Shadow and Betrayal

journey and set him down at the door of the Daikvo’s palaces did. He passed men in fine robes of wool and fur, envoys from the courts of the Khaiem or trading houses or other places, further away. Food stands at the roadside offered sumptuous fare at high prices for the great men who passed by or wheat gruel and chicken for the lower orders like himself.
    Despite the wealth and luxury of the road, the first sight of the Daikvo’s village took Otah’s breath away. Carved into the stone of the mountain, the village was something half belonging to the world of men, half to the ocean and the sun and the great forces of the world. He stopped in the road and looked up at the glittering windows and streets, stairways and garrets and towers. A thin golden ribbon of a waterfall lay just within the structures, and warm light of the coming sunset made the stone around it glow like bronze. Chimes light as birdsong and deep as bells rang when the breeze stirred them. If the view had been designed to humble those who came to it, the designer could rest well. Maati, he realized, had lived in this place, studied in it. And he, Otah, had refused it. He wondered what it would have been like, coming down this road as a boy coming to his reward; what it would have been like to see this grandeur set out before him as if it were his right.
    The path to the grand offices was easily found, and well peopled. Firekeepers - not members of the utkhaiem, but servants only of the Dai-kvo - kept kilns at the crossroads and teahouses and offered the promise of warmth and comfort in the falling night. Otah didn’t pause at them.
    He reached the grand offices: a high, arched hall open to the west so that the lowering sun set the white stone walls ablaze. Men - only men, Otah noted - paced through the hall on one errand or another, passing from one corridor to another, through doors of worked rosewood and oak. Otah had to stop a servant who was lighting lanterns to find the way to the Dai-kvo’s overseer.
    He was an old man with a kind face in the brown robes of a poet. When Otah approached his table, the overseer took a pose that was both welcome and query with a flowing grace that he had seen only in the Khai Saraykeht or the andat. Otah replied with a pose of greeting, and for an instant, he was a boy again in the cold, empty hallways of the school.
    ‘I’ve come with a letter for the Dai-kvo,’ he said, pushing the memory aside. ‘From Maati Vaupathi in Saraykeht.’
    ‘Ah?’ the overseer said. ‘Excellent. I will see that he gets it immediately.’
    The beautiful, old hand reached to him, open to accept the packet still in Otah’s sleeve. Otah considered the withered fingers like carved wood, a sudden alarm growing in him.
    ‘I had hoped to see the Dai-kvo myself,’ he said, and the overseer’s expression changed to one of sympathy.
    ‘The Dai-kvo is very busy, my friend. He hardly has time to speak to me, and I’m set to schedule his days. Give the letter to me, and I will see that he knows of it.’
    Otah pulled the letter out and handed it over, a profound disappointment blooming in his breast. It was obvious, of course, that the Dai-kvo wouldn’t meet with simple couriers, however sensitive the letters they bore. He shouldn’t have expected him to. Otah took a pose of gratitude.
    ‘Will you be staying to carry a reply?’
    ‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘If there is one.’
    ‘I will send word tomorrow whether the most high intends to respond. Where will I find you?’
    Otah took a pose of apology and explained that he had not taken rooms and didn’t know the village. The overseer gave him a recommendation, directions, and the patience Otah imagined a grandfather might have for a well-loved but rather slow grandchild. It was twilight - the distant skyline glorious with the gold and purple of the just-set sun - when Otah returned to the street, his errand complete.
    On the way back down, there was time to see the village more closely, though the light around him was fading. It struck him for the first time that he had seen no women since he had left the road. The firekeepers’ kilns, the food carts and stalls, the inn to which he’d been directed - all were overseen by men. None of the people passing him in the steep, dim street had a woman’s face.
    And as he looked more closely, he found other signs, subtler ones, that the life of the Dai-kvo’s village was unlike that of the ones he had known. The streets had none of