A Shadow In Summer(124)

"Thank you," she said.

IT WAS three weeks now since the poet had died. Three weeks was too long, Amat knew, for a city to hold its breath. The tension was still there—the uncertainty, the fear. It showed in the faces of the men and women in the street and in the way they held their bodies. Amat heard it in the too-loud laughter, and angry words of drunkards in the soft quarter streets. But the initial shock was fading. Time, suspended by the sudden change of losing the andat, was moving forward again. And that, as much as anything, drew her out, away from the protection of the comfort house and into the city. Her city.

In the gray of winter fog, the streets were like memories—here a familiar fountain emerged, took shape, and form and weight. The dark green of the stone glistened in the carvings of ship and fish, eagle and archer. And then as she passed, they faded, becoming at last a darkness behind her, and nothing more. She stopped at a stand by the seafront to buy a paper sack of roasted almonds, fresh from the cookfire and covered with raw sugar. The woman to whom Amat handed her length of copper took a pose of gratitude, and Amat moved to the water's edge, considering the half-hidden waves, the thousand smells of the seafront—salt and spiced foods, sewage and incense. She blew sharply through pursed lips to cool the sweets before she bit into them, as she had when she was a girl, and she prepared herself for the last meeting. When the sack was empty, she crumpled it and let it drop into the sea.

House Wilsin was among the first to make its position on the future known by its actions. Even as she walked up the streets to the north, moving steadily toward the compound, carts passed her, heading the other way. The warehouses were being cleared, the offices packed into crates bound for Galt and the Westlands. When she reached the familiar courtyard, the lines of men made her think of ants on sugarcane. She paused at the bronze Galtic Tree, considering it with distaste and, to her surprise, amusement. Three weeks was too long, apparently, for her to hold her breath either.

"Amatcha?"

She shifted. Epani, her thin-faced, weak-spirited replacement, stood in a pose of welcome belied by the discomfort on his face. She answered it with a pose of her own, more graceful and appropriate.

"Tell him I'd like to speak with him, will you?"

"He isn't . . . that is . . ."

"Epani-cha. Go, tell him I'm here and I want to speak with him. I won't burn the place down while you do it."

Perhaps it was the dig that set him moving. Whatever did it, Epani retreated into the dark recesses of the compound. Amat walked to the fountain, listening to the play of the water as though it was the voice of an old friend. Someone had dredged it, she saw, for the copper lengths thrown in for luck. House Wilsin wasn't leaving anything behind.

Epani returned and without a word led her back through the corridors she knew to the private meeting rooms. The room was as dark as she remembered it. Marchat Wilsin himself sat at the table, lit by the diffuse cool light from the small window, the warm, orange flame of a lantern. With one color on either cheek, he might almost have been two different men. Amat took a pose of greeting and gratitude. Moving as if unsure of himself, Marchat responded with one of welcome.

"I didn't expect to see you again," he said, and his voice was careful.

"And yet, here I am. I see House Wilsin is fleeing, just as everyone said it was. Bad for business, Marchat-cha. It looks like a failure of nerve."

"It is," he said. There was no apology in his voice. They might have been discussing dye prices. "Being in Saraykeht's too risky now. My uncle's calling me back home. I think he must have been possessed by some passing moment of sanity, and what he saw scared him. What we can't ship out by spring, we're selling at a loss. It'll take years for the house to recover. And, of course, I'm scheduled on the last boat out. So. Have you come to tell me you're ready to bring your suit to the Khai?"

Amat took a pose, more casual than she'd intended, that requested clarification. It was an irony, and Marchat's sheepish grin showed that he knew it.

"My position isn't as strong as it was before the victim best placed to stir the heart of the utkhaiem killed the poet and destroyed the city. I lost a certain credibility."

"Was it really her, then?"

"I don't know for certain. It appears it was."

"I'd say I was sorry, but . . ."

Amat didn't count the years she'd spent talking to this man across tables like this, or in the cool waters of the bathhouse, or walking together in the streets. She felt them, habits worn into her joints. She sat with a heavy sigh and shook her head.

"I did what I could," she said. "Now . . . now who would believe me, and what would it matter?"