Seasons of War

coughed - one of the servants set to watch over the Khai Machi in case there was anything he should desire in the night. Otah tried not to move.
    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 be 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 up 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 Udun 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 up, slipping from the bed softly to let Kiyan, at least, sleep, the night candle was past its three-quarter mark. Otah 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 Otah’s own father, given the honor of sitting alone in the darkness, bored and cold. Otah 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, Otah 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. Tonight, 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, bone-breaking cold of winter. With spring come, Otah found the palace beneath the palace empty and silent. The smell of old torches, long gone dark, still lingered in the air, and Otah 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 Machi. Lives cut short for the honor of having a pedestal of their own someday, deep in the darkness.
    Otah 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 bones 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. There 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