An Autumn War(14)

He hadn't asked Kiyan about Danat's health. He'd meant to. But surely if there had been anything concerning, she would have brought it up to him. And regardless, he could ask her in the morning. Perhaps he would cancel the audiences before midday and go speak with Danat's physicians. And speak to Eiah. He hadn't said he would do that, but Kiyan had asked, and it wasn't as if being present in his own daughter's life should he an imposition. He wondered what it would have been to have a dozen wives, whether he would have felt the need to attend to all of their children as he did to the two he had now, how he would have stood watching his boys grow tip when he knew he would have to send them away or else watch them slaughter one another over which of them would take his own place here on this soft, sleepless bed and fear in turn for his own sons.

The night candle ate through its marks as he listened to the internal voice nattering in his mind, gnawing at half a thousand worries both justified and inane. The trade agreements with tJdun weren't in place yet. Perhaps something really was the matter with Eiah. He didn't know how long stone buildings stood; nothing stands forever, so it only made sense that someday the palaces would fall. And the towers. The towers reached so high it seemed that low clouds would touch them; what would he do if they fell? But the night was passing and he had to sleep. If he didn't the morning would be worse. He should talk with Maati, find out how things had gone between him and the Dai-kvo's envoy. Perhaps a dinner.

And on, and on, and on. When he gave tip, slipping from the bed softly to let Kiyan, at least, sleep, the night candle was past its threequarter mark. Utah walked to the apartment's main doors on bare, chilled feet and found his keeper in the hall outside dozing. He was a young man, likely the son of some favored servant or slave of Utah's own father, given the honor of sitting alone in the darkness, bored and cold. Utah considered the boy's soft face, as peaceful in sleep as a corpse's, and walked silently past him and into the dim hallways of the palace.

His night walks had been growing more frequent in recent months. Sometimes twice in a week, Utah found himself wandering in the darkness, sleep a stranger to him. He avoided the places where he might encounter another person, jealously keeping the time to himself. 'lbnight, he took a lantern and walked down the long stairways to the ground, and then on down, to the tunnels and underground streets into which the city retreated in the deep, hone-breaking cold of winter. With spring come, Utah found the palace beneath the palace empty and silent. The smell of old torches, long gone dark, still lingered in the air, and Utah imagined the corridors and galleries of the city descending forever into the earth. Dark archways and domed sleeping chambers cut from stone that had never seen daylight, narrow stairways leading endlessly down like a thing from a children's song.

He didn't consider where he intended to go until he reached his father's crypt and found himself unsurprised to be there. The dark stone seemed to wrap itself in shadows, words of ancient language cut deep into the walls. An ornate pedestal held the pale urn, a dead flower. And beneath it, three small boxes-the remains of Biitrah, Danat, Kaiin. Otah's brothers, dead in the struggle to become the new Khai Nlachi. Lives cut short for the honor of having a pedestal of their own someday, deep in the darkness.

Utah sat on the bare floor, the lantern at his side, and contemplated the man he'd never known or loved whose place he had taken. Here was how his own end would look. An urn, a tomb, high honors and reverence for hones and ashes. And between the chill floor and the pale urn, perhaps another thirty summers. Perhaps forty. Years of ceremony and negotiation, late nights and early mornings and little else.

But when the time came, at least his crypt would be only his own. Danat, brotherless, wouldn't be called upon to kill or die in the succession. 't'here would be no second sons left to kill the other for the black chair. It seemed a thin solace, having given so much of himself to achieve something that a merchant's son could have had for free.

It would have been easier if he'd never been anything but this. A man horn into the Khaiem who had never stepped outside wouldn't carry the memories of fishing in the eastern islands, of eating at the wayhouses outside Yalakeht, of being free. If he could have forgotten it all, becoming the man he was supposed to be might have been easier. Instead he was driven to follow his own judgment, raise a militia, take only one wife, raise only one son. "I'hat his experience told him that he was right didn't make bearing the world's disapproval as easy as he'd hoped.

The lantern flame guttered and spat. Otah shook his head, uncertain now how long he had been lost in his reverie. When he stood, his left leg had gone numb from being pressed too long against the bare stone. He took up the lantern and walked-moving slowly and carefully to protect his numbed foot-back toward the stairways that would return him to the surface and the day. By the time he regained the great halls, feeling had returned. The sky peeked through the windows, a pale gray preparing itself to blue. Voices echoed and the palaces woke, and the grand, stately beast that was the court of Machi stirred and stretched.