Shadow and Betrayal

You know it. I did what I could do, and it got past me. Now I can either press the suit forward despite it all, raise what suspicions against Galt I can in the quarters who will listen to me at the cost of what credibility I have left, or else I can do this. Recreate myself as a legitimate business, organize the city, bind the wounds that can be bound. Forge connections between people who think they’re rivals. But I can’t do both. I can’t have people saying I’m an old woman frightened of shadows while I’m trying to make weavers and rope-makers who’ve been undercutting each other for the last three generations shake hands.’
    Marchat Wilsin’s eyebrows rose. She watched him consider her. The guilt and horror, the betrayals and threats fell away for a moment, and they were the players in the game of get and give that they had been at their best. It made Amat’s heart feel bruised, but she kept it out of her face as he kept his feelings from his. The lantern flame spat, shuddered, and stood back to true.
    ‘It won’t work,’ he said at last. ‘They’ll hold to all their traditional prejudices and alliances. They’ll find ways to bite each other while they’re shaking hands. Making them all feel loyal to each other and to the city? In the Westlands or Galt or the islands, you might have a chance. But among the Khaiem? It’s doomed.’
    ‘I’ll accept failure when I’ve failed,’ Amat said.
    ‘Just remember I warned you. What’s your offer for the warehouses? ’
    ‘Sixty lengths of silver a year and five hundredths of the profit.’
    ‘That’s insultingly low, and you know it.’
    ‘You haven’t figured in that it will keep me from telling the world what the Galtic Council attempted in allying with Seedless against his poet. That by itself is a fair price, but we should keep up appearances, don’t you think?’
    He thought about it. The tiny upturn of his lips, the barest of smiles, told her what she wanted to know.
    ‘And you really think you can make a going project of this? Combing raw cotton for its seeds isn’t a pleasant job.’
    ‘I have a steady stream of women looking to retire from one less pleasant than that,’ she said. ‘I think the two concerns will work quite nicely together.’
    ‘And if I agree to this,’ Marchat said, his voice suddenly softer, the game suddenly sliding out from its deep-worn track, ‘does that mean you’ll forgive me?’
    ‘I think we’re past things like forgiveness,’ she said. ‘We’re the servants of what we have to do. That’s all.’
    ‘I can live with that answer. All right, then. I’ll have Epani draw up contracts. Should we take them to that whorehouse of yours?’
    ‘Yes,’ Amat said. ‘That will do nicely. Thank you, Marchat-cha.’
    ‘It’s the least I could do,’ he said and drank at last from the bowl of cooling tea at his elbow. ‘And also likely the most I can. I don’t imagine my uncle will understand it right off. Galtic business doesn’t have quite the same subtlety you find with the Khaiem.’
    ‘It’s because your culture hasn’t finished licking off its caul,’ Amat said. ‘Once you’ve had a thousand years of Empire, things may be different. ’
    Marchat’s expression soured and he poured himself more tea. Amat pushed her own bowl toward him, and he leaned forward to fill it. The steaming teapot clinked against the porcelain.
    ‘There will be a war,’ Amat said at last. ‘Between your people and mine. Eventually, there will be a war.’
    ‘Galt’s a strange place. It’s so long since I’ve been there, I don’t know how well I’ll fit once I’m back. We’ve done well by war. In the last generation, we’ve almost doubled our farmlands. There are places that rival the cities of the Khaiem, if you’ll believe that. Only we do it with ruthlessness and bloody-minded determination. You’d have to be there, really, to understand it. It isn’t what you people have here.’
    Amat took an insistent pose, demanding an answer to her question. Marchat sighed; a long, slow sound.
    ‘Yes, someday. Someday there will be a war, but not in our lifetimes. ’
    She shifted to a pose that was both acknowledgment and thanks. Marchat toyed with his teabowl.
    ‘Amat, before . . . before you go, there’s a letter I wrote you. When it looked like the suit was going to go to the Khai and sweet hell was going to rain down on Galt in general and me in particular. I want you to have it.’
    His face was as