The time had come.
He walked the length of the seafront, throwing the spent paper soaked in grease and spices into a firekeeper's kiln where it flared and blackened, lighting for a moment the faces of the men and women warming themselves at the fire. The warehouses were dark and closed, the wide street empty. Outside a teahouse, a woman sang piteously over a begging box with three times more money in it than Otah had in the world. He tossed in one of his copper lengths for luck.
The soft quarter was much the same as any night. He was the one who was different. The drum and flute from the comfort houses, the smell of incense and stranger smokes, the melancholy eyes of women selling themselves from low parapets and high windows. It was as if he had come to the place for the first time—a traveler from a foreign land. There was time, he supposed, to turn aside. Even now, he could walk away from it all as he had from the school all those years before. He could walk away now and call it strength or purity. Or the calm of stone. He could call it that, but he would know the truth of it.
The alley was where Seedless had said it would be, hidden almost in the shadows of the buildings that lined it. He paused there for a time. Far down in the darkness, a lantern glowed without illuminating anything but itself. A showfighter lumbered past, blood flowing from his scalp. Two sailors across the street pointed at the wounded man, laughing. Otah stepped into darkness.
Mud and filth slid under his boots like a riverbed. The lantern grew nearer, but he reached the door the andat had described before he reached the light. He pressed his hand to it. The wood was solid, the lock was black iron. The light glimmering through at the edges of the shutters showed that a fire was burning within. The poet in his private apartments, the place where he hid from the beauty of the palaces and the house that had come with his burden. Otah tried the door gently, but it was locked. He scratched at it and then rapped, but no one came. With a knife, he could have forced the lock, unhinged the door—a man drunk enough might even have slept through it, but he would have had to come much later. The andat had told him not to go to the hidden apartment until well past the night candle's middle mark, and it wasn't to the first quarter yet.
"Heshaikvo," he said, not shouting, but his voice loud enough to ring against the stonework around him. "Open the door."
For a long moment, he thought no one would come. But then the line of light that haloed the shutters went dark, a bolt shot with a solid click, and the door creaked open. The poet stood silhouetted. His robes were as disheveled as his hair. His wide mouth was turned down in a heavy scowl.
"What do you think you're doing here?"
"We need to talk," Otah said.
"No we don't," the poet said, stepping back and starting to pull the door closed. "Go away."
Otah pushed in, first squaring his shoulder against the door, and then leaning in with his back and legs. The poet fell back with a surprised huff of breath. The rooms were small, dirty, squalid. A cot of stretched canvas was pulled too close to a fireplace, and empty bottles littered the floor by it. Streaks of dark mold ran down the walls from the sagging beams of the ceiling. The smell was like a swamp in summer. Otah closed the door behind him.
"Wh—what do you want?" the poet said, his face pale and fearful.
"We need to talk," Otah said again. "Seedless told me where to find you. He sent me here to kill you."
"Kill me?" Heshai repeated, and then chuckled. The fear seemed to drain away, and a bleak amusement took its place. "Kill me. Gods."
Shaking his head, the poet lumbered to the cot and sat. The canvas groaned against its wooden frame. Otah stood between the fire and the doorway, ready to block Heshai if he bolted. He didn't.
"So. You've come to finish me off, eh? Well, you're a big, strong boy. I'm old and fat and more than half drunk. I doubt you'll have a problem."
"Seedless told me that you'd welcome it," Otah said. "I suspect he overstated his case, eh? Anyway, I'm not his puppet."
The poet scowled, his bloodshot eyes narrowing in the firelight. Otah stepped forward, knelt as he had as a boy at the school and took a pose appropriate to a student addressing a teacher.
"You know what's happening. Amat Kyaan's audience before the Khai Saraykeht. You have to know what would happen."
Slowly, grudgingly, Heshai took an acknowledging pose.
"Seedless hoped that I would kill you in order to prevent it. But I find I'm not a murderer," Otah said. "The stakes here, the price that innocent people will pay . . . and the price Maati will pay. It's too high. I can't let it happen."
"I see," Heshai said. He was silent for a long moment, the ticking of the fire the only sound. Thoughtfully, he reached down and lifted a half-full bottle from the floor. Otah watched the old man drink, the thick throat working as he gulped the wine down. Then, "And how do you plan to reconcile these two issues, eh?"