lifted him to their shoulders, he called out to the messenger.
"Follow close," he said, his hands flowing into a pose of command with
the ease of long practice. "I want to hear everything you know before we
get there."
They moved quickly through the grounds of the palaces-the famed towers
rising above them like forest trees above rabbits-and into the
black-cobbled streets of Machi. Servants and slaves took abject poses as
Biitrah passed. The few members of the utkhaiem awake and in the city
streets took less extreme stances, each appropriate to the difference in
rank between themselves and the man who might one day renounce his name
and become the Khai Machi.
Biitrah hardly noticed. His mind turned instead upon his passionthe
machinery of mining: water pumps and ore graves and hauling winches. He
guessed that they would reach the low town at the mouth of the mine
before the fast sun of early spring had moved the width of two hands.
They took the south road, the mountains behind them. They crossed the
sinuous stone bridge over the Tidat, the water below them still smelling
of its mother glacier. The plain spread before them, farmsteads and low
towns and meadows green with new wheat. Trees were already pushing forth
new growth. It wouldn't be many weeks before the lush spring took root,
grabbing at the daylight that the winter stole away. The messenger told
him what he could, but it was little enough, and before they had reached
the halfway point, a wind rose whuffling in Biitrah's ears and making
conversation impossible. The closer they came, the better he recalled
these particular mines. They weren't the first that House Daikani had
leased from the Khai-those had been the ones with six ventilation
shafts. "These had four. And slowly-more slowly than it once had-his
mind recalled the details, spreading the problem before him like
something written on slate or carved from stone.
By the time they reached the first outbuildings of the low town, his
fingers had grown numb, his nose had started to run from the cold, he
had four different guesses as to what might have gone wrong, and ten
questions in mind whose answers would determine whether he was correct.
He went directly to the mouth of the mine, forgetting to stop for even
bread and tea.
HIAMI SAT BY THE BRAZIER, KNOTTING A SCARF FROM SILK TIIREAD AND
LIStening to a slave boy sing old tunes of the l- mpire.
Almost-forgotten emperors loved and fought, lost, won, and died in the
high, rich voice. Poets and their slave spirits, the andat, waged their
private battles sometimes with deep sincerity and beauty, sometimes with
bedroom humor and bawdy rhymes-but all of them ancient. She couldn't
stand to hear anything written after the great war that had destroyed
those faraway palaces and broken those song-recalled lands. The new
songs were all about the battles of the Khaiem-three brothers who held
claim to the name of Khai. Two would die, one would forget his name and
doom his own sons to another cycle of blood. Whether they were laments
for the fallen or celebrations of the victors, she hated them. They
weren't songs that comforted her, and she didn't knot scarves unless she
needed comfort.