Shadow and Betrayal

wine. Amat looked up at he descended the stairs. She looked older than usual.
    Maj followed the old woman’s gaze, glanced up at the closed door behind him, and said something else. Amat replied in the same language, her voice calm but not placating. Maj stood, rattling the bench, and strode to Otah.
    ‘Your woman sleeps?’ Maj said.
    ‘She’s asleep. Yes.’
    ‘I have questions. Wake her,’ Maj said, taking a pose that made the words a command. Her breath was a drunk’s. Over her shoulder, he saw Amat shake her head no. Otah took a pose of apology. The refusal seemed to break something in Maj, and tears brimmed in her eyes, streaked her cheeks.
    ‘Weeks,’ she said, her tone pleading. ‘I am waiting for weeks, and for nothing. There is no justice here. You people have no justice.’
    Mitat approached them and put her hand on the island girl’s arm. Maj pulled away and went to a different door, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. As the door closed behind her, Otah took a pose of query.
    ‘She didn’t understand that the Khai Saraykeht might make his own investigation,’ Mitat said. ‘She thought he’d act immediately. When she heard that there’d be another delay . . .’
    ‘It isn’t entirely her fault,’ Amat said. ‘This can’t have been easy for her, any of it.’ The master of guard - a huge bear of a man - coughed. The way he and Amat considered each other was enough to tell Otah this wasn’t the first time the girl had been the subject of conversation. Amat continued, ‘It will all be finished soon enough. Or our part, at least. As long as she’s here to make the case before the Khai, we’ll have started the thing. If she goes home after that, she goes home.’
    ‘And if she leaves before that?’ Mitat asked, sitting on the table.
    ‘She won’t,’ Amat said. ‘She’s not well, and she won’t leave before someone answers for her child. And Liat. She’s resting?’
    ‘Yes, Amat-cha,’ Otah said, taking a pose of thanks. ‘She’s asleep.’
    ‘Wilsin-cha will know by now that she’s not going back to his house,’ Amat said. ‘She’ll need to stay inside until this is over.’
    ‘Another one? And how long’s that going to be, grandmother?’ Torish Wite asked.
    Amat rested her head in her hands. She seemed smaller than she had been, diminished by fatigue and years, but not broken. Weary to her bones perhaps, but unbroken. In that moment, Otah found that he admired Liat’s old teacher very much.
    ‘I’ll send a runner in the morning,’ she said. ‘This time of year, it might take a week before we get an audience.’
    ‘But we aren’t ready!’ Mitat said. ‘We don’t even know where the first girl was kept or where she’s gone. We won’t have time to find her!’
    ‘We have all the pieces,’ Amat said. ‘And what we don’t have, the utkhaiem will find when the Khai looks into it. It isn’t all I’d hoped, but it will do. It will have to.’

18
    M archat Wilsin had seen wildfires spread more slowly than the news. Amat Kyaan’s petition had reached the servants of the Master of Tides - an idiot title for an overfed secretary, he thought - just before dawn. By the time the sun had risen the width of two hands together, a messenger from the compound had come to the bathhouse with a message from Epani. The panicky twig of a man had scratched out the basic information from the petition, his letters so hasty they were hardly legible. Not that it mattered. The word of Amat Kyaan and her petition were enough. It was happening.
    Epani’s letter floated now on the surface of the water. It was a warm bath, now that the half-hearted winter was upon them, and steam rose in wisps from the drowned paper. The ink had washed away as he’d watched it, threads of darkness like shadows fading into the clear water. It was over. There was nothing he could do now that would put the world back in its right shape, and in a strange way it was a relief. Night after night since Seedless, that miserable Khaiate god-ghost, had come to his apartments, Marchat had lain awake. He’d had a damn fine mind, once. But in the dark hours, he’d found nothing, no plan of action, no finessed stroke that would avoid the thing that had now come. And since there was no halting it, he could at least stop looking. He closed his eyes and let his head sink for a moment under the tiny lapping waves. Yes, it was a relief that at least now he wouldn’t have to try.
    He lay underwater until