A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) (6 page)

drama of succession. He would sacrifice quite a lot to keep that from

happening. Going north, doing his work, and returning was what he would

have done, had he been the man he claimed to be. And so perhaps it was

the wiser strategy.

And also he wondered what sort of man his father was. What sort of man

his brother had been. Whether his mother had wept when she sent her boy

away to the school where the excess sons of the high familes became

poets or fell forever from grace.

As he entered the courtyard, his dark reverie was interrupted by

laughter and music from the main hall, and the scent of roast pork and

baked yams mixed with the pine resin. When he stepped in, Old Mani

slapped an earthenware bowl of wine into his hands and steered him to a

bench by the fire. There were a good number of travelers-merchants from

the great cities, farmers from the low towns, travelers each with a

story and a past and a tale to tell, if only they were asked the right

questions in the right ways.

It was later, the warm air busy with conversation, that Otah caught

sight of Kiyan across the wide hall. She had on a working woman's robes,

her hair tied back, but the expression on her face and the angle of her

body spoke of a deep contentment and satisfaction. She knew her place

was here, and she was proud of it.

Otah found himself suddenly stilled by a longing for her unlike the

simple lust that he was accustomed to. He imagined himself feeling the

same satisfaction that he saw in her. The same sense of having a place

in the world. She turned to him as if he had spoken and tilted her

head-not an actual formal pose, but nonetheless a question.

He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life

worth living.

CEHMAI TYAN'S DREAMS, WHENEVER THE TIME. CAME TO RENEW HIS LIFE'S

struggle, took the same form. A normal dream-meaningless, strange, and

trivial-would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight

of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was

walking in a street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked,

when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind

had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted

the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.

Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown

robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked

stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air

fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs

felt softer than grass against Cehmai's bare feet. And the andat was

waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it-black

basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone

disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent's

pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a

windstorm sounded.

"Again?" the poet asked.

Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board,

recalled the binding-the translation that had brought the thing across

from him out of formlessness-and pushed a black stone into the empty

field of the hoard. The game began again.

The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai's work. It had been

done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had

figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding-the fluid lines of play

and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit

seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his

fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru's had once

touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted

his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held

when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across

from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat

held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part

because the binding had also made StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.

The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-Soft

glowered down on its failing line.

"You're going to lose," Cehmai said.

"I know," the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant

rockslide-another evocation of flowing stone. "Being doomed doesn't take

away from the dignity of the effort, though."

"Well said."

The andat shrugged and smiled. "One can afford to be philosophical when

losing means outliving one's opponent. This particular game? You picked

it. But there are others we play that I'm not quite so crippled at."

"I didn't pick this game. I haven't seen twenty summers, and you've seen

more than two hundred. I wasn't even a dirty thought in my grandfather's

head when you started playing this."

The andat's thick hands took a formal position of disagreement.

"We have always been playing the same game, you and I. If you were

someone else at the start, it's your problem."

They never started speaking until the game's end was a forgone

conclusion. That Stone-Made-Soft was willing to speak was as much a sign

that this particular battle was drawing to its end as the silence in

Cehmai's mind. But the last piece had not yet been pushed when a

pounding came on the door.

"I know you're in there! Wake up!"

Cehmai sighed at the familiar voice and rose. The andat brooded over the

board, searching, the poet knew, for some way to win a lost game. He

clapped a hand on the andat's shoulder as he passed by it toward the door.

"I won't have it," the stout, red-checked man said when the opened door

revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a

copper tore of office. Not for the first time, Cehmai thought Baarath

would have been better placed in life as the overseer of a merchant

house or farm than within the utkhaiem. "You poets think that because

you have the andat, you have everything. Well, I've come to tell you it

isn't so."

Cehmai took a pose of welcome and stepped back, allowing the man in.

"I've been expecting you, Baarath. I don't suppose you've brought any

food with you?"

"You have servants for that," Baarath said, striding into the wide room,

taking in the shelves of books and scrolls and maps with his customary

moment of lust. The andat looked up at him with its queer, slow smile,

and then turned back to the board.

"I don't like having strange people wandering though my library,"

Baarath said.

"Well, let's hope our friend from the Dai-kvo won't be strange."

"You are an annoying, contrary man. He's going to come in here and root

through the place. Some of those volumes are very old, you know. They

won't stand mishandling."

"Perhaps you should make copies of them."

"I am making copies. But it's not a fast process, you know. It takes a

great deal of time and patience. You can't just grab some half-trained

scribes off the street corners and set them to copying the great hooks

of the Empire."

"You also can't do the whole job by yourself, Baarath. No matter how

much you want to."

The librarian scowled at him, but there was a playfulness in the man's

eyes. The andat shifted a white marker forward and the noise in Cehmai's

head murmured. It had been a good move.

"You hold an abstract thought in human form and make it play tricks, and

you tell me what's not possible? Please. I've come to offer a trade. If

you'll-"

"Wait," Cehmai said.

"If you'll just-"

"Baarath, you can be quiet or you can leave. I have to finish this."

Stone-Made-Soft sighed as Cehmai took his seat again. The white stone

had opened a line that had until now been closed. It wasn't one he'd

seen the andat play before, and Cehmai scowled. The game was still over,

there was no way for the andat to clear his files and pour the white

markers to their target squares before Cehmai's dark stones had reached

their goal. But it would be harder now than it had been before the

librarian came. Cehmai played through the next five moves in his mind,

his fingertips twitching. Then, decisively, he pushed the black marker

forward that would block the andat's fastest course.

"Nice move," the librarian said.

"What did you want with me? Could you just say it so I can refuse and

get about my day?"

"I was going to say that I will give this little poet-let of the

Dai-kvo's full access if you'll let me include your collection here. It

really makes more sense to have all the books and scrolls cataloged

together."

Cehmai took a pose of thanks.

"No," he said. "Now go away. I have to do this."

"Be reasonable! If I choose-"

"First, you will give Maati Vaupathai full access because the Dai-kvo

and the Khai Machi tell you to. You have nothing to bargain with.

Second, I'm not the one who gave the orders, nor was I consulted on

them. If you want barley, you don't negotiate with a silversmith, do

you? So don't come here asking concessions for something that I'm not

involved with."

A flash of genuine hurt crossed Baarath's face. Stone-Made-Soft touched

a white marker, then pulled back its hand and sank into thought again.

Baarath took a pose of apology, his stance icy with its formality.

"Don't," Cehmai said. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to he a farmer's wife

about the thing, but you've come at a difficult time."

"Of course. This children's game upon which all our fates depend. No,

no. Stay. I'll see myself out."

"We can talk later," Cehmai said to the librarian's hack.

The door closed and left Cchmai and his captive, or his ward, or his

other self, alone together.

"He isn't a very good man," Stone-Made-Soft rumbled.

"No, he's not," Cehmai agreed. "But friendship falls where it falls. And

may the gods keep us from a world where only the people who deserve love

get it."

"Well said," the andat replied, and pushed forward the white stone

Cehmai knew it would.

The game ended quickly after that. Cehmai ate a breakfast of roast lamb

and boiled eggs while Stone-Made-Soft put away the game pieces and then

sat, warming its huge hands by the fire. There was a long day before

them, and after the morning's struggle, Cchmai was dreading it. They

were promised to go to the potter's works before midday. A load of

granite had come from the quarries and required his services before it

could be shaped into the bowls and vases for which Machi was famed.

After midday, he was needed for a meeting with the engineers to consider

the plans for House Pirnat's silver mine. The Khai Machi's engi neers

were concerned, he knew, that using the andat to soften the stone around

a newfound seam of ore would weaken the structure of the mine. House

Pirnat's overseer thought it worth the risk. It would be like sitting in

a child's garden during a mud fight, but it had to be done. Just

thinking of it made him tired.

"You could tell them I'd nearly won," the andat said. "Say you were too

shaken to appear."

"Yes, because my life would be so much better if they were all afraid of

turning into a second Saraykeht."

"I'm only saying that you have options," the andat replied, smiling into

the fire.

The poet's house was set apart from the palaces of the Khai and the

compounds of the utkhaiem. It was a broad, low building with thick stone

walls nestled behind a small and artificial wood of sculpted oaks. The

snows of winter had been reduced to gray-white mounds and frozen pools

in the deep shadows where sunlight would not touch them. Cehmai and the

andat strode west, toward the palaces and the Great "rower, tallest of

all the inhuman buildings of Machi. It was a relief to walk along

streets in sunlight rather than the deep network of tunnels to which the

city resorted when the drifts were too high to allow even the snow doors

to open. Brief days, and cold profound enough to crack stone, were the

hallmarks of the Machi winter. The terrible urge to he out in the

gardens and streets marked her spring. The men and women Cehmai passed

were all dressed in warm robes, but their faces were bare and their

heads uncovered. The pair paused by a firekeeper at his kiln. A singing

slave stood near enough to warm her hands at the fire as she filled the