Servants came in, their eyes wide as little moons, their hands
fluttering over the carnage of his dinner.
"What is it?" Otah said.
"Not here. Not where someone might hear us."
Sinja turned and walked from the room. Otah hesitated, mumbled an
obscenity that made the servants turn their faces away, and followed. As
his own anger faded, he saw the tension in Sinja's shoulders and through
his neck. They were the sorts of signs he should have picked up on at
once. He was tired. He was slipping.
Sinja was quartered in apartments of the third palace, where the Khai
Saraykeht's second son would have lived, had there been a Khai Saraykeht
or any sons. The walls were black marble polished until the darkness
itself shone in the torchlight. Doors of worked silver still showed
where gems had been wrenched from them by Galtic hands. They were
beautiful all the same. Perhaps more beautiful than when they had been
intact; scars created character.
Without speaking, Sinja went to each window in turn, poking his head out
into the night, then closing outer shutters and inner. Otah stood, arms
in his sleeves, unease growing in his heart.
"What is this?" Otah said, but the man only took a pose that asked
patience and continued in his errand. At the last, he looked out into
the corridor, sent the servant there away, then closed and bolted the
main door.
"We have a problem, Otah-cha," Sinja said. He was breathing hard, like a
man who'd run up stairs.
"We have a hundred of them," Otah said.
"The others may not matter," a woman's voice said from the shadows of
the bedchamber. Otah turned.
Idaan was shorter than he remembered her, wider through the shoulders
and the hips. Her hair was gray, her robe a cheaply dyed green and
travel-stained. Otah took a step back without meaning to. His sister's
appearance chilled his heart like an omen of death, but he wouldn't let
it show.
"Why are you here?" he said.
His exiled sister pursed her lips and shrugged.
"Gratitude," she said. "You did away with my lover and his family. You
took everything I had, including my true name, and sent me out into the
world to survive as best I could."
"I'm not sorry," Otah said.
"And I am? It's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me," Idaan
said. "I mean that. And I'm here to repay the debt. You're in trouble,
brother mine, and I'm the only one who can warn you. The andat are
coming back to the world. And this time, the poets won't be answering to
you."
8
Autumn came early on the high plains. Even though the leaves were as
green, the grasses as thick, Maati felt the change. It wasn't a chill,
but the presentiment of one: a sharpness to air that had been soft and
torpid with summer heat. Another few weeks and the trees would turn to