forgiven for wanting to he with a lover and not a woman her mother's age
knotting silk to fight the darkness in her heart. Hiami took a pose that
accepted the apology and released her. Idaan grinned and turned to go.
Just as the blue and gold of her robe was about to vanish through the
doorway, Hiami surprised herself by calling out.
"Does he make you laugh?"
Idaan turned, her expression questioning. Hiami's mind flooded again
with thoughts of Biitrah and of love and the prices it demanded.
"Your man. Adrah? If he doesn't make you laugh, Idaan, you mustn't marry
him."
Idaan smiled and took a pose of thanks appropriate for a pupil to her
master, and then was gone. Hiami swallowed until she was sure the fear
was under control again, picked up her knotwork and called for the slave
to return.
THE SUN WAS GONE, THE MOON A SLIVER NO WIDER THAN A NAIL CLIPPING. Only
the stars answered the miners' lanterns as Biitrah rose from the earth
into darkness. His robes were wet and clung to his legs, the gray and
violet turned to a uniform black. The night air was bitingly cold. The
mine dogs yipped anxiously and paced in their kennels, their breath
pluming like his own. The chief engineer of House Daikani's mines took a
pose of profound thanks, and Biitrah replied graciously, though his
fingers were numb and awkward as sausages.
"If it does that again, call for me," he said.
"Yes, most high," the engineer said. "As you command."
Biitrah's guard walked him to the chair, and his bearers lifted him. It
was only now, with the work behind him and the puzzles all solved, that
he felt the exhaustion. The thought of being carried back to the palaces
in the cold and mud of springtime was only slightly less odious than the
option of walking under his own power. He gestured to the chief armsman
of his guard.
"We'll stay in the low town tonight. The usual wayhouse."
The armsman took a pose of acknowledgment and strode forward, leading
his men and his bearers and himself into the unlit streets. Biitrah
pulled his arms inside his robes and hugged hare flesh to flesh. The
first shivers were beginning. He half regretted now that he hadn't
disrobed before wading down to the lowest levels of the mine.
Ore was rich down in the plain-enough silver to keep Machi's coffers
full even had there been no other mines here and in the mountains to the
north and west-but the vein led down deeper than a well. In its first
generation, when Machi had been the most distant corner of the Empire,
the poet sent there had controlled the andat Raising-Water, and the
stories said that the mines had flowed up like fountains under that
power. It wasn't until after the great war that the poet Manat Doru had
first captured Stone-Made-Soft and Machi had come into its own as the
center for the most productive mines in the world and the home of the
metal trades-ironmongers, silversmiths, Westland alchemists,
needlemakers. But Raising-Water had been lost, and no one had yet
discovered how to recapture it. And so, the pumps.
He again turned his mind back on the trouble. The treadmill pumps were