Shadow and Betrayal

bearing with them the memory of the sprawling palaces, the sweet garden, the songs of slaves. There was no room in their minds for sympathy for the families of wealth and power. For men, Otah thought sourly, like himself.
    ‘Eh?’ Epani-cha said, prodding Otah with the toe of his shoe. ‘What did you swallow, Itani? You look sorry.’
    Otah forced a smile and laughed. He was good at that smiling and laughing. Being charming. He took a loose pose of apology.
    ‘Am I lowering the tone?’ he asked. ‘I just got thrown out of the palace. That’s all.’
    ‘Thrown out?’ Tuui Anagath asked, and the others turned, suddenly interested.
    ‘I was just there, minding myself and—’
    ‘And sniffing after Liat,’ one of the others laughed.
    ‘And apparently I attracted some attention. One of the women from House Tiyaan came to me and asked whether I was a factor for House Wilsin. I told her I wasn’t but for some reason she kept speaking with me. She was very pleasant. And apparently her lover took some offense to the conversation and spoke to the palace servants . . .’
    Otah took a pose of innocent confusion that made the others laugh.
    ‘Poor, poor Itani,’ Tuui Anagath said. ‘Can’t keep the women away with a dagger. You should let us do you a favor, my boy. We could tell all the women you broke out in sores down there and had to spend three days a month in a poultice diaper.’
    Otah laughed with them now. He’d won again. He was one of them, just a man like them in no way special. The jokes and stories went on for half a hand, then Otah stood, stretched, and turned to Epani-cha.
    ‘Will you have further need of me, Epani-cha?’
    The thin man looked surprised, but took a pose of negation. Otah’s relationship with Liat was no secret, but living in the compound itself, Epani understood the extent of it better than the others. When Otah shifted to a pose of farewell, he matched it.
    ‘But Liat should be done with the poets shortly,’ Epani said. ‘You don’t want to wait for her?’
    ‘No,’ Otah said, and smiled.
     
    Amat learned. She learned first about the fine workings of a comfort house - the balances between guard and gamesman and showfighter and whore, the rhythm that the business developed like the beat of a heart or the flow of a river. She learned, more specifically, how the money moved through it like blood. And so, she understood better what it was she was searching for in the crabbed scripts and obscure receipts. She also learned to fear Ovi Niit.
    She had seen what happened when one of the other women displeased him. They were owned by the house, and so the watch extended no protection to them. They, unlike her, were easily replaced. She would not have taken their places for her weight in silver.
    Two weeks from four. Or five. Two more, or three, before Marchat’s promised amnesty. She sat in the room, sweltering; the papers stood in piles. Her days were filled with the scratch of pen on paper, the distant voices of the soft quarter, the smell of cheap food and her own sweat and the weak yellow light from the high, thin window.
    The knock, when it came, was soft. Tentative. Amat looked up. Ovi Niit or one of his guards wouldn’t have bothered. Amat jabbed her pen into its inkblock and stretched. Her joints cracked.
    ‘Come in,’ she said.
    She had seen the girl before, but hadn’t heard her name. A smallish one. Young, with a birthmark at one eye that made her seem like a child’s drawing of tears. When she took a pose of apology, Amat saw half-healed marks on her wrists. She wondered which of the payments in her ledgers matched those small wounds.
    ‘Grandmother?’ It was the name by which they all called her.
    ‘What do you want,’ Amat asked, sorry for the harshness of her voice as she heard it. She massaged her hands.
    ‘I know you aren’t to be interrupted,’ the girl said. Her voice was nervous, but not, Amat thought, from fear of an old woman locked in a back closet. Ovi Niit must have given orders to leave her be. ‘But there’s a man. He’s at the door, asking for you.’
    ‘For me?’
    The girl shifted to a pose of affirmation. Amat leaned back. Kirath. It could be Kirath. Or it could be one of the moon-faced Oshai’s minions come to find her and kill her. Ovi Niit might already be spending the gold lengths he’d earned for her death. Amat nodded as much to herself as to the girl.
    ‘What does he look like?’
    ‘Young. Handsome,’ she said, and