Shadow and Betrayal

the darkness more bearable.
    ‘Perhaps I can be of some use, then,’ Hiami said. ‘What brings you here, sister?’
    To Hiami’s surprise, Idaan blushed, the real color seeming slightly false under her powder.
    ‘I’ve . . . I wanted Biitrah to speak to our father. About Adrah. Adrah Vaunyogi. He and I . . .’
    ‘Ah,’ Hiami said. ‘I see. Have you missed a month?’
    It took a moment for the girl to understand. Her blush deepened.
    ‘No. It’s not that. It’s just that I think he may be the one. He’s from a good family,’ Idaan said quickly, as if she were already defending him. ‘They have interests in a trading house and a strong bloodline and . . .’
    Hiami took a pose that silenced the girl. Idaan looked down at her hands, but then she smiled. The horrified, joyous smile of new love discovered. Hiami remembered how once it had felt, and her heart broke again.
    ‘I will talk to him when he comes back, no matter how dearly he wants his sleep,’ Hiami said.
    ‘Thank you, sister,’ Idaan said. ‘I should . . . I should go.’
    ‘So soon?’
    ‘I promised Adrah I’d tell him as soon as I spoke to my brother. He’s waiting in one of the tower gardens, and . . .’
    Idaan took a pose that asked forgiveness, as if a girl needed to be forgiven for wanting to be with a lover and not a woman her mother’s age knotting silk to fight the darkness in her heart. Hiami took a pose that accepted the apology and released her. Idaan grinned and turned to go. Just as the blue and gold of her robe was about to vanish through the doorway, Hiami surprised herself by calling out.
    ‘Does he make you laugh?’
    Idaan turned, her expression questioning. Hiami’s mind flooded again with thoughts of Biitrah and of love and the prices it demanded.
    ‘Your man. Adrah? If he doesn’t make you laugh, Idaan, you mustn’t marry him.’
    Idaan smiled and took a pose of thanks appropriate for a pupil to her master, and then was gone. Hiami swallowed until she was sure the fear was under control again, picked up her knotwork and called for the slave to return.
     
    The sun was gone, the moon a sliver no wider than a nail clipping. Only the stars answered the miners’ lanterns as Biitrah rose from the earth into darkness. His robes were wet and clung to his legs, the gray and violet turned to a uniform black. The night air was bitingly cold. The mine dogs yipped anxiously and paced in their kennels, their breath pluming like his own. The chief engineer of House Daikani’s mines took a pose of profound thanks, and Biitrah replied graciously, though his fingers were numb and awkward as sausages.
    ‘If it does that again, call for me,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, most high,’ the engineer said. ‘As you command.’
    Biitrah’s guard walked him to the chair, and his bearers lifted him. It was only now, with the work behind him and the puzzles all solved, that he felt the exhaustion. The thought of being carried back to the palaces in the cold and mud of springtime was only slightly less odious than the option of walking under his own power. He gestured to the chief armsman of his guard.
    ‘We’ll stay in the low town tonight. The usual wayhouse.’
    The armsman took a pose of acknowledgment and strode forward, leading his men and his bearers and himself into the unlit streets. Biitrah pulled his arms inside his robes and hugged bare flesh to flesh. The first shivers were beginning. He half regretted now that he hadn’t disrobed before wading down to the lowest levels of the mine.
    Ore was rich down in the plain - enough silver to keep Machi’s coffers full even had there been no other mines here and in the mountains to the north and west - but the vein led down deeper than a well. In its first generation, when Machi had been the most distant corner of the Empire, the poet sent there had controlled the andat Raising-Water, and the stories said that the mines had flowed up like fountains under that power. It wasn’t until after the great war that the poet Manat Doru had first captured Stone-Made-Soft and Machi had come into its own as the center for the most productive mines in the world and the home of the metal trades - ironmongers, silversmiths, Westland alchemists, needlemakers. But Raising-Water had been lost, and no one had yet discovered how to recapture it. And so, the pumps.
    He again turned his mind back on the trouble. The treadmill pumps were of his own design. Four men working together could raise their own