Shadow and Betrayal (57 page)
Read Shadow and Betrayal Online
Authors: Daniel Abraham
And also he wondered what sort of man his father was. What sort of man his brother had been. Whether his mother had wept when she sent her boy away to the school where the excess sons of the high familes became poets or fell forever from grace.
As he entered the courtyard, his dark reverie was interrupted by laughter and music from the main hall, and the scent of roast pork and baked yams mixed with the pine resin. When he stepped in, Old Mani slapped an earthenware bowl of wine into his hands and steered him to a bench by the fire. There were a good number of travelers - merchants from the great cities, farmers from the low towns, travelers each with a story and a past and a tale to tell, if only they were asked the right questions in the right ways.
It was later, the warm air busy with conversation, that Otah caught sight of Kiyan across the wide hall. She had on a working woman’s robes, her hair tied back, but the expression on her face and the angle of her body spoke of a deep contentment and satisfaction. She knew her place was here, and she was proud of it.
Otah found himself suddenly stilled by a longing for her unlike the simple lust that he was accustomed to. He imagined himself feeling the same satisfaction that he saw in her. The same sense of having a place in the world. She turned to him as if he had spoken and tilted her head - not an actual formal pose, but nonetheless a question.
He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life worth living.
Cehmai Tyan’s dreams, whenever the time came to renew his life’s struggle, took the same form. A normal dream - meaningless, strange, and trivial - would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was walking in a street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked, when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.
Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs felt softer than grass against Cehmai’s bare feet. And the andat was waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it - black basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent’s pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a windstorm sounded.
‘Again?’ the poet asked.
Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board, recalled the binding - the translation that had brought the thing across from him out of formlessness - and pushed a black stone into the empty field of the board. The game began again.
The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai’s work. It had been done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding - the fluid lines of play and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru’s had once touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part because the binding had also made Stone-Made-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. Stone-Made-Soft glowered down on its failing line.
‘You’re going to lose,’ Cehmai said.
‘I know,’ the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant rockslide - another evocation of flowing stone. ‘Being doomed doesn’t take away from the dignity of the effort, though.’
‘Well said.’
The andat shrugged and smiled. ‘One can afford to be philosophical when losing means outliving one’s opponent. This particular game? You picked it. But there are others we play that I’m not quite so crippled at.’
‘I didn’t pick this game. I haven’t seen twenty summers, and you’ve seen more than two hundred. I wasn’t even a dirty thought in my grandfather’s head when you started playing this.’
The andat’s thick hands took a formal position of disagreement.
‘We have always been playing the same game, you and I. If you were someone else at the start, it’s your problem.’
They never started speaking until the game’s end was a forgone conclusion. That Stone-Made-Soft was willing to speak was as much a sign that this particular battle was drawing to its end as the silence in Cehmai’s mind. But the last piece had not yet been pushed when a pounding came on the door.
‘I know you’re in there! Wake up!’
Cehmai sighed at the familiar voice and rose. The andat brooded over the board, searching, the poet knew, for some way to win a lost game. He clapped a hand on the andat’s shoulder as he passed by it toward the door.
‘I won’t have it,’ the stout, red-cheeked man said when the opened door revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a copper torc of office. Not for the first time, Cehmai thought Baarath would have been better placed in life as the overseer of a merchant house or farm than within the utkhaiem. ‘You poets think that because you have the andat, you have everything. Well, I’ve come to tell you it isn’t so.’
Cehmai took a pose of welcome and stepped back, allowing the man in.
‘I’ve been expecting you, Baarath. I don’t suppose you’ve brought any food with you?’
‘You have servants for that,’ Baarath said, striding into the wide room, taking in the shelves of books and scrolls and maps with his customary moment of lust. The andat looked up at him with its queer, slow smile, and then turned back to the board.
‘I don’t like having strange people wandering though my library,’ Baarath said.
‘Well, let’s hope our friend from the Dai-kvo won’t be strange.’
‘You are an annoying, contrary man. He’s going to come in here and root through the place. Some of those volumes are very old, you know. They won’t stand mishandling.’
‘Perhaps you should make copies of them.’
‘I am making copies. But it’s not a fast process, you know. It takes a great deal of time and patience. You can’t just grab some half-trained scribes off the street corners and set them to copying the great books of the Empire.’
‘You also can’t do the whole job by yourself, Baarath. No matter how much you want to.’
The librarian scowled at him, but there was a playfulness in the man’s eyes. The andat shifted a white marker forward and the noise in Cehmai’s head murmured. It had been a good move.
‘You hold an abstract thought in human form and make it play tricks, and you tell me what’s not possible? Please. I’ve come to offer a trade. If you’ll—’
‘Wait,’ Cehmai said.
‘If you’ll just—’
‘Baarath, you can be quiet or you can leave. I have to finish this.’
Stone-Made-Soft sighed as Cehmai took his seat again. The white stone had opened a line that had until now been closed. It wasn’t one he’d seen the andat play before, and Cehmai scowled. The game was still over, there was no way for the andat to clear his files and pour the white markers to their target squares before Cehmai’s dark stones had reached their goal. But it would be harder now than it had been before the librarian came. Cehmai played through the next five moves in his mind, his fingertips twitching. Then, decisively, he pushed the black marker forward that would block the andat’s fastest course.
‘Nice move,’ the librarian said.
‘What did you want with me? Could you just say it so I can refuse and get about my day?’
‘I was going to say that I will give this little poet-let of the Daikvo’s full access if you’ll let me include your collection here. It really makes more sense to have all the books and scrolls cataloged together.’
Cehmai took a pose of thanks.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Now go away. I have to do this.’
‘Be reasonable! If I choose—’
‘First, you will give Maati Vaupathai full access because the Dai-kvo and the Khai Machi tell you to. You have nothing to bargain with. Second, I’m not the one who gave the orders, nor was I consulted on them. If you want barley, you don’t negotiate with a silversmith, do you? So don’t come here asking concessions for something that I’m not involved with.’
A flash of genuine hurt crossed Baarath’s face. Stone-Made-Soft touched a white marker, then pulled back its hand and sank into thought again. Baarath took a pose of apology, his stance icy with its formality.
‘Don’t,’ Cehmai said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a farmer’s wife about the thing, but you’ve come at a difficult time.’
‘Of course. This children’s game upon which all our fates depend. No, no. Stay. I’ll see myself out.’
‘We can talk later,’ Cehmai said to the librarian’s back.
The door closed and left Cehmai and his captive, or his ward, or his other self, alone together.
‘He isn’t a very good man,’ Stone-Made-Soft rumbled.
‘No, he’s not,’ Cehmai agreed. ‘But friendship falls where it falls. And may the gods keep us from a world where only the people who deserve love get it.’
‘Well said,’ the andat replied, and pushed forward the white stone Cehmai knew it would.
The game ended quickly after that. Cehmai ate a breakfast of roast lamb and boiled eggs while Stone-Made-Soft put away the game pieces and then sat, warming its huge hands by the fire. There was a long day before them, and after the morning’s struggle, Cehmai was dreading it. They were promised to go to the potter’s works before midday. A load of granite had come from the quarries and required his services before it could be shaped into the bowls and vases for which Machi was famed. After midday, he was needed for a meeting with the engineers to consider the plans for House Pirnat’s silver mine. The Khai Machi’s engineers were concerned, he knew, that using the andat to soften the stone around a newfound seam of ore would weaken the structure of the mine. House Pirnat’s overseer thought it worth the risk. It would be like sitting in a child’s garden during a mud fight, but it had to be done. Just thinking of it made him tired.
‘You could tell them I’d nearly won,’ the andat said. ‘Say you were too shaken to appear.’
‘Yes, because my life would be so much better if they were all afraid of turning into a second Saraykeht.’
‘I’m only saying that you have options,’ the andat replied, smiling into the fire.
The poet’s house was set apart from the palaces of the Khai and the compounds of the utkhaiem. It was a broad, low building with thick stone walls nestled behind a small and artificial wood of sculpted oaks. The snows of winter had been reduced to gray-white mounds and frozen pools in the deep shadows where sunlight would not touch them. Cehmai and the andat strode west, toward the palaces and the Great Tower, tallest of all the inhuman buildings of Machi. It was a relief to walk along streets in sunlight rather than the deep network of tunnels to which the city resorted when the drifts were too high to allow even the snow doors to open. Brief days, and cold profound enough to crack stone, were the hallmarks of the Machi winter. The terrible urge to be out in the gardens and streets marked her spring. The men and women Cehmai passed were all dressed in warm robes, but their faces were bare and their heads uncovered. The pair paused by a firekeeper at his kiln. A singing slave stood near enough to warm her hands at the fire as she filled the air with traditional songs. The palaces of the Khai loomed before them - huge and gray with roofs pitched sharp as axe blades - and the city and the daylight stood at their backs, tempting as sugar ghosts on Candles Night.
‘It isn’t too late,’ the andat murmured. ‘Manat Doru used to do it all the time. He’d send a note to the Khai claiming that the weight of holding me was too heavy, and that he required his rest. We would go down to a little teahouse by the river that had sweetcakes that they cooked in oil and covered with sugar so fine it hung in the air if you blew on it.’
‘You’re lying to me,’ Cehmai said.
‘No,’ the andat said. ‘No, it’s truth. It made the Khai quite angry sometimes, but what was he to do?’
The singing slave smiled and took a pose of greeting to them that Cehmai returned.
‘We could stop by the spring gardens that Idaan frequents. If she were free she might be persuaded to join us,’ the andat said.
‘And why would the daughter of the Khai tempt me more than sweetcakes?’
‘She’s well-read and quick in her mind,’ the andat said, as if the question had been genuine. ‘You find her pleasant to look at, I know. And her demeanor is often just slightly inappropriate. If memory serves, that might outweigh even sweetcakes.’
Cehmai shifted his weight from foot to foot, then, with a commanding gesture, stopped a servant boy. The boy, seeing who he was, fell into a pose of greeting so formal it approached obeisance.
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