"Does it bother you, grandmother?" Mitat asked as they walked down the street. She spoke softly, so that the words stayed between the two of them, and not so far forward as the two mercenary guards before them or so far back as the two behind.
"I can think of a half dozen things you might mean," Amat said.
"Speaking against Wilsin."
"Of course it does," Amat said. "But it isn't something I chose."
"It's only that House Wilsin was good to you for so long ... it was like family, wasn't it? To make your own way now ..."
Amat narrowed her eyes. Mitat flushed and took a pose of apology which she ignored.
"This isn't a conversation about me, is it?" Amat asked.
"Not entirely," Mitat said.
The breeze blowing in from the sea chilled her, and the sun, already falling to the horizon, did nothing more than stretch the shadows and redden the light. The banners over the watch house fluttered, the mutter of cloth like voices in another room. Her guards opened the door, nodded to the watchmen inside and gestured Amat and her aide, her friend, her first real ally in the whole sour business, through. Amat paused.
"If you're thinking of leaving, you and your man, I want two things of you. First, wait until the suit is presented. Second, let me make an offer for your time. If we can't negotiate something, you can go with my blessings."
"The terms of my indenture were harsh, and you could ..."
"Oh don't be an ass," Amat said. "That was between you and Ovi Niit. This is between us. Not the same thing at all."
Mitat smiled - a little sadly, Amat thought - and took a pose that sealed an agreement. In the watch house, Amat paid her dues, signed and countersigned the documents, and took her copy for the records of the house. For another turn through the moon's phases, she and her house were citizens in good standing of the soft quarter. She walked back to the house with her five companions, and yet also very much alone.
The scent of garlic sausages tempted her as they passed an old man and his cart, and Amat wished powerfully that she could stop, send away the men and their knives, and sit with Mitat talking as friends might. She could find what price the woman wanted to stay - whatever it was Amat expected she'd be willing to pay it. But the guards wouldn't let them pause or be alone. Mitat wouldn't have had it. Amat herself knew it would have been unwise - somewhere in the city, Marchat Wilsin had to be in a fever of desperation, and he'd proven willing to kill before this. Leaving the comfort house at all was a risk. And still, something like an ordinary life beckoned more seductively than any whore ever had.
One step at a time, Amat moved forward. There would be time later, she told herself, for all that. Later, when the Galts were revealed and her burden was passed on to someone else. When the child's death was avenged and her city was safe and her conscience was clean. Then she could be herself again, if there was anything left of that woman. Or create herself again if there wasn't.
The messenger waited for them at the front entrance of the house. He was a young man, not older than Liat, but he wore the colors of a high servant. A message, Amat knew with a sinking heart, from the Khai Saraykeht.
"You," she said. "You're looking for Amat Kyaan?"
The messenger - a young boy with narrow-set eyes and a thin nose - took a pose of acknowledgment and respect. It was a courtly pose.
"You've found her," Amat said.
The boy plucked a letter from his sleeve sealed with the mark of the Khai Saraykeht. Amat tore it open there in the street. The script was as beautiful as any message from the palaces - calligraphy so ornate as to approach illegibility. Still, Amat had the practice to make it out. She sighed and took a pose of thanks and dismissal.
"I understand," she said. "There's no reply."
"What happened?" Mitat asked as they walked into the house. "Something bad?"
"No," Amat said. "Only the usual delays. The Khai is putting the audience back four days. Another party wishes to be present."
"Wilsin?"
"I assume so. It serves us as much as him, really. We can use a few more days to prepare."
Amat paused in the front room of the house, tapping the folded paper against the edge of a dice table. The sound of a young girl laughing came from the back, from the place where her whores waited to be chosen by one client or another. It was an odd thing to hear. Any hint of joy, it seemed, had become an odd thing to hear. If she were Marchat Wilsin, she'd try one last gesture - throw one last dart at the sky and hope for a miracle.
"Get Torish-cha," Amat said. "I want to discuss security again. And have we had word from Liat's boy? Itani?"
"Nothing yet," the guard by the front door said. "The other one came by before."
"If either of them arrive, send them to see me."
She walked through to the back, Mitat beside her.
"It's likely only a delay," Amat said, "but if he's winning time for a reason, I want to be ready for it."
"Grandmother?"
They had reached the common room - full now with women and boys in the costumes they wore, with the men who ran the games and wine, with the smell of fresh bread and roast lamb and with voices. Mitat stood at the door, her arms crossed. Amat took a querying pose.
"Someone has to tell Maj," she said.
Amat closed her eyes. Of course. As if all the rest wasn't enough, someone would have to tell Maj. She would. If there was going to be a screaming fight, at least they could have it in Nippu. Amat took two long breaths and opened her eyes again. Mitat's expression had softened into a rueful amusement.
"I could have been a dancer," Amat said. "I was very graceful as a girl. I could have been a dancer, and then I would never have had to march through any of this piss."
"I can do it if you want," Mitat said. Amat only smiled, shook her head, and walked toward the door to the little room of Maj's and the storm that was inescapably to be suffered.
OTAH MACHI, the sixth son of the Khai Machi, sat at the end of the wharf and looked out over the ocean. The fading twilight left only the light of a half moon dancing on the tops of the waves. Behind him, the work of the seafront was finished for the day, and the amusements of night time - almost as loud - had begun. He ignored the activity, ate slices of hot ginger chicken from the thick paper cone he'd bought at a stand, and thought about nothing.
He had two lengths of copper left to him. Years of work, years of making a life for himself in this city, and he had come to that - two lengths of copper. Enough to buy a bowl of wine, if he kept his standards low. Everything else, spent or lost or thrown away. But he was, at least, prepared. Below him, the tide was rising. It would fall again before the dawn came.
The time had come.
He walked the length of the seafront, throwing the spent paper soaked in grease and spices into a firekeeper's kiln where it flared and blackened, lighting for a moment the faces of the men and women warming themselves at the fire. The warehouses were dark and closed, the wide street empty. Outside a teahouse, a woman sang piteously over a begging box with three times more money in it than Otah had in the world. He tossed in one of his copper lengths for luck.
The soft quarter was much the same as any night. He was the one who was different. The drum and flute from the comfort houses, the smell of incense and stranger smokes, the melancholy eyes of women selling themselves from low parapets and high windows. It was as if he had come to the place for the first time - a traveler from a foreign land. There was time, he supposed, to turn aside. Even now, he could walk away from it all as he had from the school all those years before. He could walk away now and call it strength or purity. Or the calm of stone. He could call it that, but he would know the truth of it.
The alley was where Seedless had said it would be, hidden almost in the shadows of the buildings that lined it. He paused there for a time. Far down in the darkness, a lantern glowed without illuminating anything but itself. A show-fighter lumbered past, blood flowing from his scalp. Two sailors across the street pointed at the wounded man, laughing. Otah stepped into darkness.
Mud and filth slid under his boots like a riverbed. The lantern grew nearer, but he reached the door the andat had described before he reached the light. He pressed his hand to it. The wood was solid, the lock was black iron. The light glimmering through at the edges of the shutters showed that a fire was burning within. The poet in his private apartments, the place where he hid from the beauty of the palaces and the house that had come with his burden. Otah tried the door gently, but it was locked. He scratched at it and then rapped, but no one came. With a knife, he could have forced the lock, unhinged the door - a man drunk enough might even have slept through it, but he would have had to come much later. The andat had told him not to go to the hidden apartment until well past the night candle's middle mark, and it wasn't to the first quarter yet.
"Heshai-kvo," he said, not shouting, but his voice loud enough to ring against the stonework around him. "Open the door."
For a long moment, he thought no one would come. But then the line of light that haloed the shutters went dark, a bolt shot with a solid click, and the door creaked open. The poet stood silhouetted. His robes were as disheveled as his hair. His wide mouth was turned down in a heavy scowl.
"What do you think you're doing here?"
"We need to talk," Otah said.
"No we don't," the poet said, stepping back and starting to pull the door closed. "Go away."
Otah pushed in, first squaring his shoulder against the door, and then leaning in with his back and legs. The poet fell back with a surprised huff of breath. The rooms were small, dirty, squalid. A cot of stretched canvas was pulled too close to a fireplace, and empty bottles littered the floor by it. Streaks of dark mold ran down the walls from the sagging beams of the ceiling. The smell was like a swamp in summer. Otah closed the door behind him.
"Wh - what do you want?" the poet said, his face pale and fearful.
"We need to talk," Otah said again. "Seedless told me where to find you. He sent me here to kill you."
"Kill me?" Heshai repeated, and then chuckled. The fear seemed to drain away, and a bleak amusement took its place. "Kill me. Gods."
Shaking his head, the poet lumbered to the cot and sat. The canvas groaned against its wooden frame. Otah stood between the fire and the doorway, ready to block Heshai if he bolted. He didn't.
"So. You've come to finish me off, eh? Well, you're a big, strong boy. I'm old and fat and more than half drunk. I doubt you'll have a problem."
"Seedless told me that you'd welcome it," Otah said. "I suspect he overstated his case, eh? Anyway, I'm not his puppet."
The poet scowled, his bloodshot eyes narrowing in the firelight. Otah stepped forward, knelt as he had as a boy at the school and took a pose appropriate to a student addressing a teacher.
"You know what's happening. Amat Kyaan's audience before the Khai Saraykeht. You have to know what would happen."
Slowly, grudgingly, Heshai took an acknowledging pose.
"Seedless hoped that I would kill you in order to prevent it. But I find I'm not a murderer," Otah said. "The stakes here, the price that innocent people will pay ... and the price Maati will pay. It's too high. I can't let it happen."
"I see," Heshai said. He was silent for a long moment, the ticking of the fire the only sound. Thoughtfully, he reached down and lifted a half-full bottle from the floor. Otah watched the old man drink, the thick throat working as he gulped the wine down. Then, "And how do you plan to reconcile these two issues, eh?"
"Let the andat go," Otah said. "I've come to ask you to set Seedless free."
"That simple, eh?"
"Yes."
"I can't do it."
"I think that you can," Otah said.
"I don't mean it can't be done. Gods, nothing would be easier. I'd only have to ..." He opened one hand in a gesture of release. "That isn't what I meant. It's that I can't do it. It's not ... it isn't in me. I'm sorry, boy. I know it looks simple from where you are. It isn't. I'm the poet of Saraykeht, and that isn't something you stop being just because you get tired. Just because it eats you. Just because it kills children. Look, if you had the choice of grabbing a live coal and holding it in your fist or destroying a city of innocent people, you'd do everything you could to stand the pain. You wouldn't be a decent man if you didn't at least try."
"And you would be a decent man if you let the Khai Saraykeht take his vengeance?"
"No, I'd be a poet," Heshai said, and his smile was as much melancholy as humor. "You're too young to understand. I've been holding this coal in my hand since before you were born. I can't stop now because I can't. Who I am is too much curled around this. If I stopped - just stopped - I wouldn't be anyone anymore."
"I think you're wrong."
"Yes. Yes, I see you think that, but your opinion on it doesn't matter. And that doesn't surprise you, does it?"
The sick dread in Otah's belly suddenly felt as heavy as if he'd swallowed stone. He took a pose of acknowledgment. The poet leaned forward and put his wide, thick hand gently over Otah's.
"You knew I wouldn't agree," he said.
"I ... hoped ..."
"You had to try," Heshai said, his tone approving. "It speaks well of you. You had to try. Don't blame yourself. I haven't been strong enough to end this, and I've been up to my hips in it for decades. Wine?"
Otah accepted the offered bottle. It was strong - mixed with something that left a taste of herb at the back of his throat. He handed it back. Warmth bloomed in his belly. Heshai, seeing his surprise, laughed.
"I should have warned you. It's a little more than they serve with lamb cuts, but I like it. It lets me sleep. So, if you don't mind my asking, what made our mutual acquaintance think you'd do his killing for him?"
Otah found himself telling the tale - his own secret and Wilsin's, the source of Liat's wounds and the prospect of Maati's. Throughout, Heshai listened, his face clouded, nodding from time to time or asking questions that made Otah clarify himself. When the secret of Otah's identity came out, the poet's eyes widened, but he made no other comment. Twice, he passed the bottle of wine over, and Otah drank from it. It was strange, hearing it all spoken, hearing the thoughts he'd only half-formed made real by the words he found to express them. His own fate, the fate of others - justice and betrayal, loyalty and the changes worked by the sea. The wine and the fear and the pain and dread in Otah's guts turned the old man into his confessor, his confidant, his friend even if only for the moment.
The night candle was close to the halfway mark when he finished it all - his thoughts and fears, secrets and failures. Or almost all. There was one left that he wasn't ready to mention - the ship he'd booked two passages on with the last of his silver, ready to sail south before the dawn - a small Westlands ship, desperate enough to ply winter trade where the waters never froze. An escape ship for a murderer and his accomplice. That he held still to himself.
"Hard," the poet said. "Hard. Maati's a good boy. Despite it all, he is good. Only young."
"Please, Heshai-kvo," Otah said. "Stop this thing."
"It's out of my hands. And really, even if I were to let the beast slip, your whoremonger sounds like she's good enough to tell a strong story. The next andat the Dai-kvo sends might be just as terrible. Or another Khai could be pressed into service, meting out vengeance on behalf of all the cities together. Killing me might spare Maati and keep your secrets, but Liat ... the Galts ..."
"I'd thought of that."
"Anyway, it's too late for me. Shifting names, changing who you are, putting lives on and off like fine robes - that's a young man's game. There's too many years loaded on the back of my cart. The weight makes turning tricky. How would you have done it, if you did?"
"Do what?"
"Kill me?"
"Seedless told me to come just before dawn," Otah said. "He said a cord around the throat, pulled tight, would keep you from crying out."
Heshai chuckled, but the sound was grim. He swallowed down the last dregs of the wine, leaving a smear of black leaves on the side of the bottle. He fumbled for a moment in the chaos under his cot, pulled out a fresh bottle and opened it roughly, throwing the cork into the fire.
"He's an optimist," Heshai said. "The way I drink, I'll be senseless as stones by the three quarters."
Otah frowned, and then the import of the words came over him like cold water. The dread in his belly became a knot, but he didn't speak. The poet looked into the fire, the low, dying flames casting shadows on his wide, miserable features. The urge to take the old man in his arms and embrace or else shake him came over Otah and passed - a wave against the shore. When the old man's gaze shifted, Otah saw his own darkness mirrored there.
"I've always done what I was told to, my boy. The rewards aren't what you'd expect. You aren't a killer. I'm a poet. If we're going to stop this thing, one of us has to change."
"I should go," Otah said, drawing himself up to his feet.
Heshai-kvo took a pose of farewell, as intimate as family. Otah replied with something very much the same. There were tears, he saw, on Heshai's cheeks to match his own.
"You should lock the door behind me," Otah said.
"Later," Heshai said. "I'll do it later if I remember to."
The fetid, chill air of the alley was like waking from a dream - or half-waking. Overhead, the half-moon slipped through wisps and fingers of clouds, insubstantial as veils. He walked with his head held high, but though he was ashamed of them, he couldn't stanch the tears. From outside himself, he could observe the sorrow and the black tarry dread, different from fear because of its perfect certainty. He was becoming a murderer. He wondered how his brothers would manage this, when the time came for them to turn on one another, how they would bring themselves with cool, clear minds, to end another man's life.
The comfort house of Amat Kyaan glowed in the night as the others of its species did - music and voices, the laughter of whores and the cursing of men at the tables. The wealth of the city poured through places like this in a tiny city in itself, given over entirely to pleasure and money. It wouldn't always be so, he knew. He stood in the street and drank in the sight, the smell, the golden light and brightly colored banners, the joy and the sorrow of it. Tomorrow, it would be part of a different city.
The guard outside the back door recognized him.
"Grandmother wants to see you," the man said.
Otah watched himself take a pose of acknowledgment and smile his charming smile.
"Do you know where I could find her?"
"Up in her rooms with Wilsin's girl."
Otah gave his thanks and walked in. The common room wasn't empty - a handful of women sat at the tables, eating and talking among themselves. A black-haired girl, nearly naked, stood in the alcove, cupping her breasts in diaphanous silk with the air of a fish seller wrapping cod. Otah considered the wide, rough-hewn stairs that led to Amat Kyaan's apartments, to Liat. The door at the top landing was closed. He turned away, scratching lightly on the door of the other room - the one he had seen Maj retreat to the one night he had been there, the one time they had spoken.
The door pulled open just wide enough for the islander's face to appear. Her pale skin was flushed, her eyes bright and bloodshot. Otah leaned close.
"Please," he said. "I need to speak with you."
Maj's eyes narrowed, but a breath later, she stepped back, and Otah pushed into the room, closing the door behind him. Maj stood, arms pulled back, chin jutting like a child ready for a fight. A single lantern sat on a desk showing the cot, the hand-loom, the heap of robes waiting for the launderer. An empty winebowl lay canted in the corner of wall and floor. She was drunk. Otah calculated that quickly, and found that it was likely a good thing.
"Maj-cha," Otah said. "Forgive me, but I need your help. And I think I may be of service to you."
"I am living here," she said. "Not working. I am not one of these girls. Get out."
"No," Otah said, "that isn't what I mean. Maj, I can give you your vengeance now - tonight. The man who wields the andat. The one who actually took the child from you. I can take you to him now."
Maj frowned and shook her head slowly, her gaze locked on Otah. He spoke quickly, and low, using simple words with as few poses as he could manage. He explained that the Galts had been Seedless' tools, that Heshai controlled Seedless, that Otah could take her to him if they left now, right now. He thought he saw her soften, something like hope in her expression.
"But afterwards," he said, "you have to let me take you home. I have a ship ready to take us. It leaves before dawn."
"I ask grandmother," Maj said, and moved toward the door. Otah shifted to block her.
"No. She can't know. She wants to stop the Galts, not the poet. If you tell her, you have to go the way she goes. You have to put it before the Khai and wait to see what he chooses to do. I can give it to you now - tonight. But you have to leave Amat before you see the Khai. It's my price."
"You think I am stupid? Why should I trust you? Why are you doing this?"
"You aren't stupid. You should trust me because I have what you want - certainty, an end to waiting, vengeance, and a way back home. I'm doing this because I don't want to see any more women suffer what you've suffered, and because it takes the thing that did this out of the world forever."
Because it saves Maati and Liat. Because it saves Heshai. Because it is a terrible thing, and it is right. And because I have to get you away from this house.
A half smile pulled at her thick, pale mouth.
"You are man?" Maj asked. "Or you are ghost?"
Otah took a pose of query. Maj reached out and touched him, pressing his shoulder gently with her fingertips, as if making sure his flesh had substance.
"If you are man, then I am tired of being tricked. You lie to me and I will kill you with my teeth. If you are ghost, then you are maybe the one I am praying for."
"If you were praying for this," Otah said, "then I'm the answer to it. But get your things quickly. We have to go now, and we can't come back."
For a moment she wavered, and then the anger he had seen in her before, the desperation, shone in her eyes. It was what he had known was there, what he had counted on. She looked around at the tiny room, gathered up what looked like a half-knitted cloth and deliberately spat on the ground.
"Is nothing more I want here," Maj said. "You take me now. You show me. If is not as you say, I kill you. You doubt that?"
"No," he said. "I believe you."
It was a simple enough thing to distract the guard, to send him up to speak with Amat Kyaan - her security was done with attack in mind, not escape. Leading Maj out the back took the space of four breaths, perhaps five. Another dozen, and they were gone, vanished into the maze of streets and alleys that made up the soft quarter.
Maj stayed close to him as they went, and when they passed torches or street lanterns, he caught glimpses of her face, wild with release and the heat of fury. The alley, when he reached it, was empty. The door, when he tried it, was unlocked.
MAATI STEPPED into the poet's house, his feet sore, and his head buzzing like a hive. The house was silent, dark, and cold. Only the single, steady flame of a night candle stood watch in a lantern of glass. It had burned down past the half mark, the night more than half over. He dropped to a tapestry-draped divan and pulled the heavy cloth over him. He had visited every teahouse he knew of, had asked everyone he recognized. Otah-kvo had vanished - stepped into the thin mists of the seafront like a memory. And every step had been a journey, every fingers-width of the moon in its nightly arc had encompassed a lifetime. He'd expected, huddled under the heavy cloth, for sleep to come quickly and yet the dim glow of the candle distracted him, pulled his eyes open just when he had told himself that finally, finally he was letting the day fall away from him. He shifted, his robes bunching uncomfortably under his arm, at his ribs. It seemed half a night before he gave up and sat, letting his makeshift blankets fall away. The night candle was still well before the three-quarter mark.
"Wine might help," the familiar voice said from the darkness of the stairway. "It has the advantage of tradition. Many's the night our noble poet's slept beside a pool of his own puke, stinking of half-digested grapes."
"Be quiet," Maati said, but there was no force to his voice, no reserve left to fend off the attentions of the andat. Slowly, the perfect face and hands descended. He wore a robe of white, pale as his skin. A mourning robe. His demeanor when he sat on the second stair, stretching out his legs and smiling, was the same as ever - amused and scheming and untrustworthy and sad. But perhaps there was something else, an underlying energy that Maati didn't understand.
"I only mean that a hard night can be ended, if only you have the will to do it. And don't mind paying the price, when it comes."
"Leave me alone," Maati said. "I don't want to talk to you."
"Not even if your little friend came by, the seafront laborer?"
Maati's breath stopped, his blood suddenly with a separate life from his own. He took an interrogatory pose. Seedless laughed.
"Oh, he didn't," the andat said. "I was just wondering about your terms. If you didn't want to speak to me under any conditions, or if perhaps there might be exceptions to your rule. Purely hypothetical."
Maati felt the flush in his face, as much anger as embarrassment, and picked up the nearest thing to throw at Seedless. It was a beaded cushion, and it bounced off the andat's folded knees. Seedless took a pose of contrition, rose, and carried the cushion back to its place.
"I don't mean to hurt you, my dear. But you look like someone's just stolen your puppy, and I thought a joke might brighten things. I'm sorry if I was wrong."
"Where's Heshai?"
The andat paused, looking out, as if the black eyes could see through the walls, through the trees, any distance to consider the poet where he lay. A thin smile curled its lips.
"Away," Seedless said. "In his torture box. The same as always, I suppose."
"He isn't here, though."
"No," Seedless said, simply.
"I need to speak to him."
Seedless sat on the couch beside him, considering him in silence, his expression as distant as the moon. The mourning robe wasn't new though it clearly hadn't seen great use. The cut was simple, the cloth coarse and unsoftened by pounding. From the way it sagged, it was clearly intended for a wider frame than Seedless's - it was clearly meant for Heshai. Seedless seemed to see him notice all this, and looked down, as if aware of his own robes for the first time.
"He had these made when his mother died," the andat said. "He was with the Dai-kvo at the time. He didn't see her pyre, but the news reached him. He keeps it around, I suppose, so that he won't have to buy another one should anybody else die."
"And what makes you wear it?"
Seedless shrugged, grinned, gestured with wide-spread hands that indicated everything and nothing.
"Respect for the dead," Seedless said, "Why else?"
"Everything's a joke to you," Maati said. The fatigue made his tongue thick, but if anything, he was farther from rest than before he'd come back to the house. The combination of exhaustion and restlessness felt like an illness. "Nothing matters."
"Not true," the andat said. "Just because something's a game, doesn't mean it isn't serious."
"Gods. Is there something in the way Heshai-kvo made you that keeps you from making sense? You're like talking to smoke."
"I can speak to the point if you'd like," Seedless said. "Ask me what you want."
"I don't have anything to ask you, and you don't have anything to teach me," Maati said, rising. "I'm going to sleep. Tomorrow can't be worse than today was."
"Possibility is a wide field, dear. Can't is a word for small imaginations." Seedless said from behind him, but Maati didn't turn back.
His room was colder than the main room. He lit a small fire in the brazier before he pulled back the woolen blankets, pulled off his shoes, and tried again to sleep. The errands of the day ran through his mind, unstoppable and chaotic: Liat's distress and the warmth of her flesh, Otah-kvo's last words to him and the searing remorse that they held. If only he could find him, if only he could speak with him again.
Half-awake, Maati began to catalog for himself the places he had been in the night, searching for a corner he knew of, but might have overlooked. And, as he pictured the night streets of Saraykeht, he found himself moving down them, knowing as he did that he was dreaming. Street and alley, square and court, until he was in places that were nowhere real in the city, searching for teahouses that didn't truly exist other than within his own frustration and despair, and aware all the time that this was a dream, but was not sleep.
He kicked off the blankets, desperate for some sense of freedom. But the little brazier wasn't equal to its work, and the cold soon brought him swimming back up into his full mind. He lay in the darkness and wept. When that brought no relief, he rose, changed into fresh robes, and stalked down the stairs.
Seedless had started a fire in the grate. A copper pot of wine was warming over it, filling the room with its rich scent. The andat sat in a wooden chair, a book open in his lap. The brown, leather-bound volume that told of his own creation and its errors. He didn't look up when Maati came in and walked over to the fire, warming his feet by the flames. When he spoke, he sounded weary.
"The spirit's burned out of it. You can drink as much as you'd like and not impair yourself."
"What's the point, then?" Maati asked.
"Comfort. It may taste a little strong, though. I thought you'd come down sooner, and it gets thick if it boils too long."
Maati turned his back to the andat and used an old copper ladle to fill his winebowl. When his took a sip, it tasted rich and hot and red. And, perversely, comforting.
"It's fine," he said.
He heard the hush of paper upon paper as, behind him, Seedless closed the book. The silence afterward went on so long that he looked back over his shoulder. The andat sat motionless as a statue; not even breath stirred the folds of his robe and his face betrayed nothing. His ribs shifted an inch, taking in air, and he spoke.
"What would you have said, if you'd found him?"
Maati shifted, sitting with his legs crossed, the warm bowl in his hands. He blew across it to cool it before he answered.
"I'd have asked his forgiveness."
"Would you have deserved it, do you think?"
"I don't know. Possibly not. What I did was wrong."
Seedless chuckled and leaned forward, lacing his long graceful fingers together.
"Of course it was," Seedless said. "Why would anyone ask forgiveness for something they'd done that was right? But tell me, since we're on the subject of judgment and clemency, why would you ask for something you don't deserve?"
"You sound like Heshai-kvo."
"Of course I do, you're evading. If you don't like that question, leave it aside and answer me this instead. Would you forgive me? What I did was wrong, and I know it. Would you do for me what you'd ask of him?"
"Would you want me to?"
"Yes," Seedless said, and his voice was strangely plaintive. It wasn't an emotion Maati had ever seen in the andat before now. "Yes, I want to be forgiven."
Maati sipped the wine, then shook his head.
"You'd do it again, wouldn't you? If you could, you'd sacrifice anyone or anything to hurt Heshai-kvo."
"You think that?"
"Yes."
Seedless bowed his head until his hair tipped over his hands.
"I suppose you're right," he said. "Fine, then this. Would you forgive Heshai-kvo for his failings? As a teacher to you, as a poet in making something so dangerously flawed as myself. Really, pick anything - there's no end of ways in which he's wanting. Does he deserve mercy?"
"Perhaps," Maati said. "He didn't mean to do what he did."
"Ah! And because I planned, and he blundered, the child is more my wrong than his?"
"Yes."
"Then you've forgotten again what we are to each other, he and I. But let that be. If your laborer friend - you called him Otah-kvo, by the way. You should be more careful of that. If Otah-kvo did something wrong, if he committed some crime or helped someone else commit one, could you let that go?"
"You know ... how did you ..."
"I've known for weeks, dear. Don't let it worry you. I haven't told anyone. Answer the question; would you hold his crimes against him as you hold mine against me?"
"No, I don't think I would. Who told you that Otah was ..."
Seedless leaned back and took a pose of triumph.
"And what's the difference between us, laborer and andat that you'll brush his sins aside and not my own?"
Maati smiled.
"You aren't him," he said.
"And you love him."
Maati took a pose of affirmation.
"And love is more important than justice," Seedless said.
"Sometimes. Yes."
Seedless smiled and nodded.
"What a terrible thought," he said. "That love and injustice should be married."
Maati shifted to a dismissive pose, and in reply the andat took the brown book back up, leafing through the handwritten pages as if looking for his place. Maati closed his eyes and breathed in the fumes of the wine. He felt profoundly comfortable, like sleep - true sleep - coming on. He felt himself rocking slowly, involuntarily shifting in time with his pulse. A sense of disquiet roused him and without opening his eyes again, he spoke.
"You mustn't tell anyone about Otah-kvo. If his family finds him ..."
"They won't," Seedless said. "At least not through me."
"I don't believe you."
"This time, you can. Heshai-kvo did his best by you. Do you know that? For all his failings, and for all of mine, to the degree that our private war allowed it, we have taken care of you and ..."
The andat broke off. Maati opened his eyes. The andat wasn't looking at him or the book, but out, to the south. It was as if his sight penetrated the walls, the trees, the distance, and took in some spectacle that held him. Maati couldn't help following his gaze, but there was nothing but the rooms of the house. When he glanced back, the andat's expression was exultant.
"What is it?" Maati asked, a cold dread at his back.
"It's Otah-kvo," Seedless said. "He's forgiven you."
THE SINGLE candle burned, marking the hours of the night. On the cot where Otah had left him, the poet slept, all color leached from his face by the dim light. The poet's mouth was open, his breath deep and regular. Maj, at his side, knelt, considering the sleeping man's face. Otah shut the door.
"Is him," Maj said, her voice low and tense. "Is the one who does this to me. To my baby."
Otah moved forward, careful not to rattle the bottles on the floor, not to make any sound that would wake the sleeper.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
Silently, Maj pulled a knife from her sleeve. It was a thin blade, long as her hand but thinner than a finger. Otah touched her wrist and shook his head.
"Quiet," he said. "It has to be quiet."
"So how?" she asked.
Otah fumbled for a moment in his own sleeve and drew out the cord. It was braided bamboo, thin and supple, but so strong it would have borne Otah's weight without snapping. Wooden grips at each end fit his fingers to keep it from cutting into his flesh when he pulled it tight. It was a thug's weapon. Otah saw it in his own hands as if from a distance. The dread in his belly had suffused through his body, through the world, and disconnected him from everything. He felt like a puppet, pulled by invisible strings.
"I hold him," Maj said. "You do this."
Otah looked at the sleeping man. There was no rage in him to carry him through, no hatred to justify it. For a moment, he thought of turning away, of rousing the man or calling out for the watch. It would be so simple, even now, to turn back. Maj seemed to read his thoughts. Her eyes, unnatural and pale, met his.
"You do this," she said again.
He would walk onto the blade ...
"His legs," Otah said. "I'll worry about his arms, but you keep him from kicking free."
Maj moved in so close to the cot, she seemed almost ready to crawl onto it with Heshai. Her hands flexed in the space above the bend of the poet's knees. Otah looped the cord, ready to drop it over the poet's head, his fingers in the curves that were made for them. He stepped forward. His foot brushed a bottle, the sound of glass rolling over stone louder than thunder in the silence. The poet lurched, lifted himself, less than half awake, up on his elbow.
As if his body had been expecting it, Otah dropped the cord into place and pulled. He was dimly aware of the soft sounds of Maj struggling, pulling, holding the poet down. The poet's hands were at his throat now, fingers digging for the cord that had vanished, almost, into the flesh. Otah's hands and arms ached, and the broad muscles across his shoulders burned as he drew the cord as tight as his strength allowed. The poet's face was dark with blood, his wide lips black. Otah closed his eyes, but didn't loose his grip. The struggle grew weaker. The flailing arms and clawing fingers became the soft slaps of a child, and then stopped. In the darkness behind his eyes, Otah still pulled, afraid that if he stopped too soon it would all have to be done again. There was a wet sound, and the smell of shit. His back knotted between his shoulder blades, but he counted a dozen breaths, and then a half dozen more, before he looked up.
Maj stood at the foot of the cot. Her robes were disarranged and a bad bruise was already blooming on her cheek. Her expression was as serene as a statue's. Otah released the cord, his fingers stiff. He kept his gaze high, not wanting to see the body. Not at any price.
"It's done," he said, his voice shaky. "We should go."
Maj said something, not to him but to the corpse between them. Her words were flowing and lovely and he didn't know what they meant. She turned and walked solemn and regal out of the room, leaving Otah to follow her. He hesitated at the doorway, caught between wanting to look back and not, between the horror of the thing he had done and the relief that it was over. Perversely, he felt guilty leaving Heshai like this without giving some farewell; it seemed rude.
"Thank you, Heshai-kvo," he said at last, and took a pose appropriate for a pupil to an honored teacher. After a moment, he dropped his hands, stepped out, and closed the door.
The air of the alleyway was sharp and cold, rich with the threat of rain. For a brief, frightened moment, he thought he was alone, that Maj had gone, but the sound of her retching gave her away. He found her doubled over in the mud, weeping and being sick. He placed a hand on her back, reassuring and gentle, until the worst had passed. When she rose, he brushed off what he could of the mess and, his arm around her, led her out from the alleyway, to the west and down, towards the seafront and away at last from Saraykeht.
"WHAT DO you mean?" Maati asked. "How has Otahkvo ..."
And then he stopped because, with a sound like a sigh and a scent like rain, Seedless had vanished, and only the mourning robes remained.