Shadow and Betrayal

stalked to a bookshelf, speaking over his shoulder as he went. ‘My master died, you know. The season after you left.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Otah said.
    ‘Why did you come? Why you ?’
    ‘Maati is a friend. And there was no one else who could be trusted.’ The other reasons weren’t ones he would share with Tahi-kvo. They were his own.
    Tahi-kvo ran his fingers across the spines of the books. Even turned almost away, Otah could see the bitterness in his smile.
    ‘And he trusts you? He trusts Otah Machi? Well, he’s young. Perhaps he doesn’t know you so well as I do. Do you want to know what’s in this letter I’m sending with you?’
    ‘If he cares to tell me,’ Otah said.
    The volume Tahi-kvo pulled down was ancient - bound in wood with clasps of metal and thick as a hand spread wide. He hefted it back and laid it on the table before he answered.
    ‘It says he mustn’t let Heshai lose control of his andat. It says there isn’t a replacement for it, and that there isn’t the prospect of one. If Seedless escapes, I have nothing to send, and Saraykeht becomes an oversized low town. That’s what it says.’
    Tahi-kvo’s eyebrows rose, challenging. Otah took a pose that accepted the lesson from a teacher - a pose he’d taken before, when he’d been a boy.
    ‘Every generation, it’s become more difficult,’ Tahi-kvo said, angry, it seemed, at speaking the words. ‘There are fewer men who take up the mantle. The andat that escape are more and more difficult to recapture. Even the fourth-water ones like Seedless and Unstung. The time will come - not for me, I think, but for my successor or his - when the andat may fail us entirely. The Khaiem will be overrun by Galts and Westermen. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
    ‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘But not why.’
    ‘Because you had promise,’ Tahi-kvo said bitterly. ‘And because I don’t like you. But I have to ask this. Otah Machi, have you come here with this letter because you’ve regretted your refusal? Was it an excuse to speak to me because you’re seeking the robes of a poet?’
    Otah didn’t laugh, though the questions seemed absurd. Absurd and - as they mixed in his mind with the sights and scents of the village - more than half sad. And beneath all that, perhaps he had. Perhaps he had needed to come here and see the path he had not chosen to know as a man whether he still believed in the choices he had made as a boy.
    ‘No,’ he said.
    Tahi-kvo nodded, undid the clasps on the great book and opened it. It was in no script Otah had ever seen. The poet looked up at him, his gaze direct and unpleasant.
    ‘I thought not,’ he said. ‘Go then. And don’t come back unless you decide you’re man enough to take on the work. I don’t have time to coddle children.’
    Otah took a pose of leave-taking, then hesitated.
    ‘I’m sorry, Tahi-kvo,’ he said. ‘That your master died. That you had to live this way. All of it. I’m sorry the world’s the way it is.’
    ‘Blame the sun for setting,’ the Dai-kvo said, not looking at him, not looking up.
    Otah turned and walked out. The magnificence of the palace was amazing, rich even past the Khai Saraykeht. The wide avenues outside it were crowded in the late afternoon with men going about business of the highest importance, dressed in silks and woven linen and leather supple as skin. Otah took in the majesty of it and understood for the first time since he’d come the hollowness that lay beneath it. It was the same, he thought, as the emptiness in Heshai-kvo’s eyes. The one was truly a child of the other.
    He was surprised, as he walked down to the edge of the village, to find himself moved to sorrow. The few tears that escaped him might have been shed for Maati or Heshai, Tahi-kvo or the boys of his cohort scattered now into the world, the vanity of power or himself. The question that had carried him here - whether he was truly Otah Machi or Itani Noyga; son of the Khaiem or seafront laborer - was unresolved, but it was also answered.
    Either one, but never this.

    ‘When?’ Maj demanded, her arms crossed. Her cheeks were red and flushed, her breath smelled of wine. ‘I’ve been weeks living with whores and you, their pimp. You told me that the men who killed my child would be brought to justice. Now tell me when. ’
    The island girl moved quickly, scooping up a vase from Amat’s desk and throwing it against the far wall. The pottery shattered, flowers falling broken