Shadow and Betrayal

pupil to an honored teacher. After a moment, he dropped his hands, stepped out, and closed the door.
    The air of the alleyway was sharp and cold, rich with the threat of rain. For a brief, frightened moment, he thought he was alone, that Maj had gone, but the sound of her retching gave her away. He found her doubled over in the mud, weeping and being sick. He placed a hand on her back, reassuring and gentle, until the worst had passed. When she rose, he brushed off what he could of the mess and, his arm around her, led her out from the alleyway, to the west and down, towards the seafront and away at last from Saraykeht.
     
    ‘What do you mean?’ Maati asked. ‘How has Otah-kvo . . .’
    And then he stopped because, with a sound like a sigh and a scent like rain, Seedless had vanished, and only the mourning robes remained.

20
    M orning seemed like any other for nearly an hour, and then the news came. When Liat heard it humming through the comfort house - Maj gone, the poet killed - she ran to the palaces. She forgot her own safety, if there was safety to be had anywhere. When she finally crossed the wooden bridge over water tea-brown with dead leaves, her sides ached, her wounded shoulder throbbed with her heartbeat.
    She didn’t know what she would say. She didn’t know how she would tell him.
    When she opened the door, she knew there was no need.
    The comfortable, finely appointed furniture was cast to the walls, the carpets pulled back. A wide stretch of pale wooden flooring lay bare and empty as a clearing. The air smelled of rain and smoke. Maati, dressed in formal robes poorly tied, knelt in the center of the space. His skin was ashen, his hair half-wild. A book lay open before him, bound in leather, its pages covered in beautiful script. He was chanting, a soft sibilant flow that seemed to echo against the walls and move back into itself, as complex as music. Liat watched, fascinated, as Maati shifted back and forth, his lips moving, his hands restless. Something like a wind pressed against her without disturbing the folds of her robes. A sense of profound presence, like standing before the Khai only a thousand times as intense and a thousand times less humane.
    ‘Stop this!’ she screamed even, it seemed, as she understood. ‘Stop!’
    She rushed forward, pushing through the thick presence, the air as oppressive as a furnace, but with something besides heat. Maati seemed to hear her voice distantly. His head turned, his eyes opened, and he lost the thread of the chant. Echoes fell out of phase with each other, their rhythms collapsing like a crowd that had been clapping time falling into mere applause. And then the room was silent and empty again except for the two of them.
    ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You said that it was too near what Heshai had done before. You said that it couldn’t work. You said so, Maati.’
    ‘I have to try,’ he said. The words were so simple they left her empty. She simply folded beside him, her legs tucked beneath her. Maati blinked like he was only half-awake. ‘I have to try. I think, perhaps, if I don’t wait . . . if I do it now, maybe Seedless isn’t all the way gone . . . I can pull him back before Heshai’s work has entirely . . .’
    It was what she needed, hearing the poet’s name. It gave her something to speak to. Liat took his hand in hers. He winced a little, and she relaxed her grip, but not enough to let him go.
    ‘Heshai’s dead, Maati. He’s gone. And whether he’s dead for an hour or a year, he’s just as dead. Seedless . . . Seedless is gone. They’re both gone.’
    Maati shook his head.
    ‘I can’t believe that,’ he said. ‘I understand Heshai better than anyone else. I know Seedless. It’s early, and there isn’t much time, but if I can only . . .’
    ‘It’s too late. It’s too late, and if you do this, it’s no better than sinking yourself in the river. You’ll die, Maati. You told me that. You did. If a poet fails to capture the andat, he dies. And this . . .’ She nodded to the open book written in a dead man’s hand. ‘It won’t work. You’re the one who said so.’
    ‘It’s different,’ he said.
    ‘How?’
    ‘Because I have to try. I’m a poet, love. It’s what I am. And you know as well as I do that if Seedless escapes, there’s nothing. There’s nothing to take his place.’
    ‘So there’s nothing,’ she said.
    ‘Saraykeht . . .’
    ‘Saraykeht is a city, Maati. It’s roads and walls and people