Shadow and Betrayal

by Abraham Daniel

  ‘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 usual,’ 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 an ox who seemed barely to notice him. Amat’s practiced eye valued the wheel at three or 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.

  The knife man’s dilemma was solved when another form appeared. The newcomer looked like nothing very much, a round, pale face, hair unkempt as one woken from sleep. The annoyance in his expression seemed to mirror her own, but the knife man’s reaction was of visible relief. This was his overseer, then. Amat turned her attention to him.

  ‘This woman,’ the knife man said. ‘She says she’s Wilsin’s overseer.’ The moon-faced man smiled pleasantly and took a pose of greeting to her even as he spoke to the other man.

  ‘That would be because she is. Welcome, Kyaan-cha. Please come in.’

  Amat strode into the low house, the two men stepping back to let her pass. The round-faced man closed the door, deepening the gloom. As Amat’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, details began to swim out of it. The wide, low main room, too bare to mark the house as a place where people actually lived. The moss growing at the edge where wall met ceiling.

  ‘I’ve come to see the client,’ Amat said. ‘Wilsin-cha wants to be sure she’s well. If she miscarries during the negotiations, we’ll all look fools.’

  ‘The client? Yes. Yes, of course,’ the round-faced man said, and something in his voice told Amat she’d stepped wrong. Still, he took a pose of obeisance and motioned her to the rear of the place. Down a short hallway, a door opened to a wooden porch. The light was thick and green, filtered through a canopy of trees. Insects droned and birds called, chattering to one another. And leaning against a half-rotten railing was a young woman. She was hardly older than Liat, her skin the milky pale of an islander. Golden hair trailed down her back, and her belly bulged over a pair of rough canvas laborer’s pants. Half, perhaps three-quarters of the way through her term. Hearing them, she turned and smiled. Her eyes were blue as the sky, her lips thick. Eastern islands, Amat thought. Uman, or possibly Nippu.

  ‘Forgive me, Kyaan-cha,’ the moon-faced man said. ‘My duties require me elsewhere. Miyama will be here to help you, should you require it.’

  Amat took a pose of thanks appropriate for a superior releasing an underling. The man replied with the correct form, but with a strange half-mocking cant to his wrists. He had thick hands, Amat noted, and strong shoulders. She turned away, waiting until the man’s footsteps faded behind her. He would go, she guessed, to Saraykeht, to Wilsin. She hadn’t managed to avoid suspicion, but by the time Marchat knew she’d discovered this place, it would be too late to shut her out of it. It would have to do.

  ‘My name is Amat Kyaan,’ she said. ‘I’m here to inquire after your health. Marchat is a good man, but perhaps not so wise in women’s matters.’

  The girl cocked her head, like listening to an unfamiliar song. Amat felt her smile fade a degree.

  ‘You do know the Khaiate tongues?’

  The girl giggled and said something. She spoke too quickly to follow precisely, but the words had the liquid feel of an east island language. Amat cleared her throat, and tried again, slowly in Nippu.

  ‘My name is Amat Kyaan,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Maj,’ the girl said, matching Amat’s slow diction and exaggerating as if she were speaking to a child.

  ‘You’ve come a long way to be here. I trust the travel went well?’

  ‘It was hard at first,’ the girl said. ‘But the last three days, I’ve been able to keep food down.’

  The girl’s hand strayed to her belly. Tiny, dark stretchmarks already marbled her skin. She was thin. If she went to term, she’d look like an egg on sticks. But, of course, she wouldn’t go to term. Amat watched the pale fingers as they unconsciously caressed the rise and swell where the baby grew in darkness, and a sense of profound dislocation stole into her. This wasn’t a noblewoman whose virginity wanted plausibility. This wasn’t a child of wealth too fragile for blood teas. This didn’t fit any of the hundred scenarios that had plagued Amat through the night.

  She leaned against the wooden railing, taking some of the weight off her aching hip, put her cane aside, and crossed her hands.

  ‘Marchat has told me so little of you,’ she said, struggling to find the vocabulary she needed. ‘How did you come to Saraykeht?’

  The girl grinned and spun her tale. She spoke too quickly sometimes, and Amat had to make her repeat herself.

  It seemed the father of her get had been a member of the utkhaiem - one of the great families of Saraykeht, near to the Khai himself. He’d been travelling in Nippu in disguise. He’d never revealed his true identity to her when he knew her, but though the affair had been brief, he had lost his heart to her. When he heard she was with child, he’d sent Oshai - the moon-faced man - to bring her here, to him. As soon as the politics of court allowed, he would return to her, marry her.

  As improbability mounted on improbability, Amat nodded, encouraged, drew her out. And with each lie the girl repeated, sure of its truth, nausea grew in Amat. The girl was a fool. Beautiful, lovely, pleasant, and a fool. It was a story from the worst sort of wishing epic, but the girl, Maj, believed it.

  She was being used, though for what, Amat couldn’t imagine. And worse, she loved her child.

  Nothi
ng was said to Maati. His belongings simply vanished from the room in which he had been living, and a servant girl led him down from the palace proper to a house nestled artfully in a stand of trees - the poet’s house. An artificial pond divided it from the grounds. A wooden bridge spanned the water, arching sharply, like a cat’s back. Koi - white and gold and scarlet - flowed and shifted beneath the water’s skin as Maati passed over them.

  Within, the house was as lavish as the palace, but on a more nearly human scale. The stairway that led up to the sleeping quarters was a rich, dark wood and inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, but no more than two people could have walked abreast up its length. The great rooms at the front, with their hinged walls that could open onto the night air or close like a shutter, were cluttered with books and scrolls and diagrams sketched on cheap paper. An ink brick had stained the arm of a great silk-embroidered chair. The place smelled of tallow candles and old laundry.