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.
‘Itani . . . 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 back.’
‘Kiyan-kya . . .’
‘No. No kya. No sweet. No my love. 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. Do 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? Itani, 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? There 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 me 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 the 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 half-recalled 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 bowl 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 and - without 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. O
tah 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,’ Otah 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 be . . . 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.
3
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 flat-bottomed sledges filled with gravel, or the darkness. He held his lantern low, as did the others around him. There 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 bad 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. Stone-Made-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 tu
nnels 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. Maati 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.