Going north was dangerous. He knew that, and still it didn't escape him that the Khai Machi dying by inches was his father, that these men were the brothers he knew only as vague memories. And because of these men, he had lost everything again. If he was going to be haunted his whole life by the city, perhaps he should at least see it. The only thing he risked was his life.
At length, the conversation turned to less weighty matters andwithout a word or shift in voice or manner-the meeting was ended. Otah spoke as much as any, laughed as much, and sang as loudly when the pipe players joined them. But when he stretched and turned to leave, Amiit Foss was at his side. Otah and the overseer left together, as if they had only happened to rise at the same time, and Otah knew that no one in the drunken, boisterous room they left had failed to notice it.
"So, it sounds as if all the interesting things in the world were happening in Machi," Otah said as they strode back through the hallways of the house compound. "You are still hoping to send me there?"
"I've been hoping," Amiit Foss agreed. "But I have other plans if you have some of your own."
"I don't," Otah said, and Amiit paused. In the dim lantern light, Otah let the old man search his face. Something passed over Amiit, the ghost of some old sorrow, and then he took a pose of condolence.
"I thought you had come to quit the house," Amiit said.
"I'd meant to," Otah said, surprised at himself for admitting it.
Amiit gestured Otah to follow him, and together they retired to Amiit's apartments. The rooms were large and warm, hung with tapestries and lit by a dozen candles. Utah sat on a low seat by a table, and Amiit took a box from his shelf. Inside were two small porcelain bowls and a white stoppered bottle that matched them. When Amiit poured, the scent of rice wine filled the room.
"We drink to the gods," Amiit said, raising his bowl. "May they never drink to us."
Otah drank the wine at a gulp. It was excellent, and he felt his throat grow warmer. He looked at the empty bowl in his fingers and nodded. Amiit grinned.
"It was a gift from an old friend," Amiit said. "I love to drink it, but I hate to drink alone."
"I'm pleased to be of service," Otah said as Amiit filled the bowl again.
"So things with the woman didn't work out?"
"No," Utah said.
"I'm sorry."
"It was entirely my fault."
"If it's true, you're a wise man to know it, and if not, you're a good man for saying it. Either way."
"I think it would he ... that is, if there are any letters to be carried, I think travel might be the best thing just now. I don't really care to stay in Udun."
Amiit sighed and nodded.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Come to my offices in the morning. We'll arrange something."
Afterwards, they finished the rice wine and talked of nothing important-of old stories and old travels, the women they had known and loved or else hated. Or both. Otah said nothing of Kiyan or the north, and Amiit didn't press him. When Otah rose to leave, he was surprised to find how drunk he had become. He navigated his way to his room and lay on the couch, mustering the resolve to pull off his robes. Morning found him still dressed. He changed robes and went down to the bathhouse, forcing his mind back over his conversations of the night before. He was fairly certain he had said nothing to implicate himself or make Amiit suspect the nature of his falling out with Kiyan. He wondered what the old man would have made of the truth, had he known it.
The packet of letters waited for him, each sewn and sealed, in a leather bag on Amiit Foss' desk. Most were for trading houses in Machi, though there were four that were to go to members of the utkhaiem. Otah turned the packet in his hands. Behind him, one of the apprentices said something softly and another giggled.
"You have time to reconsider," Amiit said. "You could go back to her on your knees. If the letters wait another day, there's little lost. And she might relent."
Otah tucked the letters into their pouch and slipped it into his sleeve.
"An old lover of mine once told me that everything I'd ever won, I won by leaving," Otah said.
"The island girl?"
"Did I mention her last night?"
"At length," Amiit said, chuckling. "That particular quotation came up twice, as I recall. There might have been a third time too. I couldn't really say."
"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope I didn't tell you all my secrets," Otah said, making a joke of his sudden unease. He didn't recall saying anything about Maj, and it occurred to him exactly how dangerous that night had been.
"If you had, I'd make it a point to forget them," Amiit said. "Nothing a drunk man says on the day his woman leaves him should be held against him. It's poor form. And this is, after all, a gentleman's trade, ne?"
Otah took a pose of agreement.
"I'll report what I find when I get back," he said, unnecessarily. "Assuming I haven't frozen to death on the roads."
"Be careful up there, Itani. Things are uncertain when there's the scent of a new Khai in the wind. It's interesting, and it's important, but it's not always safe."
Otah shifted to a pose of thanks, to which his supervisor replied in kind, his face so pleasantly unreadable that Otah genuinely didn't know how deep the warning ran.
When Maati considered the mines-something he had rarely had occasion to do-he had pictured great holes going deep into the earth. He had not imagined the branchings and contortions of passages where miners struggled to follow veins of ore, the stench of dust and damp, the yelps and howls of the dogs that pulled the flatbottomed sledges filled with gravel, or the darkness. He held his lantern low, as did the others around him. 't'here was no call to raise it. Nothing more would be seen, and the prospect of breaking it against the stone overhead was unpleasant.
""There can be places where the air goes bad, too," Cehmai said as they turned another twisting corner. "They take birds with them because they die first."
"What happens then?" Maati asked. "If the birds die?"
"It depends on how valuable the ore is," the young poet said. "Abandon the mine, or try to blow out the had air. Or use slaves. There are men whose indentures allow that."
Two servants followed at a distance, their own torches glowing. Maati had the sense that they would all, himself included, have been better pleased to spend the day in the palaces. All but the andat. StoneMade-Soft alone among them seemed untroubled by the weight over them and the gloom that pressed in when the lanterns flickered. The wide, calm face seemed almost stupid to Maati, the andat's occasional pronouncements simplistic compared with the thousand-layered comments of Seedless, the only andat he'd known intimately. He knew better than to be taken in. 'The form of the andat might be different, the mental bindings that held it might place different strictures upon it, but the hunger at its center was as desperate. It was an andat, and it would long to return to its natural state. They might seem as different as a marble from a thorn, but at heart they were all the same.
And Maati knew he was walking through a tunnel not so tall he could stand to his full height with a thousand tons of stone above him. This placid-faced ghost could bring it down on him as if they'd been crawling through a hole in the ocean.
"So, you see," Cehmai was saying, "the Daikani engineers find where they want to extend the mine out. Or down, or up. We have to leave that to them. Then I will come through and walk through the survey with them, so that we all understand what they're asking."
"And how much do you soften it?"
"It varies," Cehmai said. "It depends on the kind of rock. Some of them you can almost reduce to putty if you're truly clear where you want it to be. Then other times, you only want it to be easier to dig through. Most often, that's when they're concerned about collapses."
"I see," Maati said. "And the pumps? How do those figure in?"
"That was actually an entirely different agreement. The Khai's eldest son was interested in the problem. The mines here are some of the lowest that are still in u
se. The northern mines are almost all in the mountains, and so they aren't as likely to strike water."
"So the Daikani pay more for being here?"
"No, not really. The pumps he designed usually work quite well."
"But the payment for them?"
Cehmai grinned. His teeth and skin were yellowed by the lantern light.
"It was a different agreement," Cehmai said again. "The Daikani let him experiment with his designs and he let them use them."
"But if they worked well ..."
"Other mines would pay the Khai for the use of the pumps if they wished for help building them. Usually, though, the mines will help each other on things like that. There's a certain . . . what to call it ... brotherhood? The miners take care of each other, whatever house they work for."
"Might we see the pumps?"
"If you'd like," he said. "They're back in the deeper parts of the mine. If you don't mind walking down farther...."
Maati forced a grin and did not look at the wide face of the andat turning toward him.
"Not at all," he said. "Let's go down."
The pumps, when he found them at last, were ingenious. A series of treadmills turned huge corkscrews that lifted the water up to pools where another corkscrew waited to lift it higher again. They did not keep the deepest tunnels dry-the walls there seemed to weep as Maati waded through warm, knee-high water-but they kept it clear enough to work. Machi had, Cehmai assured him, the deepest tunnels in the world. NIaati did not ask if they were the safest.
They found the mine's overseer here in the depths. Voices seemed to carry better in the watery tunnels than up above, but Maati could not make out the words clearly until they were almost upon him. A small, thick-set man with a darkness to him that made Maati think of grime worked so deeply into skin that it would never come clean, he took a pose of welcome as they approached.
"We've an honored guest come to the city," Cehmai said.
"We've had many honored guests in the city," the overseer said, with a grin. "Damn few in the bottom of the hole, though. There's no palaces down here."
"But Machi's fortunes rest on its mines," Maati said. "So in a sense these are the deepest cellars of the palaces. The ones where the best treasures are hidden."
The overseer grinned.
"I like this one," he said to Cehmai. "He's got a quick head on him."
"I heard about the pumps the Khai's eldest son had designed," Maati said. "I was wondering if you could tell me of them?"
The grin widened, and the overseer launched into an expansive and delighted discussion of water and mines and the difficulty of removing the one from the other. Maati listened, struggling to follow the vocabulary and grammar particular to the trade.
"He had a gift for them," the overseer said, at last. His voice was melancholy. "We'll keep at them, these pumps, and they'll get better, but not like they would have with Biitrah-cha on them."
"He was here, I understand, on the day he was killed," Maati said. He saw the young poet's head shift, turning to consider him, and he ignored it as he had the andat's.
"That's truth. And I wish he'd stayed. His brothers aren't bad men, but they aren't miners. And ... well, he'll be missed."
"I had thought it odd, though," Nlaati said. "Whichever brother killed him, they had to know where he would be-that he would be called out here, and that the work would take so much of the day that he wouldn't return to the city itself."
"I suppose that's so," the overseer said.
"Then someone knew your pumps would fail," Maati said.
The lamplight flickered off the surface of the water, casting shadows up the overseer's face as this sank in. Cehmai coughed. Maati said nothing, did not move, waited. If any man here had been involved with it, the overseer was most likely. But Maati saw no rage or wariness in his expression, only the slow blooming of implication that might be expected in a man who had not thought the murder through. So perhaps he could be used after all.
"You're saying someone sabotaged my pumps to get him out here," the overseer said at last.
Maati wished deeply that Cehmai and his andat were not presentthis was a thing better done alone. But the moment had arrived, and there was nothing to be done but go forward. The servants at least were far enough away not to overhear if he spoke softly. Maati dug in his sleeve and came out with a letter and a small leather pouch, heavy with silver lengths. He pressed them both into the surprised overseer's hands.
"If you should discover who did, I would very much like to speak with them before the officers of the utkhaiem or the head of your House. That letter will tell you how to find me."
The overseer tucked away the pouch and letter, taking a pose of thanks which Maati waved away. Cehmai and the andat were silent as stones.
"And how long is it you've been working these mines?" Maati asked, forcing a lightness to his tone he did not feel. Soon the overseer was regaling them with stories of his years underground, and they were walking together toward the surface again. By the time Maati stepped out from the long, sloping throat of the mine and into daylight, his feet were numb. A litter waited for them, twelve strong men prepared to carry the three of them back to the palaces. Maati stopped for a moment to wring the water from the hem of his robes and to appreciate having nothing but the wide sky above him.
"Why was it the Dai-kvo sent you?" Cehmai asked as they climbed into the wooden litter. His voice was almost innocent, but even the andat was looking at Maati oddly.
"There are suggestions that the library may have some old references that the Dai-kvo lacks. Things that touch on the grammars of the first poets."
"Ah," Cehmai said. The litter lurched and rose, swaying slightly as the servants bore them away hack to the palaces. "And nothing more than that?"
"Of course not," Maati said. "What more could there he?"
He knew that he was convincing no one. And that was likely a fine thing. Maati had spent his first days in Machi learning the city, the courts, the teahouses. The Khai's daughter had introduced him to the gatherings of the younger generation of the utkhaiem as the poet Cehmai had to the elder. Maati had spent each night walking a different quarter of the city, wrapped in thick wool robes with close hoods against the vicious cold of the spring air. He had learned the intrigues of the court: which houses were vying for marriages to which cities, who was likely to be extorting favors for whom over what sorts of indiscretion, all the petty wars of a family of a thousand children.
He had used the opportunities to spread the name of Irani Noygu- saying only that he was an old friend Maati had heard might be in the city, whom he would very much like to see. There was no way to say that it was the name Otah Machi had invented for himself in Saraykeht, and even if there had been, Maati would likely not have done so. He had come to realize exactly how little he knew what he ought to do.
He had been sent because he knew Otah, knew how his old friend's mind worked, would recognize him should they meet. They were advantages, Maati supposed, but it was hard to weigh them against his inexperience. There was little enough to learn of making discreet inquiries when your life was spent in the small tasks of the Dai-kvo's village. An overseer of a trading house would have been better suited to the task. A negotiator, or a courier. Liat would have been better, the woman he had once loved, who had once loved him. Liat, mother of the boy Nayiit, whom Maati had held as a babe and loved more than water or air. Liat, who had been Otah's lover as well.
For the thousandth time, Maati put that thought aside.
When they reached the palaces, Maati again thanked Cehmai for taking the time from his work to accompany him, and Cehmai-still with the half-certain stance of a dog hearing an unfamiliar soundassured him that he'd been pleased to do so. Maati watched the slight young man and his thick-framed andat walk away across the flagstones of the courtyard. Their hems were black and sodden, ruining the drape of the robes. Much like his own, he knew.
Thankfully, his own apartments were warm. He s
tripped off his robes, leaving them in a lump for the servants to remove to a launderer, and replaced them with the thickest he had-lamb's wool and heavy leather with a thin cotton lining. It was the sort that natives of Machi wore in deep winter, but Maati pulled it close about him, vowing to use it whenever he went out, whatever the others might think of him. His boots thrown into a corner, he stretched his pale, numb feet almost into the fire grate and shuddered. He would have to go to the wayhouse where Biitrah Machi had died. The owners there had spoken to the officers of the utkhaiem, of course. They had told their tale of the moonfaced man who had come with letters of introduction, worked in their kitchens, and been ready to take over for a night when the overseers all came down ill. Still, he could not be sure there was nothing more to know unless he made his visit. Some other day, when he could feel his toes.
The summons came to him when the sun-red and angry-was just preparing to slide behind the mountains to the west. Maati pulled on thick, warm boots of soft leather, added his brown poet's robes over the warmer ones, and let himself be led to the Khai Machi's private chambers. He passed through several rooms on his way-a hall of worked marble the color of honey with a fountain running through it like a creek, a meeting chamber large enough to hold two dozen at a single table, then a smaller corridor that led to chambers of a more human size. Ahead of him, a woman passed from one side of the corridor to the other leaving the impression of night-black hair, warm brown skin, and robes the yellow of sunrise. One of the wives, Maati knew, of a man who had several.
At last, the servant slid open a door of carved rosewood, and Maati stepped into a room hardly larger than his own bedroom. The old man sat on a couch, his feet toward the fire that burned in the grate. His robes were lush, the silks seeming to take up the firelight and dance with it. They seemed more alive than his flesh. Slowly, the Khai raised a clay pipe to his mouth and puffed on it thoughtfully. The smoke smelled rich and sweet as a cane field on fire.
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