Epani returned and without a word led her back through the corridors she knew to the private meeting rooms. The room was as dark as she remembered it. Marchat Wilsin himself sat at the table, lit by the diffuse cool light from the small window, the warm, orange flame of a lantern. With one color on either cheek, he might almost have been two different men. Amat took a pose of greeting and gratitude. Moving as if unsure of himself, Marchat responded with one of welcome.
‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ he said, and his voice was careful.
‘And yet, here I am. I see House Wilsin is fleeing, just as everyone said it was. Bad for business, Marchat-cha. It looks like a failure of nerve.’
‘It is,’ he said. There was no apology in his voice. They might have been discussing dye prices. ‘Being in Saraykeht’s too risky now. My uncle’s calling me back home. I think he must have been possessed by some passing moment of sanity, and what he saw scared him. What we can’t ship out by spring, we’re selling at a loss. It’ll take years for the house to recover. And, of course, I’m scheduled on the last boat out. So. Have you come to tell me you’re ready to bring your suit to the Khai?’
Amat took a pose, more casual than she’d intended, that requested clarification. It was an irony, and Marchat’s sheepish grin showed that he knew it.
‘My position isn’t as strong as it was before the victim best placed to stir the heart of the utkhaiem killed the poet and destroyed the city. I lost a certain credibility.’
‘Was it really her, then?’
‘I don’t know for certain. It appears it was.’
‘I’d say I was sorry, but . . .’
Amat didn’t count the years she’d spent talking to this man across tables like this, or in the cool waters of the bathhouse, or walking together in the streets. She felt them, habits worn into her joints. She sat with a heavy sigh and shook her head.
‘I did what I could,’ she said. ‘Now . . . now who would believe me, and what would it matter?’
‘Someone might still. One of the other Khaiem.’
‘If you thought that was true, you’d have me killed.’
Wilsin’s face clouded, something like pain in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Something like sorrow.
‘I wouldn’t enjoy it,’ he said at last.
Despite the truth of it, Amat laughed. Or perhaps because of it.
‘Is Liat Chokavi still with you?’ Marchat asked, then took a pose that offered reassurance. ‘It’s just that I have a box of her things. Mostly her things. Some others may have found their way into it. I won’t call it apology, but . . .’
‘Unfortunately, no,’ Amat said. ‘I offered her a place. The gods all know I could use competent help keeping my books. But she’s left with the poet boy. It seems they’re heartmates.’
Marchat chuckled.
‘Oh, that’ll end well,’ he said with surprisingly gentle sarcasm.
‘Tell Epani to bring us a pot of tea,’ Amat said. ‘He can at least do something useful. Then there’s business we need to talk through.’
Marchat did as she asked, and minutes later, she cupped a small, lovely tea bowl in her hands, blowing across the steaming surface. Marchat poured a bowl for himself, but didn’t drink it. Instead, he folded his hands together and rested his great, whiskered chin in them. The silence wasn’t a ploy on his part; she could see that. He didn’t know what to say. It made the game hers to start.
‘There’s something I want of you,’ she said.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
‘The warehouses on the Nantan. I want to rent them from House Wilsin.’
He leaned back now, his head tilted like a dog hearing an unfamiliar sound. He took an interrogatory pose. Amat sipped her tea, but it was still too hot. She put the bowl on the table.
‘With the andat lost, I’m gathering investment in a combers’ hall. I’ve found ten men who worked as combers when Petals-Falling-Open was still the andat in Saraykeht. They’re willing to act as foremen. The initial outlay and the first contracts are difficult. I have people who might be willing to invest if I can find space. They’re worried that my relationship with my last employer ended poorly. Rent me the space, and I can address both issues at once.’
‘But, Amat . . .’
‘I lost,’ she said. ‘I know it. You know it. I did what I could do, and it got past me. Now I can either press the suit forward despite it all, raise what suspicions against Galt I can in the quarters who will listen to me at the cost of what credibility I have left, or else I can do this. Recreate myself as a legitimate business, organize the city, bind the wounds that can be bound. Forge connections between people who think they’re rivals. But I can’t do both. I can’t have people saying I’m an old woman frightened of shadows while I’m trying to make weavers and rope-makers who’ve been undercutting each other for the last three generations shake hands.’
Marchat Wilsin’s eyebrows rose. She watched him consider her. The guilt and horror, the betrayals and threats fell away for a moment, and they were the players in the game of get and give that they had been at their best. It made Amat’s heart feel bruised, but she kept it out of her face as he kept his feelings from his. The lantern flame spat, shuddered, and stood back to true.
‘It won’t work,’ he said at last. ‘They’ll hold to all their traditional prejudices and alliances. They’ll find ways to bite each other while they’re shaking hands. Making them all feel loyal to each other and to the city? In the Westlands or Galt or the islands, you might have a chance. But among the Khaiem? It’s doomed.’
‘I’ll accept failure when I’ve failed,’ Amat said.
‘Just remember I warned you. What’s your offer for the warehouses? ’
‘Sixty lengths of silver a year and five hundredths of the profit.’
‘That’s insultingly low, and you know it.’
‘You haven’t figured in that it will keep me from telling the world what the Galtic Council attempted in allying with Seedless against his poet. That by itself is a fair price, but we should keep up appearances, don’t you think?’
He thought about it. The tiny upturn of his lips, the barest of smiles, told her what she wanted to know.
‘And you really think you can make a going project of this? Combing raw cotton for its seeds isn’t a pleasant job.’
‘I have a steady stream of women looking to retire from one less pleasant than that,’ she said. ‘I think the two concerns will work quite nicely together.’
‘And if I agree to this,’ Marchat said, his voice suddenly softer, the game suddenly sliding out from its deep-worn track, ‘does that mean you’ll forgive me?’
‘I think we’re past things like forgiveness,’ she said. ‘We’re the servants of what we have to do. That’s all.’
‘I can live with that answer. All right, then. I’ll have Epani draw up contracts. Should we take them to that whorehouse of yours?’
‘Yes,’ Amat said. ‘That will do nicely. Thank you, Marchat-cha.’
‘It’s the least I could do,’ he said and drank at last from the bowl of cooling tea at his elbow. ‘And also likely the most I can. I don’t imagine my uncle will understand it right off. Galtic business doesn’t have quite the same subtlety you find with the Khaiem.’
‘It’s because your culture hasn’t finished licking off its caul,’ Amat said. ‘Once you’ve had a thousand years of Empire, things may be different. ’
Marchat’s expression soured and he poured himself more tea. Amat pushed her own bowl toward him, and he leaned forward to fill it. The steaming teapot clinked against the porcelain.
‘There will be a war,’ Amat said at last. ‘Between your people and mine. Eventually, there will be a war.’
‘Galt’s a strange place. It’s so long since I’ve been there, I don’t know how well I’ll fit once I’m back. We’ve done well by war. In the last generation, we’ve almost doubled our farmlands. There are places that rival the cities of t
he Khaiem, if you’ll believe that. Only we do it with ruthlessness and bloody-minded determination. You’d have to be there, really, to understand it. It isn’t what you people have here.’
Amat took an insistent pose, demanding an answer to her question. Marchat sighed; a long, slow sound.
‘Yes, someday. Someday there will be a war, but not in our lifetimes. ’
She shifted to a pose that was both acknowledgment and thanks. Marchat toyed with his teabowl.
‘Amat, before . . . before you go, there’s a letter I wrote you. When it looked like the suit was going to go to the Khai and sweet hell was going to rain down on Galt in general and me in particular. I want you to have it.’
His face was as legible as a boy’s. Amat wondered at how he could be so closed and careful with business and so clumsy with his own heart and hers. If she let it continue, he’d be offering her work in Galt next. And a part of her, despite it all, would be sorry to refuse.
‘Keep it for now,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it from you later.’
‘When?’ he asked as she rose.
She answered gently, making the words not an insult, but a moment of shared sorrow. There were, after all, ten thousand things that had been lost in this. And each one of them real, even this.
‘After the war, perhaps. Give it to me then.’
Dreaming, Otah found himself in a public place, part street corner, part bathhouse, part warehouse. People milled about, at ease, their conversations a pleasant murmur. With a shock, Otah glimpsed Heshai-kvo in the crowd, moving as if alive, speaking as if alive, but still dead. In the logic of sleep, that fleeting glimpse carried a weight of panic.
Gasping for breath, Otah sat up, his eyes open and confused by the darkness. Only as his heart slowed and his breath grew steady, did the creaking of the ship and rocking of waves remind him where he was. He pressed his palms into his closed eyes until pale lights appeared. Below him, Maj murmured in her sleep.
The cabin was tiny - too short to stand fully upright and hardly long enough to hang two hammocks one above the other. If he put his arms out, he could press his palms against the oiled wood of each wall. There was no room for a brazier, so they slept in their robes. Carefully, he lifted himself down and without touching or disturbing the sleeper, left the close, nightmare-haunted coffin for the deck and the moon and a fresh breeze.
The three men of the watch greeted him as he emerged. Otah smiled and ambled over despite wanting more than anything a moment of solitude. The moment’s conversation, the shared drink, the coarse joke - they were a small price to pay for the good will of the men to whom he had entrusted his fate. It was over quickly, and he could retreat to a quiet place by the rail and look out toward an invisible horizon where haze blurred the distinction between sea and sky. Otah sat, resting his arms on the worn wood, and waited for the wisps of dream to fade. As he had every night. As he expected he would for some time still to come. The changing of watch at the half-candle brought another handful of men, another moment of sociability. The curious glances and concern that Otah had seen during his first nights on deck were gone. The men had become accustomed to him.
Otah would have guessed the night candle had nearly reached its three-quarters mark when she came out to join him, though the night sea sometimes did strange things to time. He might also have been staring at the dark ripples and broken moonlight for sunless weeks.
Maj seemed almost to glow in the moonlight, her skin picking up the blue and the cold. She looked at the landless expanse of water with an almost proprietary air, unimpressed by vastness. Otah watched her find him, watched her walk to where he sat. Though Otah knew that at least one of the sailors on watch spoke Nippu, no one tried to speak with her. Maj lowered herself to the deck beside him, her legs crossed, her pale eyes almost colorless.
‘The dreams,’ she said.
Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.
‘If we had hand loom, you should weave,’ she said. ‘Put your mind to something real. Is unreal things that eat you.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
‘You are homesick. I know. I see it.’
‘I suppose,’ Otah said. ‘And I wonder now if we did the right thing.’
‘You think no?’
Otah turned his gaze back to the water. Something burst up from the surface and vanished again into the darkness, too quickly for Otah to see what shape it was.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘That’s to say I think we did the best that we could. But that doing that thing was right . . .’
‘Killing him,’ Maj said. ‘Call it what it is. Not that thing. Killing him. Hiding names give them power.’
‘That killing him was right . . . bothers me. At night, it bothers me.’
‘And if you can go back - make other choice - do you?’
‘No. No, I’d do the same. And that disturbs me, too.’
‘You live too long in cities,’ Maj said. ‘Is better for you to leave.’
Otah disagreed but said nothing. The night moved on. It was another week at least before they would reach Quian, southernmost of the eastern islands. The hold, filled now with the fine cloths and ropes of Saraykeht, the spices and metalworks of the cities of the Khaiem, would trade first for pearls and shells, the pelts of strange island animals, and the plumes of their birds. Only as the weeks moved on would they begin taking on fish and dried fruits, trees and salt timber and slaves. And only in the first days of spring - weeks away still and ten island ports at least - would they reach as far north as Nippu.
Years of work on the seafront, all the gifts and assistance Maati had given him for the journey to the Dai-kvo, everything he had, he had poured into two seasons of travel. He wondered what he would do, once he reached Nippu, once Maj was home and safe and with the people she knew. Back from her long nightmare with only the space where a child should have been at her side.
He could work on ships, he thought. He knew enough already to take on the simple, odious tasks like coiling rope and scrubbing decks. He might at least make his way back to the cities of the Khaiem . . . or perhaps not. The world was full of possibility, because he had nothing and no one. The unreal crowded in on him, as Maj had said, because he had abandoned the real.
‘You think of her,’ Maj said.
‘What? Ah, Liat? No, not really. Not just now.’
‘You leave her behind, the girl you love. You are angry because of her and the boy.’
A prick of annoyance troubled him but he answered calmly enough.
‘It hurt me that they did what they did, and I miss him. I miss them. But . . .’
‘But it also frees you,’ Maj said. ‘It is for me, too. The baby. I am scared, when I first go to the cities. I think I am never fit in, never belong. I am never be a good mother without my own itiru to tell me how she is caring for me when I am young. All this worry I make. And is nothing. To lose everything is not the worst can happen.’
‘It’s starting again, from nothing, with nothing,’ Otah said.
‘Is exactly this,’ Maj agreed, then a moment later, ‘Starting again, and doing better.’
The still-hidden sun lightened water and sky as they watched it in silence. The milky, lacework haze burned off as the fire rose from the sea and the full crew hauled up sails, singing, shouting, tramping their bare feet. Otah rose, his back aching from sitting so long without moving, and Maj brushed her robes and stood also. As the work of the day entered its full activity, he descended behind her into the darkness of their cabin where he hoped he might cheat his conscience of a few hours’ sleep. His thoughts still turned on the empty, open future before him and on Saraykeht behind him, a city still waking to the fact that it had fallen.
BOOK TWO: A BETRAYAL IN WINTER
PROLOGUE
‘There’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 forty-five summers, groaned and opened his eyes. The sun,
new-risen, set the paper-thin stone of the bedchamber windows glowing. Hiami sat beside him.
‘I’ve had the boy set out a good thick robe and your seal boots,’ 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’s a pump - the engineers can fix it or Bread and tea? Am I a prisoner? or Take that robe off, love - let’s have the mines care for themselves for a morning. But he said what he always did, what he knew she expected of him.
‘No time. I’ll eat once I’m there.’