The night candle was close to the halfway mark when he finished it all - his thoughts and fears, secrets and failures. Or almost all. There was one left that he wasn’t ready to mention - the ship he’d booked two passages on with the last of his silver, ready to sail south before the dawn - a small Westlands ship, desperate enough to ply winter trade where the waters never froze. An escape ship for a murderer and his accomplice. That he held still to himself.
‘Hard,’ the poet said. ‘Hard. Maati’s a good boy. Despite it all, he is good. Only young.’
‘Please, Heshai-kvo,’ Otah said. ‘Stop this thing.’
‘It’s out of my hands. And really, even if I were to let the beast slip, your whoremonger sounds like she’s good enough to tell a strong story. The next andat the Dai-kvo sends might be just as terrible. Or another Khai could be pressed into service, meting out vengeance on behalf of all the cities together. Killing me might spare Maati and keep your secrets, but Liat . . . the Galts . . .’
‘I’d thought of that.’
‘Anyway, it’s too late for me. Shifting names, changing who you are, putting lives on and off like fine robes - that’s a young man’s game. There’s too many years loaded on the back of my cart. The weight makes turning tricky. How would you have done it, if you did?’
‘Do what?’
‘Kill me?’
‘Seedless told me to come just before dawn,’ Otah said. ‘He said a cord around the throat, pulled tight, would keep you from crying out.’
Heshai chuckled, but the sound was grim. He swallowed down the last dregs of the wine, leaving a smear of black leaves on the side of the bottle. He fumbled for a moment in the chaos under his cot, pulled out a fresh bottle and opened it roughly, throwing the cork into the fire.
‘He’s an optimist,’ Heshai said. ‘The way I drink, I’ll be senseless as stones by the three-quarters.’
Otah frowned, and then the import of the words came over him like cold water. The dread in his belly became a knot, but he didn’t speak. The poet looked into the fire, the low, dying flames casting shadows on his wide, miserable features. The urge to take the old man in his arms and embrace or else shake him came over Otah and passed - a wave against the shore. When the old man’s gaze shifted, Otah saw his own darkness mirrored there.
‘I’ve always done what I was told to, my boy. The rewards aren’t what you’d expect. You aren’t a killer. I’m a poet. If we’re going to stop this thing, one of us has to change.’
‘I should go,’ Otah said, drawing himself up to his feet.
Heshai-kvo took a pose of farewell, as intimate as family. Otah replied with something very much the same. There were tears, he saw, on Heshai’s cheeks to match his own.
‘You should lock the door behind me,’ Otah said.
‘Later,’ Heshai said. ‘I’ll do it later if I remember to.’
The fetid, chill air of the alley was like waking from a dream - or half-waking. Overhead, the half-moon slipped through wisps and fingers of clouds, insubstantial as veils. Otah walked with his head held high, but though he was ashamed of them, he couldn’t stanch the tears. From outside himself, he could observe the sorrow and the black tarry dread, different from fear because of its perfect certainty. He was becoming a murderer. He wondered how his brothers would manage this, when the time came for them to turn on one another, how they would bring themselves with cool, clear minds to end another man’s life.
The comfort house of Amat Kyaan glowed in the night as the others of its species did - music and voices, the laughter of whores and the cursing of men at the tables. The wealth of the city poured through places like this in a tiny city in itself, given over entirely to pleasure and money. It wouldn’t always be so, he knew. He stood in the street and drank in the sight, the smell, the golden light and brightly colored banners, the joy and the sorrow of it. Tomorrow, it would be part of a different city.
The guard outside the back door recognized him.
‘Grandmother wants to see you,’ the man said.
Otah watched himself take a pose of acknowledgment and smile his charming smile.
‘Do you know where I could find her?’
‘Up in her rooms with Wilsin’s girl.’
Otah gave his thanks and walked in. The common room wasn’t empty - a handful of women sat at the tables, eating and talking among themselves. A black-haired girl, nearly naked, stood in the alcove, cupping her breasts in diaphanous silk with the air of a fish seller wrapping cod. Otah considered the wide, rough-hewn stairs that led to Amat Kyaan’s apartments, to Liat. The door at the top landing was closed. He turned away, scratching lightly on the door of the other room - the one he had seen Maj retreat to the one night he had been there, the one time they had spoken.
The door pulled open just wide enough for the islander’s face to appear. Her pale skin was flushed, her eyes bright and bloodshot. Otah leaned close.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need to speak with you.’
Maj’s eyes narrowed, but a breath later, she stepped back, and Otah pushed into the room, closing the door behind him. Maj stood, arms pulled back, chin jutting like a child ready for a fight. A single lantern sat on a desk showing the cot, the hand-loom, the heap of robes waiting for the launderer. An empty winebowl lay canted in the corner of wall and floor. She was drunk. Otah calculated that quickly, and found that it was likely a good thing.
‘Maj-cha,’ Otah said. ‘Forgive me, but I need your help. And I think I may be of service to you.’
‘I am living here,’ she said. ‘Not working. I am not one of these girls. Get out.’
‘No,’ Otah said, ‘that isn’t what I mean. Maj, I can give you your vengeance now - tonight. The man who wields the andat. The one who actually took the child from you. I can take you to him now.’
Maj frowned and shook her head slowly, her gaze locked on Otah. He spoke quickly, and low, using simple words with as few poses as he could manage. He explained that the Galts had been Seedless’ tools, that Heshai controlled Seedless, that Otah could take her to him if they left now, right now. He thought he saw her soften, something like hope in her expression.
‘But afterwards,’ he said, ‘you have to let me take you home. I have a ship ready to take us. It leaves before dawn.’
‘I ask grandmother,’ Maj said, and moved toward the door. Otah shifted to block her.
‘No. She can’t know. She wants to stop the Galts, not the poet. If you tell her, you have to go the way she goes. You have to put it before the Khai and wait to see what he chooses to do. I can give it to you now - tonight. But you have to leave Amat before you see the Khai. It’s my price.’
‘You think I am stupid? Why should I trust you? Why are you doing this?’
‘You aren’t stupid. You should trust me because I have what you want - certainty, an end to waiting, vengeance, and a way back home. I’m doing this because I don’t want to see any more women suffer what you’ve suffered, and because it takes the thing that did this out of the world forever.’
Because it saves Maati and Liat. Because it saves Heshai. Because it is a terrible thing, and it is right. And because I have to get you away from this house.
A half smile pulled at her thick, pale mouth.
‘You are man?’ Maj asked. ‘Or you are ghost?’
Otah took a pose of query. Maj reached out and touched him, pressing his shoulder gently with her fingertips, as if making sure his flesh had substance.
‘If you are man, then I am tired of being tricked. You lie to me and I will kill you with my teeth. If you are ghost, then you are maybe the one I am praying for.’
‘If you were praying for this,’ Otah said, ‘then I’m the answer to it. But get your things quickly. We have to go now, and we can’t come back.’
For a moment she wavered, and then the anger he had seen in her before, the desperation, shone in her eyes. It was what he had known was there, what he had counted on. She looked around at the tiny room, gathered up what lo
oked like a half-knitted cloth and deliberately spat on the ground.
‘Is nothing more I want here,’ Maj said. ‘You take me now. You show me. If is not as you say, I kill you. You doubt that?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I believe you.’
It was a simple enough thing to distract the guard, to send him up to speak with Amat Kyaan - her security was done with attack in mind, not escape. Leading Maj out the back took the space of four breaths, perhaps five. Another dozen, and they were gone, vanished into the maze of streets and alleys that made up the soft quarter.
Maj stayed close to him as they went, and when they passed torches or street lanterns, he caught glimpses of her face, wild with release and the heat of fury. The alley, when he reached it, was empty. The door, when he tried it, was unlocked.
Maati stepped into the poet’s house, his feet sore, and his head buzzing like a hive. The house was silent, dark, and cold. Only the single, steady flame of a night candle stood watch in a lantern of glass. It had burned down past the half mark, the night more than half over. He dropped to a tapestry-draped divan and pulled the heavy cloth over him. He had visited every teahouse he knew of, had asked everyone he recognized. Otah-kvo had vanished - stepped into the thin mists of the seafront like a memory. And every step had been a journey, every finger’s-width of the moon in its nightly arc had encompassed a lifetime. He’d expected, huddled under the heavy cloth, for sleep to come quickly and yet the dim glow of the candle distracted him, pulled his eyes open just when he had told himself that finally, finally he was letting the day fall away from him. He shifted, his robes bunching uncomfortably under his arm, at his ribs. It seemed half a night before he gave up and sat, letting his makeshift blankets fall away. The night candle was still well before the three-quarter mark.
‘Wine might help,’ the familiar voice said from the darkness of the stairway. ‘It has the advantage of tradition. Many’s the night our noble poet’s slept beside a pool of his own puke, stinking of half-digested grapes.’
‘Be quiet,’ Maati said, but there was no force to his voice, no reserve left to fend off the attentions of the andat. Slowly, the perfect face and hands descended. He wore a robe of white, pale as his skin. A mourning robe. His demeanor when he sat on the second stair, stretching out his legs and smiling, was the same as ever - amused and scheming and untrustworthy and sad. But perhaps there was something else, an underlying energy that Maati didn’t understand.
‘I only mean that a hard night can be ended, if only you have the will to do it. And don’t mind paying the price, when it comes.’
‘Leave me alone,’ Maati said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘Not even if your little friend came by, the seafront laborer?’
Maati’s breath stopped, his blood suddenly with a separate life from his own. He took an interrogatory pose. Seedless laughed.
‘Oh, he didn’t,’ the andat said. ‘I was just wondering about your terms. If you didn’t want to speak to me under any conditions, or if perhaps there might be exceptions to your rule. Purely hypothetical. ’
Maati felt the flush in his face, as much anger as embarrassment, and picked up the nearest thing to throw at Seedless. It was a beaded cushion, and it bounced off the andat’s folded knees. Seedless took a pose of contrition, rose, and carried the cushion back to its place.
‘I don’t mean to hurt you, my dear. But you look like someone’s just stolen your puppy, and I thought a joke might brighten things. I’m sorry if I was wrong.’
‘Where’s Heshai?’
The andat paused, looking out, as if the black eyes could see through the walls, through the trees, any distance to consider the poet where he lay. A thin smile curled its lips.
‘Away,’ Seedless said. ‘In his torture box. The same as always, I suppose. ’
‘He isn’t here, though.’
‘No,’ Seedless said, simply.
‘I need to speak to him.’
Seedless sat on the couch beside him, considering him in silence, his expression as distant as the moon. The mourning robe wasn’t new though it obviously hadn’t seen great use. The cut was simple, the cloth coarse and unsoftened by pounding. From the way it sagged, it was clearly intended for a wider frame than Seedless’s - it was meant for Heshai. Seedless seemed to see him notice all this, and looked down, as if aware of his own robes for the first time.
‘He had these made when his mother died,’ the andat said. ‘He was with the Dai-kvo at the time. He didn’t see her pyre, but the news reached him. He keeps it around, I suppose, so that he won’t have to buy another one should anybody else die.’
‘And what makes you wear it?’
Seedless shrugged, grinned, gestured with wide-spread hands that indicated everything and nothing.
‘Respect for the dead,’ Seedless said. ‘Why else?’
‘Everything’s a joke to you,’ Maati said. The fatigue made his tongue thick, but if anything, he was farther from rest than before he’d come back to the house. The combination of exhaustion and restlessness felt like an illness. ‘Nothing matters.’
‘Not true,’ the andat said. ‘Just because something’s a game doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.’
‘Gods. Is there something in the way Heshai-kvo made you that keeps you from making sense? You’re like talking to smoke.’
‘I can speak to the point if you’d like,’ Seedless said. ‘Ask me what you want.’
‘I don’t have anything to ask you, and you don’t have anything to teach me,’ Maati said, rising. ‘I’m going to sleep. Tomorrow can’t be worse than today was.’
‘Possibility is a wide field, dear. Can’t is a word for small imaginations, ’ Seedless said from behind him, but Maati didn’t turn back.
His room was colder than the main room. He lit a small fire in the brazier before he pulled back the woolen blankets, pulled off his shoes, and tried again to sleep. The errands of the day ran through his mind, unstoppable and chaotic: Liat’s distress and the warmth of her flesh, Otah-kvo’s last words to him and the searing remorse that they held. If only he could find him, if only he could speak with him again.
Half-awake, Maati began to catalog for himself the places he had been in the night, searching for a corner he knew of, but might have overlooked. And, as he pictured the night streets of Saraykeht, he found himself moving down them, knowing as he did that he was dreaming. Street and alley, square and court, until he was in places that were nowhere real in the city, searching for teahouses that didn’t truly exist other than within his own frustration and despair, and aware all the time that this was a dream, but was not sleep.
He kicked off the blankets, desperate for some sense of freedom. But the little brazier wasn’t equal to its work, and the cold soon brought him swimming back up into his full mind. He lay in the darkness and wept. When that brought no relief, he rose, changed into fresh robes, and stalked down the stairs.
Seedless had started a fire in the grate. A copper pot of wine was warming over it, filling the room with its rich scent. The andat sat in a wooden chair, a book open in his lap. The brown, leather-bound volume that told of his own creation and its errors. He didn’t look up when Maati came in and walked over to the fire, warming his feet by the flames. When he spoke, he sounded weary.
‘The spirit’s burned out of it. You can drink as much as you’d like and not impair yourself.’
‘What’s the point, then?’ Maati asked.
‘Comfort. It may taste a little strong, though. I thought you’d come down sooner, and it gets thick if it boils too long.’
Maati turned his back to the andat and used an old copper ladle to fill his winebowl. When he took a sip, it tasted rich and hot and red. And, perversely, comforting.
‘It’s fine,’ he said.
He heard the hush of paper upon paper as, behind him, Seedless closed the book. The silence afterward went on so long that he looked back over his shoulder. The andat sat motionless as a statue; not even breath
stirred the folds of his robe and his face betrayed nothing. His ribs shifted an inch, taking in air, and he spoke.
‘What would you have said, if you’d found him?’
Maati shifted, sitting with his legs crossed, the warm bowl in his hands. He blew across it to cool it before he answered.
‘I’d have asked his forgiveness.’
‘Would you have deserved it, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Possibly not. What I did was wrong.’
Seedless chuckled and leaned forward, lacing his long graceful fingers together.