Shadow and Betrayal

taken copper lengths to let him and his cohort roast pigeons over his kiln. He remembered when he’d first come to it, how foreign and frightening it had been. It seemed a lifetime ago.
    And before him was a deeper past. He had never been to the village of the Dai-kvo, never seen the libraries or heard the songs that were only ever sung there. It was what he might have been, what he had refused. It was what his father had hoped he would be, perhaps. How he might have returned to Machi one day and seen which of his memories were true. He hadn’t known, that day marching away from the school, that the price he’d chosen was so dear.
    ‘I hate this part,’ an unfamiliar voice said.
    Otah looked up. The man standing beside him wore robes of deep green. A beard shot with white belied an unlined, youthful face, and the bright, black eyes seemed amused but not unfriendly.
    ‘What do you mean?’ Otah asked.
    ‘The first three or four days on shipboard,’ the man said. ‘Before your stomach gets the rhythm of it. I have these drops of sugared tar that are supposed to help, but they never seem to. It doesn’t seem to bother you, though, eh?’
    ‘Not particularly,’ Otah said, adopting one of his charming smiles.
    ‘You’re lucky. My name’s Orai Vaukheter,’ the man said. ‘Courier of House Siyanti bound at present from Chaburi-tan to Machi - longest damn trip in the cities, and timed to put me on muleback in the north just in time for the first snows. And you? I don’t think I’ve met you, and I’d have guessed I knew everyone.’
    ‘Itani Noyga,’ Otah said, the lie still coming naturally to his lips. ‘Going to Yalakeht to visit my sister.’
    ‘Ah. But from Saraykeht?’
    Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.
    ‘Rumor has it’s difficult times there. Probably a good time to get out.’
    ‘Oh, I’ll be going back. It’s just to see the new baby, and then I’ll be going back to finish my indenture.’
    ‘And the girl?’
    ‘What girl?’
    ‘The one you were thinking about just now, before I interrupted you.’
    Otah laughed and took a pose of query.
    ‘And how are you sure I was thinking about a girl?’
    The man leaned against the railing and looked out. His smile was quick enough, but his complexion was a little green.
    ‘There’s a certain kind of melancholy a man gets the first time he chooses a ship over a woman. It fades with time. It never passes, but it fades.’
    ‘Very poetic,’ Otah said, and changed the subject. ‘You’re going to Machi?’
    ‘Yes. The winter cities. Funny, too. I’m looking forward to it now, because it’s all stone and doesn’t bob around like a cork in a bath. When I get there, I’ll wish I were back here where my piss won’t freeze before it hits the ground. Have you been to the north?’
    ‘No,’ Otah said. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in Saraykeht. What’s it like there?’
    ‘Cold,’ the man said. ‘Blasted cold. But it’s lovely in a stern way. The mines are how they make their trade. The mines and the metalworkers. And the stonemasons who built the place - gods, there’s not another city like Machi in the world. The towers . . . you’ve heard about the towers?’
    ‘Heard them mentioned,’ Otah said.
    ‘I was at the top of one once. One of the great ones. It was high as a mountain. You could see for hundreds of miles. I looked down, and I’ll swear it, the birds were flying below me and I felt like a few more bricks and I’d have been able to touch clouds.’
    The water lapped at the boards of the ship below them, the seagulls cried, but Otah didn’t hear them. For a moment, he was atop a tower. To his left, dawn was breaking, rose and gold and pale blue of robin’s egg. To his right, the land was still dark. And before him, snow covered mountains - dark stone showing the bones of the land. He smelled something - a perfume or a musk that made him think of women. He couldn’t say if the vision was dream or memory or something of both, but a powerful sorrow flowed through him that lingered after the images had gone.
    ‘It sounds beautiful,’ he said.
    ‘I climbed back down as fast as I could,’ the man said, and shuddered despite the heat of the day. ‘That high up, even stone sways.’
    ‘I’d like to go there one day.’
    ‘You’d fit in. You’ve a northern face.’
    ‘So they tell me,’ Otah said, smiling again though he felt somber. ‘I’m not sure, though. I’ve spent quite a few years in the south. I may