‘It still might be wise, locking you away,’ Adrah said. He pretended to be joking, but she could see the debate going on behind his eyes. For a moment, her life spread out before her. The first wife of the Khai Machi, looking into these eyes. She had loved him once. She had to remember that. Idaan smiled, leaned forward, kissed his lips.
‘I’m only sad,’ she said. ‘It will pass. I’ll come and meet you tomorrow. We can plan what needs to be done.’
Outside, the revelry had spread. Garlands arched above the streets. Choirs had assembled and their voices made the city chime like a struck bell. Joy and relief were everywhere, except in her. For most of the afternoon, she moved from feast to feast, celebration to celebration - always careful not to be touched or bumped, afraid she might break like a girl made from spun sugar. As the sun hovered three hands’ widths above the mountains to the west, she found the face she had been longing for.
Cehmai and Stone-Made-Soft were in a glade, sitting with a dozen children of the utkhaiem. The little boys and girls were sitting on the grass, grinding green into their silk robes with knees and elbows, while three slaves performed with puppets and dolls. The players squealed and whistled and sang, the puppets hopped and tumbled, beat one another, and fled. The children laughed. Cehmai himself was stretched out like a child, and two adventurous girls were sitting in Stone-Made-Soft’s wide lap, their arms around each other. The andat seemed mildly amused.
When Cehmai caught sight of her, he came over immediately. She smiled as she had been doing all day, took a greeting pose that her hands had shaped a hundred times since morning. He was the first one, she thought, to see through pose and smile both.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked, stepping close. His eyes were as dark as Adrah’s, but they were soft. They were young. There wasn’t any hatred there yet, or any pain. Or perhaps she only wished that was true. Her smile faltered.
‘Nothing,’ she said, and he took her hand. Here where they might be seen - where the children at least were sure to see them - he took her hand and she let him.
‘What’s happened?’ he repeated, his voice lower and closer. She shook her head.
‘My father is going to die,’ she said, her voice breaking on the words, her lips growing weak. ‘My father’s going to die, and there’s nothing I can do to help it. No way for me to stop it. And the only time crying makes me feel better is when I can do it with you. Isn’t that strange?’
8
C
ehmai rode up the wide track, switchbacking up the side of the mountain. The ore chute ran straight from the mine halfway up the mountain’s face to the carter’s base at its foot. When the path turned toward it, Cehmai considered the broad beams and pillars that held the chute smooth and even down the rough mountainside. When they turned away, he looked south to where the towers of Machi stood like reeds in the noonday sun. His head ached.
‘We do appreciate your coming, Cehmai-cha,’ the mine’s engineer said again. ‘With the new Khai come home, we thought everyone would put business off for a few days.’
Cehmai didn’t bother taking a pose accepting the thanks as he had the first few times. Repetition had made it clear that the gratitude was less than wholly sincere. He only nodded and angled his horse around the next bend, swinging around to a view of the ore chute.
There were six of them; Cehmai and Stone-Made-Soft, the mine’s engineer, the overseer with the diagrams and contracts in a leather satchel on his hip, and two servants to carry the water and food. Normally there would have been twice as many people. Cehmai wondered how many miners would be in the tunnels, then found he didn’t particularly care, and returned to contemplating the ore chute and his headache.
They had left before dawn, trekking to the Raadani mines. It had been arranged weeks before, and business and money carried a momentum that even stone didn’t. A landslide might overrun a city, but it only went down. Something had to have tremendous power to propel something as tired and heavy as he felt
up
the mountainside. Something in the back of his mind twitched at the thought - attention shifting of its own accord like an extra limb moving without his willing it.
‘Stop,’ Cehmai snapped.
The overseer and engineer hesitated for a moment before Cehmai understood their confusion.
‘Not you,’ he said and gestured to Stone-Made-Soft. ‘Him. He was judging what it would take to start a landslide.’
‘Only as an exercise,’ the andat said, its low voice sounding both hurt and insincere. ‘I wasn’t going to do it.’
The engineer looked up the slope with an expression that suggested Cehmai might not hear any more false thanks. Cehmai felt a spark of vindictive pleasure at the man’s unease and saw Stone-Made-Soft’s lips thin so slightly that no other man alive would have recognized the smile.
Idaan had spent the first night of the festival with him, weeping and laughing, taking comfort and coupling until they had both fallen asleep in the middle of their pillow talk. The night candle had hardly burned down a full quarter mark when the servant had come, tapping on his door to wake him. He’d risen for the trek to the mines, and Idaan - alone in his bed - had turned, wrapping his bedclothes about her naked body, and watched him as if afraid he would tell her to leave. By the time he had found fresh robes, her eyelids had closed again and her breath was deep and slow. He’d paused for a moment, considering her sleeping face. With the paint worn off and the calm of sleep, she looked younger. Her lips, barely parted, looked too soft to bruise his own, and her skin glowed like honey in sunlight.
But instead of slipping back into bed and sending out a servant for new apples, old cheese, and sugared almonds, he’d strapped on his boots and gone out to meet his obligations. His horse plodded along, flies buzzed about his face, and the path turned away from the ore chute and looked back toward the city.
There would be celebrations from now until Idaan’s wedding to Adrah Vaunyogi. Between those two joys - the finished succession and the marriage of the high families - there would also be the preparations for the Khai Machi’s final ceremony. And, despite everything Maati-kvo had done, likely the execution of Otah Machi in there as well. With as many rituals and ceremonies as the city faced, they’d be lucky to get any real work done before winter.
The yipping of the mine dogs brought him back to himself, and he realized he’d been half-dozing for the last few switchbacks. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. He would have to pull himself together when they began working in earnest. It would help, he told himself, to have some particular problem to set his mind to instead of the tedium of travel. Thankfully, Stone-Made-Soft wasn’t resisting him today. The effort it would have taken to force the unwilling andat to do as it was told could have pushed the day from merely unpleasant to awful.
They reached the mouth of the mine and were greeted by several workers and minor functionaries. Cehmai dismounted and walked unsteadily to the wide table that had been set up for their consultations. His legs and back and head ached. When the drawings and notes were laid out before him, it took effort to turn his attention to them. His mind wandered off to Idaan or his own discomfort or the mental windstorm that was the andat.
‘We would like to join these two passages,’ the overseer was saying, his fingers tracing lines on the maps. Cehmai had seen hundreds of sets of plans like this, and his mind picked up the markings and translated them into holes dug through the living rock of the mountain only slightly less easily than usual. ‘The vein seems richest here and then here. Our concern is—’
‘My concern,’ the engineer broke in, ‘is not bringing half the mountain down on us while we do it.’
The structure of tunnels that honeycombed the mountain wasn’t the most complicated Cehmai had ever seen, but neither was it simple. The mines around Machi were capable of a complexity difficult in the rest of the world, mostly because he himself was not in the rest of the world, and mines in the Westlands and Galt weren’t interested in paying the Khai Machi for his services. The engineer made his case - where the stone would support the tunnels and where it would not. The overseer made his counter-case - pointing out where the ores seemed richest. The decision was left to him.
The servants gave them bowls of honeyed beef and sausages that tasted of smoke and black pepper; a tart, sweet paste made from last year’s berries; and salted flatbread. Cehmai ate and drank and looked at the maps and drawings. He kept remembering the curve of Idaan’s mouth, the feeling of her hips against his own. He remembered her tears, her reticence. He would have sacrificed a good deal to better understand her sorrow.
It was more, he thought, than the struggle to face her father’s mortality. Perhaps he should talk to Maati about it. He was older and had greater experience with women. Cehmai shook his head and forced himself to concentrate. It was half a hand before he saw a path through the stone that would yield a fair return and not collapse the works. Stone-Made-Soft neither approved nor dissented. It never did.
The overseer took a pose of gratitude and approval, then folded up the maps. The engineer sucked his teeth, craning his neck as the diagrams and notes vanished into the overseer’s satchel, as if hoping to see one last objection, but then he too took an approving pose. They lit the lanterns and turned to the wide, black wound in the mountain’s side.
The tunnels were cool, and darker than night. The smell of rock dust made the air thick. As he’d guessed, there were few men working, and the sounds of their songs and the barking of their dogs only made the darkness seem more isolating. They talked very little as they wound their way through the maze. Usually Cehmai made a practice of keeping a mental map, tracking their progress through the dark passages. After the second unexpected intersection, he gave up and was content to let the overseer lead them.
Unlike the mines on the plain, even the deepest tunnels here were dry. When they reached the point Cehmai had chosen, they took out the maps one last time, consulting them in the narrow section of the passageway that the lanterns lit. Above them, the mountain felt bigger than the sky.
‘Don’t make it too soft,’ the engineer said.
‘It doesn’t bear any load,’ the overseer said. ‘Gods! Who’s been telling you ghost stories? You’re nervous as a puppy first time down the hole.’
Cehmai ignored them, looked up, considering the stone above him as if he could see through it. He wanted a path wide as two men walking with their arms outstretched. And it would need to go forward from here and then tilt to the left and then up. Cehmai pictured the distances as if he would walk them. It was about as far from where he was now to the turning point as from the rose pavilion to the library. And then, the shorter leg would be no longer than the walk from the library to Maati’s apartments. He turned his mind to it, pressed the whirlwind, applied it to the stone before him, slowly, carefully loosening the stone in the path he had imagined. Stone-Made-Soft resisted - not in the body that scowled now looking at the tunnel’s blank side, but in their shared mind. The andat shifted and writhed and pushed, though not so badly as it might have. Cehmai reached the turning point, shifted his attention and began the shorter, upward movement.
The storm’s energy turned and leapt ahead, spreading like spilled water, pushing its influence out of the channel Cehmai’s intention had prepared. Cehmai gritted his teeth with the effort of pulling it back in before the structure above them weakened and failed. The andat pressed again, trying to pull the mountain down on top of them. Cehmai felt a rivulet of sweat run down past his ear. The overseer and the engineer were speaking someplace a long way off, but he couldn’t be bothered by them. They were idiots to distract him. He paused and gathered the storm, concentrated on the ideas and grammars that had tied the andat to him in the first place, that had held it for generations. And when it had been brought to heel, he took it the rest of the way through his pathway and then slowly, carefully, brought his mind, and its, back to where they stood.
‘Cehmai-cha?’ the overseer asked again. The engineer was eyeing the walls as if they might start speaking with him.
‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I only have a headache.’
Stone-Made-Soft smiled placidly. Neither of them would tell the men how near they had all just come to dying: Cehmai, because he wished to keep it from them, Stone-Made-Soft, because it would never occur to it to care.
The overseer took a hand pick from his satchel and struck the wall. The metal head chimed and a white mark appeared on the stone. Cehmai waved his hand.
‘To your left,’ he said. ‘There.’
The overseer struck again, and the pick sank deep into the stone with a sound like a footstep on gravel.
‘Excellent,’ the overseer said. ‘Perfect.’
Even the engineer seemed grudgingly pleased. Cehmai only wanted to get out, into the light and back to the city and his own bed. Even if they left now, they wouldn’t reach Machi before nightfall. Probably not before the night candle hit its half mark.
On the way back up, the engineer started telling jokes. Cehmai allowed himself to smile. There was no call to make things unpleasant even if the pain in his head and spine was echoing his heartbeats.