and hide their faces. She handed one to Maati and pulled the other on.
When they were both ready, Kiyan dug awkwardly in her doubled sleeve for
a moment before coming out with four lengths of silver that she left on
the table. Seeing Maati's surprise, she smiled.
"We didn't ask for the food and wine," she said. "It's rude to underpay."
"The grapes were sour," Maati said.
Kiyan considered this for a moment and scooped one silver length hack
into her sleeve. They didn't leave through the front door or out to the
alley, but descended a narrow stairway into the tunnels beneath the
city. Someone-the keep or one of Kiyan's conspirators-had left a lit
lantern for them. Kiyan took it in hand and strode into the black
tunnels as assured as a woman who had walked this maze her whole life.
Maati kept close to her, dread pricking at him for the first time.
The descent seemed as deep as the mines in the plain. The stairs were
worn smooth by generations of footsteps, the path they traveled
inhabited by the memory of men and women long dead. At length the stairs
gave way to a wide, tiled hallway shrouded in darkness. Kiyan's small
lantern lit only part way up the deep blue and worked gold of the walls,
the darkness above them more profound than a moonless sky.
The mouths of galleries and halls seemed to gape and close as they
passed. Nlaati could see the scorch marks rising up the walls where
torches had been set during some past winter, the smoke staining the
tiles. A breath seemed to move through the dim air, like the earth exhaling.
The tunnels seemed empty except for them. No glimmer of light came from
the doors and passages they passed, no voices however distant competed
with the rustle of their robes. At a branching of the great hallway,
Kiyan hesitated, then bore left. A pair of great brass gates opened onto
a space like a garden, the plants all designed from silk, the birds
perched on the branches dead and dust-covered.
"Unreal, isn't it?" Kiyan said as she picked her way across the sterile
terrain. "I think they must go a little mad in the winters down here.
All those months without seeing the sunlight."
"I suppose," Maati said.
After the garden, they went down a series of corridors so narrow that
Maati could place his palms on both walls without stretching. She came
to a high wooden doorway with brass fittings that was barred from
within. Kiyan passed the lantern to Maati and knocked a complex pattern.
A scraping sound spoke of the bar being lifted, and then the door swung
in. Three men with blades in their hands stood. The center one smiled,
stepped back and silently gestured them through.
Lanterns filled the stone-walled passage with warm, buttery light and
the scent of burnt oil. There was no door at the end, only an archway
that opened out into a wide, tall space that smelled of sweat and damp
wool and torch smoke. A storehouse, then, with the door frames stuffed
with rope to keep out even a glimmer of light.
Half a dozen men stopped their conversations as Kiyan led him across the
empty space to the overseer's office-a shack within the structure that
glowed from within.
Kiyan opened the office door and stood aside, smiling encouragement to