"Does that offend you?"
A gnat landed on the back of Cehmai's hand. The tiny wings tickled, but
he looked at it carefully. A small gray insect unaware of its danger.
With a puff of breath, he New it into the darkness. The andat waited
silently for an answer.
"It should," Cehmai said at last.
"Perhaps you can work on that."
"Being offended?"
"If you think you should be."
The storm in the back of him mind shifted. The constant thought that was
this thing at his side moved, kicking like a babe in the womb or a
prisoner testing the walls of its cell. Cehmai chuckled.
"You aren't trying to help," he said.
"No," the andat agreed. "Not particularly."
"Did the others understand their lovers? The poets before me?"
"How can I say? They loved women, and were loved by them. They used
women and were used by them. You may have found a way to put me on a
leash, but you're only men."
THE IRONY WAS THAT, HIS WOUND NOT FULLY HEALED, MAATI SPENT MORE time in
the library than he had when he had been playing at scholarship. Only
now, instead of spending his mornings there, he found it a calm place to
retire when the day's work had exhausted him; when the hunt had worn him
thin. It had been fifteen days now since Itani Noygu had walked away
from the palaces and vanished. Fourteen days since the assassin had put
a dagger in Maati's own guts. Thirteen days since the fire in the cages.
He knew now as much as he was likely to know of Itani Noygu, the courier
for House Siyanti, and almost nothing of Otah-kvo. Irani had worked in
the gentleman's trade for nearly eight years. He had lived in the
eastern islands; he was a charming man, decent at his craft if not
expert. He'd had lovers in "Ian-Sadar and tltani, but had broken things
off with both after he started keeping company with a wayhouse keeper in
Udun. His fellows were frankly disbelieving that this could be the rogue
Otah Machi, night-gaunt that haunted the dreams of Machi. But where he
probed and demanded, where he dug and pried, pleaded and coddled and
threatened, there was no sign of Otah-kvo. Where there should have been
secrecy, there was nothing. Where there should have been meetings with
high men in his house, or another house, or somebody, there was nothing.
There should have been conspiracy against his father, his brothers, the
city of his birth. There was nothing.
All of which went to confirm the conclusion that Maati had reached,
bleeding on the paving stones. Otah was not scheming for his father's
chair, had not killed Biitrah, had not hired the assassin to attack him.
And yet Otah was here, or had been. Maati had written to the Daikvo,
outlining what he knew and guessed and only wondered, but he had
received no word hack as yet and might not for several weeks. By which
time, he suspected, the old Khai would be dead. That thought alone tired
him, and it was the library that he turned to for distraction.
He sat back now on one of the thick chairs, slowly unfurling a scroll
with his left hand and furling it again with his right. In the space