Shadow and Betrayal

somewhere in these dark reflections, and he dreamed of things more pleasant and less coherent. A dove with black-tipped wings flying through the galleries of the Second Palace; Hiami sewing a child’s dress with red thread and a gold needle too soft to keep its point; the moon trapped in a well and he himself called to design the pump that would raise it. When he woke, troubled by some need his sleep-sodden mind couldn’t quite place, it was still dark. He needed to drink water or to pass it, but no, it was neither of these. He reached to unshutter the candlebox, but his hands were too awkward.
    ‘There now, most high,’ a voice said. ‘Bat it around like that, and you’ll have the whole place in flames.’
    Pale hands righted the box and pulled open the shutters, the candlelight revealing the moon-faced keeper. He wore a dark robe under a gray woolen traveler’s cloak. His face, which had seemed so congenial before, filled Biitrah with a sick dread. The smile, he saw, never reached the eyes.
    ‘What’s happened?’ he demanded, or tried to. The words came out slurred and awkward. Still, the man Oshai seemed to catch the sense of them.
    ‘I’ve come to be sure you’ve died,’ he said with a pose that offered this as a service. ‘Your men drank more than you. Those that are breathing are beyond recall, but you . . . Well, most high, if you see morning the whole exercise will have been something of a waste.’
    Biitrah’s breath suddenly hard as a runner’s, he threw off the blankets, but when he tried to stand, his knees were limp. He stumbled toward the assassin, but there was no strength in the charge. Oshai, if that was his name, put a palm to Biitrah’s forehead and pushed gently back. Biitrah fell to the floor, but he hardly felt it. It was like violence being done to some other man, far away from where he was.
    ‘It must be hard,’ Oshai said, squatting beside him, ‘to live your whole life known only as another man’s son. To die having never made a mark of your own on the world. It seems unfair somehow.’
    Who , Biitrah tried to say. Which of my brothers would stoop to poison?
    ‘Still, men die all the time,’ Oshai went on. ‘One more or less won’t keep the sun from rising. And how are you feeling, most high? Can you get up? No? That’s as well, then. I was half-worried I might have to pour more of this down you. Undiluted, it tastes less of plums.’
    The assassin rose and walked to the bed. There was a hitch in his step, as if his hip ached. He is old as my father , but Biitrah’s mind was too dim to see any humor in the repeated thought. Oshai sat on the bed and pulled the blankets over his lap.
    ‘No hurry, most high. I can wait quite comfortably here. Die at your leisure.’
    Biitrah, trying to gather his strength for one last movement, one last attack, closed his eyes but then found he lacked the will even to open them again. The wooden floor beneath him seemed utterly comfortable; his limbs were heavy and slack. There were worse poisons than this. He could at least thank his brothers for that.
    It was only Hiami he would miss. And the treadmill pumps. It would have been good to finish his design work on them. He would have liked to have finished more of his work. His last thought that held any real coherence was that he wished he’d gotten to live just a little while more.
    He did not know it when his killer snuffed the candle.
     
    Hiami had the seat of honor at the funeral, on the dais with the Khai Machi. The temple was full, bodies pressed together on their cushions as the priest intoned the rites of the dead and struck his silver chimes. The high walls and distant wooden ceiling held the heat poorly; braziers had been set in among the mourners. Hiami wore pale mourning robes and looked at her hands. It was not her first funeral. She had been present for her father’s death, before her marriage into the highest family of Machi. She had only been a girl then. And through the years, when a member of the utkhaiem had passed on, she had sometimes sat and heard these same words spoken over some other body, listened to the roar of some other pyre.
    This was the first time it had seemed meaningless. Her grief was real and profound, and this flock of gawkers and gossips had no relation to it. The Khai Machi’s hand touched her own, and she glanced up into his eyes. His hair, what was left of it, had gone white years before. He smiled gently and took a pose that expressed