Shadow and Betrayal

return. Liat shifted back to the poet and took a pose of acceptance.
    ‘You’re ready?’ Heshai asked, his eyes on Maj’s. The island girl tilted her head, as if hearing a sound she almost recognized. Heshai raised his eyebrows and sighed. Without any visible bidding, Seedless stepped forward, graceful as a dancer. There was a light in his eyes, something like joy. Maati felt an inexplicable twist in his belly.
    ‘No need to struggle, old friend,’ Seedless said. ‘I promised your apprentice that I wouldn’t make you fight me for this one. And you see, I can keep my word when it suits me.’
    The silver bowl chimed like an orange had been dropped in it. Maati looked over, and then away. The thing in the bowl was only settling, he told himself, not moving. Not moving.
    And with an audible intake of breath, the island girl began to scream. The pale blue eyes were open so wide, Maati could see the whites all the way around the iris. Her wide lips pulled back until they were thin as string. Maj bent down, and her hands would have touched the thing in the bowl, cradled it, if the physician had not whisked it away. Liat could only hold the woman’s hands and look at her, confused, while shriek after shriek echoed in the empty spaces of the hall.
    ‘What?’ Heshai-kvo said, his voice fearful and small. ‘What happened? ’

10
    A mat Kyaan walked the length of the seafront with the feeling of a woman half-awakened from nightmare. The morning sun made the waters too bright to look at. Ships rested at the docks, taking on cloth or oils or sugar or else putting off brazil blocks and indigo, wheat and rye, wine and Eddensea marble. The thin stalls still barked with commerce, banners shifting in the breeze. The gulls still wheeled and complained. It was like walking into a memory. She had passed this way every day for years. How quickly it had become unfamiliar.
    Leaning on her cane, she passed the wide mouth of the Nantan and into the warehouse district. The traffic patterns in the streets had changed - the rhythm of the city had shifted as it did from season to season. The mad rush of harvest was behind them, and though the year’s work was still far from ended, the city had a sense of completion. The great trick that made Saraykeht the center of all cotton trade had been performed once more, and now normal men and women would spend their hours and days changing that advantage into power and wealth and prestige.
    She could also feel its unease. Something had happened to the poet. Only listening from her window during the evening, she’d heard three or four different stories about what had happened. Every conversation she walked past was the same - something had happened to the poet. Something to do with House Wilsin and the sad trade. Something terrible. The young men and women in the street smiled as they told each other, excited by the sense of crisis and too young or too poor or too ignorant for the news of yesterday’s events to sicken them with dread. That was for older people. People who understood.
    Amat breathed deeply, catching the scent of the sea, the perfume of grilling meat at the stalls, the unpleasant stench of the dyers’ vats that reached even from several streets away. Her city, with its high summer behind it. In her heart, she still found it hard to believe that she had returned to it, that she was not still entombed in the back office of Ovi Niit’s comfort house. And as she walked, leaning heavily on her cane, she tried not to wonder what the men and women said about her as she passed.
    At the bathhouse, the guards looked at her curiously as they took their poses. She didn’t even respond, only walked forward into the tiled rooms with their echoes and the scent of cedar and fresh water. She shrugged off her robes and went past the public baths to Marchat Wilsin’s little room at the back, just as she always had.
    He looked terrible.
    ‘Too hot,’ he said as she lowered herself into the water. The lacquer tray danced a little on the waves she stirred, but didn’t spill the tea.
    ‘You always say that,’ Amat Kyaan said. Marchat sighed and looked away. There were bags under his eyes, dark as bruises. His face, scowl-set, held a grayish cast. Amat leaned forward and pulled the tea closer.
    ‘So,’ she said. ‘I take it things went well.’
    ‘Don’t.’
    Amat sipped tea from her bowl and considered him. Her employer, her friend.
    ‘Then what is there left for us to say?’ she