even when I'd made it clear that you were not particularly welcome."
"I apologize, most high, if I've given offense."
"Not at all," Otah said, smiling. "Since you've come, you can do me the
favor of explaining again to the High Council how precarious their
position is with me. The Dai-kvo has been alerted to all I've learned,
and he shares my opinion and my policy."
"But I-"
"I know the role your people played in the succession. And more than
that, I know what happened in Saraykeht. Your nation survives now on my
sufferance. If word reaches me of one more intervention in the matters
of the cities of the Khaiem or the poets or the andat, I will wipe your
people from the memory of the world."
The emissary opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes darting
about as if there was a word written somewhere on the walls that would
open the floodgates of his diplomacy. Otah let the silence press at him.
"I don't understand, most high," he managed at last.
"Then go home," Otah said, "and repeat what I've told you to your
overseer and then to his, and keep doing so until you find someone who
does. If you reach the High Council, you'll have gone far enough."
"I'm sure if you'll just tell me what's happened to upset you, most
high, there must be something I can do to make it right."
Otah pressed his steepled fingers to his lips. For a moment, he
remembered Saraykeht-the feel of the poet's death struggles tinder his
own hand. He remembered the fires that had consumed the compound of the
Vaunyogi and the screams and cries of his sister as her husband and his
father met their ends.
"You can't make this right," he said, letting his weariness show in his
voice. "I wish that you could."
"But the contracts ... I can't go back without some agreement made, most
high. If you want me to take your message back, you have to leave me
enough credibility that anyone will hear it."
"I can't help you," Otah said. "Take the letter I've given you and go
home. Now."
As he turned and left the room, the letter in his hand sewn shut and
sealed, the Galt moved like a man newly awakened. At Otah's gesture, the
servants followed the emissary and pulled the great bronze doors closed
behind them, leaving him alone in the audience chamber. The pale silk
banners shifted in the slight breath of air. The charcoal in the iron
braziers glowed, orange within white. He pressed his hands to his eyes.
He was tired, terribly tired. And there was so much more to be done.
He heard the scrape of the servant's door behind him, heard the soft,
careful footsteps and the faintest jingling of mail. He rose and turned,
his robes shifting with a sound like sand on stone. Sinja took a pose of
greeting.
"You sent for me, most high?"
"I've just sent the Galts packing again," Otah said.
"I heard the last of it. Do you think they'll keep sending men to bow
and scrape at your feet? I was thinking how gratifying it must be, being
able to bully a whole nation of people you've never met."
"Actually, it isn't. I imagine news of it will have spread through the
city by nightfall. More stories of the Mad Khai."
"You aren't called that. Upstart's still the most common. After the
wedding, there was a week or so of calling you the shopkeeper's wife,
but I think it was too long. An insult can only sustain a certain number
of syllables."
"Thank you," Otah said. "I feel much better now."
"You are going to have to start caring what they think, you know. These
are people you're going to be living with for the rest of your life.
Starting off by proving how disrespectful and independent you can be is
only going to make things harder. And the Galts carry quite a few
contracts," Sinja said. "Are you sure you want me away just now? It's
traditional to have a guard close at hand when you're cultivating new
enemies.
"Yes, I want you to go. If the utkhaiem are talking about the Galts,
they may talk less about Idaan."
"You know they won't forget her. It doesn't matter what other issues you
wave at them, they'll come back to her."
"I know. But it's the best I can do for now. Are you ready?"
"I have everything I need prepared. We can do it now if you'd like."
"I would."
THREE ROOMS HAI) BEEN HER WORLD. A NARROW BED, A CHEAP IRON BRAzier, a
night pot taken away every second day. The armsmen brought her bits of
candle-stubs left over from around the palaces. Once, someone had
slipped a book in with her meal-a cheap translation of Westland court
poems. Still, she'd read them all and even started com posing some of
her own. It galled her to be grateful for such small kindnesses,
especially when she knew they would not have been extended to her had
she been a man.
The only breaks came when she was taken out to walk down empty tunnels,
deep under the palaces. Armsmen paced behind her and before her, as if
she were dangerous. And her mind slowly folded in on itself, the days
passing into weeks, the ankle she'd cracked in her fall mending. Some
days she felt lost in dreams, struggling to wake only to wish herself
back asleep when her mind came clear. She sang to herself. She spoke to
Adrah as if he were still there, still alive. As if he still loved her.
She raged at Cehmai or bedded him or begged his forgiveness. All on her
narrow bed, by the light of candle stubs.
She woke to the sound of the bolt sliding open. She didn't think it was
time to be fed or walked, but time had become a strange thing lately.
When the door opened and the man in the black and silver robes of the
Khai stepped in she told herself she was dreaming, half fearing he had
come to kill her at last, and half hoping for it.
The Khai Machi looked around the cell. His smile seemed forced.
"You might not think it, but I've lived in worse," he said.
"Is that supposed to comfort me?"
"No," he said.
A second man entered the room, a thick bundle under his arm. A soldier,
by his stance and by the mail that he wore under his robes. Idaan sat
up, gathering herself, preparing for whatever came and desperate that
the men not turn and close the door again behind them. The Khai Machi
hitched up his robes and squatted, his hack against the stone wall as if
he was a laborer at rest between tasks. His long face was very much like
Biitrah's, she saw. It was in the corners of his eyes and the shape of
his jaw.
"Sister," he said.
"Most high," she replied.
He shook his head. The soldier shifted. She had the feeling that the two
movements were the continuation of some conversation they had had, a
subtle commentary to which she was not privileged.
"This is Sinja-cha," the Khai said. "You'll do as he says. If you fight
hire, he'll kill you. If you try to leave him before he gives you
permission, he'll kill you."
"Are you whoring me to your pet thug then?" she asked, fighting to keep
the quaver from her voice.
"What? No. Gods," Otah said.
"No, I'm sending you into exile. He's to
take you as far as Cetani. He'll leave you there with a good robe and a
few lengths of silver. You can write. You have numbers. You'll be able
to find some work, I expect."
"I am a daughter of the Khaiem," she said bitterly. "I'm not permitted
to work."
"So lie," Otah said. "Pick a new name. Noygu always worked fairly well
for me. You could be Sian Noygu. Your mother and father were merchants
in ... well, call it Udun. You don't want people thinking about Machi if
you can help it. They died in a plague. Or a fire. Or bandits killed
them. It isn't as if you don't know how to lie. Invent something."
Idaan stood, something like hope in her heart. To leave this hole. To
leave this city and this life. To become someone else. She hadn't
understood how weary and exhausted she had become until this moment. She
had thought the cell was her prison.
The soldier looked at her with perfectly empty eyes. She might have been
a cow or a large stone he'd been set to move. Otah levered himself back
to standing.
"You can't mean this," Idaan said, her voice hardly a whisper. "I killed
Danat. I as much as killed our father,"
"I didn't know them," her brother said. "I certainly didn't love them."
"I did."
"All the worse for you, then."
She looked into his eyes for the first time. There was a pain in them
that she couldn't fathom.
"I tried to kill you."
"You won't do it again. I've killed and lived with it. I've been given
mercy I didn't deserve. Sometimes that I didn't want. So you see, we may
not be all that different, sister." He went silent for a moment, then,
"Of course if you come back, or I find you conspiring against me-"
"I wouldn't come back here if they begged me," she said. "°I'his city is
ashes to me."
Her brother smiled and nodded as much to himself as to her.
"Sinja?" he said.
The soldier tossed the bundle to her. It was a leather traveler's cloak
lined with wool and thick silk robes and leggings wrapped around heavy
boots. She was appalled at how heavy they were, at how weak she'd
become. Her brother ducked out of the room, leaving only the two of
them. The soldier nodded to the robes in her arms.
"Best change into those quickly, Idaan-cha," he said. "I've got a sledge
and team waiting, but it's an unpleasant winter out there, and I want to
make the first low town before dark."
"This is madness," she said.
The soldier took a pose of agreement.
"He's making quite a few had decisions," he said. "He's new at this,
though. He'll get better."
Idaan stripped under the soldier's impassive gaze and pulled on the
robes and the leggings, the cloak, the boots. She stepped out of her
cell with the feeling of having shed her skin. She didn't understand how
much those walls had become everything to her until she stepped out the
last door and into the blasting cold and limitless white. For a moment,
it was too much. The world was too huge and too open, and she was too
small to survive even the sight of it. She wasn't conscious of shrinking
back from it until the soldier touched her arm.
"The sledge is this way," he said.
Idaan stumbled, her hoots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the
slick ice on the snow. But she followed.
THE CHAINS WERE FROZEN To THE TOWER, THE LIFTING MECHANISM BRITtle with
cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than
he had been when they'd marched him up the tower before, and the effort
of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren't enough
braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he
passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits,
smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again,
and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.
Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Nlaati. They were to
meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other
things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to
reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low
towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his
daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi
might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all
the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.
He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs
aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then
unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath
him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising
as always from the forges. TO the south, a hundred crows rose from the
branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.
And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he'd come to see:
a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across
the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops,
and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And
then as they vanished into the white.
Daniel Abraham's first published novel, A Shadow" in Summer, is the
first volume of the Long Price Quartet. He has had stories published in
the Vanishing Acts, Bones of the World, and TheDart anthologies, and has
been included in Gardner Dozois's Years Best Science Fiction anthology
as well. His story "Flat Diane" won the International Horror Guild award
for mid-length fiction.
He is currently working on the Long Price Quartet, the third volume of
which, An Autumn War, will he published in 2008. He lives in New Mexico
with his wife and daughter.
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