Abraham Daniel - A Betrayal in Winter

north and west-but the vein led down deeper than a well. In its first

generation, when Machi had been the most distant corner of the Empire,

the poet sent there had controlled the andat Raising-Water, and the

stories said that the mines had flowed up like fountains under that

power. It wasn't until after the great war that the poet Manat Doru had

first captured Stone-Made-Soft and Machi had come into its own as the

center for the most productive mines in the world and the home of the

metal trades-ironmongers, silversmiths, Westland alchemists,

needlemakers. But Raising-Water had been lost, and no one had yet

discovered how to recapture it. And so, the pumps.

He again turned his mind back on the trouble. The treadmill pumps were

of his own design. Four men working together could raise their own

weight in water sixty feet in the time the moon-always a more reliable

measure than the seasonally fickle northern sun-traveled the width of a

man's finger. But the design wasn't perfect yet. It was clear from his

day's work that the pump, which finally failed the night before, had

been working at less than its peak for weeks. That was why the water

level had been higher than one night's failure could account for. There

were several possible solutions to that.

Biitrah forgot the cold, forgot his weariness, forgot indeed where he

was and was being borne. His mind fell into the problem, and he was lost

in it. The wayhouse, when it appeared as if by magic before them, was a

welcome sight: thick stone walls with one red lacquered door at the

ground level, a wide wooden snow door on the second story, and smoke

rising from all its chimneys. Even from the street, he could smell

seasoned meat and spiced wine. The keeper stood on the front steps with

a pose of welcome so formal it bent the old, moon-faced man nearly

double. Biitrah's bearers lowered his chair. At the last moment, Biitrah

remembered to shove his arms back into their sleeves so that he could

take a pose accepting the wayhouse keeper's welcome.

"I had not expected you, most high," the man said. "We would have

prepared something more appropriate. The best that I have-"

"Will do," Biitrah said. "Certainly the best you have will do."

The keeper took a pose of thanks, standing aside to let them through the

doorway as he did. Biitrah paused at the threshold, taking a formal pose

of thanks. The old man seemed surprised. His round face and slack skin

made Biitrah think of a pale grape just beginning to dry. He could be my

father's age, he thought, and felt in his breast the bloom of a strange,

almost melancholy, fondness for the man.

"I don't think we've met," Biitrah said. "What's your name, neighbor?"

"Oshai," the moon-faced man said. "We haven't met, but everyone knows of

the Khai Machi's kindly eldest son. It is a pleasure to have you in this

house, most high."

The house had an inner garden. Biitrah changed into a set of plain,

thick woolen robes that the wayhouse kept for such occasions and joined

his men there. The keeper himself brought them black-sauced noodles,

river fish cooked with dried figs, and carafe after stone carafe of rice

wine infused with plum. His guard, at first dour, relaxed as the night

went on, singing together and telling stories. For a time, they seemed

to forget who this long-faced man with his graying beard and thinning

hair was and might someday be. Biitrah even sang with them at the end,

intoxicated as much by the heat of the coal fire, the weariness of the

day, and the simple pleasure of the night, as by the wine.

At last he rose up and went to his bed, four of his men following him.

They would sleep on straw outside his door. He would sleep in the best

bed the wayhouse offered. It was the way of things. A night candle

burned at his bedside, the wax scented with honey. The flame was hardly

down to the quarter mark. It was early. When he'd been a boy of twenty,

he'd seen candles like this burn their last before he slept, the light

of dawn blocked by goose-down pillows around his head. Now he couldn't

well imagine staying awake to the half mark. He shuttered the candlebox,

leaving only a square of light high on the ceiling from the smoke hole.

Sleep should have come easily to him as tired, well fed, half drunk as

he was, but it didn't. The bed was wide and soft and comfortable. He

could already hear his men snoring on their straw outside his door. But

his mind would not be still.

They should have killed each other when they were young and didn't

understand what a precious thing life is. That was the mistake. He and

his brothers had forborne instead, and the years had drifted by. Danat

had married, then Kaiin. He, the oldest of them, had met Hiami and

followed his brothers' example last. He had two daughters, grown and now

themselves married. And so here he and his brothers were. None of them

had seen fewer than forty summers. None of them hated the other two.

None of them wanted what would come next. And still, it would come.

Better that the slaughter had happened when they were boys, stupid the

way boys are. Better that their deaths had come before they carried the

weight of so much life behind them. He was too old to become a killer.

Sleep came somewhere in these dark reflections, and he dreamed of things

more pleasant and less coherent. A dove with black-tipped wings flying

through the galleries of the Second Palace; Hiami sewing a child's dress

with red thread and a gold needle too soft to keep its point; the moon

trapped in a well and he himself called to design the pump that would

raise it. When he woke, troubled by some need his sleepsodden mind

couldn't quite place, it was still dark. He needed to drink water or to

pass it, but no, it was neither of these. He reached to unshutter the

candlebox, but his hands were too awkward.

"There now, most high," a voice said. "Bat it around like that, and

you'll have the whole place in flames."

Pale hands righted the box and pulled open the shutters, the candlelight

revealing the moon-faced keeper. He wore a dark robe under a gray woolen

traveler's cloak. His face, which had seemed so congenial before, filled

Biitrah with a sick dread. The smile, he saw, never reached the eyes.

"What's happened?" he demanded, or tried to. The words came out slurred

and awkward. Still, the man Oshai seemed to catch the sense of them.

"I've come to be sure you've died," he said with a pose that offered

this as a service. "Your men drank more than you. Those that are

breathing are beyond recall, but you ... Well, most high, if you see

morning the whole exercise will have been something of a waste."

Biitrah's breath suddenly hard as a runner's, he threw off the blankets,

but when he tried to stand, his knees were limp. He stumbled toward the

assassin, but there was no strength in the charge. Oshai, if that was

his name, put a palm to Biitrah's forehead and pushed gently back.

Biitrah fell to the floor, but he hardly felt it. It was like violence

being done to some other man, far away from where he was.

"It must be hard," Oshai said, squatting beside him, "to live your whole

life known only as another man's son. To die having never made a mark of

your own on the world. It seems unfair somehow."

Who, Biitrah tried to say. Which of my brothers would stoop to poison?

"Still, men die all the time," Oshai went on. "One more or less won't