prepared. Cehmai gritted his teeth with the effort of pulling it back in

before the structure above them weakened and failed. The andat pressed

again, trying to pull the mountain down on top of them. Cehmai felt a

rivulet of sweat run down past his ear. The overseer and the engineer

were speaking someplace a long way off, but he couldn't be bothered by

them. They were idiots to distract him. He paused and gathered the

storm, concentrated on the ideas and grammars that had tied the andat to

him in the first place, that had held it for generations. And when it

had been brought to heel, he took it the rest of the way through his

pathway and then slowly, carefully, brought his mind, and its, back to

where they stood.

"Cehmai-cha?" the overseer asked again. The engineer was eyeing the

walls as if they might start speaking with him.

"I'm done," he said. "It's fine. I only have a headache."

Stone-Made-Soft smiled placidly. Neither of them would tell the men how

near they had all just come to dying: Cehmai, because he wished to keep

it from them, Stone-Made-Soft, because it would never occur to it to care.

The overseer took a hand pick from his satchel and struck the wall. The

metal head chimed and a white mark appeared on the stone. Cehmai waved

his hand.

"To your left," he said. "'t'here."

The overseer struck again, and the pick sank deep into the stone with a

sound like a footstep on gravel.

"Excellent," the overseer said. "Perfect."

Even the engineer seemed grudgingly pleased. Cehmai only wanted to get

out, into the light and hack to the city and his own bed. Even if they

left now, they wouldn't reach hlachi before nightfall. probably not

before the night candle hit its half mark.

On the way back up, the engineer started telling jokes. Cehmai allowed

himself to smile. There was no call to make things unpleasant even if

the pain in his head and spine were echoing his heartbeats.

When they reached the light and fresh air, the servants had laid out a

more satisfying meal-rice, fresh chickens killed here at the mine,

roasted nuts with lemon, cheeses melted until they could be spread over

their bread with a blade. Cehmai lowered himself into a chair of strung

cloth and sighed with relief. To the south, they could see the smoke of

the forges rising from Machi and blowing off to the east. A city

perpetually afire.

"When we get there," Cehmai said to the andat, "we'll be playing several

games of stones. You'll be the one losing."

The andat shrugged almost imperceptibly.

"It's what I am," it said. "You may as well blame water for being wet."

"And when it soaks my robes, I do," Cehmai said. The andat chuckled and

then was silent. Its wide face turned to him with something like

concern. Its brow was furrowed.

"The girl," it said.

"What about her?"

"It seems to me the next time she asks if you love her, you could say yes.

Cehmai felt his heart jump in his chest, startled as a bird. The andat's

expression didn't change; it might have been carved from stone. Idaan

wept in his memory, and she laughed, and she curled herself in his

bedclothes and asked silently not to be sent away. Love, he discovered,

could feel very much like sorrow.

"I suppose you're right," he said, and the andat smiled in what looked

like sympathy.

MAATI LAID HIS NOTES OUT ON THE WIDE TABLE AT THE BACK OF THE LIbrary's

main chamber. The distant throbbing of trumpet and drum wasn't so

distracting here as in his rooms. Three times on the walk here, his

sleeves heavy with paper and books, he'd been grabbed by some masked

reveler and kissed. Twice, bowls of sweet wine had been forced into his

hand. The palaces were a riot of dancing and song, and despite his best

intentions, the memory of those three kisses drew his attention. It

would be sweet to go out, to lose himself in that crowd, to find some

woman willing to dance with him, and to take comfort in her body and her

breath. It had been years since he had let himself be so young as that.

He turned himself to his puzzle. Danat, the man destined to be Khai

Machi, had seemed the most likely to have engineered the rumors of

Otah's return. Certainly he had gained the most. Kahn Machi, whose death

had already given Maati three kisses, was the other possibility. Until

he dug in. He had asked the servants and the slaves of each household

every question he could think of. No, none of them recalled any

consultations with a man who matched the assassin's description. No,

neither man had sent word or instruction since Maati's own arrival. He'd

asked their social enemies what they knew or guessed or speculated on.

Kahn Machi had been a weak-lunged man, pale of face and watery of eye.

He'd had a penchant for sleeping with servant girls, but hadn't even

gotten a child on one-likely because he was infertile. Danat was a bully

and a sneak, a man whose oaths meant nothing to him-and the killing of

noble, scholarly Kaiin showed that. Danat's triumph was the best of all

possible outcomes or else the worst.

Searching for conspiracy in court gossip was like looking for raindrops

in a thunderstorm. Everyone he spoke to seemed to have four or five

suggestions of what might have happened, and of those, each half

contradicted the other. By far, the most common assumption was that Otah

had been the essential villain in all of it.

Nlaati had diagrammed the relationships of Danat and Kaiin with each of

the high families-Kamau, Daikani, Radaani and a dozen more. Then with

the great trading houses, with mistresses and rumored mistresses and the

teahouses they liked best. At one point he'd even listed which horses

each preferred to ride. The sad truth was that despite all these facts,

all these words scribbled onto papers, referenced and checked, nothing

pointed to either man as the author of Biitrah's death, the attempt on

Maati's own life, or the slaughter of the assassin. He was either too

dimwitted to see the pattern before him, it was too well hidden, or he

was looking in the wrong place. Clearly neither man had been present in

the city to direct the last two attacks, and there seemed to be no

supporters in Machi who had managed the plans for them.

Nor was there any reason to attack him. Nlaati had been on the verge of

exposing Otah-kvo. That was in everyone's best interest, barring Otah's.

Maati closed his eyes, sighed, then opened them again, gathered up the

pages of his notes and laid them out again, as if seeing them in a

different pattern might spark something.

Drunken song burst from the side room to his left, and Baarath, li