Shadow and Betrayal

picture the shape of the Daikani mines, but the excavations in the mountains and plains around Machi were numbered in the dozens, and the details blurred. Perhaps four ventilation shafts. Perhaps six. He would have to go and see.
    His private guard stood ready, bent in poses of obeisance, as he came out into the street. Ten men in ceremonial mail that for all its glitter would turn a knife. Ceremonial swords and daggers honed sharp enough to shave with. Each of his two brothers had a similar company, with a similar purpose. And the time would come, he supposed, that it would descend to that. But not today. Not yet. He had a pump to fix.
    He stepped into the waiting chair, and four porters came out. As they lifted him to their shoulders, he called out to the messenger.
    ‘Follow close,’ he said, his hands flowing into a pose of command with the ease of long practice. ‘I want to hear everything you know before we get there.’
    They moved quickly through the grounds of the palaces - the famed towers rising above them like forest trees above rabbits - and into the black-cobbled streets of Machi. Servants and slaves took abject poses as Biitrah passed. The few members of the utkhaiem awake and in the city streets took less extreme stances, each appropriate to the difference in rank between themselves and the man who might one day renounce his name and become the Khai Machi.
    Biitrah hardly noticed. His mind turned instead upon his passion - the machinery of mining: water pumps and ore graves and hauling winches. He guessed that they would reach the low town at the mouth of the mine before the fast sun of early spring had moved the width of two hands.
    They took the south road, the mountains behind them. They crossed the sinuous stone bridge over the Tidat, the water below them still smelling of its mother glacier. The plain spread before them, farmsteads and low towns and meadows green with new wheat. Trees were already pushing forth new growth. It wouldn’t be many weeks before the lush spring took root, grabbing at the daylight that the winter stole away. The messenger told him what he could, but it was little enough, and before they had reached the halfway point, a wind rose whuffling in Biitrah’s ears and making conversation impossible. The closer they came, the better he recalled these particular mines. They weren’t the first that House Daikani had leased from the Khai - those had been the ones with six ventilation shafts. These had four. And slowly - more slowly than it once had - his mind recalled the details, spreading the problem before him like something written on slate or carved from stone.
    By the time they reached the first outbuildings of the low town, his fingers had grown numb, his nose had started to run from the cold, he had four different guesses as to what might have gone wrong, and ten questions in mind whose answers would determine whether he was correct. He went directly to the mouth of the mine, forgetting to stop for even bread and tea.
     
    Hiami sat by the brazier, knotting a scarf from silk thread and listening to a slave boy sing old tunes of the Empire. Almost-forgotten emperors loved and fought, lost, won, and died in the high, rich voice. Poets and their slave spirits, the andat, waged their private battles sometimes with deep sincerity and beauty, sometimes with bedroom humor and bawdy rhymes - but all of them ancient. She couldn’t stand to hear anything written after the great war that had destroyed those faraway palaces and broken those song-recalled lands. The new songs were all about the battles of the Khaiem - three brothers who held claim to the name of Khai. Two would die, one would forget his name and doom his own sons to another cycle of blood. Whether they were laments for the fallen or celebrations of the victors, she hated them. They weren’t songs that comforted her, and she didn’t knot scarves unless she needed comfort.
    A servant came in, a young girl in austere robes almost the pale of mourning, and took a ritual pose announcing a guest of status equal to Hiami’s.
    ‘Idaan,’ the servant girl said, ‘daughter to the Khai Machi.’
    ‘I know my husband’s sister,’ Hiami snapped, not pausing in her handwork. ‘You needn’t tell me the sky is blue.’
    The servant girl flushed, her hands fluttering toward three different poses at once and achieving none of them. Hiami regretted her words and put down the knotting, taking a gentle pose of