Liat blinked back tears.
‘You would choose me over him?’
The words shook him, she could see that. For a moment, she wanted more than anything to unsay them, but time only moved forward. Maati met her gaze again.
‘I can’t lose either of you,’ he said. ‘What peace Otah-kvo and I make, if we can make any, is between the two of us. What I feel for you, Liat . . . I could sink my life on those rocks. You’ve become that much to me. If you stay with him, I will be your friend forever.’
It was like pouring cool water on a burn. Liat felt herself sink back.
‘Go, then. Find him if you can and tell him how sorry I am. And whether you do or not, come back to me, Maati. Promise you’ll come back.’
It was still some minutes before Maati tore himself away and headed out into the streets of the city. Liat, after he had gone, sat on the bench, her eyes closed, observing the roiling emotions in her breast. Guilt, yes, but also joy. Fear, but also relief. She loved Maati, she saw that now. As she had loved Itani once, when they had only just begun. It was because of this confusion that she didn’t notice for a long time that she was being watched.
Maj stood in the alcove, one hand pressed to her lips, her eyes shining with tears. Liat stood slowly, and took a pose that was a query. Maj strode across the room to her, put her hands on Liat’s neck and - unnervingly - kissed her on the lips.
‘Poor rabbit,’ Maj said. ‘Poor stupid rabbit. Am very sorry. The boy and you together. It makes me think of the man who I was . . . of the father. Before, I call you stupid and selfish and weak because I am forgetting what it is to be young. I am young once, too, and I am not my best mind now. What I say to hurt you, I take back, yes?’
Liat nodded, recognizing the apology in the words, if not the whole sense of them. Maj responded with a string of Nippu that Liat couldn’t follow, but she caught the words for knowledge and for pain. Maj patted Liat’s cheek gently and stepped away.
19
‘Does it bother you, grandmother?’ Mitat asked as they walked down the street. She spoke softly, so that the words stayed between the two of them, and not so far forward as the two mercenary guards before them or so far back as the two behind.
‘I can think of a half dozen things you might mean,’ Amat said.
‘Speaking against Wilsin.’
‘Of course it does,’ Amat said. ‘But it isn’t something I chose.’
‘It’s only that House Wilsin was good to you for so long . . . it was like family, wasn’t it? To make your own way now . . .’
Amat narrowed her eyes. Mitat flushed and took a pose of apology which she ignored.
‘This isn’t a conversation about me, is it?’ Amat asked.
‘Not entirely,’ Mitat said.
The breeze blowing in from the sea chilled her, and the sun, already falling to the horizon, did nothing more than stretch the shadows and redden the light. The banners over the watch house fluttered, the mutter of cloth like voices in another room. Her guards opened the door, nodded to the watchmen inside and gestured Amat and her aide, her friend, her first real ally in the whole sour business, through. Amat paused.
‘If you’re thinking of leaving, you and your man, I want two things of you. First, wait until the suit is presented. Second, let me make an offer for your time. If we can’t negotiate something, you can go with my blessings.’
‘The terms of my indenture were harsh, and you could . . .’
‘Oh don’t be an ass,’ Amat said. ‘That was between you and Ovi Niit. This is between us. Not the same thing at all.’
Mitat smiled - a little sadly, Amat thought - and took a pose that sealed an agreement. In the watch house, Amat paid her dues, signed and countersigned the documents, and took her copy for the records of the house. For another turn through the moon’s phases, she and her house were citizens in good standing of the soft quarter. She walked back to the house with her five companions, and yet also very much alone.
The scent of garlic sausages tempted her as they passed an old man and his cart, and Amat wished powerfully that she could stop, send away the men and their knives, and sit with Mitat talking as friends might. She could find what price the woman wanted to stay - whatever it was Amat expected she’d be willing to pay it. But the guards wouldn’t let them pause or be alone. Mitat wouldn’t have had it. Amat herself knew it would have been unwise - somewhere in the city, Marchat Wilsin had to be in a fever of desperation, and he’d proven willing to kill before this. Leaving the comfort house at all was a risk. And still, something like an ordinary life beckoned more seductively than any whore ever had.
One step at a time, Amat moved forward. There would be time later, she told herself, for all that. Later, when the Galts were revealed and her burden was passed on to someone else. When the child’s death was avenged and her city was safe and her conscience was clean. Then she could be herself again, if there was anything left of that woman. Or create herself again if there wasn’t.
The messenger waited for them at the front entrance of the house. He was a young man, not older than Liat, but he wore the colors of a high servant. A message, Amat knew with a sinking heart, from the Khai Saraykeht.
‘You,’ she said. ‘You’re looking for Amat Kyaan?’
The messenger - a young boy with narrow-set eyes and a thin nose - took a pose of acknowledgment and respect. It was a courtly pose.
‘You’ve found her,’ Amat said.
The boy plucked a letter from his sleeve sealed with the mark of the Khai Saraykeht. Amat tore it open there in the street. The script was as beautiful as any message from the palaces - calligraphy so ornate as to approach illegibility. Still, Amat had the practice to make it out. She sighed and took a pose of thanks and dismissal.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘There’s no reply.’
‘What happened?’ Mitat asked as they walked into the house. ‘Something bad?’
‘No,’ Amat said. ‘Only the usual delays. The Khai is putting the audience back four days. Another party wishes to be present.’
‘Wilsin?’
‘I assume so. It serves us as much as him, really. We can use a few more days to prepare.’
Amat paused in the front room of the house, tapping the folded paper against the edge of a dice table. The sound of a young girl laughing came from the back, from the place where her whores waited to be chosen by one client or another. It was an odd thing to hear. Any hint of joy, it seemed, had become an odd thing to hear. If she were Marchat Wilsin, she’d try one last gesture - throw one last dart at the sky and hope for a miracle.
‘Get Torish-cha,’ Amat said. ‘I want to discuss security again. And have we had word from Liat’s boy? Itani?’
‘Nothing yet,’ the guard by the front door said. ‘The other one came by before.’
‘If either of them arrive, send them to see me.’
She walked through to the back, Mitat beside her.
‘It’s likely only a delay,’ Amat said, ‘but if he’s winning time for a reason, I want to be ready for it.’
‘Grandmother?’
They had reached the common room - full now with women and boys in the costumes they wore, with the men who ran the games and wine, with the smell of fresh bread and roast lamb and with voices. Mitat stood at the door, her arms crossed. Amat took a querying pose.
‘Someone has to tell Maj,’ she said.
Amat closed her eyes. Of course. As if all the rest wasn’t enough, someone would have to tell Maj. She would. If there was going to be a screaming fight, at least they could have it in Nippu. Amat took two long breaths and opened her eyes again. Mitat’s expression had softened into a rueful amusement.
‘I could have been a dancer,’ Amat said. ‘I was very graceful as a girl. I could have been a dancer, and then I would never have had to march through any of this piss.’
‘I can do it if you want,’ Mitat said. Amat only smiled, shook her head, and walked toward the door to the little room
of Maj’s and the storm that was inescapably to be suffered.
Otah Machi, the sixth son of the Khai Machi, sat at the end of the wharf and looked out over the ocean. The fading twilight left only the light of a half moon dancing on the tops of the waves. Behind him, the work of the seafront was finished for the day, and the amusements of night time - almost as loud - had begun. He ignored the activity, ate slices of hot ginger chicken from the thick paper cone he’d bought at a stand, and thought about nothing.
He had two lengths of copper left to him. Years of work, years of making a life for himself in this city, and he had come to that - two lengths of copper. Enough to buy a bowl of wine, if he kept his standards low. Everything else, spent or lost or thrown away. But he was, at least, prepared. Below him, the tide was rising. It would fall again before the dawn came.
The time had come.
He walked the length of the seafront, throwing the spent paper soaked in grease and spices into a firekeeper’s kiln where it flared and blackened, lighting for a moment the faces of the men and women warming themselves at the fire. The warehouses were dark and closed, the wide street empty. Outside a teahouse, a woman sang piteously over a begging box with three times more money in it than Otah had in the world. He tossed in one of his copper lengths for luck.
The soft quarter was much the same as any night. He was the one who was different. The drum and flute from the comfort houses, the smell of incense and stranger smokes, the melancholy eyes of women selling themselves from low parapets and high windows. It was as if he had come to the place for the first time - a traveler from a foreign land. There was time, he supposed, to turn aside. Even now, he could walk away from it all as he had from the school all those years before. He could walk away now and call it strength or purity. Or the calm of stone. He could call it that, but he would know the truth of it.
The alley was where Seedless had said it would be, hidden almost in the shadows of the buildings that lined it. He paused there for a time. Far down in the darkness, a lantern glowed without illuminating anything but itself. A showfighter lumbered past, blood flowing from his scalp. Two sailors across the street pointed at the wounded man, laughing. Otah stepped into darkness.
Mud and filth slid under his boots like a riverbed. The lantern grew nearer, but he reached the door the andat had described before he reached the light. He pressed his hand to it. The wood was solid, the lock was black iron. The light glimmering through at the edges of the shutters showed that a fire was burning within. The poet in his private apartments, the place where he hid from the beauty of the palaces and the house that had come with his burden. Otah tried the door gently, but it was locked. He scratched at it and then rapped, but no one came. With a knife, he could have forced the lock, unhinged the door - a man drunk enough might even have slept through it, but he would have had to come much later. The andat had told him not to go to the hidden apartment until well past the night candle’s middle mark, and it wasn’t to the first quarter yet.
‘Heshai-kvo,’ he said, not shouting, but his voice loud enough to ring against the stonework around him. ‘Open the door.’
For a long moment, he thought no one would come. But then the line of light that haloed the shutters went dark, a bolt shot with a solid click, and the door creaked open. The poet stood silhouetted. His robes were as disheveled as his hair. His wide mouth was turned down in a heavy scowl.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
‘We need to talk,’ Otah said.
‘No we don’t,’ the poet said, stepping back and starting to pull the door closed. ‘Go away.’
Otah pushed in, first squaring his shoulder against the door, and then leaning in with his back and legs. The poet fell back with a surprised huff of breath. The rooms were small, dirty, squalid. A cot of stretched canvas was pulled too close to a fireplace, and empty bottles littered the floor by it. Streaks of dark mold ran down the walls from the sagging beams of the ceiling. The smell was like a swamp in summer. Otah closed the door behind him.
‘Wh - what do you want?’ the poet said, his face pale and fearful.
‘We need to talk,’ Otah said again. ‘Seedless told me where to find you. He sent me here to kill you.’
‘Kill me?’ Heshai repeated, and then chuckled. The fear seemed to drain away, and a bleak amusement took its place. ‘Kill me. Gods.’
Shaking his head, the poet lumbered to the cot and sat. The canvas groaned against its wooden frame. Otah stood between the fire and the doorway, ready to block Heshai if he bolted. He didn’t.
‘So. You’ve come to finish me off, eh? Well, you’re a big, strong boy. I’m old and fat and more than half drunk. I doubt you’ll have a problem.’
‘Seedless told me that you’d welcome it,’ Otah said. ‘I suspect he overstated his case, eh? Anyway, I’m not his puppet.’
The poet scowled, his bloodshot eyes narrowing in the firelight. Otah stepped forward, knelt as he had as a boy at the school and took a pose appropriate to a student addressing a teacher.
‘You know what’s happening. Amat Kyaan’s audience before the Khai Saraykeht. You have to know what would happen.’
Slowly, grudgingly, Heshai took an acknowledging pose.
‘Seedless hoped that I would kill you in order to prevent it. But I find I’m not a murderer,’ Otah said. ‘The stakes here, the price that innocent people will pay . . . and the price Maati will pay. It’s too high. I can’t let it happen.’
‘I see,’ Heshai said. He was silent for a long moment, the ticking of the fire the only sound. Thoughtfully, he reached down and lifted a half-full bottle from the floor. Otah watched the old man drink, the thick throat working as he gulped the wine down. Then, ‘And how do you plan to reconcile these two issues, eh?’
‘Let the andat go,’ Otah said. ‘I’ve come to ask you to set Seedless free.’
‘That simple, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘I think that you can,’ Otah said.
‘I don’t mean it can’t be done. Gods, nothing would be easier. I’d only have to . . .’ He opened one hand in a gesture of release. ‘That isn’t what I meant. It’s that I can’t do it. It’s not . . . it isn’t in me. I’m sorry, boy. I know it looks simple from where you are. It isn’t. I’m the poet of Saraykeht, and that isn’t something you stop being just because you get tired. Just because it eats you. Just because it kills children. Look, if you had the choice of grabbing a live coal and holding it in your fist or destroying a city of innocent people, you’d do everything you could to stand the pain. You wouldn’t be a decent man if you didn’t at least try.’
‘And you would be a decent man if you let the Khai Saraykeht take his vengeance?’
‘No, I’d be a poet,’ Heshai said, and his smile was as much melancholy as humor. ‘You’re too young to understand. I’ve been holding this coal in my hand since before you were born. I can’t stop now because I can’t. Who I am is too much curled around this. If I stopped - just stopped - I wouldn’t be anyone anymore.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘Yes. Yes, I see you think that, but your opinion on it doesn’t matter. And that doesn’t surprise you, does it?’
The sick dread in Otah’s belly suddenly felt as heavy as if he’d swallowed stone. He took a pose of acknowledgment. The poet leaned forward and put his wide, thick hand gently over Otah’s.
‘You knew I wouldn’t agree,’ he said.
‘I . . . hoped . . .’
‘You had to try,’ Heshai said, his tone approving. ‘It speaks well of you. You had to try. Don’t blame yourself. I haven’t been strong enough to end this, and I’ve been up to my hips in it for decades. Wine?’
Otah accepted the offered bottle. It was strong - mixed with something that left a taste of herb at the back of his throat. He handed it back. Warmth bloomed in his belly. Heshai, seeing his surprise, laughed.
‘I should have warned you. It’s a little
more than they serve with lamb cuts, but I like it. It lets me sleep. So, if you don’t mind my asking, what made our mutual acquaintance think you’d do his killing for him?’
Otah found himself telling the tale - his own secret and Wilsin’s, the source of Liat’s wounds and the prospect of Maati’s. Throughout, Heshai listened, his face clouded, nodding from time to time or asking questions that made Otah clarify himself. When the secret of Otah’s identity came out, the poet’s eyes widened, but he made no other comment. Twice, he passed the bottle of wine over, and Otah drank from it. It was strange, hearing it all spoken, hearing the thoughts he’d only half-formed made real by the words he found to express them. His own fate, the fate of others - justice and betrayal, loyalty and the changes worked by the sea. The wine and the fear and the pain and dread in Otah’s guts turned the old man into his confessor, his confidant, his friend even if only for the moment.