unfamiliar. He walked to the door and leaned against it, pressing his
ear to the hairline crack between the wood and its stone frame. One
voice rose above the others, its tone commanding. Otah made out the word
"chains."
The voices went away again for so long Otah began to suspect he'd
imagined it all. The scrape of the bar being lifted from the door
startled him. He stepped hack, fear and relief coming together in his
heart. This might be the end. He knew his brother had returned; this
could be his death come for him. But at least it was an end to his time
in this cell. He tried to hold himself with some dignity as the door
swung open. The torches were so bright that Otah could hardly see.
"Good evening, Otah-cha," a man's voice said. "I hope you're well enough
to move. I'm afraid we're in a bit of a hurry."
"Who are you?" Otah asked. His own voice sounded rough. Squinting, he
could make out perhaps ten men in black leather armor. They had blades
drawn. The armsmen lay in a pile against the far wall, stacked like
goods in a warehouse, a black pool of blood surrounding them. The smell
of them wasn't rotten, not yet, but it was disturbingcoppery and
intimate. They had only been dead for minutes. If all of them were dead.
"We're the men who've come to take you out of here," the commander said.
He was the one actually standing in the doorway. He had the long face of
a man of the winter cities, but a westlander's flowing hair. Otah moved
forward and took a pose of gratitude that seemed to amuse him.
"Can you walk?" he asked as Utah came out into the larger room. The
signs of struggle were everywhere-spilled wine, overturned chairs, blood
on the walls. The armsmen had been taken by surprise. Utah put a hand
against the wall to steady himself. The stone felt warm as flesh.
"I'll do what I have to," Otah said.
"That's admirable," the commander said, "but I'm more curious about what
you can do. I've suffered long confinement myself a time or two, and I
know what it does. We can't take the easy way down. We've got to walk.
If you can do this, that's all to the good. If you can't, we're prepared
to carry you, but I need to have you out of the city quickly."
"I don't understand. Did Maati send you?"
"There's better places to discuss this, Otah-cha. We can't go down by
the chains. Even if there weren't more armsmen waiting there, we've just
broken them. Can you walk down the tower?"
A memory of the endlessly turning stairs and the ghost of pain in his
knees and legs. Otah felt a stab of shame, but pulled himself up and
shook his head.
"I don't believe I can," he said. The commander nodded and two of his
men pulled lengths of wood from their backs and fitted them together in
a cripple's litter. There was a small seat for Otah, canted against the
slope of the stairway, and the poles were set one longer than the other
to fit the tight curve. It would have been useless in any other
situation, but for this task it was perfect. As one of the men helped
Otah take his place on it, he wondered if the device had been built for
this moment, or if things like it existed in service of these towers.
The largest of the men spat on his hands and gripped the carrying poles