A Shadow In Summer(29)

"Is Niitcha up there?" she asked.

"Gone. He's down to the low market for beef and pork," the guard said. He had an odd accent; long vowels and the ends of his words clipped off. Eastern, she thought.

"When he comes in . . ." She had almost said send him to me. The habit of years. "When he comes in, tell him I've done what he asked. I'll be sleeping, but I am at his disposal should he wish to discuss it."

"Tell him yourself, grandmother," the fat girl shouted, but the guard nodded.

The bed chamber had no windows. At night, a single tallow candle lit the bunks that lined the walls, five beds to a stack like the worst sort of ship's cabin. Cheap linen was tied over the mouth of each coffin-sized bed in lieu of real netting, and the planks were barely covered by thin, stained mats. The darkness, while not so hot as the kiln of an attic she had hidden in, was still and hot and muggy. Amat found one of the lower bunks unoccupied and crawled into it, her hip scraping in its joint as she did. She pulled her cane in with her for fear someone might take it and didn't bother tying the linen closed.

Three days she'd spent in an impossible task, and when she closed her eyes, the crabbed scripts and half-legible papers still danced before her. She willed the visions away, but she might as well have been pushing the tide back with her hands. The bunk above her creaked as the sleeper shifted. Amat wondered whether she could get a cup of the spiked wine, just to take her to sleep. She was bone weary, but restless. She had put Marchat Wilsin and Oshai and the island girl Maj out of her mind while she bent to Ovi Niit's books. Now that she had paused, they returned and mixed with the work she had finished and that which still lay before her. She shifted on the thin mat, her cane resting uncomfortably beside her. The smell of bodies and perfume and years of cheap tallow disturbed her.

She would have said that she had not slept so much as fallen to an anxious doze except that the boy had such trouble waking her. His little hands pressed her shoulder, and she was distantly aware that he had done so before—had been doing so for some time.

"Grandmother," he said. Again? Yes, said again. She'd been hearing the voice, folding it into her dream. "Wake up."

"I am."

"Are you well?"

All the world's ill, why should I be any different, she thought.

"I'm fine. What's happened?"

"He's back. He wants to see you."

Amat took a pose of thanks that the boy understood even in the cave-dark room and her lying on her side. Amat pulled herself out and up. Curiously, the rest seemed to have helped. Her head felt clearer and her body less protesting. In the main room, she saw how much the light from the high windows had shifted. She'd been asleep for the better part of the afternoon. The whores had shifted their positions or left entirely. The redhaired woman was still at her seat near the stairs; the fat girl was gone. A guard—not the same man as before, but of the same breed—caught her eye and nodded toward her workroom at the back. She took a pose of thanks, squared her shoulders and went in.

Ovi Niit sat at her table. His hooded eyes made him look torpid, or perhaps he had been drinking his own wines. His robes were of expensive silks and well-cut, but he still managed to look like an unmade bed. He glanced up as she came in, falling into a pose of welcome so formal as to be a mockery. Still, she replied with respect.

"I heard what was being offered for you," Ovi Niit said. "They've spread the word all through the seafront. You're an expensive piece of flesh."

The sound of his voice made her mouth dry with fear and shame at the fear. She was Amat Kyaan. She had been hiding fear and loneliness and weakness since before the thug seated at her desk had been born. It was one of her first skills.

"How much?" she asked, keeping her tone light and disinterested.

"Sixty lengths of silver for where you're sleeping. Five lengths of gold if someone takes you to Oshai's men. Five lengths of gold is a lot of money."

"You're tempted," Amat said.

The young man smiled slowly and put down the paper he'd been reading.

"As one merchant to another, I only suggest that you make your presence in my house worth more than the market rate," he said. "I have to wonder what you did to become so valuable."

She only smiled, and wondered what ideas were shifting behind those half-dead eyes. How he could trade her, no doubt. He was weighing where his greatest profit might come.

"You have my report?" Ovi Niit asked. She nodded and pulled the papers from her sleeve.

"It's only a rough estimate. I'll need to confer with you more next time, to be sure I've understood the mechanisms of your trade. But it's enough for your purposes, I think."