A Shadow In Summer (47 page)

"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 the 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."

D
REAMING
, O
TAH
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 Heshaikvo 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.

Sneek Peek of A BETRAYAL IN WINTER
Book Two of the Long Price Quartet

"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."

"Take care," she said. "I don't want to hear that one of your brothers has finally killed you."

"When the time comes, I don't think they'll come after me with a treadmill pump."

Still, he made a point to kiss her before he walked to his dressing chamber, allowed the servants to array him in a robe of gray and violet, stepped into the sealskin boots, and went out to meet the bearer of the bad tidings.

"It's the Daikani mine, most high," the man said, taking a

pose of apology formal enough for a temple. "It failed in the night. They say the lower passages are already half a man high with water."

Biitrah cursed, but took a pose of thanks all the same. Together, they walked through the wide main hall of the Second Palace. The caves shouldn't have been filling so quickly, even with a failed pump. Something else had gone wrong. He tried to picture the shape of the Daikani mines, but the excavations in the mountains and plains around Machi were numbered in the dozens, and the details blurred. Perhaps four ventilation shafts. Perhaps six. He would have to go and see.

His private guard stood ready, bent in poses of obeisance, as he came out into the street. Ten men in ceremonial mail that for all its glitter would turn a knife. Ceremonial swords and daggers honed sharp enough to shave with. Each of his two brothers had a similar company, with a similar purpose. And the time would come, he supposed, when it would descend to that. But not today. Not yet. He had a pump to fix.

He stepped into the waiting chair, and four porters came out. As they lifted him to their shoulders, he called out to the messenger.

"Follow close," he said, his hands flowing into a pose of command with the ease of long practice. "I want to hear everything you know before we get there."

They moved quickly through the grounds of the palaces—the famed towers rising above them like forest trees above rabbits—and into the black-cobbled streets of Machi. Servants and slaves took abject poses as they passed. The few members of the utkhaiem awake and in the city streets took less extreme stances, each appropriate to the difference in rank between themselves and the man who might one day renounce his name and become the Khai Machi.

Biitrah hardly noticed. His mind turned instead upon his passion—the machinery of mining; water pumps and ore grades and hauling winches. He guessed that they would reach the low town at the mouth of the mine before the fast sun of early spring had moved the width of two hands.

They took the south road, the mountains behind them. They crossed the sinuous stone bridge over the Tidat, the water below them still smelling of its mother glacier. The plain spread before them, farmsteads and low towns and meadows green with new wheat. Trees were already pushing forth new growth. It wouldn't be many weeks before the lush spring took root, grabbing at the daylight that the winter stole away. The messenger told him what he could, but it was little enough, and before they had reached the halfway point, a wind rose whuffling in Biitrah's ears and making conversation impossible. The closer they came, the better he recalled these particular mines. They weren't the first that House Daikani had leased from the Khai—those had been the ones with six ventilation shafts. These had four. And slowly—more slowly than it once had—his mind recalled the details, spreading the problem before him like something written on slate or carved from stone.