Shadow and Betrayal

Otah said, making a joke of his sudden unease. He didn’t recall saying anything about Maj, and it occurred to him exactly how dangerous that night had been.
    ‘If you had, I’d make it a point to forget them,’ Amiit said. ‘Nothing a drunk man says on the day his woman leaves him should be held against him. It’s poor form. And this is, after all, a gentleman’s trade, ne?’
    Otah took a pose of agreement.
    ‘I’ll report what I find when I get back,’ he said, unnecessarily. ‘Assuming I haven’t frozen to death on the roads.’
    ‘Be careful up there, Itani. Things are uncertain when there’s the scent of a new Khai in the wind. It’s interesting, and it’s important, but it’s not always safe.’
    Otah shifted to a pose of thanks, to which his supervisor replied in kind, his face so pleasantly unreadable that Otah genuinely didn’t know how deep the warning ran.

3
    W hen Maati considered the mines - something he had rarely had occasion to do - he had pictured great holes going deep into the earth. He had not imagined the branchings and contortions of passages where miners struggled to follow veins of ore, the stench of dust and damp, the yelps and howls of the dogs that pulled the flat-bottomed sledges filled with gravel, or the darkness. He held his lantern low, as did the others around him. There was no call to raise it. Nothing more would be seen, and the prospect of breaking it against the stone overhead was unpleasant.
    ‘There can be places where the air goes bad, too,’ Cehmai said as they turned another twisting corner. ‘They take birds with them because they die first.’
    ‘What happens then?’ Maati asked. ‘If the birds die?’
    ‘It depends on how valuable the ore is,’ the young poet said. ‘Abandon the mine, or try to blow out the bad air. Or use slaves. There are men whose indentures allow that.’
    Two servants followed at a distance, their own torches glowing. Maati had the sense that they would all, himself included, have been better pleased to spend the day in the palaces. All but the andat. Stone-Made-Soft alone among them seemed untroubled by the weight over them and the gloom that pressed in when the lanterns flickered. The wide, calm face seemed almost stupid to Maati, the andat’s occasional pronouncements simplistic compared with the thousand-layered comments of Seedless, the only andat he’d known intimately. He knew better than to be taken in. The form of the andat might be different, the mental bindings that held it might place different strictures upon it, but the hunger at its center was as desperate. It was an andat, and it would long to return to its natural state. They might seem as different as a marble from a thorn, but at heart they were all the same.
    And Maati knew he was walking through a tunnel not so tall he could stand to his full height with a thousand tons of stone above him. This placid-faced ghost could bring it down on him as if they’d been crawling through a hole in the ocean.
    ‘So, you see,’ Cehmai was saying, ‘the Daikani engineers find where they want to extend the mine out. Or down, or up. We have to leave that to them. Then I will come through and walk through the survey with them, so that we all understand what they’re asking.’
    ‘And how much do you soften it?’
    ‘It varies,’ Cehmai said. ‘It depends on the kind of rock. Some of them you can almost reduce to putty if you’re truly clear where you want it to be. Then other times, you only want it to be easier to dig through. Most often, that’s when they’re concerned about collapses.’
    ‘I see,’ Maati said. ‘And the pumps? How do those figure in?’
    ‘That was actually an entirely different agreement. The Khai’s eldest son was interested in the problem. The mines here are some of the lowest that are still in use. The northern mines are almost all in the mountains, and so they aren’t as likely to strike water.’
    ‘So the Daikani pay more for being here?’
    ‘No, not really. The pumps he designed usually work quite well.’
    ‘But the payment for them?’
    Cehmai grinned. His teeth and skin were yellowed by the lantern light.
    ‘It was a different agreement,’ Cehmai said again. ‘The Daikani let him experiment with his designs and he let them use them.’
    ‘But if they worked well . . .’
    ‘Other mines would pay the Khai for the use of the pumps if they wished for help building them. Usually, though, the mines will help each