‘Heard them mentioned,’ Otah said.
‘I was at the top of one once. One of the great ones. It was high as a mountain. You could see for hundreds of miles. I looked down, and I’ll swear it, the birds were flying below me and I felt like a few more bricks and I’d have been able to touch clouds.’
The water lapped at the boards of the ship below them, the seagulls cried, but Otah didn’t hear them. For a moment, he was atop a tower. To his left, dawn was breaking, rose and gold and pale blue of robin’s egg. To his right, the land was still dark. And before him, snow covered mountains - dark stone showing the bones of the land. He smelled something - a perfume or a musk that made him think of women. He couldn’t say if the vision was dream or memory or something of both, but a powerful sorrow flowed through him that lingered after the images had gone.
‘It sounds beautiful,’ he said.
‘I climbed back down as fast as I could,’ the man said, and shuddered despite the heat of the day. ‘That high up, even stone sways.’
‘I’d like to go there one day.’
‘You’d fit in. You’ve a northern face.’
‘So they tell me,’ Otah said, smiling again though he felt somber. ‘I’m not sure, though. I’ve spent quite a few years in the south. I may belong there now.’
‘It’s hard,’ his companion said, taking a pose of agreement. ‘I think it’s why I keep travelling even though I’m not really suited to it. Whenever I’m in one place, I remember another. So I’ll be in Udun and thinking about a black crab stew they serve in Chaburi-Tan. Or in Saraykeht, thinking of the way the rain falls in Utani. If I could take them all - all the best parts of all the cities - and bring them to a single place, I think that would be paradise. But I can’t, so I’m doomed. When the time comes I’m too old to do this, I’ll have to settle for one place and I truly believe the thought of never seeing the others again will break me.’
For a moment, they were silent. Then the courier’s distant expression changed, and he turned to look at Otah carefully.
‘You’re an interesting one, Itani Noyga. I thought I’d come make light with a young man on what looks like his first journey, and I find myself thinking about my final one. Do you always carry that cloud with you?’
Otah grinned and took a pose of light apology, but hands and smile both wilted under the cool gaze. The canvas chuffed and a man in the back of the low, barge-built ship shouted.
‘Yes,’ he surprised himself by saying. ‘But very few people seem to notice it.’
‘So the island girl’s left,’ Amat said. ‘What does it matter? You were about to send her away.’
Marchat Wilsin fidgeted, sending little waves across the bath to rebound against the tiles. Amat sipped her tea and feigned disinterest.
‘We were sending her
home.
It was arranged. Why would she go?’ he asked, as much to the water or himself as to her. Amat put her bowl of tea down in the floating tray and took a pose of query that was by its context a sarcasm.
‘Let me see, Wilsin-cha. A young girl who has been deceived, used, humiliated. A girl who believed the stories she’d been told about perfect love and a powerful lover and was taken instead to a slaughterhouse for her own blood. Now why wouldn’t she want to go back to the people she’d left? I’m sure they wouldn’t think her a credulous idiot. No more than the Khai and the utkhaiem do now. There are jokes about her, you know. At the seafront. Laborers and teahouse servants make them up to tell each other. Did you want to hear some?’
‘No,’ Marchat said and slapped the water. ‘No, I don’t. I don’t want it to happen, and if it’s going to, I don’t want to know about it.’
‘Shame, Marchat. She left from shame.’
‘I don’t see why she should feel ashamed,’ he said, a defensiveness in his voice. A defense of himself and, heartbreakingly, of Maj. ‘She didn’t do anything wrong.’
Amat released her pose and let her hands slip back under the water. Wilsin-cha’s lips worked silently, as if he were in conversation with himself and halfway moved to speaking. Amat waited.
The night before, she had taken Maj out to one of the low towns - a fishing village west of the city. A safe house outside the city would do, Amat thought, until a more suitable arrangement could be made. A week, she hoped, but perhaps more. In the last days, her plans had begun to fall away from House Wilsin’s. It wouldn’t be long before she and her employer, her old friend, parted company. It was worse, sitting there with him in the bathhouse he’d used for years, because he didn’t know. House Wilsin had taken her from a life on a knife-edge, and he - Marchat-cha - had chosen her from among the clerks and functionaries. He had promoted her through the ranks. And now they sat as they had for years, but it was nearing the last time.
Despite herself, Amat leaned forward and put her palm on his shoulder. He looked up and forced a smile.
‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘At least it’s over.’
It was something he’d said often in the last days, repeating it as if saying the words again would make them true. So perhaps some part of him did know that it was far from finished. He took her hand and, to her surprise, kissed it. His whiskers scratched her water-softened skin. Gently and despite him, she pulled away. He was blushing. Gods, the poor man was blushing. It made her want to weep, want to leave, want to shout at him until her echoing fury cracked the tiles.
After all you’ve done, how dare you make me feel sympathy for you?
‘Wilsin-cha,’ she said. ‘The shipping schedule.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. The schedule.’
Together, they went through the trivial issues of the day. A small fire in one of the weaver’s warehouses meant that they would be three thousand feet of thread short for the ship to Bakta. It was significant enough to warrant holding the ship, but they didn’t dare keep it too long - the season was turning. And then there was the issue of a persistent mildew in one of House Wilsin’s warehouses that had spoiled two bolts of silk, and had to be addressed before they dared to use the space again.
Amat laid out the options, made her suggestions, answered Wilsincha’s questions, and accepted his decisions. In the main part of the bathhouse, a man broke out in song, his voice joined - a little off-key - by two more. The warm breeze coming through the cedar trellis at the windows moved the surface of the water. Painful as it was, Amat felt herself grabbing at the details - the pinkness of Marchat’s pale skin, the thin crack in the side of the lacquer tray, the just-bitter taste of overbrewed tea. Like a squirrel, she thought, gathering nuts for the winter.
‘Amat,’ he said, when they were through and she started to rise. The hardness in his voice caught her, and she lowered herself back into the water. ‘There’s something . . . You and I, we’ve worked together for more years than I like to remember. You’ve always been . . . always been very professional. But I’ve felt that along with that, we’ve been friends. I know that I have held you in the highest regard. Gods, that sounds wrong. Highest regard? Gods. I’m doing this badly.’
He raised his hands from the water, fingertips wrinkled as raisins, and motioned vaguely. His face was tight and flushed. Amat frowned, confused, and then the realization washed over her like nausea. He was about to declare his love.
She put her head down, pressing a palm to her forehead. She couldn’t look up. Laughter that had as much to do with horror as mirth shook her gently. Of all the things she’d faced, of all the evils she’d steeled herself to walk through, this one had taken her blind. Marchat Wilsin thought he loved her. It was why he’d stood up to Oshai to save her. It was why she was alive. It was ridiculous.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have . . . Forget that. I didn’t . . . I sound like a half-wit schoolboy. Here’s the thing, Amat. I didn’t mean to be involved with this. These last days, I’ve been feeling a certain distance from you. And I’m afraid that you and I might have . . . lost something between us. Something that . . .’
It had to stop. She had to stop it.
‘Wilsin-cha,’ she said, and forced herself into a formal pose of respect appropriate to a superior in business. ‘I think perhaps it is too soon. The . . . the wounds are too fresh. Perhaps we might postpone this conversation.’
He took a pose of agreement that seemed to carry a relief almost as deep as her own. She shifted to a pose of leave-taking, which he returned. She didn’t meet his gaze as she left. In the dressing room, she pulled on her robes, washed her face, and leaned against the great granite basin, her hands clenched white on its rim, until her mind had stilled. With a long, deep, slow breath, she composed herself, then took up her cane and walked out into the streets, as if the world were not a broken place, and her path through it was not twisted.
She strode to the compound, her leg and hip hardly bothering her. She delivered the orders she had to give, made the arrangements she had discussed with Wilsin-cha. Liat, thankfully, was elsewhere. Amat’s day was difficult enough without adding the burden of Liat’s guilt and pain. And, of course, there was the decision of whether to take the girl with her when Amat left her old life behind.
When Amat had written the last entry in the house logs, she cleaned the nib on its cloth, laid the paper over the half-used inkblock, and walked south, toward the seafront. And not toward her apartments. She passed by the stalls and the ships, the watersellers and firekeepers and carts that sold strips of pork marinated in ginger and cumin. When she reached the wide mouth of the Nantan, she paused, considering the bronze form of the last emperor gazing out over the sea. His face was calm and, she thought, sorrowful. Shian Sho had watched the Empire fall, watched the devastation of war between high counselors who could wield poets and andat. How sad, she thought, to have had so much and been powerless to save it. For the first time in her life, she felt something more than awe or historical curiosity or familiarity with the image of the man eight generations dead. She walked to the base of the statue, reached out and rested her hand on the sun-hot metal of his foot, almost painful to touch. When she turned away, her sorrow was not less, but it was accompanied by a strange lifting of her heart. A kinship, perhaps, with those who had struggled before her to save the cities they held dear. She walked toward the river, and the worst parts of the city. Her city. Hers.
The teahouse was rough - its shutters needed painting, the plaster of its walls was scored with the work of vandals cheaply repaired - but not decrepit. Its faults spoke of poverty, not abandonment. A man with the deep blue eyes and red hair of the Westlands leaned out of a window, trying not to seem to stare at her. Amat raised an eyebrow and walked through the blue-painted door and into the murk of the main room.
The smell of roast lamb and Westlands beer and cheap tobacco washed over her. The stone floor was smooth and clean, and the few men and women sitting at tables seemed to take little notice of her. The dogs under the tables shifted toward her and then away, equally incurious. Amat looked around with an expression that she hoped would be read as confidence and impatience. A dark-haired girl came to her before long, wiping her hands on her robe as she came. She took a pose of greeting which Amat returned.
‘We have tables here,’ the girl said. ‘Or perhaps you would care for a room in the back? We have a good view of the river, if . . .’
‘I’m here to see a man named Torish Wite,’ Amat said. ‘I was told that he would expect me.’
The girl fell into a pose of understanding without surprise or hesitation, turned, and led Amat back through a short corridor to an open door. Amat took a pose of thanks, and stepped through.
He was a big man, thick hair the color of honey, a rough scar on his chin. He didn’t rise as she came in, only watched her with a distant amusement. Amat took a pose appropriate to opening a negotiation.
‘No,’ the man said in the language of the Westlands. ‘If you want to talk to me, you can use words.’
Amat dropped her hands and sat. Torish Wite leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. The knife he wore at his belt was as long as Amat’s forearm. She felt fear tighten her throat. This man was strong, brutal, prone to violence. That was, after all, why she was here.
‘I understand you have men for hire,’ she said.
‘Truth,’ he agreed.
‘I want a dozen of them.’
‘For what?’
‘I can’t tell you that yet.’
‘Then you can’t have ’em.’
‘I’m prepared to pay—’
‘I don’t care what you’re prepared to pay. They’re my men, and I’m not sending them out unless I know what I’m sending them into. You can’t say, then you can’t have them.’
He looked away, already bored. Amat shook her head, pushing away her emotions. This was the time to think, not feel. The man was a businessman, even if what he traded in was violence. He had nothing to gain by building a reputation of spilling his client’s secrets.
‘I am about to break with my house,’ she said. After holding her intentions in silence for so long, it was strange to hear the words spoken. ‘I am going to be taking up a project that will put me in opposition to my previous employer. If I’m to succeed in it, I will have to secure a large and steady income.’