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,