THE (tlpq-4) (50 page)

that she can take you from me."

"That's idiotic," Maati said.

"No," Idaan said, her voice oddly soft. "It's only childish."

"It fits together if you've raised a daughter," Otah agreed. "It's just

what Eiah would have done when at twelve summers. But if I'm right, it

changes things. I didn't want to say it in front of Ana-cha, but if your

poet's truly gone to ground, I can't believe we'd find her before

spring. She can find new allies if she needs them, or use the andat to

threaten people and get what she wants from them. At best, we might have

her by Candles Night."

"But if she's waiting to be found," Danat said.

"Then it's a matter of guessing where she'd wait," Otah said. "Where

she'd expect Maati to go looking for her."

"I don't know the answer to that," Maati said. "The school, maybe. She

might make her way back there."

"Or at the camp where we lost her," Eiah suggested.

Silence fell over the room for a moment. A decision had just been made,

and Maati could tell that each of them knew it. Utani would wait. They

were hunting Vanjit.

"The camp's nearest," Danat said.

"You can send one of the armsmen north with a letter," Eiah said. "Even

if we fail, it doesn't mean a larger search can't be organized while we

try."

"I'll round up the others," Idaan said, rising from the table. "No point

wasting daylight. Danat-cha, if you could tell our well-armed escorts

that we're leaving?"

Danat swilled down the last of his tea, took a pose that accepted his

aunt's instructions, and rose. In moments, only Otah, Eiah, and Maati

himself were left in the room. Otah took a bite of egg and stared out

into nothing.

"Otah-kvo," Maati said.

The Emperor looked over, his eyebrow raised in something equally query

and challenge. Maati felt his chest tighten as if it were bound by wire.

He sat silent for the rest of the meal.

To Maati's dismay, Ashti Beg, Large Kae, and Small Kae all preferred to

stay behind. There was a logic to it, and the keeper was more than happy

to take Otah's silver in return for a promise to look after them. Still,

Maati found himself wishing that they had come.

The Emperor's boat was, if anything, smaller than the one Maati had

hired. One of the armsmen had been sent north with letters that Otah had

hastily drafted, another to the south. Half of the rest were set to

finding a second boat and following with the supplies, and yet the

little craft felt crowded as they nosed out into the river.

Otah stood at the bow, Danat at his side. Idaan had appointed herself

shepherd of Eiah and Ana, the blinded women. Maati sat alone near the

stern. The sky was pale with haze, the river air rich with the scent of

decaying leaves and autumn. The kiln roared to itself, and the wheel

slapped the water. Far above, two vees of geese headed south, their

brash unlovely voices made beautiful by distance.

His rage was gone, and he missed it. All his fantasies of Otah Machi

apologizing, of Otah Machi debased before him, melted like sugar in

water when faced with the man himself. Maati felt small and alone, and

perhaps that was merely accurate. He had lost everything now except

perhaps Eiah. Irit was gone, and the wisest of them all for fleeing. He

couldn't imagine Large Kae and Small Kae would return to him. Ashti Beg

had left once already. And then Vanjit. All of his little family was

gone now.

His family. Ashti Beg's voice returned to him. Vanjit and

Clarity-ofSight and the need for family.

"Oh," he said, almost before he knew what he meant. And then, "Oh."

Maati made his unsteady way to the bow, touching crates with his

fingertips to keep from stumbling. Otah and Danat turned at the sound of

his approach, but said nothing. Maati reached them short of breath and

oddly elated. His smile seemed to surprise them.

"I know where she's gone," he said.

27

Udun had been a river city. A city of birds.

Otah remembered the first time he'd come to it, a letter of introduction

from a man he had known briefly years before limp in his sleeve. After

years of life in the eastern islands, it was like walking into a dream.

Canals laced the city, great stone quays as busy as the streets. Great

humped bridges with stairs cut in each side rose up to let even the

tallest boats pass. On the shores, tree branches bent under the brightly

colored burden of wings and beaks and a thousand kinds of song. The

street carts sold food and drink as they did everywhere, but with each

paper basket of lemon fish, every bowl of rice and sausage, there would

be a twist of colored cloth.

Open the cloth, and seeds would spill out, and then within a heartbeat

would come the birds. Fortunes were told by which birds reached you.

Finches for love, sparrows for pain, and so on, and so on. Wealth,

birth, death, love, sex, and mystery all spelled out in feathers and

hunger for those wise enough to see or credulous enough to believe.

The palaces of the Khai Udun had spanned the wide river itself, barges

disappearing into the seemingly endless black tunnel and then emerging

again into the light. Beggars sang from rafts, their boxes floating at

the side. The firekeepers' kilns had all been enameled the green of the

river water and a deep red Otah had never seen elsewhere. And at a

wayhouse with a little garden, there had been a keeper with a foxsharp

face and threads of white in her black hair.

He had entered the gentleman's trade there, become a courier and

traveled through the world, bringing his messages back to House Siyanti

and sleeping at Kiyan's wayhouse. He knew all the cities and many of the

low towns as they had been back then, but Udun had been something precious.

And then the Galts had come. There were tales afterward that the river

downstream from the ruins stank of corpses for a year. Thousands of men

and women and children had died in the bloodiest slaughter of the war.

Rich and poor, utkhaiem and laborer, none had been spared. What

survivors there were had abandoned their city's grave, leaving it to the

birds. Udun had died, and with it-among unnumbered others-the poet

Vanjit's parents and siblings and some part of her soul.

And so, Maati argued, it was where she would return now.

"It's plausible," Eiah said. "Vanjit's always thought of herself as a

victim. This would help her to play the role."

"How far would it be from here?" Danat asked.

Otah, his mind already more than half in the past, calculated. They were

six days south of Utani on this steamcart for water. Udun had been a

week's ride or ten days walking south from Utani....

"She could reach it in three days," Otah said, "if she knew where she

was headed. There are more than enough streams and creeks feeding the

river here. Water wouldn't be a problem."

"If we go there now, we might reach it before she does," Idaan said,

looking out over the river.

"The camp's still the better wager," Danat said. "It's where she parted

ways with them. They left their sleeping tents, so there's shelter of a

sort. And it doesn't require walking anywhere."

Maati started to object, but Otah raised his hand.

"It's along the way," Otah said. "We'll stop there and look. If she's

been to the camp, we should be able to tell. If not, we won't have lost

more than half a day."

Maati straightened as if the decision were a personal insult, turned and

walked back to the stern of the boat. Time had not been gentle to the

man. Hard fat had thickened his chest and belly. His skin was gray where

it wasn't flushed. Maati's long, age-paled hair had an unhealthy yellow,

and his movements were labored as if he woke every morning tired. And

his mind ...

Otah turned back to the water, the trees, the soft wind. The white haze

of sky was darkening as the day wore on, the scent of rain on the air.

The others-Idaan, Danat, Eiah, Ana-moved away quietly, as if afraid

their conversation might move him to violence. Otah breathed in and out,

slow and deep, until both his disgust and his pity had faded.

Maati had lost the right to feel anger when his pupil had killed Galt,

and any sentimental connection between Otah and his once-friend had

drowned outside Chaburi-Tan. If Maati thought that stopping at the camp

was a poor decision, he could make his case or he could choke on it. It

was the same to Otah.

In the event, they lost more than half a day. Maati identified the wrong

stretches of river twice, and Eiah had no eyes to correct him. When at

last they found the abandoned campsite, a soft, misting rain had started

to fall and the daylight was beginning to fail them. Maati led the way

into the small clearing, walking slowly. Otah and two of the armsmen

were close behind. Eiah had insisted that she come as well, and Idaan

was helping her, albeit more slowly.

"Well," Otah said, standing in the middle of the ruins. "I think we can

fairly say that she's been here."

The camp was destroyed. The thick canvas sleeping tents lay in shreds

and knots. Stones and ashes from the fire pit had been strewn about, and

two leather bags lay empty in the mud. One of the armsmen crouched on

his heels and pointed to a slick of black mud. A footprint no longer

than Otah's thumb. Idaan's steps squelched as she paced near the ruined

fire pit. Maati sat on a patch of crushed grass, his hem dragging in the

mud, his face a mask of desolation.

"Back to the boat, I think," Otah said. "I can't see staying on here."

"We may still beat her to Udun," Idaan said, prying the gray wax shards

that had been Eiah's binding from the muck. "She spent a fair amount of

time doing this. Tents like those are hard to cut through."

One of the armsmen muttered something about the only thing worse than a

mad poet being a mad poet with a knife, but Otah was already on his way

back to the river.

The boatman and his second had fitted poles into thick iron rings all

along the boat's edge and raised a tarp that kept the deck near to dry.

As darkness fell and the rain grew heavier, the drops overhead sounded

like fingertips tapping on wood. The kiln had more than enough coal. The

wide-swung doors lit the boat red and orange, and the scent of pigeons

roasting on spits made the night seem warmer than it was.

Maati had returned last, and spent the evening at the edge of the light.

Otah saw Eiah approach him once, a few murmured phrases exchanged, and

she turned back to the sound of the group eating and talking in the

stern. If Idaan hadn't risen to lead her back, he would have. The

boatman's second handed her a tin bowl, bird's flesh gray and steaming

and glistening with fat. Otah shifted to sit at her side.

"Father," Eiah said.

"You knew it was me?"

"I'm blind, not dim," Eiah said tartly. She plucked a sliver of meat

from her bowl and popped it into her mouth. She looked tired, worn thin.

He could still see the girl she had been, hiding beneath the time and

age. He felt the urge to stroke her hair the way he had when she was an

infant, to be her father again.

"This is, I assume, when you point out how much better your plan was

than my own," she said.

"I didn't intend to, no," Otah said.

Eiah turned to him, shifting her weight as if she had some angry retort

that had stuck in her throat for want of opposition. When he spoke, he

was quiet enough to keep the conversation as near to between only the

two of them as the close quarters would allow.

"We each did our best," Otah said. "We did what we could."

He put his arm around her. She bit down on her lip and fought the sobs

that shook her body like tiny earthquakes. Her fingers found his own,

and squeezed as hard as a patient under a physician's blade. He made no

complaint.

"How many people have I killed, Papa-kya? How many people have I killed

with this?"

"Hush," Otah said. "It doesn't matter. Nothing we've done matters. Only

what we do next."

"The price is too high," Eiah said. "I'm sorry. Will you tell them that

I'm sorry?"

"If you'd like."

Otah rocked her gently, and she allowed him to do it. The others all

knew what they were saying, if not in specific, then at least the sketch

of it. Otah saw Danat's concern, and Idaan's cool evaluating glance. He