Utah carefully opened the door and stepped out into the tunnel.
The physician set to watch over I)anat took a pose of obeisance to Otah,
and Otah replied with one of thanks before walking to the North, and to
the broad spiral stairway that led tip to the higher chambers of the
underground palace or else down to Otah's own rooms and the women's
quarters. Small brass lanterns filled the air with their warmth and the
scent of oil. The walls were lighter than sandstone and shone brighter
than the Hanes seemed to warrant. At the stairway, he hesitated.
Above him, Nlachi was beginning its descent into the other city, washing
down into the rooms and corridors reserved for the deep, long winter
that was almost upon them. The bathhouses far above had emptied their
pipes, shunting the water from their kilns down to lower pools. The
towers were being filled with goods of summer, the great platforms
crawling tip their tracks in the unforgiving stone, and then down again.
In the wide, vaulted corridors that would become the main roads and
public squares of the winter, beggars sang and food carts filled the air
with rich, warm scents: beef soup and peppered pork, fish on hot rice,
almond milk and honey cakes. The men and women pulling the carts would
he calling, luring the curious and the hungry and the almost-hungry.
Only, of course, they wouldn't he there this winter. Food was no longer
an item available for trade. It was being rationed out by the utkhaiem
and by the exquisite mechanisms that Kiyan had put in place. The men and
women of Cetani had been housed there or in the mines along the plain
even before Otah and his army had returned with the news that the Galts
had been turned back. Now, with the quarters being shared, there were
two and sometimes three families sharing the space meant for one.
There was a part of him that wanted badly to take the stairs leading up,
to go out of the palaces, and into the webwork of passages and tunnels
one layered upon another that were his city. He knew it was an illusion
to think that seeing things would improve them, make them easier to
control and make right. But it was a powerful illusion.
Ile sighed and took the descending stairs. ']'he women's
quartersdesigned to accommodate a Khai's dozen or more wives-had been
changed over to smaller, more private rooms by the addition of a few
planks of wood and tapestries taken from the palaces above. The utkhaiem
of Cetani-husbands and wives together-found some accommodations there.
It had seemed an obvious choice, and Kiyan had never particularly made
use of her rooms there. And still it seemed odd to have people so close.
Late in the night, he could sometimes hear the voices of people passing by.
The great blue and gold doors to his private apartments stood closed,
two guards on either side. Otah noticed as he accepted their salutes how
quickly he had come to think of these men as guards where before they
had only been servants. "Their duties were no different, their robes
just the same. It wasn't the world that had changed. It was him.
I IC found Kiyan sitting at a low table, combing her hair with a
widetoothed comb. Wordless, he took it from her, sitting beside and
behind her, and did the little task himself. Her hair was coarser than
it had been once, and so shot with white that it seemed almost as much
silver as black. I le saw the subtle curve in the shape of her cheek as