back toward the city.
There would be celebrations from now until Idaan's wedding to Adrah
Vaunyogi. Between those two joys-the finished succession and the
marriage of the high families-there would also be the preparations for
the Khai Machi's final ceremony. And, despite everything Maati-kvo had
done, likely the execution of Otah Machi in there as well. With as many
rituals and ceremonies as the city faced, they'd be lucky to get any
real work done before winter.
The yipping of the mine dogs brought him back to himself, and he
realized he'd been half-dozing for the last few switchbacks. He rubbed
his eyes with the heel of his palm. He would have to pull himself
together when they began working in earnest. It would help, he told
himself, to have some particular problem to set his mind to instead of
the tedium of travel. Thankfully, Stone-Made-Soft wasn't resisting him
today. The effort it would have taken to force the unwilling andat to do
as it was told could have pushed the day from merely unpleasant to awful.
They reached the mouth of the mine and were greeted by several workers
and minor functionaries. Cehmai dismounted and walked Unsteadily to the
wide table that had been set up for their consultations. His legs and
back and head ached. When the drawings and notes were laid out before
him, it took effort to turn his attention to them. His mind wandered off
to Idaan or his own discomfort or the mental windstorm that was the andat.
"We would like to join these two passages," the overseer was saying, his
fingers tracing lines on the maps. Cehmai had seen hundreds of sets of
plans like this, and his mind picked up the markings and translated them
into holes dug through the living rock of the mountain only slightly
less easily than usual. "The vein seems richest here and then here. Our
concern is-"
"My concern," the engineer broke in, "is not bringing half the mountain
down on us while we do it."
The structure of tunnels that honeycombed the mountain wasn't the most
complicated Cehmai had ever seen, but neither was it simple. The mines
around Machi were capable of a complexity difficult in the rest of the
world, mostly because he himself was not in the rest of the world, and
mines in the Westlands and Galt weren't interested in paying the Khai
Mach] for his services. The engineer made his casewhere the stone would
support the tunnels and where it would not. The overseer made his
counter-case-pointing out where the ores seemed richest. The decision
was left to him.
The servants gave them bowls of honeyed beef and sausages that tasted of
smoke and black pepper; a tart, sweet paste made from last year's
berries; and salted Hatbrcad. Cehmai ate and drank and looked at the
maps and drawings. Fie kept remembering the curve of Idaan's mouth, the
feeling of her hips against his own. He remembered her tears, her
reticence. He would have sacrificed a good deal to better understand her
sorrow.
It was more, he thought, than the struggle to face her father's mortal
ity. Perhaps he should talk to Maati about it. He was older and had
greater experience with women. Cehmai shook his head and forced himself
to concentrate. It was half a hand before he saw a path through the
stone that would yield a fair return and not collapse the works.
Stone-Made-Soft neither approved nor dissented. It never did.
The overseer took a pose of gratitude and approval, then folded tip the
maps. The engineer sucked his teeth, craning his neck as the diagrams
and notes vanished into the overseer's satchel, as if hoping to see one
last objection, but then he too took an approving pose. They lit the
lanterns and turned to the wide, black wound in the mountain's side.
The tunnels were cool, and darker than night. The smell of rock dust
made the air thick. As he'd guessed, there were few men working, and the
sounds of their songs and the barking of their dogs only made the
darkness seem more isolating. They talked very little as they wound
their way through the maze. Usually Cehmai made a practice of keeping a
mental map, tracking their progress through the dark passages. After the
second unexpected intersection, he gave up and was content to let the
overseer lead them.
Unlike the mines on the plain, even the deepest tunnels here were dry.
When they reached the point Cehmai had chosen, they took out the maps
one last time, consulting them in the narrow section of the passageway
that the lanterns lit. Above them, the mountain felt bigger than the sky.
"Don't make it too soft," the engineer said.
"It doesn't bear any load," the overseer said. "Gods! Who's been telling
you ghost stories? You're nervous as a puppy first time down the hole."
Cehmai ignored them, looked up, considering the stone above him as if he
could see through it. He wanted a path wide as two men walking with
their arms outstretched. And it would need to go forward from here and
then tilt to the left and then up. Cehmai pictured the distances as if
he would walk them. It was about as far from where he was now to the
turning point as from the rose pavilion to the library. And then, the
shorter leg would be no longer than the walk from the library to Maati's
apartments. He turned his mind to it, pressed the whirlwind, applied it
to the stone before him, slowly, carefully loosening the stone in the
path he had imagined. Stone-Made-Soft resisted-not in the body that
scowled now looking at the tunnel's blank side, but in their shared
mind. The andat shifted and writhed and pushed, though not so badly as
it might have. Cehmai reached the turning point, shifted his attention
and began the shorter, upward movement.
The storm's energy turned and leapt ahead, spreading like spilled water,
pushing its influence out of the channel Cehmai's intention had
prepared. Cehmai gritted his teeth with the effort of pulling it back in
before the structure above them weakened and failed. The andat pressed
again, trying to pull the mountain down on top of them. Cehmai felt a
rivulet of sweat run down past his ear. The overseer and the engineer
were speaking someplace a long way off, but he couldn't be bothered by
them. They were idiots to distract him. He paused and gathered the
storm, concentrated on the ideas and grammars that had tied the andat to
him in the first place, that had held it for generations. And when it
had been brought to heel, he took it the rest of the way through his
pathway and then slowly, carefully, brought his mind, and its, back to
where they stood.
"Cehmai-cha?" the overseer asked again. The engineer was eyeing the
walls as if they might start speaking with him.
"I'm done," he said. "It's fine. I only have a headache."
Stone-Made-Soft smiled placidly. Neither of them would tell the men how
near they had all just come to dying: Cehmai, because he wished to keep
it from them, Stone-Made-Soft, because it would never occur to it to care.
The overseer took a hand pick from his satchel and struck the wall. The
metal
head chimed and a white mark appeared on the stone. Cehmai waved
his hand.
"To your left," he said. "'t'here."
The overseer struck again, and the pick sank deep into the stone with a
sound like a footstep on gravel.
"Excellent," the overseer said. "Perfect."
Even the engineer seemed grudgingly pleased. Cehmai only wanted to get
out, into the light and hack to the city and his own bed. Even if they
left now, they wouldn't reach hlachi before nightfall. probably not
before the night candle hit its half mark.
On the way back up, the engineer started telling jokes. Cehmai allowed
himself to smile. There was no call to make things unpleasant even if
the pain in his head and spine were echoing his heartbeats.
When they reached the light and fresh air, the servants had laid out a
more satisfying meal-rice, fresh chickens killed here at the mine,
roasted nuts with lemon, cheeses melted until they could be spread over
their bread with a blade. Cehmai lowered himself into a chair of strung
cloth and sighed with relief. To the south, they could see the smoke of
the forges rising from Machi and blowing off to the east. A city
perpetually afire.
"When we get there," Cehmai said to the andat, "we'll be playing several
games of stones. You'll be the one losing."
The andat shrugged almost imperceptibly.
"It's what I am," it said. "You may as well blame water for being wet."
"And when it soaks my robes, I do," Cehmai said. The andat chuckled and
then was silent. Its wide face turned to him with something like
concern. Its brow was furrowed.
"The girl," it said.
"What about her?"
"It seems to me the next time she asks if you love her, you could say yes.
Cehmai felt his heart jump in his chest, startled as a bird. The andat's
expression didn't change; it might have been carved from stone. Idaan
wept in his memory, and she laughed, and she curled herself in his
bedclothes and asked silently not to be sent away. Love, he discovered,
could feel very much like sorrow.
"I suppose you're right," he said, and the andat smiled in what looked
like sympathy.
MAATI LAID HIS NOTES OUT ON THE WIDE TABLE AT THE BACK OF THE LIbrary's
main chamber. The distant throbbing of trumpet and drum wasn't so
distracting here as in his rooms. Three times on the walk here, his
sleeves heavy with paper and books, he'd been grabbed by some masked
reveler and kissed. Twice, bowls of sweet wine had been forced into his
hand. The palaces were a riot of dancing and song, and despite his best
intentions, the memory of those three kisses drew his attention. It
would be sweet to go out, to lose himself in that crowd, to find some
woman willing to dance with him, and to take comfort in her body and her
breath. It had been years since he had let himself be so young as that.
He turned himself to his puzzle. Danat, the man destined to be Khai
Machi, had seemed the most likely to have engineered the rumors of
Otah's return. Certainly he had gained the most. Kahn Machi, whose death
had already given Maati three kisses, was the other possibility. Until
he dug in. He had asked the servants and the slaves of each household
every question he could think of. No, none of them recalled any
consultations with a man who matched the assassin's description. No,
neither man had sent word or instruction since Maati's own arrival. He'd
asked their social enemies what they knew or guessed or speculated on.
Kahn Machi had been a weak-lunged man, pale of face and watery of eye.
He'd had a penchant for sleeping with servant girls, but hadn't even
gotten a child on one-likely because he was infertile. Danat was a bully
and a sneak, a man whose oaths meant nothing to him-and the killing of
noble, scholarly Kaiin showed that. Danat's triumph was the best of all
possible outcomes or else the worst.
Searching for conspiracy in court gossip was like looking for raindrops
in a thunderstorm. Everyone he spoke to seemed to have four or five
suggestions of what might have happened, and of those, each half
contradicted the other. By far, the most common assumption was that Otah
had been the essential villain in all of it.
Nlaati had diagrammed the relationships of Danat and Kaiin with each of
the high families-Kamau, Daikani, Radaani and a dozen more. Then with
the great trading houses, with mistresses and rumored mistresses and the
teahouses they liked best. At one point he'd even listed which horses
each preferred to ride. The sad truth was that despite all these facts,
all these words scribbled onto papers, referenced and checked, nothing
pointed to either man as the author of Biitrah's death, the attempt on
Maati's own life, or the slaughter of the assassin. He was either too
dimwitted to see the pattern before him, it was too well hidden, or he
was looking in the wrong place. Clearly neither man had been present in
the city to direct the last two attacks, and there seemed to be no
supporters in Machi who had managed the plans for them.
Nor was there any reason to attack him. Nlaati had been on the verge of
exposing Otah-kvo. That was in everyone's best interest, barring Otah's.
Maati closed his eyes, sighed, then opened them again, gathered up the
pages of his notes and laid them out again, as if seeing them in a
different pattern might spark something.
Drunken song burst from the side room to his left, and Baarath, li
brarian of Machi, stumbled in, grinning. His face was flushed, and he
smelled of wine and something stronger. He threw open his arms and
strode unevenly to Maati, embracing him like a brother.
"No one has ever loved these books as you and I have, Maati-kya,"
Baarath said. "The most glorious party of a generation. Wine flowing in
the gutters, and food and dancing, and I'll jump off a tower if we don't
see a crop of babes next spring that look nothing like their fathers.
And where do we go, you and I? Here."
Baarath turned and made a sweeping gesture that took in the books and
scrolls and codices, the shelves and alcoves and chests. He shook his
head and seemed for a moment on the verge of tears. Maati patted him on
the back and led him to a wooden bench at the side of the room. Baarath
sat back, his head against the stone, and smiled like a baby.
"I'm not as drunk as I look," Baarath said.
"I'm sure you aren't," Maati agreed.
Baarath pounded the board beside him and gestured for Maati to sit.
There was no graceful way to refuse, and at the moment, he could think
of no reason. Going back to stand, frustrated, over the table had no
appeal. He sat.
"What is bothering you, Maati-kya? You're still searching for some way
to keep the upstart alive?"
"Is that an option? I don't see Danat-cha letting him walk free. No, I
suppose I'm just hoping to see him killed for the right reasons. Except
... I don't know. I can't find anyone else with reason to do the things
that have been done."
"Perhaps there's more than one thing going on then?" Baarath suggested.
/>
Maati took a pose of surrender.
"I can't comprehend one. The gods will have to lead me by the hand if
there's two. Can you think of any other reason to kill Biitrah? The man
seems to have moved through the world without making an enemy."
"He was the best of us," Baarath agreed and wiped his eyes with the end
of his sleeve. "He was a good man."
"So it had to be one of his brothers. Gods, I wish the assassin hadn't
been killed. He could have told us if there was a connection between
Biitrah and what happened to me. Then at least I'd know if I were
solving one puzzle or two."
"Doesn't have to," Baarath said.
Maati took a pose that asked for clarification. Baarath rolled his eyes
and took on an expression of superiority that Maati had seen beneath his
politeness for weeks now.
"It doesn't have to be one of his brothers," Baarath said. "You say it's
not the upstart. Fine, that's what you choose. But then you say you
can't find anything that I)anat or Kaiin's done that makes you think
they've done it. And why would they hide it, anyway? It's not shameful
for them to kill their brother."
"But no one else has a reason," Maati said.
"No one? Or only no one you've found?"
"If it isn't about the succession, I can't find any call to kill
Biitrah. If it isn't about my search for Otah, I can't think of any
reason to want me dead. The only killing that makes sense at all was
poking the assassin full of holes, and that only because he might have
answered my questions."
"Why couldn't it have been the succession?"
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