A Shadow In Summer(12)

"Heshai is about to kill a child whose mother loves it. There isn't anything worse than that. Not for him. Picture it. This island girl? He's going to watch the light die in her eyes and know that without him, it wouldn't have happened. You want to know will that break him? Wilsincha, it will snap him like a twig."

They were silent for a moment. The naked hunger on the andat's face made Marchat squirm on his stool. Then, as if they'd been speaking of nothing more intimate or dangerous than a sugar crop, Seedless leaned back and grinned.

"With the poet broken, you'll be rid of me, which is what you want," Seedless said, "and I won't exist anymore to care one way or the other. So we'll both have won."

"You sound like a suicide to me," Marchat said. "You want your own death."

"In a sense," Seedless agreed. "But it doesn't mean for me what it would for you. We aren't the same kind of beast, you and I."

"Agreed."

"Do you want to see her? She's asleep in the next room. If you're quiet . . ."

"No, thank you," Marchat said, rising. "I'll arrange things with Oshai once I've scheduled the audience with the Khai. He and I can make the arrangements from there. If I could avoid seeing her at all before the day itself, that would be good."

"If good's the word," Seedless said, taking a pose of agreement and farewell.

Outside again, the night seemed cooler. Marchat pounded his walking stick against the ground, as if shaking dried mud off it, but really just to feel the sting in his fingers. His chest ached with something like dread. It was rotten, this business. Rotten and wrong and dangerous. And if he did anything to prevent it . . . what then? The Galtic High Council would have him killed, to start. He couldn't stop it. He couldn't even bow out and let someone else take his part in it.

There was no way through this but through. At least he'd kept Amat out of it.

"Everything went well?" the boy Itani asked.

"Well enough," Marchat lied as he started off briskly into the darkness.

AMAT KYAAN had hoped to set out in the morning, before the day's heat was too thick. Liat had come to her with Itani's account of the route early enough, but the details were few and sketchy. Marchat and the boy hadn't gotten back to the compound until past the quarter candle, and his report to Liat hadn't been as thorough as it might have been had he known what use he had been put to. It had been enough to find which of the low towns they had visited and what sort of house they'd gone to.

Armed with those facts, it hadn't been so hard to find a contract that rented such a building, one that had been paid out of Wilsin's private funds and not those of the house proper. There were letters that spoke vaguely of a girl and a journey to Saraykeht, but the time it took to find that much cost Amat the better part of the morning. As she walked down the low road east of the city, the boundary arch grown small behind her, she felt her annoyance growing. Sweat ran down her spine, and her bad hip ached already.

In the cool just before dawn, it might almost have been a pleasant walk. The high grasses sang with cicadas, the trees were thick with their summer leaves. As it was, Amat felt as damp as if she'd walked out of a bathhouse, drenched in her own sweat. The sun pressed on her shoulders like a hand. And the trip back, she knew, would be worse.

Men and women of the low towns took poses of greeting and deference as they passed her, universally heading into the city. They pushed handcarts of fruits and grains, chickens and ducks to sell to the compounds of the rich or the palaces or the open markets. Some carried loads on their backs. On one particularly rutted stretch of road, she passed an oxcart where it had slid into the roadside mud. One wheel was badly bent. The carter, a young man with tears in his eyes, was shouting and beating an ox who seemed barely to notice him. Amat's practiced eye valued the wheel at three of four times the contents of the cart. Whoever the boy carter answered to—father, uncle, or farmer rich enough to own indentured labor—they wouldn't be pleased to hear of this. Amat stepped around, careful how she placed her cane, and moved on.

Low towns existed at the edges of all the cities of the Khaiem like swarms of flies. Outside the boundaries of the city, no particular law bound these men and women; the utkhaiem didn't enforce peace or punish crimes. And still, a rough order was the rule. Disagreements were handled between the people or taken to a low judge who passed an opinion, which was followed more often than not. The traditions of generations were as complex and effective as the laws of the Empire. Amat felt no qualms about walking along the broken cobbles of the low road by herself, so long as it was in daylight and there was enough traffic to keep the dogs away.