THE ONLY REASON OVI NIIT’S HOUSE HAD SURVIVED THE GROSS INCOMpetence of its bookkeepers was the scale of the money that came through the place. It was a constant stream of copper, silver, and gold that had shocked her. Would still have shocked her now if she hadn’t been so damned tired. She had never known anyone except for her sister who gave themselves into sexual indenture, and by then they hadn’t been speaking to each other. The cost of a whore was higher than she’d expected, and the compensation for the employee was a pittance. And that, she came to see, was only the beginning.
Overall, gamblers lost at the tables, and in addition, they paid a fee for the privilege. The wine was cheap, and the drugs added to it only slightly more expensive. The price the house charged for the combination was exorbitant. Amat suspected that if the sex were given away for free, the house would still turn a profit. It was amazing.
She took her cane from where it leaned against the desk and pulled herself up. Once she was sure of herself, she took the sheet with her estimates, folded it, and tucked it in her sleeve. There was no call, she thought, leaving it about until she’d spoken with Ovi Niit. And, for all that she thought it useless, it would suffice to answer the question she expected from him. She walked to the door and out to the common room.
The place was filthy. Children and dogs rolled together on a floor that apparently hadn’t been swept in living memory. Off-shift whores sat at the tables smoking and gossiping and picking tics out of each other’s flesh. On the east wall was a long alcove where women disfigured by illness or violence or age fashioned obscene implements from leather and cloth. Kirath couldn’t have known how bad this house was. Or else he had been more desperate to be rid of her than she’d guessed. Or cared less for her than she’d imagined.
One of Niit-cha’s thugs sat on the stairs that led up to the private quarters where the owner of the house kept himself. All eyes shifted to her as she limped over to him. The fat girl sitting nearest the ironbound door to the front house said something to the man beside her and giggled. A red-haired woman—Westlands blood, or Galtic—raised her pale eyebrows and looked away. A boy of five or six summers—another whore—looked up at her and smiled. The smile was enough. She roughed the boy’s hair and walked with what dignity she could muster to the guard.
“Is Niit-cha up there?” she asked.
“Gone. He’s down to the low market for beef and pork,” the guard said. He had an odd accent; long vowels and the ends of his words clipped off. Eastern, she thought.
“When he comes in . . .” She had almost said send him to me. The habit of years. “When he comes in, tell him I’ve done what he asked. I’ll be sleeping, but I am at his disposal should he wish to discuss it.”
“Tell him yourself, grandmother,” the fat girl shouted, but the guard nodded.
The bed chamber had no windows. At night, a single tallow candle lit the bunks that lined the walls, five beds to a stack like the worst sort of ship’s cabin. Cheap linen was tied over the mouth of each coffin-sized bed in lieu of real netting, and the planks were barely covered by thin, stained mats. The darkness, while not so hot as the kiln of an attic she had hidden in, was still and hot and muggy. Amat found one of the lower bunks unoccupied and crawled into it, her hip scraping in its joint as she did. She pulled her cane in with her for fear someone might take it and didn’t bother tying the linen closed.
Three days she’d spent in an impossible task, and when she closed her eyes, the crabbed scripts and half-legible papers still danced before her. She willed the visions away, but she might as well have been pushing the tide back with her hands. The bunk above her creaked as the sleeper shifted. Amat wondered whether she could get a cup of the spiked wine, just to take her to sleep. She was bone weary, but restless. She had put Marchat Wilsin and Oshai and the island girl Maj out of her mind while she bent to Ovi Niit’s books. Now that she had paused, they returned and mixed with the work she had finished and that which still lay before her. She shifted on the thin mat, her cane resting uncomfortably beside her. The smell of bodies and perfume and years of cheap tallow disturbed her.
She would have said that she had not slept so much as fallen to an anxious doze except that the boy had such trouble waking her. His little hands pressed her shoulder, and she was distantly aware that he had done so before—had been doing so for some time.
“Grandmother,” he said. Again? Yes, said again. She’d been hearing the voice, folding it into her dream. “Wake up.”
“I am.”
“Are you well?”
All the world’s ill, why should I be any different, she thought.
“I’m fine. What’s happened?”
“He’s back. He wants to see you.”
Amat took a pose of thanks that the boy understood even in the cave-dark room and her lying on her side. Amat pulled herself out and up. Curiously, the rest seemed to have helped. Her head felt clearer and her body less protesting. In the main room, she saw how much the light from the high windows had shifted. She’d been asleep for the better part of the afternoon. The whores had shifted their positions or left entirely. The red-haired woman was still at her seat near the stairs; the fat girl was gone. A guard—not the same man as before, but of the same breed—caught her eye and nodded toward her workroom at the back. She took a pose of thanks, squared her shoulders and went in.
Ovi Niit sat at her table. His hooded eyes made him look torpid, or perhaps he had been drinking his own wines. His robes were of expensive silks and well-cut, but he still managed to look like an unmade bed. He glanced up as she came in, falling into a pose of welcome so formal as to be a mockery. Still, she replied with respect.
“I heard what was being offered for you,” Ovi Niit said. “They’ve spread the word all through the seafront. You’re an expensive piece of flesh.”
The sound of his voice made her mouth dry with fear and shame at the fear. She was Amat Kyaan. She had been hiding fear and loneliness and weakness since before the thug seated at her desk had been born. It was one of her first skills.
“How much?” she asked, keeping her tone light and disinterested.
“Sixty lengths of silver for where you’re sleeping. Five lengths of gold if someone takes you to Oshai’s men. Five lengths of gold is a lot of money.”
“You’re tempted,” Amat said.
The young man smiled slowly and put down the paper he’d been reading.
“As one merchant to another, I only suggest that you make your presence in my house worth more than the market rate,” he said. “I have to wonder what you did to become so valuable.”
She only smiled, and wondered what ideas were shifting behind those half-dead eyes. How he could trade her, no doubt. He was weighing where his greatest profit might come.
“You have my report?” Ovi Niit asked. She nodded and pulled the papers from her sleeve.
“It’s only a rough estimate. I’ll need to confer with you more next time, to be sure I’ve understood the mechanisms of your trade. But it’s enough for your purposes, I think.”
“And what would a half-dead bitch like you know about my purposes?” he asked. His voice held no rancor, but Amat still felt her throat close. She forced a confidence into her tone that she didn’t feel.
“From those numbers? I know what you must have suspected. Or else why would you have gone through the trouble to have me here? Someone in your organization is stealing from you.” Ovi Niit frowned as he looked at her numbers, but he didn’t deny her. “And it would be worth more than five lengths of gold, I think, to have me find out who.”
5
> +
ng advantage of the delay to relieve themselves.
The morning rain had not stopped, but it had slackened. The sun had not appeared, but the clouds above them had lost their brooding gray for a white that promised blue skies by nightfall. And heat. The canopy bearers met them in their turn and House Wilsin took its place in the parade to the palace of the grand audience.
There were no walls, precisely. The canopies fell behind as they reached the first arches, and walked, it seemed to Liat, into a wide forest of marble columns. The ceiling was so far above them and so light, it seemed hard to believe that they were sheltered—that the pillars held up stone instead of the white bowl of the cloudy sky. The hall of the grand audience was built to seem like a clearing in the stone forest. The Khai sat alone on a great divan of carved blackwood, calm and austere—his counselors and servants would not join him until after the audience proper had begun. Now, he alone commanded the open space before him. The utkhaiem surrounding the presentation floor like the audience at a performance spoke to each other in the lowest voices. Wilsin-cha seemed to know just where they should be, and steered her gently to a bench among other traders.
“Liat,” he said as they sat. “Trade is hard sometimes. I mean, the things you’re called on to do. They aren’t always what you’d wish.”
“I understand that, Wilsin-cha,” she said, adopting an air of confidence she only partly felt. “But this is a thing I can do.”
For a moment, he seemed on the verge of speaking again. Then a flute trilled, and a trumpet sounded, and the procession of gifts began. Each family of the utkhaiem in attendance had brought some token, as custom required. And following them, each trading house or foreign guest. Servants in the colors of their family or house stepped as carefully as dancers, carrying chests and tapestries, gilded fruits and bolts of fine silk, curiosities and wonders. The Khai Saraykeht considered each offering in turn, accepting them with a formal pose of recognition. She could feel Marchat Wilsin shift beside her as the bearers of his house stepped into the clearing. Four men bore a tapestry worked with a map of the cities of the Khaiem done in silver thread. Each man held one corner, pulling the cloth tight, and they stepped slowly and in perfect unison, grave as mourners.
Three of them grave as mourners. The fourth, while he kept pace with his fellows, kept casting furtive glances at the crowd. His head shifted subtly back and forth, as if he were searching for someone or something. Liat heard an amused murmur, the men and women of the audience enjoying the spectacle, and her heart sank.
The fourth man was Itani.
Marchat Wilsin must have noticed some reaction in her, because he glanced over, his expression puzzled and alarmed. Liat held her countenance empty, vacant. She felt a blush growing and willed it to be faint. The four men reached the Khai, the two in front kneeling to provide a better view of the work. Itani, at the rear, seemed to realize where he was and straightened. The Khai betrayed no sense of amusement or disapproval, only recognized the gift and sent it on its way. Itani and the other three moved off as the bearers of House Kiitan came forward. Liat shifted toward her employer.
“Wilsin-cha. If there’s a private room. For women . . .”
“Being anxious does the same to me,” he said. “Epani will show you. Just be back before the Khai brings in his wise men. At the rate this is going, you’ve probably got half a hand, but don’t test that.”
Liat took a pose of gratitude, rose, and wove her way to the rear of the assembly. She didn’t look for Epani. Itani was waiting there for her. She gestured with her eyes to a column, and he followed her behind it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded when they were out of sight. “You avoid me for days, and then you . . . you do this?”
“I know the man who was supposed to be the fourth bearer,” Itani said, taking a pose of apology. “He let me take his place. I didn’t intend to avoid you. I only . . . I was angry, sweet. And I didn’t want that to get in your way. Not with this before you.”
“And this is how you don’t come in my way?”
He smiled. His mouth had a way of being disarming.
“This is how I say I’m at your back,” he said. “I know you can do this. It’s no more than a negotiation, and if Amat Kyaan and Wilsin-cha chose you—if they believe in you—then my faith may not signify anything much. But you have it. And I didn’t want you going to your audience without knowing that. I know you can do this.”
Her hand strayed to his without her realizing that it had. She only noticed when he raised it to his lips.
“ ‘Tani, you pick the worst time to say the sweetest things.”
The music of the flute changed its rhythm and Liat turned, pulling her hand free. The audience proper was about to begin—the counselors and servants about to rejoin the Khai. Itani stepped back, taking a pose of encouragement. His gaze was on her, his mouth tipped in a smile. His fingernails—gods, his fingernails were still dye-stained.
“I’ll be waiting,” he said, and she turned back, moving through the seated men and women as quickly as she could without appearing to run. She sat at Wilsin-cha’s side just as the two poets and the andat knelt before the Khai and took their places, the last of the counselors to arrive.
“You’re just in time,” Wilsin-cha said. “Are you well?”
Well? I’m perfect, she thought. She imagined Amat Kyaan’s respectful, assured expression and arranged her features to match it.
MAATI SAT ON A CUSHION OF VELVET, SHIFTING NOW AND THEN IN AN ATtempt to keep his legs from falling asleep. It wasn’t working as well as he’d hoped. The Khai Saraykeht sat off to Maati’s left on a blackwood divan. Heshai-kvo and Seedless sat somewhat nearer, and if the Khai couldn’t see his discomfort, they certainly could. In the clear space before them, one petitioner after another came before the Khai and made a plea.
The worst had been a man from the Westlands demonstrating with a cart the size of a dog that carried a small fire that boiled water. Steam from the boiling water set the cart’s wheels in motion, and it had careened off into the crowd, its master chasing after it. The utkhaiem had laughed as the man warned that the Galts were creating larger models that they used as war machines. Whole wards had been overrun in less than a month’s time, he said.
The Khai’s phrase had been “an army of teapots.” Only Heshai-kvo, Maati noticed, hadn’t joined in the laughter. Not because he took the ridiculous man seriously, he thought, but because it pained him to see a man embarrass himself. The fine points of Galtic war strategies were of no consequence to the Khaiem. So long as the andat protected them, the wars of other nations were a curiosity, like the bones of ancient monsters.
The most interesting was the second son the Khai Udun. He held the court enraptured with his description of how his younger brother had attempted to poison him and their elder brother. The grisly detail of the his elder brother’s death had Maati almost in tears, and the Khai Saraykeht had responded with a moving speech—easily four times as long as any other pronouncement he had made in the day—that poisons were not the weapons of the Khaiem, and that the powers of Saraykeht would come to the aid of justice in tracking down the killer.
“Well,” Seedless said as the crowd rose to its feet, cheering. “That settles which of Old Udun’s sons will be warming his chair once he’s gone. You’d almost think no one in our Most High Saraykeht’s ancestry had offered his brother a cup of bad wine.”
Maati looked over at Heshai-kvo, expecting the poet to defend the Khai Saraykeht. But the poet only watched the son of the Khai Udun prostrate himself before the blackwood divan.
“It’s all theater,” Seedless went on, speaking softly enough that no one could hear him but Maati and Heshai. “Don’t forget that. This is no more than a long, drawn out epic that no one composed, no one oversees, and no one plans. It’s why they keep falling back on fratricide. There’s precedent—everyone knows more or less what to expect. And they like to pretend that one of the old Khai’s sons is better than a
nother.”
“Be quiet,” Heshai-kvo said, and the andat took a pose of apology but smirked at Maati as soon as Heshai-kvo turned away. The poet had had little to say. His demeanor had been grim from when they had first left the poet’s house that morning in the downpour. As the ceremonies moved on, his face seemed to grow more severe.
Two firekeepers stood before the Khai to argue a fine point of city law, and the Khai commanded an ancient woman named Niania Tosogu, his court historian, to pass judgment. The old woman yammered for a time in a broken voice, retelling old stories of the summer cities that dated back to the first days of the Khaiate when the Empire had hardly fallen. Then without seeming to tie her stories in with the situation before her, she made an order than appeared to please no one. As the firekeepers sat, an old Galt in robes of green and bronze came forward. A girl Maati’s own age or perhaps a year more stood at his side. Her robes matched the old Galt’s, but where his demeanor seemed deeply respectful, the girl’s face and manner verged on haughty. Even as she took a pose of obeisance, her chin was lifted high, an eyebrow arched.
“Ah, now she’s a lousy actress,” Seedless murmured.
Beside him, Heshai-kvo ignored the comment and sat forward, his eyes on the pair. Seedless leaned back, his attention as much on Heshai-kvo as the pair who stood before the Khai.