Amat watched until the girl vanished around a corner, passing beyond recall, then she went down and barred her door.
2
> + < The boundary arch on the low road east of Saraykeht was a short walk from the Wilsin compound. They reached it in about the time it took the crescent moon to shift the width of two of Marchat’s thick fingers. Buildings and roads continued, splaying out into the high grasses and thick trees, but once they passed through the pale stone arch wide enough for three carts to pass through together and high as a tree, they had left the city.
“In Galt, there’d have been a wall,” Marchat said.
The young man, Itani, took a pose of query.
“Around the city,” Marchat said. “To protect it in time of war. We didn’t have andat to aim at each other like your ancestors did. In Kirinton, where I was born, anytime you were bad, the Lord Watchman set you to repairing the wall.”
“Can’t have been pleasant,” Itani agreed.
“What do they do in Saraykeht when a boy’s caught stealing a pie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Never misbehaved as a child?”
Itani grinned. He had a strong smile.
“Rarely caught,” Itani said. Marchat laughed.
They made an odd pair, he thought. Him, an old Galt with a walking staff as much to lean on as to swipe at dogs if the occasion arose, and this broad-backed, stone-armed young man in the rough canvas of a laborer. Not so odd, he hoped, as to attract attention.
“Noyga’s your family name? Noyga. Yes. You work on Muhatia’s crew, don’t you?”
“He’s a good man, Muhatia,” Itani said.
“I hear he’s a prick.”
“That too,” Itani agreed, in the same cheerful tone of voice. “A lot of the men don’t like working with him. He’s got a sharp tongue, and he hates running behind schedule.”
“You don’t mind him, though?”
Itani shrugged. It was another point in his favor. The boy disliked his overseer, that was clear, and yet here he was, alone with the head of the house and not willing to tell tales against him. It spoke well of him, and that was good for more than one reason. That he could trust Itani’s discretion made his night one degree less awful.
“What else was different in Kirinton?” Itani asked, and as they walked, Marchat told him. Tales of the Galt of his childhood. The war with Eymond, the blackberry harvests, the midwinter bonfires when people brought their sins to be burned. The boy listened carefully, appreciatively. Granted, he was likely just currying favor, but he did it well. It wasn’t far before Marchat felt the twinges of memories half-forgotten. He’d belonged somewhere once, before his uncle had sent him here.
The road was very little traveled, especially in the dead of night. The darkness made the uneven cobbles and then rutted dirt treacherous; the flies and night wasps were out in swarms, freed from torpor by the relative cool of the evening. Cicadas sang in the trees. The air smelled of moonrose and rain. No one in the few houses they passed that had candles and lanterns still burning seemed to show much curiosity, and it wasn’t long before they were out, away from the last traces of Saraykeht. Tall grasses leaned close against the road, and twice groups of men passed them without comment or glance. Once something large shifted in the grass, but nothing emerged from it.
As they came nearer the low town, Marchat could feel his companion moving more slowly, hesitating. He couldn’t say if the laborer was picking up on his own growing dread, or if there was some other issue. The first glimmering light of the low town was showing in the darkness when the man spoke.
“Marchat-cha, I was wondering . . .”
Marchat tried to take a pose of polite encouragement, but the walking stick complicated things. Instead he said, “Yes?”
“I’m coming near to the end of my indenture,” Itani said.
“Really? How old are you?”
“Twenty summers, but I signed on young.”
“You must have. You’d have been, what? Fifteen?”
“There’s a girl,” the young man said, having trouble with the words. Embarrassed. “She’s . . . well, she’s not a laborer. I think it’s hard for her that I am. I’m not a scholar or a translator, but I have numbers and letters. I was wondering if you might know of any opportunities.”
In the darkness, Marchat could see the boy’s hands twisted into a pose of respect. So that was it.
“If you move up in the world, you think she’ll like you better.”
“It would make things easier for her,” Itani said.
“And not for you?”
Again, the grin and this time a shrug with it.
“I lift things and put them back down,” Itani said. “It’s tiring sometimes, but it’s not difficult.”
“I don’t know of anything just at hand. I’ll see what I can find though.”
“Thank you, Wilsin-cha.”
They walked along another few paces. The light before them became a solid glow. A dog barked, but not so nearby as to be worrisome, and no other barks or howls answered it.
“She told you to ask me, didn’t she?” Marchat asked.
“Yes,” Itani agreed, the tension that had been in his voice gone.
“Are you in love with her?”
“Yes,” the boy said, “I want her to be happy.”
Those are two different answers, Marchat thought, but didn’t say. He’d been that age once, and he remembered it well enough to know there was no point in pressing. They were in the low town proper now, anyway.
The streets here were muddy and smelled more of shit than moon-rose. The buildings with their rotting thatch roofs and rough stone walls stood off at angles from the road. Two streets in, and so almost halfway though the town, a long, low house stood at the opening to a rough square. A lantern hung from a hook beside its door. Marchat motioned to Itani.
“Wait for me here,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Itani nodded his understanding. There was no hesitation or objection in his stance so far as Marchat could tell. It was more than he would have expected of himself if someone had told him to stand in this pesthole street in the black of night for some unknown stretch of time. Gods go with you, you poor bastard, Marchat thought. And with me, too, for that.
Inside, the house was dim. The ceiling was low, and though the walls were wide apart, the house had the feel of being too close. Like a cave. Part of that was the smell of mold and stale water, part the dim doorways and black arches that led to the inner rooms. A squat table ran the length of one wall, and two men stood against it. The larger, a thick-necked tough with a long knife hanging from his belt, eyed Marchat. The other, moon-faced and pleasant-looking, nodded welcome.
“Oshai,” Marchat said by way of greeting.
“Welcome to our humble quarters,” the moon-faced man said and smiled. Marchat disliked that smile, polite though it was. It was too much like the smile of someone helping you onto a sinking boat.
“Is it here?” Marchat asked.
Oshai nodded to a door set deeper in the gloom. A glimmer of candlelight showed its outline. Bad craftsmanship.
“He’s been waiting,” Oshai said.
Marchat grunted before walking deeper into the darkness. The wood of the door was water-rotted, the leather hinge loose and ungainly. Marchat had to lift the door by its handle to close it behind him. The meeting room was smaller, better lit, quiet. A night candle stood in a wall niche, burned past half. Several other candles burned on a small table. And sitting at the table itself was the andat. Seedless. Marchat’s skin crawled as the thing considered him, black eyes shifting silently. The andat were unnerving under the best circumstances.
Marchat took a pose of greeting that the andat returned, then Seedless pushed out a stool and motioned to it. Marchat sat.
“You were able to come here without the poet’s knowing?” Marchat asked.
“The great poet of Saraykeht is spending his evening drunk. As us
ual,” Seedless replied, his voice conversational and smooth as cream. “He’s beyond caring where I am or what I’m doing.”
“And I hear the woman arrived?”
“Yes. Oshai says she’s everything we need. Sweet-tempered, tractable, and profoundly credulous. She’s unlikely to spook and run away like the last one. And she’s from Nippu.”
“Nippu?” Marchat said and curled his lip. “That’s a backwater little island. Don’t you think it might raise suspicion? I mean why would some farm bitch from a half-savage island come to Saraykeht just to drop her baby?”
“You’ll think of something plausible,” Seedless said, waving the objection away. “The point is she only speaks east island tongues. If she were from someplace with a real port, she might know a civilized language. Instead, you’ll be using Oshai as her translator. It should be easy.”
“My overseer may know the language.”
“And you can’t delegate this to someone who doesn’t?” Seedless said. “Or are all of your employees brilliant translators?”
“Any idea who the father is?” Marchat said, shifting the subject.
Seedless made a gesture that wasn’t a formal pose, but indicated the whole world and everything in it with a sweep of his delicate fingers.
“Who knows? Some passing fisherman. A tradesman. Someone who passed though her town and got her legs apart. No one who’ll notice or care much if he does. He isn’t important. And your part of the plan is progressing?”
“We’re prepared. We have the payment ready. Pearls, mostly, and a hundred lengths of silver. It’s the sort of thing an East Islander might pay with,” Marchat said. “And there’s no reason the Khai should look into it until the thing’s been done.”
“That’s to the good, then,” Seedless said. “Arrange the audience with the Khai. If all goes well, we won’t have to speak again, you and I.”
Marchat started to take a pose that expressed hope, but halfway in wondered if it might be taken the wrong way. He saw Seedless notice his hesitation. A thin smile graced the pale lips. Feeling an angry blush coming on, Marchat abandoned the pose.
“It will work, won’t it?” he asked.
“It isn’t the first babe I’ll drop out before its time. This is what I am, Wilsin.”
“No, I don’t mean can you do it. I mean will it really break him? Heshai. He’s taken the worst you could give him for years. Because if this little drama we’re arranging doesn’t work . . . If there’s any chance at all that it should fail and the Khai find out that Galts were conspiring to deprive him of his precious andat, the consequences could be huge.”
Seedless shifted forward on his chair, his gaze fastened on nothing. Marchat had heard once that andat didn’t breathe except to speak. He watched the unmoving ribs for a long moment while the andat was silent. The rumor appeared true. At last, the spirit drew in his breath and spoke.
“Heshai is about to kill a child whose mother loves it. There isn’t anything worse than that. Not for him. Picture it. This island girl? He’s going to watch the light die in her eyes and know that without him, it wouldn’t have happened. You want to know will that break him? Wilsin-cha, it will snap him like a twig.”
They were silent for a moment. The naked hunger on the andat’s face made Marchat squirm on his stool. Then, as if they’d been speaking of nothing more intimate or dangerous than a sugar crop, Seedless leaned back and grinned.
“With the poet broken, you’ll be rid of me, which is what you want,” Seedless said, “and I won’t exist anymore to care one way or the other. So we’ll both have won.”
“You sound like a suicide to me,” Marchat said. “You want your own death.”
“In a sense,” Seedless agreed. “But it doesn’t mean for me what it would for you. We aren’t the same kind of beast, you and I.”
“Agreed.”
“Do you want to see her? She’s asleep in the next room. If you’re quiet . . .”
“No, thank you,” Marchat said, rising. “I’ll arrange things with Oshai once I’ve scheduled the audience with the Khai. He and I can make the arrangements from there. If I could avoid seeing her at all before the day itself, that would be good.”
“If good’s the word,” Seedless said, taking a pose of agreement and farewell.
Outside again, the night seemed cooler. Marchat pounded his walking stick against the ground, as if shaking dried mud off it, but really just to feel the sting in his fingers. His chest ached with something like dread. It was rotten, this business. Rotten and wrong and dangerous. And if he did anything to prevent it . . . what then? The Galtic High Council would have him killed, to start. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t even bow out and let someone else take his part in it.
There was no way through this but through. At least he’d kept Amat out of it.
“Everything went well?” the boy Itani asked.
“Well enough,” Marchat lied as he started off briskly into the darkness.
AMAT KYAAN HAD HOPED TO SET OUT IN THE MORNING, BEFORE THE DAY’S heat was too thick. Liat had come to her with Itani’s account of the route early enough, but the details were few and sketchy. Marchat and the boy hadn’t gotten back to the compound until past the quarter candle, and his report to Liat hadn’t been as thorough as it might have been had he known what use he had been put to. It had been enough to find which of the low towns they had visited and what sort of house they’d gone to.
Armed with those facts, it hadn’t been so hard to find a contract that rented such a building, one that had been paid out of Wilsin’s private funds and not those of the house proper. There were letters that spoke vaguely of a girl and a journey to Saraykeht, but the time it took to find that much cost Amat the better part of the morning. As she walked down the low road east of the city, the boundary arch grown small behind her, she felt her annoyance growing. Sweat ran down her spine, and her bad hip ached already.
In the cool just before dawn, it might almost have been a pleasant walk. The high grasses sang with cicadas, the trees were thick with their summer leaves. As it was, Amat felt as damp as if she’d walked out of a bathhouse, drenched in her own sweat. The sun pressed on her shoulders like a hand. And the trip back, she knew, would be worse.
Men and women of the low towns took poses of greeting and deference as they passed her, universally heading into the city. They pushed handcarts of fruits and grains, chickens and ducks to sell to the compounds of the rich or the palaces or the open markets. Some carried loads on their backs. On one particularly rutted stretch of road, she passed an oxcart where it had slid into the roadside mud. One wheel was badly bent. The carter, a young man with tears in his eyes, was shouting and beating the ox who seemed barely to notice. Amat’s practiced eye valued the wheel at three of four times the contents of the cart. Whoever the boy carter answered to—father, uncle, or farmer rich enough to own indentured labor—they wouldn’t be pleased to hear of this. Amat stepped around, careful how she placed her cane, and moved on.
Low towns existed at the edges of all the cities of the Khaiem like swarms of flies. Outside the boundaries of the city, no particular law bound these men and women; the utkhaiem didn’t enforce peace or punish crimes. And still, a rough order was the rule. Disagreements were handled between the people or taken to a low judge who passed an opinion, which was followed more often than not. The traditions of generations were as complex and effective as the laws of the Empire. Amat felt no qualms about walking along the broken cobbles of the low road by herself, so long as it was in daylight and there was enough traffic to keep the dogs away.
No qualms except for what she might find at the end.
The low town itself was worse than she’d expected. Itani hadn’t mentioned the smell of shit or the thick, sticky mud of the roads. Dogs and pigs and chickens all shared the path with her. A girl perhaps two years old stood naked in a doorway as she passed, her eyes no more domesticated than the pigs’. Amat found herself struggling to imagine Marchat Wilsin
, head of House Wilsin in Saraykeht, trudging through this squalor in the dead of night. But there was the house Itani had described to Liat, and then Liat to her. Amat stood in the ruined square and steeled herself. To be turned back now would be humiliating.
So, she told herself, she wouldn’t be turned back. Simple as that.
“Hai!” Amat called, rapping the doorframe with her cane. Across the square, a dog barked, as if the hail had been intended for him. Something stirred in the gloom of the house. Amat stood back, cultivating impatience. She was the senior overseer of the house. She mustn’t go into this unsure of herself, and anger was a better mask than courtesy. She crossed her arms and waited.
A man emerged, younger then she was, but still gray about the temples. His rough clothes inspired no confidence, and the knife at his belt shone. For the first time, Amat wondered if she had come unprepared. Perhaps if she’d made Itani accompany her . . . She raised her chin, considering the man as if he were a servant.
The silence between them stretched.
“What?” the man demanded at last.
“I’m here to see the woman,” Amat Kyaan said. “Wilsin-cha wants an inventory of her health.”
The man frowned, and his gaze passed over her head, nervously surveying the street.
“You got the wrong place, grandmother. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m Amat Kyaan, senior overseer for House Wilsin. And if you don’t want to continue our conversation here in the open, you should invite me in.”
He hesitated, hand twitching toward his knife and then away. He was caught, she could see. To let her in was an admission that some traffic was taking place. But turning her away risked the anger of his employer if Amat was who she said she was, and on the errand she claimed. Amat took a pose of query that implied the offer of assistance—not a pose she would wish to see from a superior.
A Shadow in Summer (The Long Price Quartet Book 1) Page 6