Shadow and Betrayal (83 page)

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Authors: Daniel Abraham

BOOK: Shadow and Betrayal
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‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice solemn.
Kiyan looked out the window. There was a dread in the lines of her mouth, a fear that confused him. He reached out, thinking to take her hand in his own, but the movement brought her back and a smile flitted over her and was gone.
‘I don’t know if you want to hear this. But I’ve been waiting to say it for longer than I can stand, and so I’m going to be selfish. And I don’t know how to. Not well.’
‘Is it something I’ll want to hear?’
‘I don’t know. I hope . . . I . . . Gods. Here. When you left, I missed you worse than I’d expected. I was sick with it. Physically ill. I thought I should be patient. I thought it would pass. And then I noticed that I seemed to miss you most in the early mornings. You understand?’
She looked Otah deep in the eye, and he frowned, trying to find some deeper significance in the words. And then he did, and he felt the world drop away from under him. He took a pose of query, and she replied with a confirmation.
‘Ah,’ he said and then sat, utterly at a loss. After ten or twenty breaths, Kiyan spoke again.
‘The midwife thinks sometime around Candles Night. Maybe a little after. So you see, I knew there was no avoiding the issue, not as long as I was carrying a baby with your blood in it. I went to Amiit-cha and we . . . he, really . . . put things in motion.’
‘There are blood teas,’ Otah said.
‘I know. The midwife offered them to me. Would you . . . I mean, is that what you would have wanted?’
‘No! Only I . . . I’d thought you wouldn’t give up what you had. Your father’s wayhouse. I don’t know that I have much of a life to give you. I was a dead man until a little before dawn today. But if you want . . .’
‘I wouldn’t have left the wayhouse for you, ’Tani. It’s where I grew up. It’s my home, and I wouldn’t give it up for a man. Not even a good man. I made that decision the night you told me who your father was. But for the both of you. Or really, even just for her. That’s a harder question.’
‘Her?’
‘Or him,’ Kiyan said. ‘Whichever. But I suppose that puts the decision in your hands now. The last time I saw you, I turned you out of my house. I won’t use this as a means of forcing you into something you’d rather not. I’ve made my choice, not yours.’
Perhaps it was the fatigue or the wine, but it took Otah the space of two or three breaths to understand what she was saying. He felt the grin draw back the corners of his mouth until they nearly ached.
‘I want you to be with me, Kiyan-kya. I want you to always be with me. And the baby too. If I have to flee to the Westlands and herd sheep, I want you both with me.’
Kiyan breathed in deeply, and let the breath out with a rough stutter. He hadn’t seen how unsure she’d been until now, when the relief relaxed her face. She took his hand and squeezed it until he thought both of their bones were creaking.
‘That’s good. That’s very good. I would have been . . .’ laughter entered her voice ‘. . . very disappointed.’
A knock at the door startled them both. The commander opened the door and then glanced from one of the laughing pair to the other. His face took a stern expression.
‘You told him,’ Sinja said. ‘You should at least let the man rest before you tell him things like that. He’s had a hard day.’
‘He’s been up to the task,’ Kiyan said.
‘Well, I’ve come to make things worse. We’ve just had a runner from the city, Otah-cha. It appears you’ve murdered your father in his sleep. Your brother Danat led a hunting party bent on bringing back your head on a stick, but apparently you’ve killed him too. You’re running out of family, Otah-cha.’
‘Ah,’ Otah said, and then a moment later, ‘I think perhaps I should lie down now.’
10
T
hey burned the Khai Machi and his son together in the yard outside the temple. The head priest wore his pale robes, the hood pulled low over his eyes in respect, and tended the flames. Thick, black smoke rose from the pyre and vanished into the air high above the city. Machi had woken from its revels to find the world worse than when they’d begun, and Cehmai saw it in every face he passed. A thousand of them at least stood in the afternoon sun. Shock and sorrow, confusion and fear.
And excitement. In a few eyes among the utkhaiem, he saw the bright eyes and sharp ears of men who smelled opportunity. He walked among them, Stone-Made-Soft at his side, peering through the funereal throng for the one familiar face. Idaan had to be there, but he could not find her.
The lower priests also passed through the crowds, singing dirges and beating the dry notes of drums. Slaves in ceremonially torn robes passed out tin cups of bittered water. Cehmai ignored them. The burning would go on through the night until the ashes of the men and the ashes of the coal were indistinguishable. And then a week’s mourning. And then these men weeping or staring, grim or secretly pleased, would meet and decide which of their number would have the honor of sitting on the dead family’s chair and leading the hunt for the man who had murdered his own father. Cehmai found himself unable to care particularly who won or lost, whether the upstart was caught or escaped. Somewhere among all these mourners was the woman he’d come to love, in more pain than she had ever been in since he’d known her. And he - he who could topple towers at a whim and make mountains flow like floodwater - couldn’t find her.
Instead, he found Maati in brown poet’s robes standing on a raised walkway that overlooked the mourning throng. Though they were on the edge of the ceremony, Cehmai saw the pyre light reflecting in Maati’s fixed eyes. Cehmai almost didn’t approach him, almost didn’t speak. There was a darkness wrapped around the poet. But it was possible he had been there from the ceremony’s beginning. He might know where Idaan was. Cehmai took a pose of greeting which Maati did not return.
‘Maati-kvo?’
Maati looked over first at Cehmai, then Stone-Made-Soft, and then back again at the fire. After a moment’s pause, his face twisted in disgust.
‘Not
kvo
. Never
kvo
. I haven’t taught you anything, so don’t address me as a teacher. I was wrong. From the beginning, I was wrong.’
‘Otah was very convincing,’ Cehmai said. ‘No one thought he would—’
‘Not about that. He didn’t do this. Baarath . . . Gods, why did it have to be Baarath that saw it? Prancing, self-important, smug . . .’
Maati fumbled with a sewn-leather wineskin and took a long, deep, joyless drink from it. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, then held the skin out in offering. Cehmai declined. Maati offered it to the andat, but Stone-Made-Soft only smiled as if amused.
‘I thought it was someone in the family. One of his brothers. It had to be. Who else would benefit? I was stupid.’
‘Forgive me, Maati-kvo. But no one did benefit.’
‘One of
them
did,’ he said, gesturing out at the mourners. ‘One of them is going to be the new Khai. He’ll tell you what to do, and you’ll do it. He’ll live in the high palaces, and everyone else in the city will lick his ass if he tells them to. That’s what it’s all about. Who has to lick whose ass. And there’s blood enough to fill a river answering that.’ He took another long pull from the wineskin, then dropped it idly to the ground at his feet. ‘I hate all of them.’
‘So do I,’ Stone-Made-Soft said, his tone light and conversational.
‘You’re drunk, Maati-kvo.’
‘Not half enough. Here, look at this. You know what this is?’
Cehmai glanced at the object Maati had pulled from his sleeve.
‘A book.’
‘This is my teacher’s masterwork. Heshai-kvo, poet of Saraykeht. The Dai-kvo sent me to him when I was hardly younger than you are now. I was going to study under him, take control of Seedless. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues. We called him Seedless. This is Heshai-kvo’s examination of everything he’d done wrong. Every improvement he could have made to his binding, if he’d had it to do over again. It’s brilliant.’
‘But it can’t work, can it?’ Cehmai said. ‘It would be too close . . .’
‘Of course not, it’s a refinement of his work, not how to bind Seedless again. It’s a record of his failure. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Cehmai grasped for a right answer to the question and ended with honesty.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Heshai-kvo was a drunkard. He was a failure. He was haunted his whole life by the woman he loved and the child he lost, and every measure of the hatred he had for himself was in his binding. He imagined the andat as the perfect man and implicit in that was the disdain he imagined such a man would feel looking at him. But Heshai was strong enough to look his mistake in the face. He was strong enough to sit with it and catalog it and
understand
. And the Dai-kvo sent me to him. Because he thought we could be the same. He thought I would understand him well enough to stand in his place.’
‘Maati-kvo, I’m sorry. Have you seen Idaan?’
‘Well,’ Maati said, ignoring the question as he swayed slightly and frowned at the crowd. ‘I can face my stupidities just as well as he did. The Dai-kvo wants to know who killed Biitrah? I’ll find out. He can tell me it’s too late and he can tell me to come home, but he can’t make me stop looking. Whoever gets that chair . . . whoever gets it . . .’
Maati frowned, confused for a moment, and a sudden racking sob shook him. He leaned forward. Cehmai moved to him, certain for a moment that Maati was about to pitch off the walkway and down to the distant ground, but instead the older poet gathered himself and took a pose of apology.
‘I’m . . . making an ass of myself,’ he said. ‘You were saying something. ’
Cehmai was torn for a moment. He could see the red that lined Maati’s eyes, could smell the sick reek of distilled wine on his breath and something deeper - some drug mixed with the wine. Someone needed to see Maati back to his apartments, needed to see that he was cared for. On another night, Cehmai would have done it.
‘Idaan,’ he said. ‘She must have been here. They’re burning her brother and her father. She had to attend the ceremony.’
‘She did,’ Maati agreed. ‘I saw her.’
‘Where’s she gone?’
‘With her man, I think. He was there beside her,’ Maati said. ‘I don’t know where they went.’
‘Are you going to be all right, Maati-kvo?’
Maati seemed to think about this, then nodded once and turned back to watch the pyre burning. The brown leather book had fallen to the ground by the wineskin, and the andat retrieved it and put it back in Maati’s sleeve. As they walked away, Cehmai took a pose of query.
‘I didn’t think he’d want to lose it,’ the andat said.
‘So that was a favor to him?’ Cehmai said. Stone-Made-Soft didn’t reply. They walked toward the women’s quarters and Idaan’s apartments. If she was not there, he would go to the Vaunyogi’s palace. He would say he was there to offer condolences to Idaan-cha. That it was his duty as poet and representative of the Dai-kvo to offer condolences to Idaan Machi on this most sorrowful of days. It was his duty. Gods. And the Vaunyogi would be chewing their own livers out. They’d contracted to marry their son to the Khai Machi’s sister. Now she was no one’s family.
‘Maybe they’ll cancel the arrangement,’ Stone-Made-Soft said. ‘It isn’t as if anyone would blame them. She could come live with us.’
‘You can be quiet now,’ Cehmai said.
At Idaan’s quarters, the servant boy reported that Idaan-cha had been there, but had gone. Yes, Adrah-cha had been there as well, but he had also gone. The unease in the boy’s manner made Cehmai wonder. Part of him hoped that they had been fighting, those two. It was despicable, but it was there: the desire that he and not Adrah Vaunyogi be the one to comfort her.
He stopped next at the palace of the Vaunyogi. A servant led him to a waiting chamber that had been dressed in pale mourning cloth fragrant from the cedar chests in which it had been stored. The chairs and statuary, windows and floors were all swathed in white rags that candlelight made gold. The andat stood at the window, peering out at the courtyard, while Cehmai sat on the front handspan of a seat. Every breath he took here made him wonder if coming had been a mistake.
The door to the main hall swung open. Adrah Vaunyogi stepped in. His shoulders rode high and tight, his lips thin as a line drawn on paper. Cehmai stood and took a pose of greeting which Adrah mirrored before he closed the door.
‘I’m surprised to see you, Cehmai-cha,’ Adrah said, walking forward slowly, as if unsure what precisely he was approaching. Cehmai smiled to keep his unease from showing. ‘My father is occupied. But perhaps I might be able to help you?’
‘You’re most kind. I came to offer my sympathies to Idaan-cha. I had heard she was with you, and so . . .’
‘No. She was, but she’s left. Perhaps she went back to the ceremony.’ Adrah’s voice was distant, as if only half his attention was on the conversation. His eyes, however, were fixed on Cehmai like a snake on a mouse, only Cehmai wasn’t sure which of them would be the mouse, which the serpent.

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