Shadow and Betrayal (65 page)
Read Shadow and Betrayal Online
Authors: Daniel Abraham
It was a ghost memory, strong and certain as stone, but without a place in his life. Something had happened, once, that tied all these senses together, but it was gone and he would never have it. He was upstart and traitor. Poisoner and villain. None of it was true, but it made for an interesting story to tell in the teahouses and meeting rooms - a variation on the theme of fratricide that the Khaiem replayed in every generation. A deep fatigue pressed into him. He had been an innocent to think that he might be forgotten, that Otah Machi might escape the venomous speculation of the traders and merchants, high families and low townsmen. There was no use for truth when spectacle was at issue. And there was nothing in the city that could matter less than the half-recalled memories of a courier’s abandoned childhood. The life he’d built mattered less than ashes to these people. His death would be a relief to them.
He returned to House Nan just as the stars began to glimmer in the deep northern sky. There was fresh bread and pepper-baked lamb, distilled rice wine and cold water. The other men who were to share his room joined him at the table, and they laughed and joked, traded information and gossip from across the world. Otah slid back comfortably into Itani Noygu, and his smiles came more easily as the night wore on, though a cold core remained in his breast. It was only just before he went to crawl into his cot that he found the steward, recovered his pouch of letters, and prepared himself.
All the letters were, of course, still sewn shut, but Otah checked the knots. None had been undone so far as he could tell. It would have been a breach of the gentleman’s trade to open letters held in trust, and it would have been foolishness to trust to honor. Had House Nan been willing to break trust, that would have been interesting to know as well. He laid them out on his cot, considering.
Letters to the merchant houses and lower families among the utkhaiem were the most common. He didn’t carry a letter for the Khai himself - he would have balked at so high a risk - but his work would take him to the palaces. And there were audiences, no doubt, to which he could get an invitation. If he chose, he could go to the Master of Tides and claim business with members of the court. It wouldn’t even require stretching the truth very far. He sat in silence, feeling as if there were two men within him.
One wanted nothing more than to embrace the fear and flee to some distant island and be pleased to live wondering whether his brothers would still be searching him out. The other was consumed by an anger that drove him forward, deeper into the city of his birth and the family that had first discarded him and then fashioned a murderer from his memory.
Fear and anger. He waited for the calm third voice of wisdom, but it didn’t come. He was left with no better plan than to act as Itani Noygu would have, had he been nothing other than he appeared. When at last he repacked his charges and lay on his cot, he expected that sleep would not come, but it did, and he woke in the morning forgetful of where he was and surprised to find that Kiyan was not in the bed beside him.
The palaces of the Khai were deep within the city, and the gardens around them made it seem more like a walk into some glorious low town than movement into the center of a great city. Trees arched over the walkways, branches bright with new leaves. Birds fluttered past him, reminding him of Udun and the wayhouse he had almost made his home. The greatest tower loomed overhead, dark stone rising up like twenty palaces, one above the other. Otah stopped in a courtyard before the lesser palace of the Master of Tides and squinted up at the great tower, wondering whether he had ever been to the top of it. Wondering whether being here, now, was valor, cowardice, foolishness, or wisdom; the product of anger or fear or the childish drive to show that he could defy them all if he chose.
He gave his name to the servants at the door and was led to an antechamber larger than his apartments back in Udun. A slave girl plucked a lap harp, filling the high air with a sweet, slow tune. He smiled at her and took a pose of appreciation. She returned his smile and nodded, but her fingers never left the strings. The servant, when he came, wore robes of deep red shot with yellow and a silver armband. He took a pose of greeting so brief it almost hadn’t happened.
‘Itani Noygu. You’re Itani Noygu, then? Ah, good. I am Piyun See, the Master of Tides’ assistant. He’s too busy to see you himself. So House Siyanti has taken an interest in Machi, then?’ he said. Otah smiled, though he meant it less this time.
‘I couldn’t say. I only go where they send me, Piyun-cha.’
The assistant took a pose of agreement.
‘I had hoped to know the court’s schedule in the next week,’ Otah said. ‘I have business—’
‘With the poet. Yes, I know. He left your name with us. He said we should keep a watch out for you. You’re wise to come to us first. You wouldn’t imagine the people who simply drift through on the breeze as if the poets weren’t members of the court.’
Otah smiled, his mouth tasting of fear, his heart suddenly racing. The poet of Machi - Cehmai Tyan, his name was - had no reason to know Itani Noygu or expect him. This was a mistake or a trap. If it was a trap, it was sloppy, and if a mistake, dangerous. The lie came to his lips as gracefully as a rehearsed speech.
‘I’m honored to have been mentioned. I hadn’t expected that he would remember me. But I’m afraid the business I’ve come on may not be what he had foreseen.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ the assistant said as he shifted. ‘Visiting dignitaries might confide in the Master of Tides, but I’m like you. I follow orders. Now. Let me see. I can send a runner to the library, and if he’s there . . .’
‘Perhaps it would be best if I went to the poet’s house,’ Otah said. ‘He can find me there when he isn’t—’
‘Oh, we haven’t put him there. Gods! He has his own rooms.’
‘His own rooms?’
‘Yes. We have a poet of our own, you know. We aren’t going to put Cehmai-cha on a cot in the granary every time the Dai-kvo sends us a guest. Maati-cha has apartments near the library.’
The air seemed to leave the room. A dull roar filled Otah’s ears, and he had to put a hand to the wall to keep from swaying. Maati-cha. The name came like an unforeseen blow.
Maati Vaupathai. Maati whom Otah had known briefly at the school, and to whom he had taught the secrets he had learned before he turned his back on the poets and all they offered. Maati whom he had found again in Saraykeht, who had become his friend and who knew that Itani Noygu was the son of the Khai Machi.
The last night they had seen one another - thirteen, fourteen summers ago - Maati had stolen his lover and Otah had killed Maati’s master. He was here now, in Machi. And he was looking for Otah. He felt like a deer surprised by the hunter at its side.
The servant girl fumbled with her strings, the notes of the tune coming out a jangle, and Otah shifted his gaze to her as if she’d shouted. For a moment, their eyes met and he saw discomfort in her as she hurried back to her song. She might have seen something in his face, might have realized who was standing before her. Otah balled his fists at his sides, pressing them into his thighs to keep from shaking. The assistant had been speaking. Otah didn’t know what he’d said.
‘Forgive me, but before we do anything, would you be so kind . . .,’ Otah feigned an embarrassed simper. ‘I’m afraid I had one bowl of tea too many this morning, and waters that run in, run out . . .’
‘Of course. I’ll have a slave take you to—’
‘No need,’ Otah said as he stepped to the door. No one shouted. No one stopped him. ‘I’ll be back with you in a moment.’
He walked out of the hall, forcing himself not to run though he could feel his heartbeat in his neck, and his ribs seemed too small for his breath. He waited for the warning yell to come - armsmen with drawn blades or the short, simple pain of an arrow in his breast. Generations of his uncles had spilled their blood, spat their last breaths perhaps here, under these arches. He was not immune. Itani Noygu would not protect him. He controlled himself as best he could, and when he reached the gardens, boughs shielding him from the eyes of the palaces, he bolted.
Idaan sat at the open sky doors, her legs hanging out over the void, and let her gaze wander the moonlit valley. The glimmers of the low towns to the south. The Daikani mine where her brother had gone to die. The Poinyat mines to the west and southeast. And below the soles of her bare feet, Machi itself: the smoke rising from the forges, the torches and lanterns glimmering in the streets and windows smaller and dimmer than fireflies. The winches and pulleys hung in the darkness above her, long lengths of iron chain in guides and hooks set in the stone, ready to be freed should there be call to haul something up to the high reaches of the tower or lower something down. Chains that clanked and rattled, uneasy in the night breeze.
She leaned forward, forcing herself to feel the vertigo twist her stomach and tighten her throat. Savoring it. Scoot forward a few inches, no more effort really than standing from a chair, and then the sound of wind would fill her ears. She waited as long as she could stand and then drew back, gasping and nauseated and trembling. But she did not pull her legs back in. That would have been weakness.
It was an irony that the symbols of Machi’s greatness were so little used. In the winter, there was no heating them - all the traffic of the city went in the streets, or over the snows, or through the networks of tunnels. And even in summer, the endless spiraling stairways and the need to haul up any wine or food or musical instruments made the gardens and halls nearer the ground more inviting. The towers were symbols of power, existing to show that they could exist and little enough more. A boast in stone and iron used for storage and exotic parties to impress visitors from the other courts of the Khaiem. And still, they made Idaan think that perhaps she could imagine what it would be to fly. In her way she loved them, and she loved very few things these days.
It was odd, perhaps that she had two lovers and still felt alone. Adrah had been with her for longer, it felt, than she had been herself. And so it had surprised her that she was so ready to betray him in another man’s bed. Perhaps she’d thought that by being a new man’s lover, she would strip off that old skin and become innocent again.
Or perhaps it was only that Cehmai had a sweet face and wanted her. She was young, she thought, to have given up flirtation and courtship. She’d been angry with Adrah for embarrassing Cehmai at the dance. She’d promised herself never to be owned by a man. And also, killing Biitrah had left a hunger in her - a need that nothing yet had sated.
She liked Cehmai. She longed for him. She needed him in a way she couldn’t quite fathom, except to say that she hated herself less when she was with him.
‘Idaan!’ a voice whispered from the darkness behind her. ‘Come away from there! You’ll be seen!’
‘Only if you’re fool enough to bring a torch,’ she said, but she pulled her feet back in from the abyss and hauled the great bronze-bound oaken sky doors shut. For a moment, there was nothing - black darker than closing her eyes - and then the scrape of a lantern’s hood and the flame of a single candle. Crates and boxes threw deep shadows on the stone walls and carved cabinets. Adrah looked pale, even in the dim light. Idaan found herself amused and annoyed - pulled between wanting to comfort him and the desire to point out that it wasn’t his family they were killing. She wondered if he knew yet that she had taken the poet to bed and whether he would care. And whether she did. He smiled nervously and glanced around at the shadows.
‘He hasn’t come,’ Idaan said.
‘He will. Don’t worry,’ Adrah said, and then a moment later: ‘My father has drafted a letter. Proposing our union. He’s sending it to the Khai tomorrow.’
‘Good,’ Idaan said. ‘We’ll want that in place before everyone finishes dying.’
‘Don’t.’
‘If we can’t speak of it to each other, Adrah-kya, when will we ever? It isn’t as if I can go to our friends or the priest.’ Idaan took a pose of query to some imagined confidant. ‘Adrah’s going to take me as his wife, but it’s important that we do it now, so that when I’ve finished slaughtering my brothers, he can use me to press his suit to become the new Khai without it seeming so clearly that I’m being traded at market. And don’t you love this new robe? It’s Westlands silk.’
She laughed bitterly. Adrah did not step back, quite, but he did pull away.
‘What is it, Idaan-kya?’ he said, and Idaan was surprised by the pain in his voice. It sounded genuine. ‘Have I done something to make you angry with me?’
For a moment, she saw herself through his eyes - cutting, ironic, cruel. It wasn’t who she had been with him. Once, before they had made this bargain with Chaos, she had had the luxury of being soft and warm. She had always been angry, only not with him. How lost he must feel.
Idaan leaned close and kissed him. For one terrible moment, she meant it - the softness of his lips against hers stirring something within her that cried out to hold and be held, to weep and wail and take comfort. Her flesh also remembered the poet, the strange taste of another man’s skin, the illusion of hope and of safety that she’d felt in her betrayal of the man who was destined to share her life.
‘I’m not angry, sweet. Only tired. I’m very tired.’
‘This will pass, Idaan-kya. Remember that this part only lasts a while.’
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