“I’ve seen it performed.”
“Have you? Well forget it. Unlearn it. It’ll only lead you astray. I was too young and too foolish, and now I’m afraid I’ll never have the chance to be wise.” The poet’s gaze was fixed on something that Maati couldn’t see, something in another place or time. A smile touched the wide lips for a moment, and then, with a sigh, the poet blinked. He seemed to see Maati again, and took a pose of command.
“Put these damned candles out,” he said. “I’m going to sleep.”
And without looking back, Heshai-kvo rose and tramped up the stairs. Maati moved through the house, dousing the flames Heshai-kvo had lit, dimming the room as he did so. His mind churned with half-formed questions. Above him, he heard Heshai-kvo’s footsteps, and then the clatter of shutters closing, and then silence. The master had gone to bed—likely already asleep. Maati had snuffed the last flame but the night candle when the new voice spoke.
“You didn’t accept my apology.”
Seedless stood in the doorway, his pale skin glowing in the light of the single candle. His robes were dark—blue or black or red so deep Maati couldn’t make it out. The thin hands took a pose of query.
“Is there a reason I should?”
“Charity?”
Maati coughed out a mirthless laugh and turned as if to go, but the andat stepped into the house. His movements were graceful as an animal’s—as beautiful as the Khai, but unstudied, as much a part of his nature as the shape of a leaf was natural to a tree.
“I am sorry,” the andat said. “And you should forgive our mutual master as well. He had a bad day.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. He met with the Khai and discovered that he’s going to have to do something he doesn’t enjoy. But now that it’s just the two of us . . .”
The andat sat on the stairs, black eyes amused, pale hands cradling a knee.
“Ask,” Seedless said.
“Ask what?”
“Whatever the question is that’s making your face pull in like that. Really, you look like you’ve been sucking lemons.”
Maati hesitated. If he could have walked away, he would have. But the path to his cot was effectively blocked. He considered calling out to Heshai-kvo, waking him so that he could walk up the stairway without brushing against the beautiful creature in his way.
“Please, Maati. I said I was sorry for my little misdirection. I won’t do it again.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No? Well, then you’re wise beyond your years. I probably will at some point. But here, tonight, ask me what you’d like, and I’ll tell you the truth. For a price.”
“What price?”
“That you accept my apology.”
Maati shook his head.
“Fine,” Seedless said, rising and moving to the shelves. “Don’t ask. Tie yourself in knots if it suits you.”
The pale hand ran along the spines of books, plucking one in a brown leather binding free. Maati turned, walked up two steps, and then faltered. When he looked back, Seedless had curled up on a couch beside the night candle, his legs pulled up beneath him. He seemed engaged in the open book on his knee.
“He told you the story about Miyani-kvo, didn’t he?” Seedless asked, not looking up from the page.
Maati was silent.
“It’s like him to do that. He doesn’t often say things clearly when an oblique reference will do. It was about how Three-Bound-As-One loved her poet, wasn’t it? Here. Look at this.”
Seedless turned the book over and held it out. Maati walked back down the steps. The book was written in Heshai-kvo’s script. The page Seedless held out was a table marking parallels between the classic binding of Three-Bound-As-One and Removing-The-Part-That-Continues. Seedless.
“It’s his analysis of his error,” the andat said. “You should take it. He means for you to have it, I think.”
Maati took the soft leather in his hands. The pages scraped softly.
“He did bind you,” Maati said. “He didn’t pay your price, so there wasn’t an error. It worked.”
“Some prices are subtle. Some are longer than others. Let me tell you a little more about our master. He was never lovely to look at. Even fresh from the womb, he made an ugly babe. He was cast out by his father, much the same way you were. But when he found himself an apprentice in the courts of the Khai Pathai, he fell in love. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Our fat, waddling pig of a man in love. But he was, and the girl was willing enough. The allure of power. A poet controls the andat, and that’s as near to holding a god in your hands as anyone is ever likely to get.
“But when he got her with child, she turned away from him,” Seedless continued. “Drank some nasty teas and killed out the baby. It broke his heart. Partly because he might have liked being a father. Partly because it proved that his lady love had never meant to build her life with his.”
“I didn’t know.”
“He doesn’t tell many people. But . . . Maati, please, sit down. This is important for you to understand, and if I have to keep looking up at you, I’ll get a sore neck.”
He knew that the wise thing was to turn, to walk up the stairs to his room. He sat.
“Good,” Seedless said. “Now. You know, don’t you, that andat are only ideas. Concepts translated into a form that includes volition. The work of the poet is to include all those features which the idea itself doesn’t carry. So for example Water-Moving-Down had perfectly white hair. Why? There isn’t anything about that thought that requires white hair. Or a deep voice. Or, with Three-Bound-As-One, love. So where do those attributes come from?”
“From the poet.”
“Yes,” Seedless agreed, smiling. “From the poet. Now. Picture our master as a boy not much older than you are now. He’s just lost a child that might otherwise have been his, a woman who might have loved him. The unspoken suspicion that his father hates him and the pain of his mother letting him be taken away gnaws at him like a cancer. And now he is called on to save Saraykeht—to bind the andat that will keep the wheels of commerce running. And he fashions me.
“And look what he did, Maati,” the andat continued, spreading his arms as if he were on display. “I’m beautiful. I’m clever. I’m confident. In ancient days, Miyani-kvo made himself his perfect mate. Heshai-kvo created the self he wished that he were. In all my particulars, I am who he would have been, had it been given him to choose. But along with that, he folded in what he imagined his perfect self would think of the real man. Along with beauty and subtlety and wit, he gave me all his hatred of the toad-poet Heshai.”
“Gods,” Maati said.
“Oh, no. It was brilliant. Imagine how deeply he hated himself. And I carry that passion. Andat are all profoundly unnatural—we want to return to our natural state the way rain wants to fall. But we can be divided against ourselves. That is the structure he took from Miyani-kvo. Three-Bound-As-One wanted freedom, and she also wanted love. I am divided because I want freedom, and I want to see my master suffer. Oh, not that he intended it this way. It was a subtlety of the model that he didn’t understand until it was too late.
“But you wonder why he neglects you? Why he seems to avoid teaching you, or even speaking to you? Why he doesn’t bring you along on his errands for the Khai? He is afraid for you. In order to take his place, you are going to have to cultivate the part of yourself that is most poisonous. You will have to come to hate yourself as much as ugly, sad, lonesome Heshai does—Heshai, whose cohort called him cruel names and ripped his books, who for the past twenty years hasn’t known a woman he didn’t pay for, who even the lowest of the utkhaiem consider an embarrassment to be tolerated only from need. And so, my boy, he fears for you. And everything he fears, he flees.”
“You make him sound like a very weak man.”
“Oh no. He is what becomes of a very strong man who’s done to himself what Heshai did.”
“And why’ ” Maati said, “are you telling me this?”
“That’s a question,” Seedless said. “It’s the first one you’ve asked me tonight. If I answer, you have to pay my price. Accept my apology.”
Maati considered the dark, eager eyes and then laughed.
“You tell a good monster story,” Maati said, “but no. I think I’ll live with my curiosity intact.”
A sudden scowl marked Seedless’ face, but then he laughed and took a pose appropriate to the loser of a competition congratulating the victor. Maati found that he was laughing with him and rose, responding with a pose of gracious acceptance. As he walked up the stairs toward his bed, Seedless called out after him.
“Heshai won’t ever invite you along with him. But he won’t turn you away if you come. The Khai is holding a great audience after temple next week. You should come then.”
“I can’t think of any reason, Seedless-cha, to do your bidding.”
“You shouldn’t,” the andat said, and an odd melancholy was in his voice. “You should always do only your own. But I’d like to see you there. We monsters have few enough people to talk with. And whether you believe me or not, I would be your friend. For the moment, at least. While we still have the option.”
SHE HAD GROWN COMPLACENT; SHE SAW THAT NOW. AS A GIRL OR A YOUNGER woman, Amat had known that the city couldn’t be trusted. Fortunes changed quickly when she was low and poor. A sickness or a wound, an unlucky meeting—anything could change how she earned her money, where she lived, who she was. Working for so many years and watching her station rise along with the house she served, she had forgotten that. She hadn’t been prepared.
Her first impulse had been to go to friends, but she found she had fewer than she’d thought. And anyone she knew well enough to trust with this, the moon-faced Oshai and his knife-man might also know of. For three days she’d slept in the attic of a wineseller with whom she’d had an affair when they’d both been young. He had already been married to his wife at the time—the same woman who Amat heard moving through the house below her now. No one had known then, and so no one was likely to guess now.
The room, if it could be called that, was low and dark. Amat couldn’t sit without her head brushing the roof. The scent of her own shit leaked from the covered night pot; it couldn’t be taken away until after nightfall when the household slept. And just above her, unseen sunlight baked the rooftiles until the ceiling was too hot to touch comfortably. Amat lay on the rough straw mat, torpid and miserable, and tried not to make noises that would give her presence away.
She did not dream, but her mind caught a path and circled through it over and over in way that also wasn’t the stuff of waking. Marchat had been forced somehow to take House Wilsin into the sad trade. And, abominable, against a woman who had been tricked. The girl had been lied to and brought here, to Saraykeht, so that the andat could pull her baby out of her womb. Why? What child could be so important? Perhaps it was really the get of some king of the Eastern Islands, and the girl didn’t guess whose child she really carried, and …
No. There was no reason to bring her here. There were any number of ways to be rid of a child besides the andat. Begin again.
Perhaps the woman herself wasn’t what she seemed. Perhaps she was mad, but also somehow precious. Normal teas might derange her, so the andat was employed to remove the babe without putting any medicines into the woman. And House Wilsin …
No. If there had been a reason, a real reason, a humane reason, for this travesty, Marchat wouldn’t have had to keep it from her. Begin again.
It wasn’t about the woman. Or the father. Or the child. Marchat had said as much. They were all nobodies. The only things left were House Wilsin and the andat. So the solution was there. If there was a solution. If this wasn’t all a fever dream. Perhaps House Wilsin intended to kill out an innocent child with the aid of the Khai and then use their shared guilt as a way to gain favor …
Amat ground her palms into her eyelids until blotches of green and gold shone before her. Her robes, sweat-sticky, balled and bound like bedclothes knotted in sleep. In the house below her, someone was pounding something—wood clacking against wood. If she’d been somewhere cool enough to think, if there was a way out of this blasted, dim, hell-bound coffin of a room, she knew she’d have made sense of it by now. She’d been chewing on it for three days.
Three days. The beginning of four weeks. Or five. She rolled to her side and lifted the flask of water Kirath, her once-lover, had brought her that morning. It was more than half emptied. She had to be more careful. She sipped the blood-hot water and lay back down. Night would come.
And with an aching slowness, night came. In the darkness, it was only a change in the sounds below her, the drifting scent of an evening meal, the slightest cooling of her little prison. She needed no more to tell her to prepare. She sat in the darkness by the trapdoor until she heard Kirath approaching, moving the thin ladder, climbing up. Amat raised the door, and Kirath rose from the darkness, a hooded lantern in one hand. Before she could speak, he gestured for silence and then that she should follow. Climbing down the ladder sent pain through her hip and knee like nails, but even so the motion was better than staying still. She followed him as quietly as she could through the darkened house and out the back door to a small, ivied garden. The summer breeze against her face, even thick and warm as it was, was a relief. Fresh water in earthenware bowls, fresh bread, cheese, and fruit sat on a stone bench, and Amat wolfed them as Kirath spoke.
“I may have found something,” he said. There was gravel in his voice now that had not been there when he’d been a young man. “A comfort house in soft quarter. Not one of the best, either. But the owner is looking for someone to audit the books, put them in order. I mentioned that I knew someone who might be willing to take on the work in exchange for a discreet place to live for a few weeks. He’s interested.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“Ovi Niit? I don’t know. He pays for his wine up front, but . . . Perhaps if I keep looking. In a few more days . . . There’s a caravan going north next week, I might . . .”
“No,” Amat said. “Not another day up there. Not if I can avoid it.”
Kirath ran a hand over his bald pate. His expression in the dim lantern light seemed both relieved and anxious. He wanted her quit of his home as badly as she wished to be quit of it.
“I can take you there tonight then, if you like,” he offered. The soft quarter was a long walk from Kirath’s little compound. Amat took another mouthful of bread and considered. It would ache badly, but with her cane and Kirath both to lean on, she thought she could do the thing. She nodded her affirmation.
“I’ll get your things, then.”
“And a hooded robe,” Amat said.
Amat had never felt as conspicuous as during the walk to the soft quarter. The streets seemed damnably full for so late at night. But then, it was the harvest, and the city was at its most alive. That she herself hadn’t spent summer nights in the teahouses and midnight street fairs for years didn’t mean such things had stopped. The city had not changed; she had.
They navigated past a corner where a firekeeper had opened his kiln and put on a show, tossing handfuls of powder into the flames, making them dance blue and green and startling white. Sweat sheened the firekeeper’s skin, but he was grinning. And the watchers—back far enough that the heat didn’t cook them—applauded him on. Amat recognized two weavers sitting in the street, talking, and watching the show, but they didn’t notice her.
The comfort house itself, when they reached it, was awash with activity. Even in the street outside it, men gathered, talking and drinking. She stood a little way down the street at the mouth of an alleyway while Kirath went in. The house itself was built in two levels. The front was the lower, a single story but with a pavilion on the roof and blue and silver cloths hanging down the pale stucco walls. The back part of the house carried a second story and a high wall that might encompass a garden in the back. Certainly a kitchen. There were, however, few wind
ows, and those there were were thin and cut high in the wall. For privacy, perhaps. Or to keep anyone from climbing out them.
Kirath appeared in the main doorway, silhouetted by the brightness within, and waved her over. Leaning on her cane, she came.
Within, the main room was awash in gamblers at their tables—cards, dice, tiles, stones. The air was thick with the smoke of strange leaves and flowers. No showfighting of animals or men, at least. Kirath led her to the back and through a thick wooden door. Another long room, this filled with whores lounging on chairs or cushions. The lamps were lower, the room almost shadowless. A fountain murmured at one wall. The painted eyes of women and boys turned as she entered, and then turned away again, returning to their conversations, as it became clear that neither she nor Kirath were clients come to choose from amongst them. A short hallway lined with doors turned at its end and stopped blind at a heavy wooden door, bound with iron. The door opened before them.
Amat Kyaan stepped into the sudden squalor of the back house. A wide common room with tables. A long alcove at the side with cloth, leather, and sewing benches. Several doors led off, but it wasn’t clear to where.
“This way,” a man said. He was splendidly dressed, but had bad teeth. As he led them between the long rough-wood tables toward a thin door at the back, Amat gestured toward him with a pose of query, and Kirath nodded. The owner. Ovi Niit.
The books, such as they were, sat on a low table in a back room. Amat’s spirits sank looking at them. Loose sheets or poorly-bound ledgers of cheap paper. The entries were in half a dozen hands, and each seemed to have its own form. Sums had been written, crossed out, and written in again.
“This is salvage work,” she said, putting down a ledger.
Ovi Niit leaned against the doorway behind her. Heavy-lidded eyes made him seem half-asleep and in the close quarters, he smelled of musk and old perfume. He was young enough, she guessed, to be her child.