measure of respect and protection. It was poor form to assault a healer,
in part because of the very real chance of requiring her services one
day. The toughs and beggars who haunted the alleys near the seafront
might meet her eyes as she walked past, might even hail her with an
obscenity or veiled threat, but they had never followed her. And so she
didn't see that she had any need of the palace guard. If her work
protected her, there was no reason to call upon her blood.
She stopped at the bronze statue of Shian Sho. The last emperor gazed
out wistfully over the sea, or perhaps back through the ages to a time
when his name had been important. Eiah pulled her robe tight around
herself and squatted at his metalwork feet, waiting for the firekeeper
and his steamcart. In daytime, she would have walked the streets north
and uphill to the palaces, but the seafront wasn't the worst part of
Saraykeht. It was safer to wait.
To the west, the soft quarter was lit in its nightly festival. To the
east, the bathhouses, the great stone warehouses, rarely more than
half-filled now. Beyond that, the cohort houses of the laborers were
darker, but far from unpeopled. Eiah heard a man's laugh from one
direction, a woman's voice lifted in drunken song from another. The
ships that filled the seafront docks stood silent, their masts like
winter trees, and the ocean beyond them gray with a low mist.
There was a beauty in it, and a familiarity. Eiah had made her studies
in places like this, whatever city she'd been in. She'd sewn closed the
flesh of whores and thieves as often as soothed the coughs and pains of
the utkhaiem in their perfumed palaces. It was a decision she'd made
early in her career, not to be a court physician, not to care only for
the powerful. Her father had approved, and even, she thought, been proud
of the decision. For all their differences-and there were many-it was
one reason she loved him.
The steamcart appeared first as a sound: the rough clatter of iron-bound
wheels against the bricks of the street, the chuff of the boiler, the
low rumble of the kiln. And then, as Eiah stood and shook the dirt and
grime from her robe, it turned into the wide street they called the
Nantan and came down toward the statue. In the light of the kiln, she
saw seven or perhaps eight figures clinging to the cart's side. The
firekeeper himself sat on the top, guiding the cart with a series of
levers and pedals that made the most ornate loom seem simple. Eiah
stepped forward as the cart trundled past, took one of the leather
grips, and hoisted herself up to the cart's side runner along with the
others.
"Two coppers," the firekeeper said without looking at her.
Eiah dug in her sleeve with her free hand, came out with two lengths of
copper, and tossed them into the lacquer box at the firekeeper's feet.
The man nodded rather than take any more-complex pose. His hands and
eyes were occupied. The breeze shifted, a waft of smoke and thick steam
washing her in its scent, and the cart lurched, shuddered, and turned
again to the north along its constant route. Eiah sighed and made
herself comfortable. It would take her almost the time for the moon to
move the width of her hand before she stepped down at the pathway that
led to the palaces. In the meantime, she watched the night city pass by her.
The streets nearest the seafront alternated between the high roofs of
warehouses and the low of the tradesmen's shops. In the right season,
the clack of looms would have filled the air, even this late at night.
The streets converged on wide squares where the litter of the week's
market still fouled the street: cheeses dropped to the cobbles and trod
into mush, soiled cabbages and yams, even a skinned rabbit too corrupt
to sell and not worth hauling away. One of the men on the far side of
the steamcart stepped down, shifting the balance slightly. Eiah watched
as his red-brown cloak passed into darkness.
There had been a time, she knew, when the streets had been safe to walk
down, even alone. There had been a time beggars with their boxes would
have been on the corners, filling the night with plaintive, amateur
song. She had never seen it, never heard it. It was a story she knew,
Old Saraykeht from long ago. She knew it like she knew Bakta, where she
had never been, and the courts of the Second Empire, gone from the world
for hundreds of years. It was a story. Once upon a time there was a city
by the sea, and it lived in prosperity and innocence. But it didn't anymore.
The steamcart passed into the compounds of the merchant houses, three,
four, five stories tall. They were almost palaces in themselves. There
were more lights here, more voices. Lanterns hung from ropes at the
crossroads, spilling buttery light on the bricks. Three more of Eiah's
fellows stepped down from the cart. Two stepped on, dropping their
copper lengths into the firekeeper's box. They didn't speak, didn't
acknowledge one another. She shifted her hands on the leather grip. The
palaces of the utkhaiem would be coming soon. And her apartments, and
bed, and sleep. The kiln roared when the firekeeper opened it and poured
in another spade's worth of coal.
The servants met her at the gateway that separated the palaces from the
city, the smooth brick streets from the crushed marble pathways. The air
smelled different here, coal smoke and the rich, fetid stink of humanity
displaced by incense and perfume. Eiah felt relieved to be back, and
then guilty for her relief. She answered their poses of greeting and
obeisance with one of acknowledgment. She was no longer her work. Among
these high towers and palaces, she was and would always be her father's
daughter.
"Eiah-cha," the most senior of the servants said, his hands in a pose of
ritual offering, "may we escort you to your rooms?"
"No," she said. "Food first. Then rest."
Eiah suffered them to take her satchel, but refused the sable cloak they
offered against the night air. It really wasn't that cold.
"Is there word from my father?" she asked as they walked along the wide,
empty paths.
"No, Eiah-cha," the servant replied. "Nor from your brother. There have
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.
The runner was a young man, broad across the shoulder. Twenty summers,
perhaps. His hair was soaked and sticking to his forehead. His robe hung
heavily from his shoulders, sodden with the rain.
"Eiah-cha," he said. "Parit-cha sent me. He's at his workroom. He said
he has something and that you should come. Quickly."
She caught her breath, the first movements of excitement lighting her
nerves. The other times one or another of the physicians and healers and
herb women of the city had sent word, it had been with no sense of
urgency. A man ill one day was very likely to be ill the next as well.
This, then, was something different.
"What is it?" she asked.
The runner took an apologetic pose. Eiah waved it away and called for a
servant. She needed a thick robe. And a litter; she wasn't waiting for
the firekeeper. And now, she needed them now. The Emperor's daughter got
what she wanted, and she got it quickly. She and the boy were on the
streets in less than half a hand, the litter jouncing uncomfortably as
they were carried through the drizzle. The runner tried not to seem awed
at the palace servants' fear of Eiah. Eiah tried not to bite her
fingernails from anxiety. The streets slid by outside their shelter as
Eiah willed the litter bearers to go faster. When they reached Parit's
house, she strode through the courtyard gardens like a general going to war.
Without speaking, Parit ushered her to the back. It was the same room in
which she'd seen the last woman. Parit sent the runner away. There were
no servants. There was no one besides the two physicians and a body on
the wide slate table, covered by a thick canvas cloth soaked through
with blood.
"They brought her to me this morning," Parit said. "I called for you
immediately."
"Let me see," Eiah said.
Parit pulled back the cloth.
The woman was perhaps five summers older than Eiah herself, darkhaired
and thickly built. She was naked, and Eiah saw the wounds that covered
her body: belly, breasts, arms, legs. A hundred stab wounds. The woman's
skin was unnaturally pale. She'd bled to death. Eiah felt no revulsion,
no outrage. Her mind fell into the patterns she had cultivated all her
life. This was only death, only violence. This was where she was most at
home.
"Someone wasn't happy with her," Eiah said. "Was she a soft-quarter whore?"
Parit startled, his hands almost taking a pose of query. Eiah shrugged.
"That many knife wounds," she said, "aren't meant only to kill. Three or
four would suffice. And the spacing of them isn't what I've seen when
the killer had simply lost control. Someone was sending a message."
"She wasn't stabbed," Parit said. He took a cloth from his sleeve and
tossed it to her. Eiah turned back to the corpse, wiping the blood away
from a wound in the dead woman's side. The smear of gore thinned. The
nature of the wound became clear.
It was a mouth. Tiny rosebud lips, slack as sleep. Eiah told her hand to
move, but for a long moment her flesh refused her. Then, her breath
shallow, she cleaned another. And then another.
The woman was covered with babies' mouths. Eiah's fingertips traced the