work. Machi had, Cehmai assured him, the deepest tunnels in the world.
NIaati did not ask if they were the safest.
They found the mine's overseer here in the depths. Voices seemed to
carry better in the watery tunnels than up above, but Maati could not
make out the words clearly until they were almost upon him. A small,
thick-set man with a darkness to him that made Maati think of grime
worked so deeply into skin that it would never come clean, he took a
pose of welcome as they approached.
"We've an honored guest come to the city," Cehmai said.
"We've had many honored guests in the city," the overseer said, with a
grin. "Damn few in the bottom of the hole, though. There's no palaces
down here."
"But Machi's fortunes rest on its mines," Maati said. "So in a sense
these are the deepest cellars of the palaces. The ones where the best
treasures are hidden."
The overseer grinned.
"I like this one," he said to Cehmai. "He's got a quick head on him."
"I heard about the pumps the Khai's eldest son had designed," Maati
said. "I was wondering if you could tell me of them?"
The grin widened, and the overseer launched into an expansive and
delighted discussion of water and mines and the difficulty of removing
the one from the other. Maati listened, struggling to follow the
vocabulary and grammar particular to the trade.
"He had a gift for them," the overseer said, at last. His voice was
melancholy. "We'll keep at them, these pumps, and they'll get better,
but not like they would have with Biitrah-cha on them."
"He was here, I understand, on the day he was killed," Maati said. He
saw the young poet's head shift, turning to consider him, and he ignored
it as he had the andat's.
"That's truth. And I wish he'd stayed. His brothers aren't bad men, but
they aren't miners. And ... well, he'll be missed."
"I had thought it odd, though," Nlaati said. "Whichever brother killed
him, they had to know where he would be-that he would be called out
here, and that the work would take so much of the day that he wouldn't
return to the city itself."
"I suppose that's so," the overseer said.
"Then someone knew your pumps would fail," Maati said.
The lamplight flickered off the surface of the water, casting shadows up
the overseer's face as this sank in. Cehmai coughed. Maati said nothing,
did not move, waited. If any man here had been involved with it, the
overseer was most likely. But Maati saw no rage or wariness in his
expression, only the slow blooming of implication that might be expected
in a man who had not thought the murder through. So perhaps he could be
used after all.
"You're saying someone sabotaged my pumps to get him out here," the
overseer said at last.
Maati wished deeply that Cehmai and his andat were not presentthis was a
thing better done alone. But the moment had arrived, and there was
nothing to be done but go forward. The servants at least were far enough