Shadow and Betrayal

said.
    ‘It doesn’t bear any load,’ the overseer said. ‘Gods! Who’s been telling you ghost stories? You’re nervous as a puppy first time down the hole.’
    Cehmai ignored them, looked up, considering the stone above him as if he could see through it. He wanted a path wide as two men walking with their arms outstretched. And it would need to go forward from here and then tilt to the left and then up. Cehmai pictured the distances as if he would walk them. It was about as far from where he was now to the turning point as from the rose pavilion to the library. And then, the shorter leg would be no longer than the walk from the library to Maati’s apartments. He turned his mind to it, pressed the whirlwind, applied it to the stone before him, slowly, carefully loosening the stone in the path he had imagined. Stone-Made-Soft resisted - not in the body that scowled now looking at the tunnel’s blank side, but in their shared mind. The andat shifted and writhed and pushed, though not so badly as it might have. Cehmai reached the turning point, shifted his attention and began the shorter, upward movement.
    The storm’s energy turned and leapt ahead, spreading like spilled water, pushing its influence out of the channel Cehmai’s intention had prepared. Cehmai gritted his teeth with the effort of pulling it back in before the structure above them weakened and failed. The andat pressed again, trying to pull the mountain down on top of them. Cehmai felt a rivulet of sweat run down past his ear. The overseer and the engineer were speaking someplace a long way off, but he couldn’t be bothered by them. They were idiots to distract him. He paused and gathered the storm, concentrated on the ideas and grammars that had tied the andat to him in the first place, that had held it for generations. And when it had been brought to heel, he took it the rest of the way through his pathway and then slowly, carefully, brought his mind, and its, back to where they stood.
    ‘Cehmai-cha?’ the overseer asked again. The engineer was eyeing the walls as if they might start speaking with him.
    ‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I only have a headache.’
    Stone-Made-Soft smiled placidly. Neither of them would tell the men how near they had all just come to dying: Cehmai, because he wished to keep it from them, Stone-Made-Soft, because it would never occur to it to care.
    The overseer took a hand pick from his satchel and struck the wall. The metal head chimed and a white mark appeared on the stone. Cehmai waved his hand.
    ‘To your left,’ he said. ‘There.’
    The overseer struck again, and the pick sank deep into the stone with a sound like a footstep on gravel.
    ‘Excellent,’ the overseer said. ‘Perfect.’
    Even the engineer seemed grudgingly pleased. Cehmai only wanted to get out, into the light and back to the city and his own bed. Even if they left now, they wouldn’t reach Machi before nightfall. Probably not before the night candle hit its half mark.
    On the way back up, the engineer started telling jokes. Cehmai allowed himself to smile. There was no call to make things unpleasant even if the pain in his head and spine was echoing his heartbeats.
    When they reached the light and fresh air, the servants had laid out a more satisfying meal - rice, fresh chickens killed here at the mine, roasted nuts with lemon, cheeses melted until they could be spread over their bread with a blade. Cehmai lowered himself into a chair of strung cloth and sighed with relief. To the south, they could see the smoke of the forges rising from Machi and blowing off to the east. A city perpetually afire.
    ‘When we get there,’ Cehmai said to the andat, ‘we’ll be playing several games of stones. You’ll be the one losing.’
    The andat shrugged almost imperceptibly.
    ‘It’s what I am,’ it said. ‘You may as well blame water for being wet.’
    ‘And when it soaks my robes, I do,’ Cehmai said. The andat chuckled and then was silent. Its wide face turned to him with something like concern. Its brow was furrowed.
    ‘The girl,’ it said.
    ‘What about her?’
    ‘It seems to me the next time she asks if you love her, you could say yes.’
    Cehmai felt his heart jump in his chest, startled as a bird. The andat’s expression didn’t change; it might have been carved from stone. Idaan wept in his memory, and she laughed, and she curled herself in his bedclothes and asked silently not to be sent away. Love, he