been no couriers today."
Eiah kept her pleasure at the news from her expression.
The palaces of Saraykeht had suffered less under their brief Galtic
occupation than many others had. Nantani had been nearly ruined. Udun
had been razed and never rebuilt. In Saraykeht, it was clear where
statues had once been and were gone, where jewels had been set into the
goldwork around the doorways and been wrenched out, but all the
buildings except the Khai's palace and the library still stood. The
utkhaiem of the city hadn't restored the damage or covered it over. Like
a woman assaulted but with unbroken spirit, Saraykeht wore her scars
without shame. Of all the cities of the Khaiem, she was the least
devastated, the strongest, and the most arrogant in her will to survive.
Eiah thought she might love the city just a little, even as it made her sad.
A singing slave occupied the garden outside Eiah's apartments. Eiah left
the shutters open so that the songs could come through more clearly. A
fire burned in the grate and candles glowed in glass towers. A Galtic
clock marked the hours of the night in soft metallic counterpoint to the
singer, and as she pulled off her robes and prepared for sleep, Eiah was
amazed to see how early it was. The night had hardly exhausted its first
third. It had seemed longer. She put out the candles, pulled herself
into her bed, and drew the netting closed.
The night passed, and the day that followed it, and the day that
followed that. Eiah's life in Saraykeht had long since taken on a
rhythm. The mornings she spent at the palaces working with the court
physicians, the afternoons down in the city or in the low towns that
spread out from Saraykeht. To those who didn't know her, she gave
herself out to be a visitor from Cetani in the north, driven to the
summer cities by hardship. It wasn't an implausible tale. There were
many for whom it was true. And while it couldn't be totally hidden, she
didn't want to be widely known as her father's daughter. Not here. Not yet.
On a morning near the end of her second month in the city-two weeks
after Candles Night-the object of her hunt finally appeared. She was in
her rooms, working on a guide to the treatment of fevers in older
patients. The fire was snapping and murmuring in the grate and a thin,
cold rain tapped at the shutters like a hundred polite mice asking
permission to enter. The scratch at the door startled her. She arranged
her robe and opened the door just as the slave outside it was raising
her hand to scratch again.
"Eiah-cha," the girl said, falling into a pose that was equal parts
apology and greeting. "Forgive me, but there's a man ... he says he has
to speak with you. He has a message."
"From whom?" Eiah demanded.
"He wouldn't say, Most High," the slave said. "He said he could speak
only with you."
Eiah considered the girl. She was little more than sixteen summers. One
of the youngest in the cities of the Khaiem. One of the last.
"Bring him," Eiah said. The girl made a brief pose that acknowledged the
command and fled back out into the damp night. Eiah shuddered and went
to add more coal to the fire. She didn't close the door.