A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) (28 page)

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