A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) by Daniel Abraham Page B

on the road.
     
    A fire had been lit in the grate, and warm tea and cakes of honeyed
    almonds waited for him at a lacquered table. He lowered himself into the
    chair, rested his feet, and closed his eyes. Being here, in this place,
    had a sense of unreality to it. To have been entrusted with anything of
    importance was a surprise after his loss of status. The thought stung,
    but he forced himself to turn in toward it. He had lost a great deal of
    the Dai-kvo's trust between his failure in Saraykeht and his refusal to
    disavow Liat, the girl who had once loved Otah-kvo but left both him and
    the fallen city to be with Maati, when it became clear she was bearing
    his child. If there had been time between the two, perhaps it might have
    been different. One scandal on the heels of the other, though, had been
    too much. Or so he told himself. It was what he wanted to believe.
     
    A scratch at the door roused him from his bitter reminiscences. He
    straightened his robes and ran a hand through his hair before he spoke.
     
    "Come in."
     
    The door slid open and a young man of perhaps twenty summers wearing the
    brown robes of a poet stepped in and took a pose of greeting. Maati
    returned it as he considered Cehmai Tyan, poet of Mach]. The broad
    shoulders, the open face. Here, Maati thought, is what I should have
    been. A talented boy poet who studied under a master while young enough
    to have his mind molded to the right shape. And when the time came, he
    had taken that burden on himself for the sake of his city. As I should
    have done.
     
    "I only just heard you'd arrived," Cehmai Tyan said. "I left orders at
    the main road, but apparently they don't think as much of me as they
    pretend."
     
    There was a light humor in his voice and manner. As if this were a game,
    as if he were a person whom anyone in Machi-or in the worldcould truly
    treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone-it
    was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat I)oru had translated
    into a human form all those generations ago. This widefaced, handsome
    boy could collapse every bridge, level every mountain. The great towers
    of Machi could turn to a river of stone, fast-flowing and dense as
    quicksilver, which would lay the city to ruin at his order. And he made
    light of being ignored as if he were junior clerk in some harbormaster's
    house. Maati couldn't tell if it was an affectation or if the poet was
    really so utterly naive.
     
    "The Khai left orders as well," Maati said.
     
    "Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is
    acceptable with your apartments?"
     
    "I ... I really don't know. I haven't really looked around yet. 'Ibo
    busy sitting on something that doesn't move, I suppose. I close my eyes,
    and I feel like I'm still jouncing around on the back of a cart."
     
    The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of selfconfidence
    and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally
    reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion
    beside the fire, legs crossed under him.
     
    "I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning,"
    Cehmai said. "The man who guards the library is ... he's a good man, but
    he's protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the
    ages."
     
    "Like a poet," Maati said.
     
    Cehmai grinned. "I suppose so. Only he'd have made a terrible poet. He's
    puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the
    keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people
    in the city can read. If he'd ever been given something important to do,
    he'd have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if
    I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to
    you, I expect he'll be fine. It's that first negotiation that's tricky."
     
    Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.
     
    "There's no call to take you from your duties,"