred, and if it were, whether it was for herself or this man before

her.

"It's going to be fine," he said.

"I know," she said. "I knew it would be hard. It's the ways it's hard

that surprise me. I don't know how I should act or who I should be. I

don't know where the normal grief that anyone would feel stops or turns

into something else." She shook her head. "This seemed simpler when we

were only talking about it."

"I know, love. It will be simple again, I promise you. It's only this in

the middle that feels complicated."

"I don't know how they do it," she said. "I don't know how they kill one

another. I dream about him, you know. I dream that I am walking through

the gardens or the palaces and I see him in among a crowd of people."

Tears came to her eyes unbidden, flowing warm and thick down her cheeks,

but her voice, when she continued, was steady and calm as a woman

predicting the weather. "He's always happy in the dreams. He's always

forgiven me."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I know you loved him."

Idaan nodded, but didn't speak.

"Be strong, love. It will be over soon. It will all be finished very soon.

She wiped the tears away with the hack of her hand, her knuckles

darkened where her paints were running, and pulled him close. He seemed

to hold back for a moment, then folded against her, his arms around her

trembling shoulders. He was warm and the smell of sage and violet was

mixed now with his skin-the particular musk of his body that she had

treasured once above all other scents. He murmured small comforts into

her ears and stroked her hair as she wept.

"Is it too late?" she asked. "Can we stop it, Adrah? Can we take it all

hack?"

He kissed her eyes, his lips soft as a girl's. His voice was calm and

implacable and hard as stone. When she heard it, she knew he had been

thinking himself down the same pathways and had come to the same place.

"No, love. It's too late. It was too late as soon as your brother died.

We have started, and there's no ending it now except to win through or die."

They stayed still in each others' embrace. If all went well, she would

die an old woman in this man's arms, or he would die in hers. While

their sons killed one another. And there had been a time not half a year

ago she'd thought the prize worth winning.

"I should go," she murmured. "I have to attend to my father. There's

some dignitary just come to the city that I'm to smile at."

"Have you heard of the others? Kaiin and Danat?"

"Nothing," Idaan said. "They've vanished. Gone to ground."

"And the other one? Otah?"

Idaan pulled back, straightening the sleeves of her robes as she spoke.

"Otah's a story that the utkhaiem tell to make the song more

interesting. He's likely not even alive any longer. Or if he is, he's

wise enough to have no part of this."

"Are you certain of that?"

"Of course not," she said. "But what else can I give you?"

They spoke little after that. Adrah walked with her through the gardens

of the Second Palace and then out to the street. Idaan made her way to

her rooms and sent for the slave boy who repainted her face. The sun

hadn't moved the width of two hands together before she strode again

though the high palaces, her face cool and perfect as a player's mask.

The formal poses of respect and deference greeted and steadied her. She

was Idaan Machi, daughter of the Khai and wife, though none knew it yet,

of the man who would take his place. She forced confidence into her

spine, and the men and women around her reacted as if it were real.

Which, she supposed, meant that it was. And that the sorrow and darkness

they could not see were false.

When she entered the council chambers, her father greeted her with a

silent pose of welcome. He looked ill, his skin gray and his mouth

pinched by the pain in his belly. The delicate lanterns of worked iron

and silver made the wood-sheathed walls glow, and the cushions that

lined the floor were thick and soft as pillows. The men who sat on

them-yes, men, all of them-made their obeisances to her, but her father

motioned her closer. She walked to his side and knelt.

"There is someone I wish you to meet," her father said, gesturing to an

awkward man in the brown robes of a poet. "The I)ai-kvo has sent him.

Maati Vaupathai has come to study in our library."

Fear flushed her mouth with the taste of metal, but she simpered and

took a pose of welcome as if the words had meant nothing. Her mind

raced, ticking through ways that the Dal-kvo could have discovered her,

or Adrah, or the Galts. The poet replied to her gesture with a formal

pose of gratitude, and she took the opportunity to look at him more

closely. The body was soft as a scholar's, the lines of his face round

as dough, but there was a darkness to his eyes that had nothing to do

with color or light. She felt certain he was someone worth fearing.

"The library?" she said. "That's dull. Surely there are more interesting

things in the city than room after room of old scrolls."

"Scholars have strange enthusiasms," the poet said. "But it's true, I've

never been to any of the winter cities before. I'm hoping that not all

my time will be taken in study."

'T'here had to be a reason that the Dai-kvo and the Galts wanted the

same thing. There had to be a reason that they each wanted to plumb the

depths of the library of Machi.

"And how have you found the city, Maati-cha?" she asked. "When you

haven't been studying."

"It is as beautiful as I had been told," the poet said.

"He has been here only a few days," her father said. "Had he come

earlier, I would have had your brothers here to guide him, but perhaps

you might introduce him to your friends."

"I would be honored," Idaan said, her mind considering the thou sand

ways that this might be a trap. "Perhaps tomorrow evening you would join

me for tea in the winter gardens. I have no doubt there are many people

who would be pleased to join us."

"Not too many, I hope," he said. He had an odd voice, she thought. As if

he was amused at something. As if he knew how badly he had shaken her.

Her fear shifted slightly, and she raised her chin. "I already find

myself forgetting names I should remember," the poet continued. "It's

most embarrassing."

"I will he pleased to remind you of my own, should it be required," she

said. Her father's movement was almost too slight to see, but she caught

it and cast her gaze down. Perhaps she had gone too far. But when the

poet spoke, he seemed to have taken no offense.

"I expect I will remember yours, Idaan-cha. It would be very rude not

to. I look forward to meeting your friends and seeing your city. Perhaps

even more than closeting myself in your library."

He had to know. He had to. Except that she was not being led away under

guard. She was not being taken to the quiet chambers and questioned. If

he did not know, he must only suspect.

Let him suspect, then. She would get word to Adrah and the Galts. They

would know better than she what to do with this NIaati Vaupathai. If he

was a threat, he would be added to the list. I3iitrah, Danat, Kaiin,

Otah, Maati. The men she would have to kill or have killed. She smiled

at him gently, and he nodded to her. One more name could make little

difference now, and he, at least, was no one she loved.

"WHEN ARE THEY SENDING YOU?" KIYAN ASKED AS SIZE POURED OUT THE bucket.

Gray water flowed over the bricks that paved the small garden at the

hack of the wayhouse. Otah took the longhandled brush and swept the

water off to the sides, leaving the walkway deep red and glistening in

the sunlight. He felt Kiyan's gaze on him, felt the question in the air.

The gardens smelled of fresh turned earth. Spices for the kitchen grew

here. In a few weeks, the place would be thick with growing things:

basil and mint and thyme. He imagined scrubbing these bricks week after

week over the span of years until they wore smooth or he died, and felt

an irrational surge of fondness for the walkway. He smiled to himself.

"Itani?"

"I don't know. That is, I know they want me to go to Machi in two weeks

time. Amiit Foss is sending half the couriers he has up there, it seems.

"Of course he is. It's where everything's happening."

"But I haven't decided to go."

The silence bore down on him now, and he turned. Kiyan stood in the

doorway-in her doorway. Her crossed arms, her narrowed eyes, and the

single frown-line drawn vertically between her brows, made Otah smile.

He leaned on his brush.

"We need to talk, sweet," he said. "There are some things ... we have

some business, I think, to attend to."

Kiyan answered by taking the brush from him, leaning it against the

wall, and marching to a meeting room at the back of the house. It was

small but formal, with a thick wooden door and a window that looked out

on the corner of the interior courtyard. The sort of place she might

give to a diplomat or a courier for an extra length of copper. The sort

of place it would be difficult to be overheard. That was as it should be.

Kiyan sat carefully, her face as blank as that of a man playing tiles.

Otah sat across from her, careful not to touch her hand. She was holding

herself back, he knew. She was restraining herself from hoping until she

knew, so that if what he said did not match what she longed to hear, the

disappointment would not he so heavy. For a moment, his mind flickered

back to a bathhouse in Saraykeht and another woman's eyes. He had had

this conversation once before, and he doubted he would ever have it again.

"I don't want to go to the north," Otah said. "For more reasons than one.

"Why not?" Kiyan asked.

"Sweet, there are some things I haven't told you. Things about my

family. About myself...."

And so he began, slowly, carefully, to tell the story. He was the son of

the Khai Machi, but his sixth son. One of those cast out by his family

and sent to the school where the sons of the Khaiem and utkhaiem

struggled in hope of one day being selected to be poets and wield the

power of the andat. He had been chosen once, and had walked away. Itani

Noygu was the name he had chosen for himself, the man he had made of

himself. But he was also Otah Machi.

He was careful to tell the story well. He more than half expected her to

laugh at him. Or to accuse him of a self-aggrandizing madness. Or to

sweep him into her arms and say that she'd known, she'd always known he

was something more than a courier. Kiyan defeated all the stories he had

spun in his dreams of this moment. She merely listened, arms crossed,

eyes turned toward the window. The vertical line between her brows

deepened slightly, and that was all. She did not move or ask questions

until he had nearly reached the end. All that was left was to tell her

he'd chosen to take her offer to work with her here at the wayhouse, but

she knew that already and lifted her hands before he could say the words.

"Irani ... lover, if this isn't true ... if this is a joke, please tell

me. Now."

"It isn't a joke," he said.

She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. When she spoke, she

seemed calm in a way that he knew meant rage beyond expression. At the

first tone of it, his heart went tight.

"You have to leave. Now. Tonight. You have to leave and never come hack."

"Kiyan-kya..."

"No. No kya. No sweet. No my lone. None of that. You have to leave my

house and you can't ever come back or tell anyone who you are or who I

am or that we knew each other once. Igo you understand that?"

"I understand that you're angry with me," Otah said, leaning toward her.

"You have a right to be. But you don't know how carefully I have had to

guard this."

Kiyan tilted her head, like a fox that's heard a strange noise, then

laughed once.

"You think I'm upset you didn't tell me? You think I'm upset because you

had a secret and you didn't spill it the first time we shared a bed?

Irani, this may surprise you, but I have secrets a thousand times less

important than that, and I've kept them a hundred times better."

`But you want me to leave?

"Of course I want you to leave. Are you dim? Do you know what happened

to the men who guarded your eldest brother? They're dead. Do you recall

what happened when the Khai Yalakeht's sons turned on each other six

years back? 't'here were a dozen corpses before that was through, and

only two of them were related to the Khai. Now look around you. How do

you expect me to protect my house? How can I protect Old Mani? And think

before you speak, because if you tell me that you'll be strong and manly

and protect me, I swear by all the gods I'll turn you in myself."

"No one will find out," Otah said.

She closed her eyes. A tear broke free, tracing a bright line down her

cheek. When he leaned close, reaching out to wipe it away, she slapped

his hand before it touched her.

"I would almost be willing to take that chance, if it were only me. Not

quite, but nearly. It isn't, though. It's everyone and everything I've

worked for."

"Kiyan-kya, together we could ..."

"Do nothing. Together we could do nothing, because you are leaving now.

And odd as it sounds, I do understand. Why you concealed what you did,

why you told inc now. And I hope ghosts haunt you and chew out your eyes

at night. I hope all the gods there are damn you for making me love you

and then doing this to me. Now get out. If you're here in half a hand's

time, I will call for the guard."

Outside the window, a flutter of wings and then the fluting melody of a

songbird. The constant distant sound of the river. The scent of pine.

"Do you believe me?" she asked. "That I'll call the guard on you if you

stay?"

"I do," he said.

"Then go."

"I love you."

"I know you do, 'Tani-kya. Go."

House Siyanti had quarters in the city for its people-small rooms hardly

large enough for a cot and a brazier, but the blankets were thick and

soft, and the kitchens sold meals at half the price a cart on the street

would. When the rain came that night, Otah lay in the glow of the coals

and listened to patter of water against leaves mix with the voices from

the covered courtyard. Someone was playing a nomad's harp, and the music

was lively and sorrowful at the same time. Sometimes voices would rise

up together in song or laughter. He turned Kiyan's words over in his

mind and noticed how empty they made him feel.

He'd been a fool to tell her, a fool to say anything. If he had only

kept his secrets secret, he could have made a life for himself based on

lies, and if the brothers he only knew as shadows and moments from a

halfrecalled childhood had ever discovered him, Kiyan and Old Mani and

anyone else unfortunate enough to know him might have been killed

without even knowing why.

Kiyan had not been wrong.

A gentle murmur of thunder came and went. Otah rose from his cot and

walked out. Amiit Foss kept late hours, and Otah found him sitting at a

fire grate, poking the crackling flames with a length of iron while he

joked over his shoulder with the five men and four women who lounged on

cushions and low chairs. He smiled when he saw Otah and called for a

howl of wine for him. The gathering looked so calm and felt so relaxed

that only someone in the gentleman's trade would have recognized it for

the business meeting that it was.

"Itani-cha is one of the couriers I mean to send north, if I can pry him

away from his love of sloth and comfort," Amiit said with a smile. The

others greeted him and made him welcome. Otah sat by the fire and

listened. There would be nothing said here that he was not permitted to

know. Amiit's introduction had established with the subtlety of a master

Otah's rank and the level of trust to be afforded him, and no one in the

room was so thick as to misunderstand him.

The news from the north was confusing. The two surviving sons of Machi

had vanished. Neither had appeared in the other cities of the Khaiem,

going to courts and looking for support as tradition would have them do.

Nor had the streets of Machi erupted in bloodshed as their bases of

power within the city vied for advantage. The best estimates were that

the old Khai wouldn't see another winter, and even some of the houses of

the utkhaiem seemed to be preparing to offer up their sons as the new

Khai should the succession fail to deliver a single living heir.

Something very quiet was happening, and House Siyanti-like everyone else

in the world-was aching with curiosity. Otah could hear it in their

voices, could see it in the way they held their wine. Even when the

conversation shifted to the glassblowers of Cetani and the collapse of

the planned summer fair in Amnat-Tan, all minds were drawn toward Machi.

He sipped his wine.

Going north was dangerous. He knew that, and still it didn't escape him

that the Khai Machi dying by inches was his father, that these men were

the brothers he knew only as vague memories. And because of these men,

he had lost everything again. If he was going to be haunted his whole

life by the city, perhaps he should at least see it. The only thing he

risked was his life.

At length, the conversation turned to less weighty matters andwithout a

word or shift in voice or manner-the meeting was ended. Otah spoke as

much as any, laughed as much, and sang as loudly when the pipe players

joined them. But when he stretched and turned to leave, Amiit Foss was

at his side. Otah and the overseer left together, as if they had only

happened to rise at the same time, and Otah knew that no one in the

drunken, boisterous room they left had failed to notice it.

"So, it sounds as if all the interesting things in the world were

happening in Machi," Otah said as they strode back through the hallways

of the house compound. "You are still hoping to send me there?"

"I've been hoping," Amiit Foss agreed. "But I have other plans if you

have some of your own."

"I don't," Otah said, and Amiit paused. In the dim lantern light, Otah

let the old man search his face. Something passed over Amiit, the ghost

of some old sorrow, and then he took a pose of condolence.

"I thought you had come to quit the house," Amiit said.

"I'd meant to," Otah said, surprised at himself for admitting it.

Amiit gestured Otah to follow him, and together they retired to Amiit's

apartments. The rooms were large and warm, hung with tapestries and lit

by a dozen candles. Utah sat on a low seat by a table, and Amiit took a

box from his shelf. Inside were two small porcelain bowls and a white

stoppered bottle that matched them. When Amiit poured, the scent of rice

wine filled the room.

"We drink to the gods," Amiit said, raising his bowl. "May they never

drink to us."

Otah drank the wine at a gulp. It was excellent, and he felt his throat

grow warmer. He looked at the empty bowl in his fingers and nodded.

Amiit grinned.

"It was a gift from an old friend," Amiit said. "I love to drink it, but

I hate to drink alone."

"I'm pleased to be of service," Otah said as Amiit filled the bowl again.

"So things with the woman didn't work out?"

"No," Utah said.

"I'm sorry."

"It was entirely my fault."

"If it's true, you're a wise man to know it, and if not, you're a good

man for saying it. Either way."

"I think it would he ... that is, if there are any letters to be

carried, I think travel might be the best thing just now. I don't really

care to stay in Udun."

Amiit sighed and nodded.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Come to my offices in the morning. We'll arrange

something."

Afterwards, they finished the rice wine and talked of nothing

important-of old stories and old travels, the women they had known and

loved or else hated. Or both. Otah said nothing of Kiyan or the north,

and Amiit didn't press him. When Otah rose to leave, he was surprised to

find how drunk he had become. He navigated his way to his room and lay

on the couch, mustering the resolve to pull off his robes. Morning found

him still dressed. He changed robes and went down to the bathhouse,

forcing his mind back over his conversations of the night before. He was

fairly certain he had said nothing to implicate himself or make Amiit

suspect the nature of his falling out with Kiyan. He wondered what the

old man would have made of the truth, had he known it.

The packet of letters waited for him, each sewn and sealed, in a leather

bag on Amiit Foss' desk. Most were for trading houses in Machi, though

there were four that were to go to members of the utkhaiem. Otah turned

the packet in his hands. Behind him, one of the apprentices said

something softly and another giggled.

"You have time to reconsider," Amiit said. "You could go back to her on

your knees. If the letters wait another day, there's little lost. And

she might relent."

Otah tucked the letters into their pouch and slipped it into his sleeve.

"An old lover of mine once told me that everything I'd ever won, I won

by leaving," Otah said.

"The island girl?"

"Did I mention her last night?"

"At length," Amiit said, chuckling. "That particular quotation came up

twice, as I recall. There might have been a third time too. I couldn't

really say."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope I didn't tell you all my secrets," Otah

said, making a joke of his sudden unease. He didn't recall saying

anything about Maj, and it occurred to him exactly how dangerous that

night had been.

"If you had, I'd make it a point to forget them," Amiit said. "Nothing a

drunk man says on the day his woman leaves him should be held against

him. It's poor form. And this is, after all, a gentleman's trade, ne?"

Otah took a pose of agreement.

"I'll report what I find when I get back," he said, unnecessarily.

"Assuming I haven't frozen to death on the roads."

"Be careful up there, Itani. Things are uncertain when there's the scent

of a new Khai in the wind. It's interesting, and it's important, but

it's not always safe."

Otah shifted to a pose of thanks, to which his supervisor replied in

kind, his face so pleasantly unreadable that Otah genuinely didn't know

how deep the warning ran.

When Maati considered the mines-something he had rarely had occasion to

do-he had pictured great holes going deep into the earth. He had not

imagined the branchings and contortions of passages where miners

struggled to follow veins of ore, the stench of dust and damp, the yelps

and howls of the dogs that pulled the flatbottomed sledges filled with

gravel, or the darkness. He held his lantern low, as did the others

around him. 't'here was no call to raise it. Nothing more would be seen,

and the prospect of breaking it against the stone overhead was unpleasant.

""There can be places where the air goes bad, too," Cehmai said as they

turned another twisting corner. "They take birds with them because they

die first."

"What happens then?" Maati asked. "If the birds die?"

"It depends on how valuable the ore is," the young poet said. "Abandon

the mine, or try to blow out the had air. Or use slaves. There are men

whose indentures allow that."

Two servants followed at a distance, their own torches glowing. Maati

had the sense that they would all, himself included, have been better

pleased to spend the day in the palaces. All but the andat.

StoneMade-Soft alone among them seemed untroubled by the weight over

them and the gloom that pressed in when the lanterns flickered. The

wide, calm face seemed almost stupid to Maati, the andat's occasional

pronouncements simplistic compared with the thousand-layered comments of

Seedless, the only andat he'd known intimately. He knew better than to

be taken in. 'The form of the andat might be different, the mental

bindings that held it might place different strictures upon it, but the

hunger at its center was as desperate. It was an andat, and it would

long to return to its natural state. They might seem as different as a

marble from a thorn, but at heart they were all the same.

And Maati knew he was walking through a tunnel not so tall he could

stand to his full height with a thousand tons of stone above him. This

placid-faced ghost could bring it down on him as if they'd been crawling

through a hole in the ocean.

"So, you see," Cehmai was saying, "the Daikani engineers find where they

want to extend the mine out. Or down, or up. We have to leave that to

them. Then I will come through and walk through the survey with them, so

that we all understand what they're asking."

"And how much do you soften it?"

"It varies," Cehmai said. "It depends on the kind of rock. Some of them

you can almost reduce to putty if you're truly clear where you want it

to be. Then other times, you only want it to be easier to dig through.

Most often, that's when they're concerned about collapses."

"I see," Maati said. "And the pumps? How do those figure in?"

"That was actually an entirely different agreement. The Khai's eldest

son was interested in the problem. The mines here are some of the lowest

that are still in use. The northern mines are almost all in the

mountains, and so they aren't as likely to strike water."

"So the Daikani pay more for being here?"

"No, not really. The pumps he designed usually work quite well."

"But the payment for them?"

Cehmai grinned. His teeth and skin were yellowed by the lantern light.

"It was a different agreement," Cehmai said again. "The Daikani let him

experiment with his designs and he let them use them."

"But if they worked well ..."

"Other mines would pay the Khai for the use of the pumps if they wished

for help building them. Usually, though, the mines will help each other

on things like that. There's a certain . . . what to call it ...

brotherhood? The miners take care of each other, whatever house they

work for."

"Might we see the pumps?"

"If you'd like," he said. "They're back in the deeper parts of the mine.

If you don't mind walking down farther...."

Maati forced a grin and did not look at the wide face of the andat

turning toward him.

"Not at all," he said. "Let's go down."

The pumps, when he found them at last, were ingenious. A series of

treadmills turned huge corkscrews that lifted the water up to pools

where another corkscrew waited to lift it higher again. They did not

keep the deepest tunnels dry-the walls there seemed to weep as Maati

waded through warm, knee-high water-but they kept it clear enough to

work. Machi had, Cehmai assured him, the deepest tunnels in the world.

NIaati did not ask if they were the safest.

They found the mine's overseer here in the depths. Voices seemed to

carry better in the watery tunnels than up above, but Maati could not

make out the words clearly until they were almost upon him. A small,

thick-set man with a darkness to him that made Maati think of grime

worked so deeply into skin that it would never come clean, he took a

pose of welcome as they approached.

"We've an honored guest come to the city," Cehmai said.

"We've had many honored guests in the city," the overseer said, with a

grin. "Damn few in the bottom of the hole, though. There's no palaces

down here."

"But Machi's fortunes rest on its mines," Maati said. "So in a sense

these are the deepest cellars of the palaces. The ones where the best

treasures are hidden."

The overseer grinned.

"I like this one," he said to Cehmai. "He's got a quick head on him."

"I heard about the pumps the Khai's eldest son had designed," Maati

said. "I was wondering if you could tell me of them?"

The grin widened, and the overseer launched into an expansive and

delighted discussion of water and mines and the difficulty of removing

the one from the other. Maati listened, struggling to follow the

vocabulary and grammar particular to the trade.

"He had a gift for them," the overseer said, at last. His voice was

melancholy. "We'll keep at them, these pumps, and they'll get better,

but not like they would have with Biitrah-cha on them."

"He was here, I understand, on the day he was killed," Maati said. He

saw the young poet's head shift, turning to consider him, and he ignored

it as he had the andat's.

"That's truth. And I wish he'd stayed. His brothers aren't bad men, but

they aren't miners. And ... well, he'll be missed."

"I had thought it odd, though," Nlaati said. "Whichever brother killed

him, they had to know where he would be-that he would be called out

here, and that the work would take so much of the day that he wouldn't

return to the city itself."

"I suppose that's so," the overseer said.

"Then someone knew your pumps would fail," Maati said.

The lamplight flickered off the surface of the water, casting shadows up

the overseer's face as this sank in. Cehmai coughed. Maati said nothing,

did not move, waited. If any man here had been involved with it, the

overseer was most likely. But Maati saw no rage or wariness in his

expression, only the slow blooming of implication that might be expected

in a man who had not thought the murder through. So perhaps he could be

used after all.

"You're saying someone sabotaged my pumps to get him out here," the

overseer said at last.

Maati wished deeply that Cehmai and his andat were not presentthis was a

thing better done alone. But the moment had arrived, and there was

nothing to be done but go forward. The servants at least were far enough

away not to overhear if he spoke softly. Maati dug in his sleeve and

came out with a letter and a small leather pouch, heavy with silver

lengths. He pressed them both into the surprised overseer's hands.

"If you should discover who did, I would very much like to speak with

them before the officers of the utkhaiem or the head of your House. That

letter will tell you how to find me."

The overseer tucked away the pouch and letter, taking a pose of thanks

which Maati waved away. Cehmai and the andat were silent as stones.

"And how long is it you've been working these mines?" Maati asked,

forcing a lightness to his tone he did not feel. Soon the overseer was

regaling them with stories of his years underground, and they were

walking together toward the surface again. By the time Maati stepped out

from the long, sloping throat of the mine and into daylight, his feet

were numb. A litter waited for them, twelve strong men prepared to carry

the three of them back to the palaces. Maati stopped for a moment to

wring the water from the hem of his robes and to appreciate having

nothing but the wide sky above him.

"Why was it the Dai-kvo sent you?" Cehmai asked as they climbed into the

wooden litter. His voice was almost innocent, but even the andat was

looking at Maati oddly.

"There are suggestions that the library may have some old references

that the Dai-kvo lacks. Things that touch on the grammars of the first

poets."

"Ah," Cehmai said. The litter lurched and rose, swaying slightly as the

servants bore them away hack to the palaces. "And nothing more than that?"

"Of course not," Maati said. "What more could there he?"

He knew that he was convincing no one. And that was likely a fine thing.

Maati had spent his first days in Machi learning the city, the courts,

the teahouses. The Khai's daughter had introduced him to the gatherings

of the younger generation of the utkhaiem as the poet Cehmai had to the

elder. Maati had spent each night walking a different quarter of the

city, wrapped in thick wool robes with close hoods against the vicious

cold of the spring air. He had learned the intrigues of the court: which

houses were vying for marriages to which cities, who was likely to be

extorting favors for whom over what sorts of indiscretion, all the petty

wars of a family of a thousand children.

He had used the opportunities to spread the name of Irani Noygu- saying

only that he was an old friend Maati had heard might be in the city,

whom he would very much like to see. There was no way to say that it was

the name Otah Machi had invented for himself in Saraykeht, and even if

there had been, Maati would likely not have done so. He had come to

realize exactly how little he knew what he ought to do.

He had been sent because he knew Otah, knew how his old friend's mind

worked, would recognize him should they meet. They were advantages,

Maati supposed, but it was hard to weigh them against his inexperience.

There was little enough to learn of making discreet inquiries when your

life was spent in the small tasks of the Dai-kvo's village. An overseer

of a trading house would have been better suited to the task. A

negotiator, or a courier. Liat would have been better, the woman he had

once loved, who had once loved him. Liat, mother of the boy Nayiit, whom

Maati had held as a babe and loved more than water or air. Liat, who had

been Otah's lover as well.

For the thousandth time, Maati put that thought aside.

When they reached the palaces, Maati again thanked Cehmai for taking the

time from his work to accompany him, and Cehmai-still with the

half-certain stance of a dog hearing an unfamiliar soundassured him that

he'd been pleased to do so. Maati watched the slight young man and his

thick-framed andat walk away across the flagstones of the courtyard.

Their hems were black and sodden, ruining the drape of the robes. Much

like his own, he knew.

Thankfully, his own apartments were warm. He stripped off his robes,

leaving them in a lump for the servants to remove to a launderer, and

replaced them with the thickest he had-lamb's wool and heavy leather

with a thin cotton lining. It was the sort that natives of Machi wore in

deep winter, but Maati pulled it close about him, vowing to use it

whenever he went out, whatever the others might think of him. His boots

thrown into a corner, he stretched his pale, numb feet almost into the

fire grate and shuddered. He would have to go to the wayhouse where

Biitrah Machi had died. The owners there had spoken to the officers of

the utkhaiem, of course. They had told their tale of the moonfaced man

who had come with letters of introduction, worked in their kitchens, and

been ready to take over for a night when the overseers all came down

ill. Still, he could not be sure there was nothing more to know unless

he made his visit. Some other day, when he could feel his toes.

The summons came to him when the sun-red and angry-was just preparing to

slide behind the mountains to the west. Maati pulled on thick, warm

boots of soft leather, added his brown poet's robes over the warmer

ones, and let himself be led to the Khai Machi's private chambers. He

passed through several rooms on his way-a hall of worked marble the

color of honey with a fountain running through it like a creek, a

meeting chamber large enough to hold two dozen at a single table, then a

smaller corridor that led to chambers of a more human size. Ahead of

him, a woman passed from one side of the corridor to the other leaving

the impression of night-black hair, warm brown skin, and robes the

yellow of sunrise. One of the wives, Maati knew, of a man who had several.

At last, the servant slid open a door of carved rosewood, and Maati

stepped into a room hardly larger than his own bedroom. The old man sat

on a couch, his feet toward the fire that burned in the grate. His robes

were lush, the silks seeming to take up the firelight and dance with it.

They seemed more alive than his flesh. Slowly, the Khai raised a clay

pipe to his mouth and puffed on it thoughtfully. The smoke smelled rich

and sweet as a cane field on fire.

Maati took a pose of greeting as formal as high court. The Khai Machi

raised an ancient eyebrow and only smiled. With the stem of the pipe, he

pointed to the couch opposite him and nodded to Maati that he should sit.

"They make me smoke this," the Khai said. "Whenever my belly troubles

me, they say. I tell them they might as well make it air, burn it by the

bushel in all the firekeeper's kilns, but they only laugh as if it were

wit, and I play along."

"Yes, most high."

There was a long pause as the Khai contemplated the flames. Maati

waited, uncertain. He noticed the catch in the Khai Machi's breath, as

if it pained him. He had not noticed it before.

"Your search for my outlaw son," the Khai said. "It is going well?"

"It is early yet, most high. I have made myself visible. I have let it

be known that I am looking into the death of your son."

"You still expect Otah to come to you?"

"Yes."

"And if he does not?"

"Then it will take more time, most high. But I will find him."

The old man nodded, then exhaled a plume of pale smoke. He took a pose

of gratitude, his wasted hands holding the position with the grace of a

lifetime's practice.

"His mother was a good woman. I miss her. Iyrah, her name was. She gave

me Idaan too. She was glad to have a child of her own that she could keep."

Maati thought he saw the old man's eyes glisten for a moment, lost as he

was in old memories of which Maati could only guess the substance. Then

the Khai sighed.

"Idaan," the Khai said. "She's treated you gently?"

"She's been nothing but kind," Maati said, "and very generous with her

time."

The Khai shook his head, smiling more to himself than his audience.

"That's good. She was always unpredictable. Age has calmed her, I think.

There was a time she would study outrages the way most girls study face

paints and sandals. Always sneaking puppies into court or stealing

dresses she fancied from her little friends. She relied on me to keep

her safe, however far she flew," he said, smiling fondly. "A mischievous

girl, my daughter, but good-hearted. I'm proud of her."

Then he sobered.

"I am proud of all my children. It's why I am not of one mind on this,"

the Khai said. "You would think that I should be, but I am not. With

every day that the search continues, the truce holds, and Kaiin and

Danat still live. I've known since I was old enough to know anything

that if I took this chair, my sons would kill each other. It wasn't so

hard before I knew them, when they were only the idea of sons. But then

they were Biitrah and Kaiin and Danat. And I don't want any of them to die."

"But tradition, most high. If they did not-"

"I know why they must," the Khai said. "I was only wishing. It's

something dying men do, I'm told. Sit with their regrets. It's likely

that which kills us as much as the sickness. I sometimes wish that this

had all happened years ago. That they had slaughtered each other in

their childhood. Then I might have at least one of them by me now. I had

not wanted to die alone."

"You are not alone, most high. The whole court . .

Maati broke off. The Khai Machi took a pose accepting correction, but

the amusement in his eyes and the angle of his shoulders made a sarcasm

of it. Maati nodded, accepting the old man's point.

"I can't say which of them I would have wanted to live, though," the

Khai said, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. "I love them all. Very

dearly. I cannot tell you how deeply I miss Biitrah."

"Had you known him, you would have loved Otah as well."

"You think so? Certainly you knew him better than I. I can't think he

would have thought well of me," the Khai said. Then, "Did you go back?

After you took your robes? Did you go to see you parents?"

"My father was very old when I went to the school," Maati said. "He died

before I completed my training. We did not know each other."

"So you have never had a family."

"I have, most high," Maati said, fighting to keep the tightness in his

chest from changing the tone of his voice. "A lover and a son. I had a

family once."

"But no longer. They died?"

"They live. Only not with me."

The Khai considered him, bloodshot eyes blinking slowly. With his thin,

wrinkled skin, he reminded Maati of a very old turtle or else a very

young bird. The Khai's gaze softened, his brows tilting in understanding

and sorrow.

"It is never easy for fathers," the Khai said. "Perhaps if the world had

needed less from us."

Maati waited a long moment until he trusted his voice.

"Perhaps, most high."

The Khai exhaled a breath of gray, his gaze trapped by the smoke.

"It isn't the world I knew when I was young," the old man said.

"Everything changed when Saraykeht fell."

"The Khai Saraykeht has a poet," Maati said. "He has the power of the

andat."

"It took the Dai-kvo eight years and six failed bindings," the Khai

said. "And every time word came of another failure, I could see it in

the faces of the court. The utkhaiem may put on proud faces, but I've

seen the fear that swims under that ice. And you were there. You said so

in the audience when I greeted you."

"Yes, most high."

"But you didn't say everything you knew," the Khai said. "Did you?"

The yellowed eyes fixed on Maati. The intelligence in them was

unnerving. Maati felt himself squirming, and wondering what had happened

to the melancholy dying man he'd been speaking with only moments before.

"I ... that is ..."

"There were rumors that the poet's death was more than an angry east

island girl's revenge. The Galts were mentioned."

"And Eddensea," Maati said. "And Eymond. There was no end of accusation,

most high. Some even believed what they charged. When the cotton trade

collapsed, a great number of people lost a great amount of money. And

prestige."

"They lost more than that," the Khai said, leaning forward and stabbing

at the air with the stem of his pipe. "The money, the trade. The

standing among the cities. They don't signify. Saraykeht was the death

of certainty. They lost the conviction that the Khaiem would hold the

world at bay, that war would never come to Saraykeht. And we lost it

here too."

"If you say so, most high."

"The priests say that something touched by chaos is never made whole,"

the Khai said, sinking back into his cushions. "Do you know what they

mean by that, Maati-cha?"

"I have some idea," Maati said, but the Khai went on.

"It means that something unthinkable can only happen once. Because after

that, it's not unthinkable any longer. We've seen what happens when a

city is touched by chaos. And now it's in the back of every head in

every court in all the cities of the Khaiem."

Maati frowned and leaned forward.

"You think Cehrnai-cha is in some danger?"

"What?" the Khai said, then waved the thought away, stirring the smoky

air. "No. Not that. I think my city is at risk. I think Otah ... my

upstart son ..."

He's forgiven you, a voice murmured in the back of Maati's mind. The

voice of Seedless, the andat of Saraykeht. They were the words the andat

had spoken to Maati in the instant before Heshai's death had freed it.

It had been speaking of Otah.

"I've called you here for a reason, Maati-cha," the Khai said, and Maati

pulled his attention back to the present. "I didn't care to speak of it

around those who would use it to fuel gossip. Your inquiry into

Biitrah's death. You must move more quickly."

"Even with the truce?"

"Yes, even at the price of my sons returning to their tradition. If I

die without a successor chosen-especially if Danat and Kaiin are still

gone to ground-there will be chaos. The families of the utkhaiem start

thinking that perhaps they would sit more comfortably in my chair, and

schemes begin. Your task isn't only to find Otah. Your task is to

protect my city."

"I understand, most high."

"You do not, Maati-cha. The spring roses are starting to bloom, and I

will not see high summer. Neither of us has the luxury of time."

THE GATHERING WAS ALL THAT CEHMAI HAD HOPED FOR, AND LESS. SPRING

breezes washed the pavilion with the scent of fresh flowers. Kilns set

along the edges roared behind the music of reed organ, flute, and drum.

Overhead, the stars shone like gems strewn on dark velvet. The long

months of winter had given musicians time to compose and practice new

songs, and the youth of the high families week after weary week to tire

of the cold and dark and the terrible constriction that deep winter

brought to those with no business to conduct on the snow.

Cehmai laughed and clapped time with the music and danced. Women and

girls caught his eye, and he, theirs. The heat of youth did where

heavier robes would otherwise have been called for, and the draw of body

to body filled the air with something stronger than the perfume of

flowers. Even the impending death of the Khai lent an air of license.

Momentous things were happening, the world's order was changing, and

they were young enough to find the thought romantic.

And yet he could not enjoy it.

A young man in an eagle's mask pressed a bowl of hot wine into his hand,

and spun away into the dance. Cehmai grinned, sipped at it, and faded

back to the edge of the pavilion. In the shadows behind the kilns,

Stone-Made-Soft stood motionless. Cehmai sat beside it, put the bowl on

the grass, and watched the revelry. Two young men had doffed their robes

entirely and were sprinting around the wide grounds in nothing but their

masks and long scarves trailing from their necks. The andat shifted like

the first shudder of a landslide, then was still again. When it spoke,

its voice was so soft that they would not be heard by the others.

"It wouldn't he the first time the Dai-kvo had lied."

"Or the first time I'd wondered why," Cehmai said. "It's his to decide

what to say and to whom."

"And yours?"

"And mine to satisfy my curiosity. You heard what he said to the

overseer in the mines. If he truly didn't want me to know, he would have

lied better. Maati-kvo is looking into more than the library, and that's

certain."

The andat sighed. Stone-blade-Soft had no more need of breath than did a

mountainside. The exhalation could only be a comment. Cehmai felt the

subject of their conversation changing even before the andat spoke.

"She's come."

And there, dressed black as rooks and pale as mourning, Idaan Machi

moved among the dancers. Her mask hid only part of her face and not her

identity. Wrapped as he was by the darkness, she did not see him. Cehmai

felt a lightening in his breast as he watched her move through the

crowd, greeting friends and looking, he thought, for something or

perhaps someone among them. She was not beautiful-well painted, but any

number of the girls and women were more nearly perfect. She was not the

most graceful, or the best spoken, or any of the hundred things that

Cehmai thought of when he tried to explain to himself why this girl

should fascinate him. The closest he could come was that she was

interesting, and none of the others were.

"It won't end well," the andat murmured.

"It hasn't begun," Cehmai said. "How can something end when it hasn't

even started?"

Stone-blade-Soft sighed again, and Cehmai rose, tugging at his robes to

smooth their lines. The music had paused and someone in the crowd

laughed long and high.

"Come back when you've finished and we'll carry on our conversation,"

the andat said.

Cchmai ignored the patience in its voice and strode forward, back into

the light. The reed organ struck a chord just as he reached Idaan's

side. He brushed her arm, and she turned-first annoyed and then

surprised and then, he thought, pleased.

"Idaan-cha," he said, the exaggerated formality acting as its opposite

without taking him quite into the intimacy that the kya suffix would

have suggested. "I'd almost thought you wouldn't be joining us."

"I almost wasn't," she said. "I hadn't thought you'd be here."

The organ set a beat, and the drums picked it up; the dance was

beginning again. Cehmai held out a hand and, after a pause that took a

thousand years and lasted perhaps a breath, Idaan took it. The music

began in earnest, and Cehmai spun her, took her under his arm, and was

turned by her. It was a wild tune, rich and fast with a rhythm like a

racing heart. Around him the others were grinning, though not at him.

Idaan laughed, and he laughed with her. The paving stones beneath them

seemed to echo hack the song, and the sky above them received it.

As they turned to face each other, he could see the flush in Idaan's

check, and felt the same blood in his own, and then the music whirled

them off again.

In the center of the frenzy, someone took Cehmai's elbow from behind,

and something round and hard was pressed into his hands. A man's voice

whispered urgently in his ear.

"Hold this."

Cehmai faltered, confused, and the moment was gone. He was suddenly

standing alone in a throng of people, holding an empty bowl-a thread of

wine wetting the rim-while Adrah Vaunyogi took Idaan Machi through the

steps and turns of the dance. The pair shifted away from him, left him

behind. Cehmai felt the flush in his cheek brighten. He turned and

walked through the shifting bodies, handing the bowl to a servant as he

left.

"He is her lover," the andat said. "Everyone knows it."

"I don't," Cehmai said.

"I just told you."

"You tell me things all the time; it doesn't mean I agree to them."

"This thing you have in mind," Stone-Made-Soft said. "You shouldn't do it."

Cehmai looked up into the calm gray eyes set in the wide, placid face.

He felt his own head lift in defiance, even as he knew the words were

truth. It was stupid and mean and petty. Adrah Vaunyogi wasn't even

entirely in the wrong. There was a perspective by which the little

humiliation Cehmai had been dealt was a small price for flirting so

openly with another man's love.

And yet.

The andat nodded slowly and turned to consider the dancers. It was easy

enough to pick out Idaan and Adrah. They were too far for Cehmai to be

sure, but he liked to think she was frowning. It hardly mattered. Cehmai

focused on Adrah's movements-his feet, shifting in time with the drums

while Idaan danced to the flutes. He doubled his attention, feeling it

through his own body and also the constant storm at the hack of his

mind. In that instant he was both of them-a single being with two bodies

and a permanent struggle at the heart. And then, at just the moment when

Adrah's foot came hack to catch his weight, Cehmai reached out. The

paving stone gave way, the smooth stone suddenly soft as mud, and Adrah

stumbled backward and fell, landing on his rear, legs splayed. Cehmai

waited a moment for the stone to flow back nearer to smooth, then let

his consciousness return to its usual state. The storm that was

Stone-Made-Soft was louder, more present in his mind, like the proud

flesh where a thorn has scratched skin. And like a scratch, Cehmai knew

it would subside.

"We should go," Cehmai said, "before I'm tempted to do something childish."

The andat didn't answer, and Cehmai led the way through the nightdark

gardens. The music floated in the distance and then faded. Far from the

kilns and dancing, the night was cold-not freezing, but near it. But the

stars were brighter, and the moon glowed: a rim of silver that made the

starless thumbprint darker by contrast. They passed by the temple and

the counting house, the bathhouse and base of the great tower. The andat

turned down a side path then, and paused when Cehmai did not follow.

Stone-Made-Soft took a pose of query.

"Is this not where you were going?" it asked.

Cehmai considered, and then smiled.

"I suppose it is," he said, and followed the captive spirit down the

curving pathway and up the wide, shallow steps that led to the library.

The great stone doors were barred from within, but Cehmai followed the

thin gravel path at the side of the building, keeping close to the wall.

The windows of Baarath's apartments glowed with more than a night

candle's light. Even with the night half gone, he was awake. The door

slave was an ancient man, and Cehmai had to shake him by the shoulder

before he woke, retreated into the apartments, and returned to lead them in.

The apartments smelled of old wine, and the sandalwood resin that

Baarath burned in his brazier. The tables and couches were covered with

books and scrolls, and no cushion had escaped from some ink stain.

Baarath, dressed in deep red robes thick as tapestry, rose from his desk

and took a pose of welcome. His copper tore of office was lying

discarded on the floor at his feet.

"Cehmai-cha, to what do I owe this honor?"

Cehmai frowned. "Are you angry with me?" he asked.

"Of course not, great poet. How could a poor man of books dare to feel

angry with a personage like yourself?"

"Gods," Cehmai said as he shifted a pile of papers from a wide chair. "I

don't know, Baarath-kya. Do tell me."

"Kya? Oh, you are too familiar with me, great poet. I would not suggest

so deep a friendship as that with a man so humble as myself."

"You're right," Cehmai said, sitting. "I was trying to flatter you. Did

it work?"

"You should have brought wine," the stout man said, taking his own seat.

The false graciousness was gone, and a sour impatience in its place.

"And come at an hour when living men could talk business. Isn't it late

for you to be wandering around like a dazed rabbit?"

"There was a gathering at the rose pavilion. I was just going back to my

apartments and I noticed the lights burning."

Baarath made a sound between a snort and a cough. Stone-MadeSoft gazed

placidly at the marble walls, thoughtful as a lumberman judging the best

way to fell a tree. Cehmai frowned at him, and the andat replied with a

gesture more eloquent than any pose. Don't blame me. He's your friend,

not mine.

"I wanted to ask how things were proceeding with Maati Vaupathai,"

Cehmai said.

"About time someone took an interest in that annoying, feckless idiot.

I've met cows with more sense than he has."

"Not proceeding well, then?"

"Who can tell? Weeks, it's been. He's only here about half the morning,

and then he's off dining with the dregs of the court, taking meetings

with trading houses, and loafing about in the low towns. If I were the

Dai-kvo, I'd pull that man back home and set him to plowing fields. I've

eaten hens that were better scholars."

"Cows and hens. He'll be a whole farmyard soon," Cehmai said, but his

mind was elsewhere. "What does he study when he is here?"

"Nothing in particular. He picks up whatever strikes him and spends a

day with it, and then comes hack the next for something totally

unrelated. I haven't told him about the Khai's private archives, and he

hasn't bothered to ask. I was sure, you know, when he first came, that

he was after something in the private archives. But now it's like the

library itself might as well not exist."

"Perhaps there is some pattern in what he's looking at. A common thread

that places them all together."

"You mean maybe poor old Baarath is too simple to see the picture when

it's being painted for him? I doubt it. I know this place better than

any man alive. I've even made my own shelving system. I have read more

of these books and seen more of their relationships than anyone. When I

tell you he's wandering about like tree fluff on a breezy day, it's

because he is."

Cehmai tried to feel surprise, and failed. The library was only an

excuse. The Dai-kvo had sent Maati Vaupathai to examine the death of

Biitrah Machi. That was clear. Why he would choose to do so, was not. It

wasn't the poets' business to take sides in the succession, only to work

with-and sometimes cool the ambitions of-whichever son sur vived. The

Khaiem administered the city, accepted the glory and tribute, passed

judgment. The poets kept the cities from ever going to war one against

the other, and fueled the industries that brought wealth from the

Westlands and Galt, Bakta, and the east islands. But something had

happened, or was happening, that had captured the Dai-kvo's interest.

And Maati Vaupathai was an odd poet. He held no post, trained under no

one. He was old to attempt a new binding. By many standards, he was

already a failure. The only thing Cehmai knew of him that stood out at

all was that Maati had been in Saraykeht when that city's poet was

murdered and the andat set free. He thought of the man's eyes, the

darkness that they held, and a sense of unease troubled him.

"I don't know what the point of that sort of grammar would be," Baarath

said. "Dalani Toygu's was better for one thing, and half the length."

Cehmai realized that the Baarath had been talking this whole time, that

the subject had changed, and in fact they were in the middle of a debate

on a matter he couldn't identify. All this without the need that he speak.

"I suppose you're right," Cehmai said. "I hadn't seen it from that angle."

Stone-Made-Soft's calm, constant near-smile widened slightly.

"You should have, though. That's my point. Grammars and translations and

the subtleties of thought are your trade. That I know more about it than

you and that Maati person is a bad sign for the world. Note this,

Cehmai-kya, write down that I said it. It's that kind of ignorance that

will destroy the Khaiem."

"I'll write down that you said it," Cehmai said. "In fact, I'll go back

to my apartments right now and do that. And afterwards, I'll crawl into

bed, I think."

"So soon?"

"The night candle's past its center mark," Cehmai said.

"Fine. Go. When I was your age, I would stay up nights in a row for the

sake of a good conversation like this, but I suppose the generations

weaken, don't they?"

Cehmai took a pose of farewell, and Baarath returned it.

"Come by tomorrow, though," Baarath said as they left. "There's some old

imperial poetry I've translated that might interest you."

Outside, the night had grown colder, and few lanterns lit the paths and

streets. Cehmai pulled his arms in from their sleeves and held his

fingers against his sides for warmth. His breath plumed blue-white in

the faint moonlight, and even the distant scent of pine resin made the

air seem colder.

"He doesn't think much of our guest," Cehmai said. "I would have thought

he'd be pleased that Maati took little interest in the books, after all

the noise he made."

When Stone-Made-Soft spoke, its breath did not fog. "He's like a girl

bent on protecting her virginity until she finds no one wants it."

Cehmai laughed.

"That is entirely too apt," he said, and the andat took a pose accepting

the compliment.

"You're going to do something," it said.

"I'm going to pay attention," Cehmai said. "If something needs doing,

I'll try to be on hand."

They turned down the cobbled path that led to the poet's house. The

sculpted oaks that lined it rustled in the faint breeze, rubbing new

leaves together like a thousand tiny hands. Cehmai wished that he'd

thought to bring a candle from Baarath's. He imagined Maati Vaupathai

standing in the shadows with his appraising gaze and mysterious agenda.

"You're frightened of him," the andat said, but Cehmai didn't answer.

There was someone there among the trees-a shape shifting in the

darkness. He stopped and slid his arms back into their sleeves. The

andat stopped as well. They weren't far from the house-Cehmai could see

the glow of the lantern left out before his doorway. The story of a poet

slaughtered in a distant city raced in his mind until the figure came

out between him and his doorway, silhouetted in the dim light. Cehmai's

heart didn't slow, but it did change contents.

She still wore the half-mask she'd had at the gathering. Her black and

white robes shifted, the cloth so rich and soft, and he could hear it

even over the murmur of the trees. He stepped toward her, taking a pose

of welcome.

"Idaan," he said. "Is there something ... I didn't expect to find you

here. I mean ... I'm doing this rather badly, aren't l?"

"Start again," she said.

"Idaan."

"Cehmai."

She took a step toward him. He could see the flush in her cheek and

smell the faint, nutty traces of distilled wine on her breath. When she

spoke, her words were sharp and precise.

"I saw what you did to Adrah," she said. "He left a heel mark in the stone."

"Have I given offense?" he asked.

"Not to me. He didn't see it, and I didn't say."

In the back of his mind, or in some quarter of his flesh, Cehmai felt

Stone-Made-Soft receding as if in answer to his own wish. They were

alone on the dark path.

"It's difficult for you, isn't it?" she said. "Being a part of the court

and yet not. Being among the most honored men in the city, and yet not

of Machi."

"I bear it. You've been drinking."

"I have. But I know who I am and where I am. I know what I'm doing."

"What are you doing, Idaan-kya?"

"Poets can't take wives, can they?"

"We don't, no. There's not often room in our lives for a family."

"And lovers?"

Cehmai felt his breath coming faster and willed it to slow. An echo of

amusement in the back of his mind was not his own thought. He ignored it.

"Poets take lovers," he said.

She stepped nearer again, not touching, not speaking. There was no chill

to the air now. There was no darkness. Cehmai's senses were as fresh and

bright and clear as midday, his mind as focused as the first day he'd

controlled the andat. Idaan took his hand and slowly, deliberately, drew

it through the folds of her robes until it cupped her breast.

"You ... you have a lover, Idaan-kya. Adrah ..."

"Do you want me to sleep here tonight?"

"Yes, Idaan. I do."

"And I want that too."

He struggled to think, but his skin felt as though he was basking in

some hidden sun. There seemed to be some sound in his ears that he

couldn't place that drove away everything but his fingertips and the

cold-stippled flesh beneath them.

"I don't understand why you're doing this," he said.

Her lips parted, and she moved half an inch back. His hand pressed

against her skin, his eyes were locked on hers. Fear sang through him

that she would take another step back, that his fingers would only

remember this moment, that this chance would pass. She saw it in his

face, she must have, because she smiled, calm and knowing and sure of

herself, like something from a dream.

"Do you care?" she asked.

"No," he said, half-surprised at the answer. "No, I truly don't."

THE CARAVAN LEFT THE LOW TOWN BEFORE DAWN, CARTWHEELS RATTLING on the

old stone paving, oxen snorting white in the cold, and the voices of

carters and merchants light with the anticipation of journey's end. The

weeks of travel were past. By midday, they would cross the bridge over

the Tidat and enter Machi. The companionship of the roadalready somewhat

strained by differences in political opinions and some unfortunate words

spoken by one of the carters early in the journeywould break apart, and

each of them would be about his own business again. Otah walked with his

hands in his sleeves and his heart divided between dread and

anticipation. Irani Noygu was going to Machi on the business of his

house-the satchel of letters at his side proved that. There was nothing

he carried with him that would suggest anything else. He had come away

from this city as a child so long ago he had only shreds of memory left

of it. A scent of musk, a stone corridor, bathing in a copper tub when

he was small enough to be lifted with a single hand, a view from the top

of one of the towers. Other things as fragmentary, as fleeting. He could

not say which memories were real and which only parts of dreams.

It was enough, he supposed, to be here now, walking in the darkness. He

would go and see it with a man's eyes. He would see this place that had

sent him forth and, despite all his struggles, still had the power to

poison the life he'd built for himself. Itani Noygu had made his way as

an indentured laborer at the seafronts of Saraykeht, as a translator and

fisherman and midwife's assistant in the east islands, as a sailor on a

merchant ship, and as a courier in House Siyanti and all through the

cities. He could write and speak in three tongues, play the flute badly,

tell jokes well, cook his own meals over a half-dead fire, and comport

himself well in any company from the ranks of the utkhaiem to the

denizens of the crudest dockhouse. This from a twelve-year-old boy who

had named himself, been his own father and mother, formed a life out of

little more than the will to do so. Irani Noygu was by any sane standard

a success.

It was Otah Machi who had lost Kiyan's love.

The sky in the east lightened to indigo and then royal blue, and Otah

could see the road out farther ahead. Between one breath and the next,

the oxen came clearer. And the plains before them opened like a vast

scroll. Far to the north, mountains towered, looking flat as a painting

and blued by the distance. Smoke rose from low towns and mines on the

plain, the greener pathway of trees marked the river, and on the

horizon, small as fingers, rose the dark towers of Machi, unnatural in

the landscape.

Otah stopped as sunlight lit the distant peaks like a fire. The

brilliance crept down and then the distant towers blazed suddenly, and a

moment later, the plain flooded with light. Otah caught his breath.

This is where I started, he thought. I come from here.

He had to trot to catch hack up with the caravan, but the questioning

looks were all answered with a grin and a gesture. The enthusiastic

courier still nave enough to be amazed by a sunrise. There was nothing

more to it than that.

House Siyanti kept no quarters in Machi, but the gentleman's trade had

its provisions for this. Other Houses would extend courtesy even to

rivals so long as it was understood that the intrigues and prying were

kept to decorous levels. If a courier were to act against a rival House

or carried information that would too deeply tempt his hosts, it was

better form to pay for a room elsewhere. Nothing Otah carried was so

specific or so valuable, and once the caravan had made its trek across

the plain and passed over the wide, sinuous bridge into Machi, Otah made

his way to the compound of House Nan.

The structure itself was a gray block three stories high that faced a

wide square and shared walls with the buildings on either side. Otah

stopped by a street cart and bought a bowl of hot noodles in a smoky

black sauce for two lengths of copper and watched the people passing by

with a kind of doubled impression. He saw them as the subjects of his

training: people clumped at the firekeepers' kilns and streetcarts meant

a lively culture of gossip, women walking alone meant little fear of

violence, and so on in the manner that was his profession. He also saw

them as the inhabitants of his childhood. A statue of the first Khai

Machi stood in the square, his noble expression undermined by the pigeon

streaks. An old, rag-wrapped beggar sat on the street, a black lacquer

box before her, and chanted songs. The forges were only a few streets

away, and Otah could smell the sharp smoke; could even, he thought, hear

the faint sound of metal on metal. He sucked down the last of the

noodles and handed back the howl to a man easily twice his age.

"You're new to the north," the man said, not unkindly.

"Does it show?" Otah asked.

"Thick robes. It's spring, and this is warm. If you'd been here over

winter, your blood would be able to stand a little cold."

Otah laughed, but made note. If he were to fit in well, it would mean

suffering the cold. He would have to sit with that. He did want to

understand the place, to see it, if only for a time, through the eyes of

a native, but he didn't want to swim in ice water just because that was

the local custom.

The door servant at the gray House Nan left him waiting in the street

for a while, then returned to usher him to his quarters-a small,

windowless room with four stacked cots that suggested he would be

sharing the small iron brazier in the center of the room with seven

other men, though he was the only one present just then. He thanked the

servant, learned the protocols for entering and leaving the house, got

directions to the nearest bathhouse, and after placing the oiled leather

pouch that held his letters safely with the steward, went back out to

wash off the journey.

The bathhouse smelled of iron pipes and sandalwood, but the air was warm

and thick. A launderer had set tip shop at the front, and Otah gave over

his robes to be scrubbed and kiln-dried with the understanding that it

doomed him to be in the baths for at least the time it took the sun to

move the width of two hands. He walked naked to the public baths and

eased himself into the warm water with a sigh.

"Hai!" a voice called, and Otah opened his eyes. Two older men and a

young woman sat on the same submerged bench on which he rested. One of

the older men spoke.

"You've just come in with the `van?"

"Indeed," Otah said. "Though I hope you could tell by looking more than

smell."

"Where from?"

"Udun, most recently."

The trio moved closer. The woman introduced them all-overseers for a

metalworkers group. Silversmiths, mostly. Otah was gracious and ordered

tea for them all and set about learning what they knew and thought, felt

and feared and hoped for, and all of it with smiles and charm and just

slightly less wit displayed than their own. It was his craft, and they

knew it as well as he did, and would exchange their thoughts and

speculations for his gossip. It was the way of traders and merchants the

world over.

It was not long before the young woman mentioned the name of Otah Machi.

"If it is the upstart behind it all, it's a poor thing for Machi," the

older man said. "None of the trading houses would know him or trust him.

None of the families of the utkhaiem would have ties to him. Even if

he's simply never found, the new Khai will always he watching over his

shoulder. It isn't good to have an uncertain line in the Khai's chair.

The best thing that could happen for the city would be to find him and

put a knife through his belly. Him, and any children he's got meantime."

Otah smiled because it was what a courier of House Siyanti would do. The

younger man sniffed and sipped his bowl of tea. The woman shrugged, the

motion setting small waves across the water.

"It might do us well to have someone new running the city," she said.

"It's clear enough that nothing will change with either of the two

choices we have now. Biitrah. He at least was interested in mechanism.

The Galts have been doing more and more with their little devices, and

we'd be fools to ignore what they've managed."

"Children's toys," the older man said, waving the thought away.

"Toys that have made them the greatest threat Eddensea and the Westlands

have seen," the younger man said. "Their armies can move faster than

anyone else's. There isn't a warden who hasn't felt the bite of them. If

they haven't been invaded, they've had to offer tribute to the Lords

Convocate, and that's just as bad."

"The ward being sacked might disagree," Otah said, trying for a joke to

lighten the mood.

"The problem with the Galts," the woman said, "is they can't hold what

they take. Every year it's another raid, another sack, another fleet

carrying slaves and plunder back to Galt. But they never keep the land.

They'd have much more money if they stayed and ruled the Westlands. Or

Eymond. Or Eddensea."

"Then we'd have only them to trade with," the younger man said. "That'd

be ugly."

"The Galts don't have the andat," the older man said, and his tone

carried the rest: they don't have the andat, so they are not worth

considering.

"But if they did," Otah said, hoping to keep the subject away from

himself and his family. "Or if we did not-"

"If the sky dives into the sea, we'll be fishing for birds," the older

man said. "It's this Otah Machi who's uneasing things. I have it on good

authority that Danat and Kaiin have actually called a truce between them

until they can rout out the traitor."

"Traitor?" Otah asked. "I hadn't heard that of him."

"There are stories," the younger man said. "Nothing anyone has proved.

Six years ago, the Khai fell ill, and for a few days, they thought he

might die. Some people suspected poison."

"And hasn't he turned to poison again? Look at Biitrah's death," the

younger man said. "And I tell you the Khai Machi hasn't been himself

since then, not truly. Even if Otah were to claim the chair, it'd be

better to punish him for his crimes and raise up one of the high families."

"It could have been had fish," the woman said. "There was a lot of bad

fish that year."

"No one believes that," the older man said.

"Which of the others would be best for the city now that Biitrah is

gone?" Otah asked.

The older man named Kaiin, and the younger man and woman Danat, in the

same moment, the syllables grinding against each other in the warm, damp

air, and they immediately fell to debate. Kaiin was a master negotiator;

Danat was better thought of by the utkhaiem. Kaiin was prone to fits of

temper, Danat to weeks of sloth. Each man, to hear it, was a paragon of

virtue and little better than a street thug. Otah listened, interjected