the pace disturbing. She was a woman of the South, and abrupt change
uneased her.
For instance, she thought as she sipped smoky tea in her apartments, she
still imagined herself a businesswoman of Saraykeht. Had anyone asked of
her work, she would have spoken of the combing rooms, the warehouses. I
lad anyone asked of her home, she would have described the seafront of
Saraykeht, the scent of the ocean, the babble of a hundred languages.
She would have pictured the brick-built house she'd taken over when Amat
Kyaan had died, and the little bedroom with its window half-choked with
vines. She hadn't seen that city in over a year, and wouldn't go back
now before the spring at best.
At best.
At worst, Saraykeht itself might be gone. Or she might not live to see
summer again.
The city in which she now passed her days was suffering from change as
well. Small shrines with images of the vanished andat had begun to
appear in the niches between buildings, as if a few flowers and candles
could coax them back. The temples had been filled every day by men and
women who might not have sat before a priest in years. The beggars
singing with boxes at their feet all chose songs about redemption and
the return of things lost.
She sipped her tea. It was no longer hot enough to scald her lips, but
it felt good drinking it. It warmed her throat like wine, only without
the casing in her muscles or the softness in her mind. The morning
before her was full-coordinating the movement of food and fuel into the
tunnels below Machi, the raising of stores into the high towers where
they would wait out the cold of winter. "There wasn't time for dark
thoughts. And yet the darkness came whether she courted it or not.
She looked up at the sound of the door. Nayiit stepped in. The nights
were not so long or so cold as to keep him in his rooms. Liat put down
her howl.
"Good morning, Mother," he said as he sat on a cushion beside the fire.
"You're up early."
"Not particularly," Liat said.
"No?" Nayiit said, and then smiled the disarming, rueful smile that
would always and forever mark him as the son of Otah Machi. "No, I
suppose not. May I?"
Liat gestured her permission, and Nayiit poured himself a howl of the
tea. He looked tired, and it was more than a night spent in teahouses
and the baths. Something had changed while he'd been gone. She had
thought at first that it was only exhaustion. When she'd found him
asleep on Nlaati's floor, he had been half-dead from his time on the
road and visibly thinner. But since then he'd rested and eaten, and
still there was something behind his eyes. An echo of her own bleak
thoughts, perhaps.
"I failed him," Nayiit said. Liat blinked and sat back in her chair.
Nayiit tilted his head. "It's what you were wondering, ne? What's been
eating the boy? Why can't he sleep anymore? I failed the Khai. I had his
good opinion. There was a time that he valued my counsel and listened to
me, even when I had unpleasant things to say. And then I failed him. And
he sent me away."
"You didn't fail-"
"I did. Mother, I love you, and I know that you'd move the stars for me
if you could, but I failed. Your son can fail," Nayiit said. He put down
his bowl with a sharp click, and Liat wondered if perhaps he was still
just a bit tipsy from his night's revelry. Drink sometimes made her
maudlin too. "I'm not a good man, Mother. I'm not. I have left my wife
and my child. I have slept with half the women I've met since we left
home. I lost the Khai's trust-"
"Nayiit-"
"I killed those men."
I Iis face was still as stone, but a tear crept from the corner of his
eye. Liat slid down from her scat to kneel on the floor beside him. She
put her hand on his, but Nayiit didn't move.
"I called the retreat," he said. "I saw them fighting, and the Galts
were everywhere. They were all around us. All I could think was that
they needed to get away. I was calling signals. I knew how to call the
retreat, and I did it. And they died. Every man that fell because we ran
is someone I killed. And he knew it. The Khai. He knew it, and it's why
he sent me hack here."
""l'hat battle was doomed from the start," Liat said. ""I'hey
outnumbered you; they were veterans. Your men were exhausted laborers
and huntsmen. If what happened out there is anyone's fault, it's Otah's."
"You don't understand," he said. His voice wasn't angry, only tired. "I
want to be a good man. And I'm not. For a time, I thought I was. I
thought I coin(! be. I was wrong."
I,iat felt a thickness at the back of her throat. She forced a smile,
half-rose, and kissed him on the top of his head, where the hones hadn't
yet grown closed the first time she'd held him.
""Then do better," she said. "As long as you're alive, the next thing
you do can be a good one, ne? Besides which, of course you're a good
man. Only good men worry about whether they're bad."
Nayiit chuckled. The darkness slid hack to the place it had been. Not
gone, but hidden.
"And what do bad men worry about?" he asked.
Liat shrugged and started to answer him, but the bells began to ring. It
took half a breath for Liat to recall what the deep chiming alarm meant.
She didn't remember going to the window; she couldn't say how Nayiit had
come to he at her side. She squinted against the blue-yellow light of
morning, trying to make out the banners hanging from the towers high above.
"Is it red or yellow?" Liat asked.
"Gods," Naviit said. "Look at that."
His gaze was nearer the ground. Liat looked to the south. The low cloud
of dust seemed to cover half the horizon. Otah's remaining men couldn't
have done that. It wasn't him. The Galts had come to Machi. Liat stepped
back from the window, her hands gripping the folds of her robe just over
her heart.
"We have to get Kiyan-cha," she said. "We have to get Kiyan-cha and the
children. And htaati. We have to get them out before-"
"Red," Nayiit said.
Liat shook her head, uncertain for a moment what he meant. Nayiit
pointed to the high dark tower and spoke over the still-ringing bells.
"The banner's red," he said. "It's not the Galts. It's the Khai."
Only it wasn't. The couriers reached Kiyan just before Liat did, so when
she entered Kiyan-cha's meeting rooms, she found Otah's wife with a
thick letter-seams ripped, seal broken-lying abandoned in her lap and an