A Betrayal in Winter lpq-2

by Abraham Daniel

  even when I'd made it clear that you were not particularly welcome."

  "I apologize, most high, if I've given offense."

  "Not at all," Otah said, smiling. "Since you've come, you can do me the

  favor of explaining again to the High Council how precarious their

  position is with me. The Dai-kvo has been alerted to all I've learned,

  and he shares my opinion and my policy."

  "But I-"

  "I know the role your people played in the succession. And more than

  that, I know what happened in Saraykeht. Your nation survives now on my

  sufferance. If word reaches me of one more intervention in the matters

  of the cities of the Khaiem or the poets or the andat, I will wipe your

  people from the memory of the world."

  The emissary opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes darting

  about as if there was a word written somewhere on the walls that would

  open the floodgates of his diplomacy. Otah let the silence press at him.

  "I don't understand, most high," he managed at last.

  "Then go home," Otah said, "and repeat what I've told you to your

  overseer and then to his, and keep doing so until you find someone who

  does. If you reach the High Council, you'll have gone far enough."

  "I'm sure if you'll just tell me what's happened to upset you, most

  high, there must be something I can do to make it right."

  Otah pressed his steepled fingers to his lips. For a moment, he

  remembered Saraykeht-the feel of the poet's death struggles tinder his

  own hand. He remembered the fires that had consumed the compound of the

  Vaunyogi and the screams and cries of his sister as her husband and his

  father met their ends.

  "You can't make this right," he said, letting his weariness show in his

  voice. "I wish that you could."

  "But the contracts ... I can't go back without some agreement made, most

  high. If you want me to take your message back, you have to leave me

  enough credibility that anyone will hear it."

  "I can't help you," Otah said. "Take the letter I've given you and go

  home. Now."

  As he turned and left the room, the letter in his hand sewn shut and

  sealed, the Galt moved like a man newly awakened. At Otah's gesture, the

  servants followed the emissary and pulled the great bronze doors closed

  behind them, leaving him alone in the audience chamber. The pale silk

  banners shifted in the slight breath of air. The charcoal in the iron

  braziers glowed, orange within white. He pressed his hands to his eyes.

  He was tired, terribly tired. And there was so much more to be done.

  He heard the scrape of the servant's door behind him, heard the soft,

  careful footsteps and the faintest jingling of mail. He rose and turned,

  his robes shifting with a sound like sand on stone. Sinja took a pose of

  greeting.

  "You sent for me, most high?"

  "I've just sent the Galts packing again," Otah said.

  "I heard the last of it. Do you think they'll keep sending men to bow

  and scrape at your feet? I was thinking how gratifying it must be, being

  able to bully a whole nation of people you've never met."

  "Actually, it isn't. I imagine news of it will have spread through the

  city by nightfall. More stories of the Mad Khai."

  "You aren't called that. Upstart's still the most common. After the

  wedding, there was a week or so of calling you the shopkeeper's wife,

  but I think it was too long. An insult can only sustain a certain number

  of syllables."

  "Thank you," Otah said. "I feel much better now."

  "You are going to have to start caring what they think, you know. These

  are people you're going to be living with for the rest of your life.

  Starting off by proving how disrespectful and independent you can be is

  only going to make things harder. And the Galts carry quite a few

  contracts," Sinja said. "Are you sure you want me away just now? It's

  traditional to have a guard close at hand when you're cultivating new

  enemies.

  "Yes, I want you to go. If the utkhaiem are talking about the Galts,

  they may talk less about Idaan."

  "You know they won't forget her. It doesn't matter what other issues you

  wave at them, they'll come back to her."

  "I know. But it's the best I can do for now. Are you ready?"

  "I have everything I need prepared. We can do it now if you'd like."

  "I would."

  THREE ROOMS HAI) BEEN HER WORLD. A NARROW BED, A CHEAP IRON BRAzier, a

  night pot taken away every second day. The armsmen brought her bits of

  candle-stubs left over from around the palaces. Once, someone had

  slipped a book in with her meal-a cheap translation of Westland court

  poems. Still, she'd read them all and even started com posing some of

  her own. It galled her to be grateful for such small kindnesses,

  especially when she knew they would not have been extended to her had

  she been a man.

  The only breaks came when she was taken out to walk down empty tunnels,

  deep under the palaces. Armsmen paced behind her and before her, as if

  she were dangerous. And her mind slowly folded in on itself, the days

  passing into weeks, the ankle she'd cracked in her fall mending. Some

  days she felt lost in dreams, struggling to wake only to wish herself

  back asleep when her mind came clear. She sang to herself. She spoke to

  Adrah as if he were still there, still alive. As if he still loved her.

  She raged at Cehmai or bedded him or begged his forgiveness. All on her

  narrow bed, by the light of candle stubs.

  She woke to the sound of the bolt sliding open. She didn't think it was

  time to be fed or walked, but time had become a strange thing lately.

  When the door opened and the man in the black and silver robes of the

  Khai stepped in she told herself she was dreaming, half fearing he had

  come to kill her at last, and half hoping for it.

  The Khai Machi looked around the cell. His smile seemed forced.

  "You might not think it, but I've lived in worse," he said.

  "Is that supposed to comfort me?"

  "No," he said.

  A second man entered the room, a thick bundle under his arm. A soldier,

  by his stance and by the mail that he wore under his robes. Idaan sat

  up, gathering herself, preparing for whatever came and desperate that

  the men not turn and close the door again behind them. The Khai Machi

  hitched up his robes and squatted, his hack against the stone wall as if

  he was a laborer at rest between tasks. His long face was very much like

  Biitrah's, she saw. It was in the corners of his eyes and the shape of

  his jaw.

  "Sister," he said.

  "Most high," she replied.

  He shook his head. The soldier shifted. She had the feeling that the two

  movements were the continuation of some conversation they had had, a

  subtle commentary to which she was not privileged.

  "This is Sinja-cha," the Khai said. "You'll do as he says. If you fight

  hire, he'll kill you. If you try to leave him before he gives you

  permission, he'll kill you."

  "Are you whoring me to your pet thug then?" she asked, fighting to keep

  the quaver from her voice.

  "What? No. Gods," Otah said.
"No, I'm sending you into exile. He's to

  take you as far as Cetani. He'll leave you there with a good robe and a

  few lengths of silver. You can write. You have numbers. You'll be able

  to find some work, I expect."

  "I am a daughter of the Khaiem," she said bitterly. "I'm not permitted

  to work."

  "So lie," Otah said. "Pick a new name. Noygu always worked fairly well

  for me. You could be Sian Noygu. Your mother and father were merchants

  in ... well, call it Udun. You don't want people thinking about Machi if

  you can help it. They died in a plague. Or a fire. Or bandits killed

  them. It isn't as if you don't know how to lie. Invent something."

  Idaan stood, something like hope in her heart. To leave this hole. To

  leave this city and this life. To become someone else. She hadn't

  understood how weary and exhausted she had become until this moment. She

  had thought the cell was her prison.

  The soldier looked at her with perfectly empty eyes. She might have been

  a cow or a large stone he'd been set to move. Otah levered himself back

  to standing.

  "You can't mean this," Idaan said, her voice hardly a whisper. "I killed

  Danat. I as much as killed our father,"

  "I didn't know them," her brother said. "I certainly didn't love them."

  "I did."

  "All the worse for you, then."

  She looked into his eyes for the first time. There was a pain in them

  that she couldn't fathom.

  "I tried to kill you."

  "You won't do it again. I've killed and lived with it. I've been given

  mercy I didn't deserve. Sometimes that I didn't want. So you see, we may

  not be all that different, sister." He went silent for a moment, then,

  "Of course if you come back, or I find you conspiring against me-"

  "I wouldn't come back here if they begged me," she said. "°I'his city is

  ashes to me."

  Her brother smiled and nodded as much to himself as to her.

  "Sinja?" he said.

  The soldier tossed the bundle to her. It was a leather traveler's cloak

  lined with wool and thick silk robes and leggings wrapped around heavy

  boots. She was appalled at how heavy they were, at how weak she'd

  become. Her brother ducked out of the room, leaving only the two of

  them. The soldier nodded to the robes in her arms.

  "Best change into those quickly, Idaan-cha," he said. "I've got a sledge

  and team waiting, but it's an unpleasant winter out there, and I want to

  make the first low town before dark."

  "This is madness," she said.

  The soldier took a pose of agreement.

  "He's making quite a few had decisions," he said. "He's new at this,

  though. He'll get better."

  Idaan stripped under the soldier's impassive gaze and pulled on the

  robes and the leggings, the cloak, the boots. She stepped out of her

  cell with the feeling of having shed her skin. She didn't understand how

  much those walls had become everything to her until she stepped out the

  last door and into the blasting cold and limitless white. For a moment,

  it was too much. The world was too huge and too open, and she was too

  small to survive even the sight of it. She wasn't conscious of shrinking

  back from it until the soldier touched her arm.

  "The sledge is this way," he said.

  Idaan stumbled, her hoots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the

  slick ice on the snow. But she followed.

  THE CHAINS WERE FROZEN To THE TOWER, THE LIFTING MECHANISM BRITtle with

  cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than

  he had been when they'd marched him up the tower before, and the effort

  of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren't enough

  braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he

  passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits,

  smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again,

  and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.

  Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Nlaati. They were to

  meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other

  things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to

  reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low

  towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his

  daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi

  might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all

  the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.

  He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs

  aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then

  unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath

  him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising

  as always from the forges. TO the south, a hundred crows rose from the

  branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.

  And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he'd come to see:

  a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across

  the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops,

  and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And

  then as they vanished into the white.

  Daniel Abraham's first published novel, A Shadow" in Summer, is the

  first volume of the Long Price Quartet. He has had stories published in

  the Vanishing Acts, Bones of the World, and TheDart anthologies, and has

  been included in Gardner Dozois's Years Best Science Fiction anthology

  as well. His story "Flat Diane" won the International Horror Guild award

  for mid-length fiction.

  He is currently working on the Long Price Quartet, the third volume of

  which, An Autumn War, will he published in 2008. He lives in New Mexico

  with his wife and daughter.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 7b378cc6-e044-4a33-9175-44c1542ad9a3

  Document version: 2

  Document creation date: 2010-04-03

  Created using: doc2fb, FB Editor v2.0 software

  Document authors :

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/

 

 

 
hare-buttons">share