Shadow and Betrayal

and warehouses and statues. It doesn’t know you. It doesn’t love you. It’s me who does that. I love you. Please, Maati, do not do this.’
    Slowly, carefully, Maati took his hand from hers. When he smiled, it was as much sorrow as fondness.
    ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘I have something I need to do. If it works out as I hope, I’ll find you.’
    Liat rose. The room was hazy with tears, but sorrow wasn’t what warmed her chest and burned her skin. It was rage, rage fueled by pain.
    ‘You can kill yourself if you like,’ she said. ‘You can do this thing now and die, and they may even talk about you like a hero. But I’ll know better.’
    She turned and walked out, her heart straining. On the steps, she stopped. The sun shone cool over the bare trees. She closed her eyes, waiting to hear the grim, unnatural chant begin again behind her. Crows hopped from branch to branch, and then as if at a signal, rose together and streamed off to the south. She stood for almost half a hand, the chill air pressing into her flesh.
    She wondered how long she could wait there. She wondered where Itani was now, and if he knew what had happened. If he would ever forgive her for loving more than one man. She chewed at the inside of her cheek until it hurt.
    Behind her, the door scraped open. Maati looked defeated. He was tucking the leatherbound book into his sleeve as he stepped out to her.
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go back to the Dai-kvo and tell him I’ve failed.’
    She stepped close to him, resting her head against his shoulder. He was warm, or the day had cooled her even more than she’d thought. For a moment, she remembered the feeling of Itani’s broad arms and the scent of his skin.
    ‘Thank you,’ she said.
     
    It was three weeks now since the poet had died. Three weeks was too long, Amat knew, for a city to hold its breath. The tension was still there - the uncertainty, the fear. It showed in the faces of the men and women in the street and in the way they held their bodies. Amat heard it in the too-loud laughter, and angry words of drunkards in the soft-quarter streets. But the initial shock was fading. Time, suspended by the sudden change of losing the andat, was moving forward again. And that, as much as anything, drew her out, away from the protection of the comfort house and into the city. Her city.
    In the gray of winter fog, the streets were like memories - here a familiar fountain emerged, took shape, and form and weight. The dark green of the stone glistened in the carvings of ship and fish, eagle and archer. And then as she passed, they faded, becoming at last a darkness behind her, and nothing more. She stopped at a stand by the seafront to buy a paper sack of roasted almonds, fresh from the cookfire and covered with raw sugar. The woman to whom Amat handed her length of copper took a pose of gratitude, and Amat moved to the water’s edge, considering the half-hidden waves, the thousand smells of the seafront - salt and spiced foods, sewage and incense. She blew sharply through pursed lips to cool the sweets before she bit into them, as she had when she was a girl, and she prepared herself for the last meeting. When the sack was empty, she crumpled it and let it drop into the sea.
    House Wilsin was among the first to make its position on the future known by its actions. Even as she walked up the streets to the north, moving steadily toward the compound, carts passed her, heading the other way. The warehouses were being cleared, the offices packed into crates bound for Galt and the Westlands. When she reached the familiar courtyard, the lines of men made her think of ants on sugarcane. She paused at the bronze Galtic Tree, considering it with distaste and, to her surprise, amusement. Three weeks was too long, apparently, for her to hold her breath either.
    ‘Amat-cha?’
    She shifted. Epani, her thin-faced, weak-spirited replacement, stood in a pose of welcome belied by the discomfort on his face. She answered it with a pose of her own, more graceful and appropriate.
    ‘Tell him I’d like to speak with him, will you?’
    ‘He isn’t . . . that is . . .’
    ‘Epani-cha. Go, tell him I’m here and I want to speak with him. I won’t burn the place down while you do it.’
    Perhaps it was the dig that set him moving. Whatever did it, Epani retreated into the dark recesses of the compound. Amat walked to the fountain, listening to the play of the water as though it was the voice