Read Shadow and Betrayal Online
Authors: Daniel Abraham
Shadow and Betrayal (51 page)
She turned and walked out, her heart straining. On the steps, she stopped. The sun shone cool over the bare trees. She closed her eyes, waiting to hear the grim, unnatural chant begin again behind her. Crows hopped from branch to branch, and then as if at a signal, rose together and streamed off to the south. She stood for almost half a hand, the chill air pressing into her flesh.
She wondered how long she could wait there. She wondered where Itani was now, and if he knew what had happened. If he would ever forgive her for loving more than one man. She chewed at the inside of her cheek until it hurt.
Behind her, the door scraped open. Maati looked defeated. He was tucking the leatherbound book into his sleeve as he stepped out to her.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go back to the Dai-kvo and tell him I’ve failed.’
She stepped close to him, resting her head against his shoulder. He was warm, or the day had cooled her even more than she’d thought. For a moment, she remembered the feeling of Itani’s broad arms and the scent of his skin.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
It was three weeks now since the poet had died. Three weeks was too long, Amat knew, for a city to hold its breath. The tension was still there - the uncertainty, the fear. It showed in the faces of the men and women in the street and in the way they held their bodies. Amat heard it in the too-loud laughter, and angry words of drunkards in the soft-quarter streets. But the initial shock was fading. Time, suspended by the sudden change of losing the andat, was moving forward again. And that, as much as anything, drew her out, away from the protection of the comfort house and into the city. Her city.
In the gray of winter fog, the streets were like memories - here a familiar fountain emerged, took shape, and form and weight. The dark green of the stone glistened in the carvings of ship and fish, eagle and archer. And then as she passed, they faded, becoming at last a darkness behind her, and nothing more. She stopped at a stand by the seafront to buy a paper sack of roasted almonds, fresh from the cookfire and covered with raw sugar. The woman to whom Amat handed her length of copper took a pose of gratitude, and Amat moved to the water’s edge, considering the half-hidden waves, the thousand smells of the seafront - salt and spiced foods, sewage and incense. She blew sharply through pursed lips to cool the sweets before she bit into them, as she had when she was a girl, and she prepared herself for the last meeting. When the sack was empty, she crumpled it and let it drop into the sea.
House Wilsin was among the first to make its position on the future known by its actions. Even as she walked up the streets to the north, moving steadily toward the compound, carts passed her, heading the other way. The warehouses were being cleared, the offices packed into crates bound for Galt and the Westlands. When she reached the familiar courtyard, the lines of men made her think of ants on sugarcane. She paused at the bronze Galtic Tree, considering it with distaste and, to her surprise, amusement. Three weeks was too long, apparently, for her to hold her breath either.
‘Amat-cha?’
She shifted. Epani, her thin-faced, weak-spirited replacement, stood in a pose of welcome belied by the discomfort on his face. She answered it with a pose of her own, more graceful and appropriate.
‘Tell him I’d like to speak with him, will you?’
‘He isn’t . . . that is . . .’
‘Epani-cha. Go, tell him I’m here and I want to speak with him. I won’t burn the place down while you do it.’
Perhaps it was the dig that set him moving. Whatever did it, Epani retreated into the dark recesses of the compound. Amat walked to the fountain, listening to the play of the water as though it was the voice of an old friend. Someone had dredged it, she saw, for the copper lengths thrown in for luck. House Wilsin wasn’t leaving anything behind.
Epani returned and without a word led her back through the corridors she knew to the private meeting rooms. The room was as dark as she remembered it. Marchat Wilsin himself sat at the table, lit by the diffuse cool light from the small window, the warm, orange flame of a lantern. With one color on either cheek, he might almost have been two different men. Amat took a pose of greeting and gratitude. Moving as if unsure of himself, Marchat responded with one of welcome.
‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ he said, and his voice was careful.
‘And yet, here I am. I see House Wilsin is fleeing, just as everyone said it was. Bad for business, Marchat-cha. It looks like a failure of nerve.’
‘It is,’ he said. There was no apology in his voice. They might have been discussing dye prices. ‘Being in Saraykeht’s too risky now. My uncle’s calling me back home. I think he must have been possessed by some passing moment of sanity, and what he saw scared him. What we can’t ship out by spring, we’re selling at a loss. It’ll take years for the house to recover. And, of course, I’m scheduled on the last boat out. So. Have you come to tell me you’re ready to bring your suit to the Khai?’
Amat took a pose, more casual than she’d intended, that requested clarification. It was an irony, and Marchat’s sheepish grin showed that he knew it.
‘My position isn’t as strong as it was before the victim best placed to stir the heart of the utkhaiem killed the poet and destroyed the city. I lost a certain credibility.’
‘Was it really her, then?’
‘I don’t know for certain. It appears it was.’
‘I’d say I was sorry, but . . .’
Amat didn’t count the years she’d spent talking to this man across tables like this, or in the cool waters of the bathhouse, or walking together in the streets. She felt them, habits worn into her joints. She sat with a heavy sigh and shook her head.
‘I did what I could,’ she said. ‘Now . . . now who would believe me, and what would it matter?’
‘Someone might still. One of the other Khaiem.’
‘If you thought that was true, you’d have me killed.’
Wilsin’s face clouded, something like pain in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Something like sorrow.
‘I wouldn’t enjoy it,’ he said at last.
Despite the truth of it, Amat laughed. Or perhaps because of it.
‘Is Liat Chokavi still with you?’ Marchat asked, then took a pose that offered reassurance. ‘It’s just that I have a box of her things. Mostly her things. Some others may have found their way into it. I won’t call it apology, but . . .’
‘Unfortunately, no,’ Amat said. ‘I offered her a place. The gods all know I could use competent help keeping my books. But she’s left with the poet boy. It seems they’re heartmates.’
Marchat chuckled.
‘Oh,
that’ll
end well,’ he said with surprisingly gentle sarcasm.
that’ll
end well,’ he said with surprisingly gentle sarcasm.
‘Tell Epani to bring us a pot of tea,’ Amat said. ‘He can at least do something useful. Then there’s business we need to talk through.’
Marchat did as she asked, and minutes later, she cupped a small, lovely tea bowl in her hands, blowing across the steaming surface. Marchat poured a bowl for himself, but didn’t drink it. Instead, he folded his hands together and rested his great, whiskered chin in them. The silence wasn’t a ploy on his part; she could see that. He didn’t know what to say. It made the game hers to start.
‘There’s something I want of you,’ she said.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
‘The warehouses on the Nantan. I want to rent them from House Wilsin.’
He leaned back now, his head tilted like a dog hearing an unfamiliar sound. He took an interrogatory pose. Amat sipped her tea, but it was still too hot. She put the bowl on the table.
‘With the andat lost, I’m gathering investment in a combers’ hall. I’ve found ten men who worked as combers when Petals-Falling-Open was still the andat in Saraykeht. They’re willing to act as foremen. The initial outlay and the first contracts are difficult. I have people who might be willing to invest if I can find space. They’re worried that my relationship with my last employer ended poorly. Rent me the space, and I can address both issues at once.’
‘But, Amat . . .’
‘I lost,’ she said. ‘I know it. You know it. I did what I could do, and it got past me. Now I can either press the suit forward despite it all, raise what suspicions against Galt I can in the quarters who will listen to me at the cost of what credibility I have left, or else I can do this. Recreate myself as a legitimate business, organize the city, bind the wounds that can be bound. Forge connections between people who think they’re rivals. But I can’t do both. I can’t have people saying I’m an old woman frightened of shadows while I’m trying to make weavers and rope-makers who’ve been undercutting each other for the last three generations shake hands.’
Marchat Wilsin’s eyebrows rose. She watched him consider her. The guilt and horror, the betrayals and threats fell away for a moment, and they were the players in the game of get and give that they had been at their best. It made Amat’s heart feel bruised, but she kept it out of her face as he kept his feelings from his. The lantern flame spat, shuddered, and stood back to true.
‘It won’t work,’ he said at last. ‘They’ll hold to all their traditional prejudices and alliances. They’ll find ways to bite each other while they’re shaking hands. Making them all feel loyal to each other and to the city? In the Westlands or Galt or the islands, you might have a chance. But among the Khaiem? It’s doomed.’
‘I’ll accept failure when I’ve failed,’ Amat said.
‘Just remember I warned you. What’s your offer for the warehouses? ’
‘Sixty lengths of silver a year and five hundredths of the profit.’
‘That’s insultingly low, and you know it.’
‘You haven’t figured in that it will keep me from telling the world what the Galtic Council attempted in allying with Seedless against his poet. That by itself is a fair price, but we should keep up appearances, don’t you think?’
He thought about it. The tiny upturn of his lips, the barest of smiles, told her what she wanted to know.
‘And you really think you can make a going project of this? Combing raw cotton for its seeds isn’t a pleasant job.’
‘I have a steady stream of women looking to retire from one less pleasant than that,’ she said. ‘I think the two concerns will work quite nicely together.’
‘And if I agree to this,’ Marchat said, his voice suddenly softer, the game suddenly sliding out from its deep-worn track, ‘does that mean you’ll forgive me?’
‘I think we’re past things like forgiveness,’ she said. ‘We’re the servants of what we have to do. That’s all.’
‘I can live with that answer. All right, then. I’ll have Epani draw up contracts. Should we take them to that whorehouse of yours?’
‘Yes,’ Amat said. ‘That will do nicely. Thank you, Marchat-cha.’
‘It’s the least I could do,’ he said and drank at last from the bowl of cooling tea at his elbow. ‘And also likely the most I can. I don’t imagine my uncle will understand it right off. Galtic business doesn’t have quite the same subtlety you find with the Khaiem.’
‘It’s because your culture hasn’t finished licking off its caul,’ Amat said. ‘Once you’ve had a thousand years of Empire, things may be different. ’
Marchat’s expression soured and he poured himself more tea. Amat pushed her own bowl toward him, and he leaned forward to fill it. The steaming teapot clinked against the porcelain.
‘There will be a war,’ Amat said at last. ‘Between your people and mine. Eventually, there will be a war.’
‘Galt’s a strange place. It’s so long since I’ve been there, I don’t know how well I’ll fit once I’m back. We’ve done well by war. In the last generation, we’ve almost doubled our farmlands. There are places that rival the cities of the Khaiem, if you’ll believe that. Only we do it with ruthlessness and bloody-minded determination. You’d have to be there, really, to understand it. It isn’t what you people have here.’
Amat took an insistent pose, demanding an answer to her question. Marchat sighed; a long, slow sound.
‘Yes, someday. Someday there will be a war, but not in our lifetimes. ’
She shifted to a pose that was both acknowledgment and thanks. Marchat toyed with his teabowl.
‘Amat, before . . . before you go, there’s a letter I wrote you. When it looked like the suit was going to go to the Khai and sweet hell was going to rain down on Galt in general and me in particular. I want you to have it.’
His face was as legible as a boy’s. Amat wondered at how he could be so closed and careful with business and so clumsy with his own heart and hers. If she let it continue, he’d be offering her work in Galt next. And a part of her, despite it all, would be sorry to refuse.
‘Keep it for now,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it from you later.’
‘When?’ he asked as she rose.
She answered gently, making the words not an insult, but a moment of shared sorrow. There were, after all, ten thousand things that had been lost in this. And each one of them real, even this.
‘After the war, perhaps. Give it to me then.’
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