"You have to go, grandmother," Mitat said. "Niitcha is getting worse."
"Of course he is," Amat said. "He's frightened. And he drinks too much. I need you. Now, tonight."
Mitat took a pose of agreement. Amat smiled and took her hand. In the wall behind Mitat, the little scar blemished the wall where he'd kicked it. Amat wondered in passing if the whoremaster would ever understand how much that mark had cost him. And Amat intended it to cost dear.
"Who is the most valuable man here?" Amat asked. "Niitcha must have men who he trusts more than others, ne?"
"The guards," Mitat began, but Amat waved the comment away.
"Who does he trust like a brother?"
Mitat's eyes narrowed. She's caught scent of it, Amat thought and smiled.
"Black Rathvi," Mitat said. "He's in charge of the house when Niitcha's away."
"You know what his handwriting looks like?"
"No," Mitat said. "But I know he took in two gold and seventy silver lengths from the high tables two nights ago. I heard him talking about it."
Amat paged through the most recent ledger until she found the precise sum. It was a wide hand with poorly formed letters and a propensity for dropping the ends of words. She knew it well. Black Rathvi was a poor keeper of notes, and she'd been struggling with his entries since she'd started the project. She found herself ghoulishly pleased that he'd be suffering for his poor job keeping books.
"I'll need a cloak—a hooded one—perhaps two hands before daybreak," Amat said.
"You should leave now," Mitat said. "Niitcha's occupied for the moment, but he may—"
"I'm not finished yet. Two hands before daybreak, I will be. You and your man should slow down for a time after Ovi Niit deals with Black Rathvi. At least several weeks. If he sees things get better, he'll know he was right. You understand?"
Mitat took a pose of affirmation, but it wasn't solid. Amat didn't bother replying formally, only raised a single eyebrow and waited. Mitat looked away, and then back. There was something like hope and also like distrust in her eyes. The face of someone who wants to believe, but is afraid to.
"Can you do it?" Mitat asked.
"Make the numbers point to Black Rathvi? Of course I can. This is what I do. Can you get me a cloak and safe passage at least as far as the street?"
"If you can put those two at each other's throats, I can do anything," Mitat said.
It took less time than she'd expected. The numbers were simple enough to manipulate once she knew what she wanted to do with them. She even changed a few of the entries on their original sheets, blacking out the scrawling hand and forging new figures. When she was finished, a good accountant would have been able to see the deception. But if Ovi Niit had had one of those, Amat would never have been there.
She spent the remaining time composing her letter of leave-taking. She kept the tone formal, using all the titles and honorary flourishes she would have for a very respected merchant or one of the lower of the utkhaiem. She expressed her thanks for the shelter and discretion Ovi Niit and his house had extended and expressed regret that she felt it in her best interest—now that her work was done—to leave inconspicuously. She had too much respect, she wrote sneering as she did so, for Niitcha's sense of advantage to expect him not to sell a commodity for which he no longer had use. She then outlined her findings, implicating Black Rathvi without showing any sign that she knew his name or his role in the house.
She folded the letter twice and then at the corners in the style of a private message and wrote Ovi Niit's name on the overleaf. It perched atop the papers and books, ready to be discovered. Amat sat a while longer, listening to the wild music and slurred voices of the street, waiting for Mitat to appear. The night candle consumed small mark after small mark, and Amat began to wonder whether something had gone wrong.
It hadn't.
However the girl had arranged it, leaving the house was as simple as shrugging on the deep green cloak, taking up her cane, and stepping out the rear door and down a stone path to the open gate that led to the street. In the east, the blackness was starting to show the gray of charcoal, the weakest stars on the horizon failing. The moon, near full, had already set. The night traffic was over but for a few revelers pulling themselves back from their entertainments. Amat, for all the pain in her joints, wasn't the slowest.
She paused at a corner stand and bought a meal of fresh greens and fried pork wrapped in almond skin and a bowl of tea. She ate as the sun rose, climbing like a god in the east. She was surprised by the calm she felt, the serenity. Her ordeal was, if not over, at least near its end. A few more days, and then whatever Marchat was doing would be done. And if she spent weeks in hell, she was strong enough, she saw, to come through it with grace.