Daniel Abraham - THE

or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey-and this one

heading south into the summer cities-hadn't seemed to signify anything

more than a few weeks' time and, of course, the errand itself. But

somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown

accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked

pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he

had felt their absence.

The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it.

Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and

the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he'd thought

they would be.

Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown

quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people

were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a

once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of

the war itself-the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and

saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined

Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed-had faded,

but they had not disappeared.

The distrust of the foreign was driven deep into the flesh here. He had

heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns,

thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their

own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion.

Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to

marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid

by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped,

and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand's depth of water.

And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the

less certain he was.

Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men

at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were

Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam

rising from the river itself, a flat barge sitting low to the water and

driven by the same chuffing, tarnished bulb as the wagons. Even the

fields below him now were cultivated in a pattern he had never seen

before the Galts came. Perhaps Otah's betrayal of the cities colored all

of Maati's perceptions now, but it felt as if the Galts were invading

again, only slowly this time, burrowing under the ground and changing

all they touched in small, insidious ways.

Something tickled his arm. Maati plucked out the tick and cracked it

between his thumbnails. He was wasting time. His feet ached from walking

and his robe stuck to his back and legs, but the sooner this meeting

happened, the sooner he would know where he stood. He emptied the last

of the seeds into his hand, ate them, then put the pouch back in his

sleeve and untied his mule.

Seven years before, he and Cehmai had parted for the last time at a

wayhouse three days' walk northwest of the farms and the river and

catalpa-shaded hill. It had not been an entirely friendly parting, but

they had agreed to leave letters of their whereabouts at that house,

should the need ever arise to find each other.

Maati had found the place easily. In the intervening years, the kitchens

had burned, and the two huge trees in the courtyard. The boy who stabled

the horses had grown to be a man. The bricks that had been brown and

yellow had been painted white and blue. And the box they had paid the

keeper to hold for them had a letter in it, sewn and sealed, with

ciphered directions that would lead to the farmhouse Cehmai had taken

under his new false name. Jadit Noygu.

Jadit Noygu, and his wife Sian.

Maati took the letter out again, consulting the deciphered text he'd

marked in between the lines written in Cehmai's clean, clear hand.

Forward down the track until he passed the ruin of an old mill, then the

first east-turning pathway, and half a hand's walk to a low

mud-and-straw farmhouse with a brick cistern in front. Maati clucked at

the mule and resumed his walk.

He arrived in the heat of the afternoon; even the shade beneath the

trees sweltered. Maati helped himself to a bowl of water from the

cistern, and then another bowl for the mule. No one came out to greet

him, but the shutters on the windows looked recently painted and the

track that led around the side of the house was well-tended. There was

no sense that the farm stood empty. Maati made his way toward the back.

A small herd of goats bleated at him from their pen, the disturbing,

clever eyes considering him with as little joy as he had for them. The

low sound of whistling came to him from a tall, narrow building set

apart from both house and pen. A slaughterhouse.

He stepped into the doorway, blocking the light. The air was thick with

smoke to drive the flies away. The body of the sacrificed goat hung from

a hook, buckets of blood and entrails at the butcher's feet. The butcher

turned. Her hands were crimson, her leather apron sodden with blood. A

hooked knife flashed in her hand.

She was not the only reason that Maati and Cehmai had parted company,

but she would have been sufficient. Idaan Machi, outcast sister to the

Emperor. As a girl no older than Vanjit was now, Idaan had plotted the

slaughter of her own family in a bloody-minded attempt to win Machi for

herself and her husband. Otah had come near to being executed for her

crimes, Cehmai had been seduced and used by her, and Maati still had a

thick scar on his belly where her assassin had tried to gut him. Otah,

for reasons that passed beyond Maati's understanding, had spared the

murderess. Even less comprehensible, Cehmai had found her, and in their

shared exile, they had once again become lovers. Only Maati still saw

her for what she was.

Age had thickened her. Her hair, tied back in a ferocious knot, was more

gray than black. Her long, northern face showed curiosity, then

surprise, then for less than a heartbeat something like contempt.

"You'll want to see him, then," said Otah's exiled sister: the woman who

had once set an assassin to kill Maati. Who had blamed Otah for the

murders she and her ambitious lover had committed.

She sank the gory knife into the dead animal's side, setting the corpse

swinging, and walked forward.

"Follow me," she said.

"Tell me where to find him," Maati said. "I can just as well. . ."

"The dogs don't know you," Idaan said. "Follow me."

Once Maati saw the dogs-five wide-jawed beasts as big as ponies, lazing

in the rich dirt at the back of the house-he was glad she was there to

guide him. She walked with a strong gait, leading him past the house,

past a low barn where chickens scattered and complained, to a wide, low

field of grass, its black soil under half an inch of water. At the far

side of the field, a thin figure stood. He wore the canvas trousers of a

workman and a rag the color of old blood around his head. By the time

the man's face had ceased to be a leather-colored blur, they were almost

upon him. There were the bright, boyish eyes, the serious mouth. The sun

had coarsened his skin and complicated the corners of his eyes. He

smiled and took a pose of greeting appropriate for one master of their

arcane trade to another. Idaan snorted, turned, and walked back toward

the slaughterhouse, leaving them alone.