Shadow and Betrayal

was already falling as he closed the door, truly alone for the first time in weeks. The journey from his home in the Dai-kvo’s village wasn’t the half-season’s trek he would have had from Saraykeht, but it was enough, and Maati didn’t enjoy the constant companionship of strangers on the road.
    A fire had been lit in the grate, and warm tea and cakes of honeyed almonds waited for him at a lacquered table. He lowered himself into the chair, rested his feet, and closed his eyes. Being here, in this place, had a sense of unreality to it. To have been entrusted with anything of importance was a surprise after his loss of status. The thought stung, but he forced himself to turn in toward it. He had lost a great deal of the Dai-kvo’s trust between his failure in Saraykeht and his refusal to disavow Liat, the girl who had once loved Otah-kvo but left both him and the fallen city to be with Maati, when it became clear she was bearing his child. If there had been time between the two, perhaps it might have been different. One scandal on the heels of the other, though, had been too much. Or so he told himself. It was what he wanted to believe.
    A scratch at the door roused him from his bitter reminiscences. He straightened his robes and ran a hand through his hair before he spoke.
    ‘Come in.’
    The door slid open and a young man of perhaps twenty summers wearing the brown robes of a poet stepped in and took a pose of greeting. Maati returned it as he considered Cehmai Tyan, poet of Machi. The broad shoulders, the open face. Here, Maati thought, is what I should have been. A talented boy poet who studied under a master while young enough to have his mind molded to the right shape. And when the time came, he had taken that burden on himself for the sake of his city. As I should have done.
    ‘I only just heard you’d arrived,’ Cehmai Tyan said. ‘I left orders at the main road, but apparently they don’t think as much of me as they pretend.’
    There was a light humor in his voice and manner. As if this were a game, as if he were a person whom anyone in Machi - or in the world - could truly treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone - it was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat Doru had translated into a human form all those generations ago. This wide-faced, handsome boy could collapse every bridge, level every mountain. The great towers of Machi could turn to a river of stone, fast-flowing and dense as quicksilver, which would lay the city to ruin at his order. And he made light of being ignored as if he were junior clerk in some harbormaster’s house. Maati couldn’t tell if it was an affectation or if the poet was really so utterly naïve.
    ‘The Khai left orders as well,’ Maati said.
    ‘Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is acceptable with your apartments?’
    ‘I . . . I really don’t know. I haven’t really looked around yet. Too busy sitting on something that doesn’t move, I suppose. I close my eyes, and I feel like I’m still jouncing around on the back of a cart.’
    The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of self-confidence and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion beside the fire, legs crossed under him.
    ‘I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning, ’ Cehmai said. ‘The man who guards the library is . . . he’s a good man, but he’s protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the ages.’
    ‘Like a poet,’ Maati said.
    Cehmai grinned. ‘I suppose so. Only he’d have made a terrible poet. He’s puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people in the city can read. If he’d ever been given something important to do, he’d have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to you, I expect he’ll be fine. It’s that first negotiation that’s tricky.’
    Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.
    ‘There’s no call to take you from your duties,’ he said. ‘I expect the order of the Khai will suffice.’
    ‘I wouldn’t only be doing it as a favor to you, Maati-kvo,’ Cehmai said. The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn’t seem to notice