‘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 back.
The door closed and left Cehmai 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, Cehmai 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 engineers 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 Tower, 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 be 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 me. To the Master of Tides.’
‘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.’
2
‘They tell me you knew my son,’ the Khai Machi said. The grayness of his skin and yellow in his long, bound 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-That-Continues. 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 red-rimmed 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 res
embled 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 Dai-kvo, 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 Machi. 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 world - could truly treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone - it was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat Doru had translated into a human form all those generations ago. This wide-faced, 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 naïve.
‘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. Too 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 self-confidence 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. Th
ank 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 books 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 back 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 smiths’ 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.