generation, when Machi had been the most distant corner of the Empire,
the poet sent there had controlled the andat Raising-Water, and the
stories said that the mines had flowed up like fountains under that
power. It wasn't until after the great war that the poet Manat Doru had
first captured Stone-Made-Soft and Machi had come into its own as the
center for the most productive mines in the world and the home of the
metal trades-ironmongers, silversmiths, Westland alchemists,
needlemakers. But Raising-Water had been lost, and no one had yet
discovered how to recapture it. And so, the pumps.
He again turned his mind back on the trouble. The treadmill pumps were
of his own design. Four men working together could raise their own
weight in water sixty feet in the time the moon-always a more reliable
measure than the seasonally fickle northern sun-traveled the width of a
man's finger. But the design wasn't perfect yet. It was clear from his
day's work that the pump, which finally failed the night before, had
been working at less than its peak for weeks. That was why the water
level had been higher than one night's failure could account for. There
were several possible solutions to that.
Biitrah forgot the cold, forgot his weariness, forgot indeed where he
was and was being borne. His mind fell into the problem, and he was lost
in it. The wayhouse, when it appeared as if by magic before them, was a
welcome sight: thick stone walls with one red lacquered door at the
ground level, a wide wooden snow door on the second story, and smoke
rising from all its chimneys. Even from the street, he could smell
seasoned meat and spiced wine. The keeper stood on the front steps with
a pose of welcome so formal it bent the old, moon-faced man nearly
double. Biitrah's bearers lowered his chair. At the last moment, Biitrah
remembered to shove his arms back into their sleeves so that he could
take a pose accepting the wayhouse keeper's welcome.
"I had not expected you, most high," the man said. "We would have
prepared something more appropriate. The best that I have-"
"Will do," Biitrah said. "Certainly the best you have will do."
The keeper took a pose of thanks, standing aside to let them through the
doorway as he did. Biitrah paused at the threshold, taking a formal pose
of thanks. The old man seemed surprised. His round face and slack skin
made Biitrah think of a pale grape just beginning to dry. He could be my
father's age, he thought, and felt in his breast the bloom of a strange,
almost melancholy, fondness for the man.
"I don't think we've met," Biitrah said. "What's your name, neighbor?"
"Oshai," the moon-faced man said. "We haven't met, but everyone knows of
the Khai Machi's kindly eldest son. It is a pleasure to have you in this
house, most high."
The house had an inner garden. Biitrah changed into a set of plain,
thick woolen robes that the wayhouse kept for such occasions and joined
his men there. The keeper himself brought them black-sauced noodles,
river fish cooked with dried figs, and carafe after stone carafe of rice
wine infused with plum. His guard, at first dour, relaxed as the night
went on, singing together and telling stories. For a time, they seemed
to forget who this long-faced man with his graying beard and thinning
hair was and might someday be. Biitrah even sang with them at the end,
intoxicated as much by the heat of the coal fire, the weariness of the
day, and the simple pleasure of the night, as by the wine.
At last he rose up and went to his bed, four of his men following him.
They would sleep on straw outside his door. He would sleep in the best
bed the wayhouse offered. It was the way of things. A night candle
burned at his bedside, the wax scented with honey. The flame was hardly
down to the quarter mark. It was early. When he'd been a boy of twenty,
he'd seen candles like this burn their last before he slept, the light
of dawn blocked by goose-down pillows around his head. Now he couldn't
well imagine staying awake to the half mark. He shuttered the candlebox,
Sleep should have come easily to him as tired, well fed, half drunk as
he was, but it didn't. The bed was wide and soft and comfortable. He
could already hear his men snoring on their straw outside his door. But
his mind would not be still.
They should have killed each other when they were young and didn't
understand what a precious thing life is. That was the mistake. He and
his brothers had forborne instead, and the years had drifted by. Danat
had married, then Kaiin. He, the oldest of them, had met Hiami and
followed his brothers' example last. He had two daughters, grown and now
themselves married. And so here he and his brothers were. None of them
had seen fewer than forty summers. None of them hated the other two.
None of them wanted what would come next. And still, it would come.
Better that the slaughter had happened when they were boys, stupid the
way boys are. Better that their deaths had come before they carried the
weight of so much life behind them. He was too old to become a killer.
Sleep came somewhere in these dark reflections, and he dreamed of things
more pleasant and less coherent. A dove with black-tipped wings flying
through the galleries of the Second Palace; Hiami sewing a child's dress
with red thread and a gold needle too soft to keep its point; the moon
trapped in a well and he himself called to design the pump that would
raise it. When he woke, troubled by some need his sleepsodden mind
couldn't quite place, it was still dark. He needed to drink water or to
pass it, but no, it was neither of these. He reached to unshutter the
candlebox, but his hands were too awkward.
"There now, most high," a voice said. "Bat it around like that, and
you'll have the whole place in flames."
Pale hands righted the box and pulled open the shutters, the candlelight
revealing the moon-faced keeper. He wore a dark robe under a gray woolen
traveler's cloak. His face, which had seemed so congenial before, filled
Biitrah with a sick dread. The smile, he saw, never reached the eyes.
"What's happened?" he demanded, or tried to. The words came out slurred
and awkward. Still, the man Oshai seemed to catch the sense of them.
"I've come to be sure you've died," he said with a pose that offered
this as a service. "Your men drank more than you. Those that are
breathing are beyond recall, but you ... Well, most high, if you see
morning the whole exercise will have been something of a waste."
Biitrah's breath suddenly hard as a runner's, he threw off the blankets,
but when he tried to stand, his knees were limp. He stumbled toward the
assassin, but there was no strength in the charge. Oshai, if that was
his name, put a palm to Biitrah's forehead and pushed gently back.
Biitrah fell to the floor, but he hardly felt it. It was like violence
being done to some other man, far away from where he was.
"It must be hard," Oshai said, squatting beside him, "to live you
r whole
life known only as another man's son. To die having never made a mark of
your own on the world. It seems unfair somehow."
Who, Biitrah tried to say. Which of my brothers would stoop to poison?
"Still, men die all the time," Oshai went on. "One more or less won't
keep the sun from rising. And how are you feeling, most high? Can you
get up? No? That's as well, then. I was half-worried I might have to
pour more of this down you. Undiluted, it tastes less of plums."
The assassin rose and walked to the bed. There was a hitch in his step,
as if his hip ached. He is old as my father, but Biitrah's mind was too
dim to see any humor in the repeated thought. Oshai sat on the bed and
pulled the blankets over his lap.
"No hurry, most high. I can wait quite comfortably here. Die at your
leisure."
Biitrah, trying to gather his strength for one last movement, one last
attack, closed his eyes but then found he lacked the will even to open
them again. The wooden floor beneath him seemed utterly comfortable; his
limbs were heavy and slack. There were worse poisons than this. He could
at least thank his brothers for that.
It was only Hiami he would miss. And the treadmill pumps. It would have
been good to finish his design work on them. He would have liked to have
finished more of his work. His last thought that held any real coherence
was that he wished he'd gotten to live just a little while more. He did
not know it when his killer snuffed the candle.
HIAMI HAD THE SEAT OF HONOR AT THE FUNERAL, ON THE DAIS WITH THE Khai
Machi. The temple was full, bodies pressed together on their cushions as
the priest intoned the rites of the dead and struck his silver chimes.
The high walls and distant wooden ceiling held the heat poorly; braziers
had been set in among the mourners. Hiami wore pale mourning robes and
looked at her hands. It was not her first funeral. She had been present
for her father's death, before her marriage into the highest family of
Machi. She had only been a girl then. And through the years, when a
member of the utkhaiem had passed on, she had sometimes sat and heard
these same words spoken over some other body, listened to the roar of
some other pyre.
This was the first time it had seemed meaningless. Her grief was real
and profound, and this flock of gawkers and gossips had no relation to
it. The Khai Machi's hand touched her own, and she glanced up into his
eyes. His hair, what was left of it, had gone white years before. He
smiled gently and took a pose that expressed his sympathy. He was
graceful as an actor-his poses inhumanly smooth and precise.
Biitrah would have been a terrible Khai Machi, she thought. He would
never have put in enough practice to hold himself that well.
And the tears she had suffered through the last days remembered her. Her
once-father's hand trembled as if uneased by the presence of genuine
feeling. He leaned hack into his black lacquer seat and motioned for a
servant to bring him a bowl of tea. At the front of the temple, the
priest chanted on.
When the last word was sung, the last chime struck, bearers came and
lifted her husband's body. The slow procession began, moving through the
streets to the pealing of hand bells and the wailing of flutes. In the
central square, the pyre was ready-great logs of pine stinking of oil
and within them a bed of hard, hot-burning coal from the mines. Biitrah
was lifted onto it and a shroud of tight metal links placed over him to
hide the sight when his skin peeled from his noble bones. It was her
place now to step forward and begin the conflagration. She moved slowly.
All eyes were on her, and she knew what they were thinking. Poor woman,
to have been left alone. Shallow sympathies that would have been
extended as readily to the wives of the Khai Machi's other sons, had
their men been under the metal blanket. And in those voices she heard
also the excitement, dread, and anticipation that these bloody paroxysms
carried. When the empty, insincere words of comfort were said, in the
same breath they would move on to speculations. Both of Biitrah's
brothers had vanished. Danat, it was said, had gone to the mountains
where he had a secret force at the ready, or to Lachi in the south to
gather allies, or to ruined Saraykeht to hire mercenaries, or to the
Dai-kvo to seek the aid of the poets and the andat. Or he was in the
temple, gathering his strength, or he was cowering in the basement of a
low town comfort house, too afraid to come to the streets. And every
story they told of him, they also told of Kaiin.
It had begun. At long last, after years of waiting, one of the men who
might one day be Khai Machi had made his move. The city waited for the
drama to unfold. This pyre was only the opening for them, the first
notes of some new song that would make this seem to be about something
honorable, comprehensible, and right.
Hiami took a pose of thanks and accepted a lit torch from the
firekeeper. She stepped to the oil-soaked wood. A dove fluttered past
her, landed briefly on her husband's chest, and then flew away again.
She felt herself smile to see it go. She touched the flame to the small
kindling and stepped back as the fire took. She waited there as long as
tradition required and then went back to the Second Palace. Let the
others watch the ashes. "Their song might be starting, but hers here had
ended.
Her servant girl was waiting for her at the entrance of the palace's
great hall. She held a pose of welcome that suggested there was some
news waiting for her. Hiami was tempted to ignore the nuance, to walk
through to her chambers and her fire and bed and the knotwork scarf that
was now nearly finished. But there were tear-streaks on the girl's
cheeks, and who was Hiami, after all, to treat a suffering child
unkindly? She stopped and took a pose that accepted the welcome before
shifting to one of query.
"Idaan Machi," the servant girl said. "She is waiting for you in the
summer garden."
Hiami shifted to a pose of thanks, straightened her sleeves, and walked
quietly down the palace halls. The sliding stone doors to the garden
were open, a breeze too cold to be comfortable moving through the hall.
And there, by an empty fountain surrounded by bare-limbed cherry trees,
sat her once-sister. If her formal robes were not the pale of mourning,
her countenance contradicted them: reddened eyes, paint and powder
washed away. She was a plain enough woman without them, and Hiami felt
sorry for her. It was one thing to expect the violence. It was another
to see it done.
She stepped forward, her hands in a pose of greeting. Idaan started to
her feet as if she'd been caught doing something illicit, but then she
took an answering pose. Hiami sat on the fountain's stone lip, and Idaan
lowered herself, sitting on the ground at her feet as a child might.
"Your things are packed," Idaan said.
"Yes. I'll leave tomorrow. It's weeks to "Ian-Sadar. It won't be so
hard, I think. O
ne of my daughters is married there, and my brother is a
decent man. They'll treat me well while I make arrangements for my own
apartments."
"It isn't fair," Idaan said. "They shouldn't force you out like this.
You belong here."
"It's tradition," Hiami said with a pose of surrender. "Fairness has
nothing to do with it. My husband is dead. I will return to my father's
house, whoever's actually sitting in his chair these days."
"If you were a merchant, no one would require anything like that of you.
You could go where you pleased, and do what you wanted."
"True, but I'm not, am I? I was born to the utkhaiem. You were horn to a
Khai."
"And women," Idaan said. Hiami was surprised by the venom in the word.
"We were born women, so we'll never even have the freedoms our brothers do."
Hiami laughed. She couldn't help herself, it was all so ridiculous. She
took her once-sister's hand and leaned forward until their foreheads
almost touched. Idaan's tear-red eyes shifted to meet her gaze.
"I don't think the men in our families consider themselves unconstrained
by history," she said, and Idaan's expression twisted with chagrin.
"I wasn't thinking," she said. "I didn't mean that ... Gods ... I'm
sorry, Hiami-kya. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry ..."
Hiami opened her arms, and the girl fell into them, weeping. Hiami
rocked her slowly, cooing into her ear and stroking her hair as if she
were comforting a babe. And as she did, she looked around the gardens.
This would be the last time she saw them. "Thin tendrils of green were
rising from the soil. The trees were bare, but their bark had an
undertone of green. Soon it would be warm enough to turn on the fountains.