Shadow and Betrayal

water. Cehmai ignored them. The burning would go on through the night until the ashes of the men and the ashes of the coal were indistinguishable. And then a week’s mourning. And then these men weeping or staring, grim or secretly pleased, would meet and decide which of their number would have the honor of sitting on the dead family’s chair and leading the hunt for the man who had murdered his own father. Cehmai found himself unable to care particularly who won or lost, whether the upstart was caught or escaped. Somewhere among all these mourners was the woman he’d come to love, in more pain than she had ever been in since he’d known her. And he - he who could topple towers at a whim and make mountains flow like floodwater - couldn’t find her.
    Instead, he found Maati in brown poet’s robes standing on a raised walkway that overlooked the mourning throng. Though they were on the edge of the ceremony, Cehmai saw the pyre light reflecting in Maati’s fixed eyes. Cehmai almost didn’t approach him, almost didn’t speak. There was a darkness wrapped around the poet. But it was possible he had been there from the ceremony’s beginning. He might know where Idaan was. Cehmai took a pose of greeting which Maati did not return.
    ‘Maati-kvo?’
    Maati looked over first at Cehmai, then Stone-Made-Soft, and then back again at the fire. After a moment’s pause, his face twisted in disgust.
    ‘Not kvo . Never kvo . I haven’t taught you anything, so don’t address me as a teacher. I was wrong. From the beginning, I was wrong.’
    ‘Otah was very convincing,’ Cehmai said. ‘No one thought he would—’
    ‘Not about that. He didn’t do this. Baarath . . . Gods, why did it have to be Baarath that saw it? Prancing, self-important, smug . . .’
    Maati fumbled with a sewn-leather wineskin and took a long, deep, joyless drink from it. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, then held the skin out in offering. Cehmai declined. Maati offered it to the andat, but Stone-Made-Soft only smiled as if amused.
    ‘I thought it was someone in the family. One of his brothers. It had to be. Who else would benefit? I was stupid.’
    ‘Forgive me, Maati-kvo. But no one did benefit.’
    ‘One of them did,’ he said, gesturing out at the mourners. ‘One of them is going to be the new Khai. He’ll tell you what to do, and you’ll do it. He’ll live in the high palaces, and everyone else in the city will lick his ass if he tells them to. That’s what it’s all about. Who has to lick whose ass. And there’s blood enough to fill a river answering that.’ He took another long pull from the wineskin, then dropped it idly to the ground at his feet. ‘I hate all of them.’
    ‘So do I,’ Stone-Made-Soft said, his tone light and conversational.
    ‘You’re drunk, Maati-kvo.’
    ‘Not half enough. Here, look at this. You know what this is?’
    Cehmai glanced at the object Maati had pulled from his sleeve.
    ‘A book.’
    ‘This is my teacher’s masterwork. Heshai-kvo, poet of Saraykeht. The Dai-kvo sent me to him when I was hardly younger than you are now. I was going to study under him, take control of Seedless. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues. We called him Seedless. This is Heshai-kvo’s examination of everything he’d done wrong. Every improvement he could have made to his binding, if he’d had it to do over again. It’s brilliant.’
    ‘But it can’t work, can it?’ Cehmai said. ‘It would be too close . . .’
    ‘Of course not, it’s a refinement of his work, not how to bind Seedless again. It’s a record of his failure. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
    Cehmai grasped for a right answer to the question and ended with honesty.
    ‘No,’ he said.
    ‘Heshai-kvo was a drunkard. He was a failure. He was haunted his whole life by the woman he loved and the child he lost, and every measure of the hatred he had for himself was in his binding. He imagined the andat as the perfect man and implicit in that was the disdain he imagined such a man would feel looking at him. But Heshai was strong enough to look his mistake in the face. He was strong enough to sit with it and catalog it and understand . And the Dai-kvo sent me to him. Because he thought we could be the same. He thought I would understand him well enough to stand in his place.’
    ‘Maati-kvo, I’m sorry. Have you seen Idaan?’
    ‘Well,’ Maati said, ignoring the question as he swayed slightly and frowned at the crowd. ‘I can