Daniel Abraham - THE

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