Shadow and Betrayal (52 page)

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Authors: Daniel Abraham

BOOK: Shadow and Betrayal
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Dreaming, Otah 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 Heshai-kvo 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.
BOOK TWO: A BETRAYAL IN WINTER
PROLOGUE
‘T
here’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, that 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 Biitrah 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 graves 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.
By the time they reached the first outbuildings of the low town, his fingers had grown numb, his nose had started to run from the cold, he had four different guesses as to what might have gone wrong, and ten questions in mind whose answers would determine whether he was correct. He went directly to the mouth of the mine, forgetting to stop for even bread and tea.
 
Hiami sat by the brazier, knotting a scarf from silk thread and listening to a slave boy sing old tunes of the Empire. Almost-forgotten emperors loved and fought, lost, won, and died in the high, rich voice. Poets and their slave spirits, the andat, waged their private battles sometimes with deep sincerity and beauty, sometimes with bedroom humor and bawdy rhymes - but all of them ancient. She couldn’t stand to hear anything written after the great war that had destroyed those faraway palaces and broken those song-recalled lands. The new songs were all about the battles of the Khaiem - three brothers who held claim to the name of Khai. Two would die, one would forget his name and doom his own sons to another cycle of blood. Whether they were laments for the fallen or celebrations of the victors, she hated them. They weren’t songs that comforted her, and she didn’t knot scarves unless she needed comfort.
A servant came in, a young girl in austere robes almost the pale of mourning, and took a ritual pose announcing a guest of status equal to Hiami’s.
‘Idaan,’ the servant girl said, ‘daughter to the Khai Machi.’
‘I know my husband’s sister,’ Hiami snapped, not pausing in her handwork. ‘You needn’t tell me the sky is blue.’
The servant girl flushed, her hands fluttering toward three different poses at once and achieving none of them. Hiami regretted her words and put down the knotting, taking a gentle pose of command.
‘Bring her here. And something comfortable for her to sit on.’
The servant took a pose of acknowledgment, grateful, it seemed, to know what response to make, and scampered off. And then Idaan was there.
Hardly twenty, she could have been one of Hiami’s own daughters. Not a beauty, but it took a practiced eye to know that. Her hair, pitch dark, was pleated with strands of silver and gold. Her eyes were touched with paints, her skin made finer and paler than it really was by powder. Her robes, blue silk embroidered with gold, flattered her hips and the swell of her breasts. To a man or a younger woman, Idaan might have seemed the loveliest woman in the city. Hiami knew the difference between talent and skill, but of the pair, she had greater respect for skill, so the effect was much the same.

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