Shadow and Betrayal

to the floor. The wet mark on the wall dripped and streaked. The guard was in the room almost before Amat could move, a knife the length of his forearm at the ready. Amat rose and pushed him back out despite his protests, closing the door behind him. Her hip ached badly. It had been getting worse these last weeks, and it added to everything else that made her irritable. Still, she held herself tall as she turned back to her sometime ally, sometime charge. The girl was breathing fast now, her chin jutting out, her arms pulled back. She looked like a little boy, daring someone to strike him. Amat smiled sweetly, took two slow strides, and slapped her smartly across the mouth.
    ‘I am working from before the sun comes up to half through the night for you,’ Amat said. ‘I am keeping this filthy house so that I have the money we need to prosecute your case. I have ruined my life for you. And I haven’t asked thanks, have I? Only cooperation.’
    There were tears brimming in Maj’s pale eyes, streaking down her ruddy cheeks. The anger that filled Amat’s chest like a fire lessened. Moving more slowly, she walked to the mess against the far wall and, slowly, painfully, knelt.
    ‘What I’m doing isn’t simple,’ Amat said, not looking as she gathered the shards and broken flowers. ‘Wilsin-cha didn’t keep records that would tie him directly to the trade, and the ones that do exist are plausible whether he knew of the treachery or not. I have to show that he did. Otherwise, you may as well go home.’
    The floor creaked with Maj’s steps, but Amat didn’t look up. Amat made a sack from the hem of her robe, dropped in the shattered vase and laid in the soft petals afterwards. The flowers, though destroyed, smelled lovely. She found herself reluctant to crush them. Maj crouched down beside her and helped clean.
    ‘We’ve made progress,’ Amat said, her voice softer now. She could hear the exhaustion in her own words. ‘I have records of all the transactions. The pearls that paid the Khai came on a Galtic ship, but I have to find which one.’
    ‘That will be enough?’
    ‘That will be a start,’ Amat said. ‘But there will be more. Torish-cha has had men on the seafront, offering payment for information. Nothing’s come from it yet, but it will. These things take time.’
    Maj leaned close, placing a handful of debris into Amat’s makeshift bag. She meant well, Amat knew, but she buried the flowers all the same. Amat met her gaze. Maj tried to smile.
    ‘You’re drunk,’ Amat said gently. ‘You should go and sleep. Things will look better in the morning.’
    ‘And worse again when night comes,’ Maj said and shook her head, then lurched forward and kissed Amat’s mouth. As she left - awkward phrases in civilized languages passing between her and the guard at the door - Amat dropped the ruined vase into the small crate she kept beside her desk. Her flesh felt heavy, but there were books to be gone over, orders to place for the house and audits to be made.
    She was doing the work, she knew, of three women. Had she seen forty fewer summers, it might have been possible. Instead, each day seemed to bring collapse nearer. She woke in the morning to a list of things that had to be completed - for the comfort house and for the case she was building inch by inch against House Wilsin - and fell asleep every night with three or four items still undone and the creeping sense that she was forgetting something important.
    And the house, while it provided her the income she needed to pay for investigations and bribes and rewards, was just the pit of vipers that she’d been warned it would be. Mitat was her savior there - she knew the politics of the staff and had somehow won the trust of Torish Wite. Still, it seemed as if every decision had to be brought to Amat eventually. Whose indenture to end, whose to hold. What discipline to mete out against the women whose bodies were the produce she sold, what against the men who staffed the gambling tables and provided the wine and drugs. How to balance rule from respect and rule from fear. And Mitat, after all, had stolen from the house before . . .
    The night candle - visibly longer now and made of harder wax than the ones that measured the short nights of summer - was near its halfway mark when Amat put down her pen. Three times she had added a column of numbers, and three times had found different sums. She shrugged out of her robes and pulled the netting closed