Shadow and Betrayal

free, the house would still turn a profit. It was amazing.
    She took her cane from where it leaned against the desk and pulled herself up. Once she was sure of herself, she took the sheet with her estimates, folded it, and tucked it in her sleeve. There was no call, she thought, leaving it about until she’d spoken with Ovi Niit. And, for all that she thought it useless, it would suffice to answer the question she expected from him. She walked to the door and out to the common room.
    The place was filthy. Children and dogs rolled together on a floor that apparently hadn’t been swept in living memory. Off-shift whores sat at the tables smoking and gossiping and picking ticks out of each other’s flesh. On the east wall was a long alcove where women disfigured by illness or violence or age fashioned obscene implements from leather and cloth. Kirath couldn’t have known how bad this house was. Or else he had been more desperate to be rid of her than she’d guessed. Or cared less for her than she’d imagined.
    One of Niit-cha’s thugs sat on the stairs that led up to the private quarters where the owner of the house kept himself. All eyes shifted to her as she limped over to him. The fat girl sitting nearest the ironbound door to the front house said something to the man beside her and giggled. A red-haired woman - Westlands blood, or Galtic - raised her pale eyebrows and looked away. A boy of five or six summers - another whore - looked up at her and smiled. The smile was enough. She roughed the boy’s hair and walked with what dignity she could muster to the guard.
    ‘Is Niit-cha up there?’ she asked.
    ‘Gone. He’s down to the low market for beef and pork,’ the guard said. He had an odd accent; long vowels and the ends of his words clipped off. Eastern, she thought.
    ‘When he comes in . . .’ She had almost said send him to me. The habit of years. ‘When he comes in, tell him I’ve done what he asked. I’ll be sleeping, but I am at his disposal should he wish to discuss it.’
    ‘Tell him yourself, grandmother,’ the fat girl shouted, but the guard nodded.
    The bed chamber had no windows. At night, a single tallow candle lit the bunks that lined the walls, five beds to a stack like the worst sort of ship’s cabin. Cheap linen was tied over the mouth of each coffin-sized bed in lieu of real netting, and the planks were barely covered by thin, stained mats. The darkness, while not so hot as the kiln of an attic she had hidden in, was still and hot and muggy. Amat found one of the lower bunks unoccupied and crawled into it, her hip scraping in its joint as she did. She pulled her cane in with her for fear someone might take it and didn’t bother tying the linen closed.
    Three days she’d spent in an impossible task, and when she closed her eyes, the crabbed scripts and half-legible papers still danced before her. She willed the visions away, but she might as well have been pushing the tide back with her hands. The bunk above her creaked as the sleeper shifted. Amat wondered whether she could get a cup of the spiked wine, just to take her to sleep. She was bone weary, but restless. She had put Marchat Wilsin and Oshai and the island girl Maj out of her mind while she bent to Ovi Niit’s books. Now that she had paused, they returned and mixed with the work she had finished and that which still lay before her. She shifted on the thin mat, her cane resting uncomfortably beside her. The smell of bodies and perfume and years of cheap tallow disturbed her.
    She would have said that she had not slept so much as fallen to an anxious doze except that the boy had such trouble waking her. His little hands pressed her shoulder, and she was distantly aware that he had done so before - had been doing so for some time.
    ‘Grandmother,’ he said. Again? Yes, said again. She’d been hearing the voice, folding it into her dream. ‘Wake up.’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Are you well?’
    All the world’s ill, why should I be any different? she thought.
    ‘I’m fine. What’s happened?’
    ‘He’s back. He wants to see you.’
    Amat took a pose of thanks that the boy understood even in the cave-dark room and her lying on her side. Amat pulled herself out and up. Curiously, the rest seemed to have helped. Her head felt clearer and her body less protesting. In the main room, she saw how much the light from the high windows had shifted. She’d been asleep for the better part of the afternoon. The whores had shifted