Shadow and Betrayal (48 page)

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Authors: Daniel Abraham

BOOK: Shadow and Betrayal
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‘Grandmother?’
They had reached the common room - full now with women and boys in the costumes they wore, with the men who ran the games and wine, with the smell of fresh bread and roast lamb and with voices. Mitat stood at the door, her arms crossed. Amat took a querying pose.
‘Someone has to tell Maj,’ she said.
Amat closed her eyes. Of course. As if all the rest wasn’t enough, someone would have to tell Maj. She would. If there was going to be a screaming fight, at least they could have it in Nippu. Amat took two long breaths and opened her eyes again. Mitat’s expression had softened into a rueful amusement.
‘I could have been a dancer,’ Amat said. ‘I was very graceful as a girl. I could have been a dancer, and then I would never have had to march through any of this piss.’
‘I can do it if you want,’ Mitat said. Amat only smiled, shook her head, and walked toward the door to the little room of Maj’s and the storm that was inescapably to be suffered.
 
Otah Machi, the sixth son of the Khai Machi, sat at the end of the wharf and looked out over the ocean. The fading twilight left only the light of a half moon dancing on the tops of the waves. Behind him, the work of the seafront was finished for the day, and the amusements of night time - almost as loud - had begun. He ignored the activity, ate slices of hot ginger chicken from the thick paper cone he’d bought at a stand, and thought about nothing.
He had two lengths of copper left to him. Years of work, years of making a life for himself in this city, and he had come to that - two lengths of copper. Enough to buy a bowl of wine, if he kept his standards low. Everything else, spent or lost or thrown away. But he was, at least, prepared. Below him, the tide was rising. It would fall again before the dawn came.
The time had come.
He walked the length of the seafront, throwing the spent paper soaked in grease and spices into a firekeeper’s kiln where it flared and blackened, lighting for a moment the faces of the men and women warming themselves at the fire. The warehouses were dark and closed, the wide street empty. Outside a teahouse, a woman sang piteously over a begging box with three times more money in it than Otah had in the world. He tossed in one of his copper lengths for luck.
The soft quarter was much the same as any night. He was the one who was different. The drum and flute from the comfort houses, the smell of incense and stranger smokes, the melancholy eyes of women selling themselves from low parapets and high windows. It was as if he had come to the place for the first time - a traveler from a foreign land. There was time, he supposed, to turn aside. Even now, he could walk away from it all as he had from the school all those years before. He could walk away now and call it strength or purity. Or the calm of stone. He could call it that, but he would know the truth of it.
The alley was where Seedless had said it would be, hidden almost in the shadows of the buildings that lined it. He paused there for a time. Far down in the darkness, a lantern glowed without illuminating anything but itself. A showfighter lumbered past, blood flowing from his scalp. Two sailors across the street pointed at the wounded man, laughing. Otah stepped into darkness.
Mud and filth slid under his boots like a riverbed. The lantern grew nearer, but he reached the door the andat had described before he reached the light. He pressed his hand to it. The wood was solid, the lock was black iron. The light glimmering through at the edges of the shutters showed that a fire was burning within. The poet in his private apartments, the place where he hid from the beauty of the palaces and the house that had come with his burden. Otah tried the door gently, but it was locked. He scratched at it and then rapped, but no one came. With a knife, he could have forced the lock, unhinged the door - a man drunk enough might even have slept through it, but he would have had to come much later. The andat had told him not to go to the hidden apartment until well past the night candle’s middle mark, and it wasn’t to the first quarter yet.
‘Heshai-kvo,’ he said, not shouting, but his voice loud enough to ring against the stonework around him. ‘Open the door.’
For a long moment, he thought no one would come. But then the line of light that haloed the shutters went dark, a bolt shot with a solid click, and the door creaked open. The poet stood silhouetted. His robes were as disheveled as his hair. His wide mouth was turned down in a heavy scowl.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
‘We need to talk,’ Otah said.
‘No we don’t,’ the poet said, stepping back and starting to pull the door closed. ‘Go away.’
Otah pushed in, first squaring his shoulder against the door, and then leaning in with his back and legs. The poet fell back with a surprised huff of breath. The rooms were small, dirty, squalid. A cot of stretched canvas was pulled too close to a fireplace, and empty bottles littered the floor by it. Streaks of dark mold ran down the walls from the sagging beams of the ceiling. The smell was like a swamp in summer. Otah closed the door behind him.
‘Wh - what do you want?’ the poet said, his face pale and fearful.
‘We need to talk,’ Otah said again. ‘Seedless told me where to find you. He sent me here to kill you.’
‘Kill me?’ Heshai repeated, and then chuckled. The fear seemed to drain away, and a bleak amusement took its place. ‘Kill me. Gods.’
Shaking his head, the poet lumbered to the cot and sat. The canvas groaned against its wooden frame. Otah stood between the fire and the doorway, ready to block Heshai if he bolted. He didn’t.
‘So. You’ve come to finish me off, eh? Well, you’re a big, strong boy. I’m old and fat and more than half drunk. I doubt you’ll have a problem.’
‘Seedless told me that you’d welcome it,’ Otah said. ‘I suspect he overstated his case, eh? Anyway, I’m not his puppet.’
The poet scowled, his bloodshot eyes narrowing in the firelight. Otah stepped forward, knelt as he had as a boy at the school and took a pose appropriate to a student addressing a teacher.
‘You know what’s happening. Amat Kyaan’s audience before the Khai Saraykeht. You have to know what would happen.’
Slowly, grudgingly, Heshai took an acknowledging pose.
‘Seedless hoped that I would kill you in order to prevent it. But I find I’m not a murderer,’ Otah said. ‘The stakes here, the price that innocent people will pay . . . and the price Maati will pay. It’s too high. I can’t let it happen.’
‘I see,’ Heshai said. He was silent for a long moment, the ticking of the fire the only sound. Thoughtfully, he reached down and lifted a half-full bottle from the floor. Otah watched the old man drink, the thick throat working as he gulped the wine down. Then, ‘And how do you plan to reconcile these two issues, eh?’
‘Let the andat go,’ Otah said. ‘I’ve come to ask you to set Seedless free.’
‘That simple, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘I think that you can,’ Otah said.
‘I don’t mean it can’t be done. Gods, nothing would be easier. I’d only have to . . .’ He opened one hand in a gesture of release. ‘That isn’t what I meant. It’s that
I
can’t do it. It’s not . . . it isn’t in me. I’m sorry, boy. I know it looks simple from where you are. It isn’t. I’m the poet of Saraykeht, and that isn’t something you stop being just because you get tired. Just because it eats you. Just because it kills children. Look, if you had the choice of grabbing a live coal and holding it in your fist or destroying a city of innocent people, you’d do everything you could to stand the pain. You wouldn’t be a decent man if you didn’t at least try.’
‘And you would be a decent man if you let the Khai Saraykeht take his vengeance?’
‘No, I’d be a poet,’ Heshai said, and his smile was as much melancholy as humor. ‘You’re too young to understand. I’ve been holding this coal in my hand since before you were born. I can’t stop now because I
can’t.
Who I am is too much curled around this. If I stopped - just
stopped
- I wouldn’t be anyone anymore.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘Yes. Yes, I see you think that, but your opinion on it doesn’t matter. And that doesn’t surprise you, does it?’
The sick dread in Otah’s belly suddenly felt as heavy as if he’d swallowed stone. He took a pose of acknowledgment. The poet leaned forward and put his wide, thick hand gently over Otah’s.
‘You knew I wouldn’t agree,’ he said.
‘I . . . hoped . . .’
‘You had to try,’ Heshai said, his tone approving. ‘It speaks well of you. You had to try. Don’t blame yourself. I haven’t been strong enough to end this, and I’ve been up to my hips in it for decades. Wine?’
Otah accepted the offered bottle. It was strong - mixed with something that left a taste of herb at the back of his throat. He handed it back. Warmth bloomed in his belly. Heshai, seeing his surprise, laughed.
‘I should have warned you. It’s a little more than they serve with lamb cuts, but I like it. It lets me sleep. So, if you don’t mind my asking, what made our mutual acquaintance think you’d do his killing for him?’
Otah found himself telling the tale - his own secret and Wilsin’s, the source of Liat’s wounds and the prospect of Maati’s. Throughout, Heshai listened, his face clouded, nodding from time to time or asking questions that made Otah clarify himself. When the secret of Otah’s identity came out, the poet’s eyes widened, but he made no other comment. Twice, he passed the bottle of wine over, and Otah drank from it. It was strange, hearing it all spoken, hearing the thoughts he’d only half-formed made real by the words he found to express them. His own fate, the fate of others - justice and betrayal, loyalty and the changes worked by the sea. The wine and the fear and the pain and dread in Otah’s guts turned the old man into his confessor, his confidant, his friend even if only for the moment.
The night candle was close to the halfway mark when he finished it all - his thoughts and fears, secrets and failures. Or almost all. There was one left that he wasn’t ready to mention - the ship he’d booked two passages on with the last of his silver, ready to sail south before the dawn - a small Westlands ship, desperate enough to ply winter trade where the waters never froze. An escape ship for a murderer and his accomplice. That he held still to himself.
‘Hard,’ the poet said. ‘Hard. Maati’s a good boy. Despite it all, he is good. Only young.’
‘Please, Heshai-kvo,’ Otah said. ‘Stop this thing.’
‘It’s out of my hands. And really, even if I were to let the beast slip, your whoremonger sounds like she’s good enough to tell a strong story. The next andat the Dai-kvo sends might be just as terrible. Or another Khai could be pressed into service, meting out vengeance on behalf of all the cities together. Killing me might spare Maati and keep your secrets, but Liat . . . the Galts . . .’
‘I’d thought of that.’
‘Anyway, it’s too late for me. Shifting names, changing who you are, putting lives on and off like fine robes - that’s a young man’s game. There’s too many years loaded on the back of my cart. The weight makes turning tricky. How would you have done it, if you did?’
‘Do what?’
‘Kill me?’
‘Seedless told me to come just before dawn,’ Otah said. ‘He said a cord around the throat, pulled tight, would keep you from crying out.’
Heshai chuckled, but the sound was grim. He swallowed down the last dregs of the wine, leaving a smear of black leaves on the side of the bottle. He fumbled for a moment in the chaos under his cot, pulled out a fresh bottle and opened it roughly, throwing the cork into the fire.
‘He’s an optimist,’ Heshai said. ‘The way I drink, I’ll be senseless as stones by the three-quarters.’
Otah frowned, and then the import of the words came over him like cold water. The dread in his belly became a knot, but he didn’t speak. The poet looked into the fire, the low, dying flames casting shadows on his wide, miserable features. The urge to take the old man in his arms and embrace or else shake him came over Otah and passed - a wave against the shore. When the old man’s gaze shifted, Otah saw his own darkness mirrored there.
‘I’ve always done what I was told to, my boy. The rewards aren’t what you’d expect. You aren’t a killer. I’m a poet. If we’re going to stop this thing, one of us has to change.’
‘I should go,’ Otah said, drawing himself up to his feet.
Heshai-kvo took a pose of farewell, as intimate as family. Otah replied with something very much the same. There were tears, he saw, on Heshai’s cheeks to match his own.
‘You should lock the door behind me,’ Otah said.
‘Later,’ Heshai said. ‘I’ll do it later if I remember to.’
The fetid, chill air of the alley was like waking from a dream - or half-waking. Overhead, the half-moon slipped through wisps and fingers of clouds, insubstantial as veils. Otah walked with his head held high, but though he was ashamed of them, he couldn’t stanch the tears. From outside himself, he could observe the sorrow and the black tarry dread, different from fear because of its perfect certainty. He was becoming a murderer. He wondered how his brothers would manage this, when the time came for them to turn on one another, how they would bring themselves with cool, clear minds to end another man’s life.

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