"So things with the woman didn't work out?"
"No," Utah said.
"I'm sorry."
"It was entirely my fault."
"If it's true, you're a wise man to know it, and if not, you're a good
man for saying it. Either way."
"I think it would he ... that is, if there are any letters to be
carried, I think travel might be the best thing just now. I don't really
care to stay in Udun."
Amiit sighed and nodded.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Come to my offices in the morning. We'll arrange
something."
Afterwards, they finished the rice wine and talked of nothing
important-of old stories and old travels, the women they had known and
loved or else hated. Or both. Otah said nothing of Kiyan or the north,
and Amiit didn't press him. When Otah rose to leave, he was surprised to
find how drunk he had become. He navigated his way to his room and lay
on the couch, mustering the resolve to pull off his robes. Morning found
him still dressed. He changed robes and went down to the bathhouse,
forcing his mind back over his conversations of the night before. He was
fairly certain he had said nothing to implicate himself or make Amiit
suspect the nature of his falling out with Kiyan. He wondered what the
old man would have made of the truth, had he known it.
The packet of letters waited for him, each sewn and sealed, in a leather
bag on Amiit Foss' desk. Most were for trading houses in Machi, though
there were four that were to go to members of the utkhaiem. Otah turned
the packet in his hands. Behind him, one of the apprentices said
something softly and another giggled.
"You have time to reconsider," Amiit said. "You could go back to her on
your knees. If the letters wait another day, there's little lost. And
she might relent."
Otah tucked the letters into their pouch and slipped it into his sleeve.
"An old lover of mine once told me that everything I'd ever won, I won
by leaving," Otah said.
"The island girl?"
"Did I mention her last night?"
"At length," Amiit said, chuckling. "That particular quotation came up
twice, as I recall. There might have been a third time too. I couldn't
really say."
"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope I didn't tell you all my secrets," Otah
said, making a joke of his sudden unease. He didn't recall saying
anything about Maj, and it occurred to him exactly how dangerous that
night had been.
"If you had, I'd make it a point to forget them," Amiit said. "Nothing a
drunk man says on the day his woman leaves him should be held against
him. It's poor form. And this is, after all, a gentleman's trade, ne?"
Otah took a pose of agreement.
"I'll report what I find when I get back," he said, unnecessarily.
"Assuming I haven't frozen to death on the roads."
"Be careful up there, Itani. Things are uncertain when there's the scent
of a new Khai in the wind. It's interesting, and it's important, but
it's not always safe."
Otah shifted to a pose of thanks, to which his supervisor replied in
kind, his face so pleasantly unreadable that Otah genuinely didn't know
how deep the warning ran.
When Maati considered the mines-something he had rarely had occasion to
do-he had pictured great holes going deep into the earth. He had not
imagined the branchings and contortions of passages where miners
struggled to follow veins of ore, the stench of dust and damp, the yelps
and howls of the dogs that pulled the flatbottomed sledges filled with
gravel, or the darkness. He held his lantern low, as did the others
around him. 't'here was no call to raise it. Nothing more would be seen,
and the prospect of breaking it against the stone overhead was unpleasant.
""There can be places where the air goes bad, too," Cehmai said as they
turned another twisting corner. "They take birds with them because they
die first."
"What happens then?" Maati asked. "If the birds die?"
"It depends on how valuable the ore is," the young poet said. "Abandon
the mine, or try to blow out the had air. Or use slaves. There are men
whose indentures allow that."
Two servants followed at a distance, their own torches glowing. Maati
had the sense that they would all, himself included, have been better
pleased to spend the day in the palaces. All but the andat.
StoneMade-Soft alone among them seemed untroubled by the weight over
them and the gloom that pressed in when the lanterns flickered. The
wide, calm face seemed almost stupid to Maati, the andat's occasional
pronouncements simplistic compared with the thousand-layered comments of
Seedless, the only andat he'd known intimately. He knew better than to
be taken in. 'The form of the andat might be different, the mental
bindings that held it might place different strictures upon it, but the
hunger at its center was as desperate. It was an andat, and it would
long to return to its natural state. They might seem as different as a
marble from a thorn, but at heart they were all the same.
And Maati knew he was walking through a tunnel not so tall he could
stand to his full height with a thousand tons of stone above him. This
placid-faced ghost could bring it down on him as if they'd been crawling
through a hole in the ocean.
"So, you see," Cehmai was saying, "the Daikani engineers find where they
want to extend the mine out. Or down, or up. We have to leave that to
them. Then I will come through and walk through the survey with them, so
that we all understand what they're asking."
"And how much do you soften it?"
"It varies," Cehmai said. "It depends on the kind of rock. Some of them
you can almost reduce to putty if you're truly clear where you want it
to be. Then other times, you only want it to be easier to dig through.
Most often, that's when they're concerned about collapses."
"I see," Maati said. "And the pumps? How do those figure in?"
"That was actually an entirely different agreement. The Khai's eldest
son was interested in the problem. The mines here are some of the lowest
that are still in use. The northern mines are almost all in the
mountains, and so they aren't as likely to strike water."
"So the Daikani pay more for being here?"
"No, not really. The pumps he designed usually work quite well."
"But the payment for them?"
Cehmai grinned. His teeth and skin were yellowed by the lantern light.
"It was a different agreement," Cehmai said again. "The Daikani let him
experiment with his designs and he let them use them."
"But if they worked well ..."
"Other mines would pay the Khai for the use of the pumps if they wished
for help building them. Usually, though, the mines will help each other
on things like that. There's a certain . . . what to call it ...
brotherhood? The miners take care of each other, whatever house they
work for."
"Might we see the pumps?"
"If you'd like," he said. "They're back in the deeper parts of the mine.
If you don't mind walking down farther...."
Maati forced a grin and did not look at the wide face of the andat
turning toward him.
"Not at all," he said. "Let's go down."
The pumps, when he found them at last, were ingenious. A series of
treadmills turned huge corkscrews that lifted the water up to pools
where another corkscrew waited to lift it higher again. They did not
keep the deepest tunnels dry-the walls there seemed to weep as Maati
waded through warm, knee-high water-but they kept it clear enough to
work. Machi had, Cehmai assured him, the deepest tunnels in the world.
NIaati did not ask if they were the safest.
They found the mine's overseer here in the depths. Voices seemed to
carry better in the watery tunnels than up above, but Maati could not
make out the words clearly until they were almost upon him. A small,
thick-set man with a darkness to him that made Maati think of grime
worked so deeply into skin that it would never come clean, he took a
pose of welcome as they approached.
"We've an honored guest come to the city," Cehmai said.
"We've had many honored guests in the city," the overseer said, with a
grin. "Damn few in the bottom of the hole, though. There's no palaces
down here."
"But Machi's fortunes rest on its mines," Maati said. "So in a sense
these are the deepest cellars of the palaces. The ones where the best
treasures are hidden."
The overseer grinned.
"I like this one," he said to Cehmai. "He's got a quick head on him."
"I heard about the pumps the Khai's eldest son had designed," Maati
said. "I was wondering if you could tell me of them?"
The grin widened, and the overseer launched into an expansive and
delighted discussion of water and mines and the difficulty of removing
the one from the other. Maati listened, struggling to follow the
vocabulary and grammar particular to the trade.
"He had a gift for them," the overseer said, at last. His voice was
melancholy. "We'll keep at them, these pumps, and they'll get better,
but not like they would have with Biitrah-cha on them."
"He was here, I understand, on the day he was killed," Maati said. He
saw the young poet's head shift, turning to consider him, and he ignored
it as he had the andat's.
"That's truth. And I wish he'd stayed. His brothers aren't bad men, but
they aren't miners. And ... well, he'll be missed."
"I had thought it odd, though," Nlaati said. "Whichever brother killed
him, they had to know where he would be-that he would be called out
here, and that the work would take so much of the day that he wouldn't
return to the city itself."
"I suppose that's so," the overseer said.
"Then someone knew your pumps would fail," Maati said.
The lamplight flickered off the surface of the water, casting shadows up
the overseer's face as this sank in. Cehmai coughed. Maati said nothing,
did not move, waited. If any man here had been involved with it, the
overseer was most likely. But Maati saw no rage or wariness in his
expression, only the slow blooming of implication that might be expected
in a man who had not thought the murder through. So perhaps he could be
used after all.
"You're saying someone sabotaged my pumps to get him out here," the
overseer said at last.
Maati wished deeply that Cehmai and his andat were not presentthis was a
thing better done alone. But the moment had arrived, and there was
nothing to be done but go forward. The servants at least were far enough
away not to overhear if he spoke softly. Maati dug in his sleeve and
came out with a letter and a small leather pouch, heavy with silver
lengths. He pressed them both into the surprised overseer's hands.
"If you should discover who did, I would very much like to speak with
them before the officers of the utkhaiem or the head of your House. That
letter will tell you how to find me."
The overseer tucked away the pouch and letter, taking a pose of thanks
which Maati waved away. Cehmai and the andat were silent as stones.
"And how long is it you've been working these mines?" Maati asked,
forcing a lightness to his tone he did not feel. Soon the overseer was
regaling them with stories of his years underground, and they were
walking together toward the surface again. By the time Maati stepped out
from the long, sloping throat of the mine and into daylight, his feet
were numb. A litter waited for them, twelve strong men prepared to carry
the three of them back to the palaces. Maati stopped for a moment to
wring the water from the hem of his robes and to appreciate having
nothing but the wide sky above him.
"Why was it the Dai-kvo sent you?" Cehmai asked as they climbed into the
wooden litter. His voice was almost innocent, but even the andat was
looking at Maati oddly.
"There are suggestions that the library may have some old references
that the Dai-kvo lacks. Things that touch on the grammars of the first
poets."
"Ah," Cehmai said. The litter lurched and rose, swaying slightly as the
servants bore them away hack to the palaces. "And nothing more than that?"
"Of course not," Maati said. "What more could there he?"
He knew that he was convincing no one. And that was likely a fine thing.
Maati had spent his first days in Machi learning the city, the courts,