Shadow and Betrayal

trust me because I have what you want - certainty, an end to waiting, vengeance, and a way back home. I’m doing this because I don’t want to see any more women suffer what you’ve suffered, and because it takes the thing that did this out of the world forever.’
    Because it saves Maati and Liat. Because it saves Heshai. Because it is a terrible thing, and it is right. And because I have to get you away from this house.
    A half smile pulled at her thick, pale mouth.
    ‘You are man?’ Maj asked. ‘Or you are ghost?’
    Otah took a pose of query. Maj reached out and touched him, pressing his shoulder gently with her fingertips, as if making sure his flesh had substance.
    ‘If you are man, then I am tired of being tricked. You lie to me and I will kill you with my teeth. If you are ghost, then you are maybe the one I am praying for.’
    ‘If you were praying for this,’ Otah said, ‘then I’m the answer to it. But get your things quickly. We have to go now, and we can’t come back.’
    For a moment she wavered, and then the anger he had seen in her before, the desperation, shone in her eyes. It was what he had known was there, what he had counted on. She looked around at the tiny room, gathered up what looked like a half-knitted cloth and deliberately spat on the ground.
    ‘Is nothing more I want here,’ Maj said. ‘You take me now. You show me. If is not as you say, I kill you. You doubt that?’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I believe you.’
    It was a simple enough thing to distract the guard, to send him up to speak with Amat Kyaan - her security was done with attack in mind, not escape. Leading Maj out the back took the space of four breaths, perhaps five. Another dozen, and they were gone, vanished into the maze of streets and alleys that made up the soft quarter.
    Maj stayed close to him as they went, and when they passed torches or street lanterns, he caught glimpses of her face, wild with release and the heat of fury. The alley, when he reached it, was empty. The door, when he tried it, was unlocked.
     
    Maati stepped into the poet’s house, his feet sore, and his head buzzing like a hive. The house was silent, dark, and cold. Only the single, steady flame of a night candle stood watch in a lantern of glass. It had burned down past the half mark, the night more than half over. He dropped to a tapestry-draped divan and pulled the heavy cloth over him. He had visited every teahouse he knew of, had asked everyone he recognized. Otah-kvo had vanished - stepped into the thin mists of the seafront like a memory. And every step had been a journey, every finger’s-width of the moon in its nightly arc had encompassed a lifetime. He’d expected, huddled under the heavy cloth, for sleep to come quickly and yet the dim glow of the candle distracted him, pulled his eyes open just when he had told himself that finally, finally he was letting the day fall away from him. He shifted, his robes bunching uncomfortably under his arm, at his ribs. It seemed half a night before he gave up and sat, letting his makeshift blankets fall away. The night candle was still well before the three-quarter mark.
    ‘Wine might help,’ the familiar voice said from the darkness of the stairway. ‘It has the advantage of tradition. Many’s the night our noble poet’s slept beside a pool of his own puke, stinking of half-digested grapes.’
    ‘Be quiet,’ Maati said, but there was no force to his voice, no reserve left to fend off the attentions of the andat. Slowly, the perfect face and hands descended. He wore a robe of white, pale as his skin. A mourning robe. His demeanor when he sat on the second stair, stretching out his legs and smiling, was the same as ever - amused and scheming and untrustworthy and sad. But perhaps there was something else, an underlying energy that Maati didn’t understand.
    ‘I only mean that a hard night can be ended, if only you have the will to do it. And don’t mind paying the price, when it comes.’
    ‘Leave me alone,’ Maati said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
    ‘Not even if your little friend came by, the seafront laborer?’
    Maati’s breath stopped, his blood suddenly with a separate life from his own. He took an interrogatory pose. Seedless laughed.
    ‘Oh, he didn’t,’ the andat said. ‘I was just wondering about your terms. If you didn’t want to speak to me under any conditions, or if perhaps there might be exceptions to your rule. Purely hypothetical. ’
    Maati felt