"No," Utah said.
"I'm sorry."
"It was entirely my fault."
"If it's true, you're a wise man to know it, and if not, you're a good
man for saying it. Either way."
"I think it would he ... that is, if there are any letters to be
carried, I think travel might be the best thing just now. I don't really
care to stay in Udun."
Amiit sighed and nodded.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Come to my offices in the morning. We'll arrange
something."
Afterwards, they finished the rice wine and talked of nothing
important-of old stories and old travels, the women they had known and
loved or else hated. Or both. Otah said nothing of Kiyan or the north,
and Amiit didn't press him. When Otah rose to leave, he was surprised to
find how drunk he had become. He navigated his way to his room and lay
on the couch, mustering the resolve to pull off his robes. Morning found
him still dressed. He changed robes and went down to the bathhouse,
forcing his mind back over his conversations of the night before. He was
fairly certain he had said nothing to implicate himself or make Amiit
suspect the nature of his falling out with Kiyan. He wondered what the
old man would have made of the truth, had he known it.
The packet of letters waited for him, each sewn and sealed, in a leather
bag on Amiit Foss' desk. Most were for trading houses in Machi, though
there were four that were to go to members of the utkhaiem. Otah turned
the packet in his hands. Behind him, one of the apprentices said
something softly and another giggled.
"You have time to reconsider," Amiit said. "You could go back to her on
your knees. If the letters wait another day, there's little lost. And
she might relent."
Otah tucked the letters into their pouch and slipped it into his sleeve.
"An old lover of mine once told me that everything I'd ever won, I won
by leaving," Otah said.
"The island girl?"
"Did I mention her last night?"
"At length," Amiit said, chuckling. "That particular quotation came up
twice, as I recall. There might have been a third time too. I couldn't
really say."
"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope I didn't tell you all my secrets," Otah
said, making a joke of his sudden unease. He didn't recall saying
anything about Maj, and it occurred to him exactly how dangerous that
night had been.
"If you had, I'd make it a point to forget them," Amiit said. "Nothing a
drunk man says on the day his woman leaves him should be held against
him. It's poor form. And this is, after all, a gentleman's trade, ne?"
Otah took a pose of agreement.
"I'll report what I find when I get back," he said, unnecessarily.
"Assuming I haven't frozen to death on the roads."
"Be careful up there, Itani. Things are uncertain when there's the scent
of a new Khai in the wind. It's interesting, and it's important, but
it's not always safe."
Otah shifted to a pose of thanks, to which his supervisor replied in
kind, his face so pleasantly unreadable that Otah genuinely didn't know
how deep the warning ran.
When Maati considered the mines-something he had rarely had occasion to
do-he had pictured great holes going deep into the earth. He had not
imagined the branchings and contortions of passages where miners
struggled to follow veins of ore, the stench of dust and damp, the yelps
and howls of the dogs that pulled the flatbottomed sledges filled with
gravel, or the darkness. He held his lantern low, as did the others
around him. 't'here was no call to raise it. Nothing more would be seen,
and the prospect of breaking it against the stone overhead was unpleasant.
""There can be places where the air goes bad, too," Cehmai said as they
turned another twisting corner. "They take birds with them because they
die first."
"What happens then?" Maati asked. "If the birds die?"
"It depends on how valuable the ore is," the young poet said. "Abandon
the mine, or try to blow out the had air. Or use slaves. There are men
whose indentures allow that."
Two servants followed at a distance, their own torches glowing. Maati
had the sense that they would all, himself included, have been better
pleased to spend the day in the palaces. All but the andat.
StoneMade-Soft alone among them seemed untroubled by the weight over
them and the gloom that pressed in when the lanterns flickered. The
wide, calm face seemed almost stupid to Maati, the andat's occasional
pronouncements simplistic compared with the thousand-layered comments of
Seedless, the only andat he'd known intimately. He knew better than to
be taken in. 'The form of the andat might be different, the mental
bindings that held it might place different strictures upon it, but the
hunger at its center was as desperate. It was an andat, and it would
long to return to its natural state. They might seem as different as a
marble from a thorn, but at heart they were all the same.
And Maati knew he was walking through a tunnel not so tall he could
stand to his full height with a thousand tons of stone above him. This
placid-faced ghost could bring it down on him as if they'd been crawling
through a hole in the ocean.
"So, you see," Cehmai was saying, "the Daikani engineers find where they
want to extend the mine out. Or down, or up. We have to leave that to
them. Then I will come through and walk through the survey with them, so
that we all understand what they're asking."
"And how much do you soften it?"
"It varies," Cehmai said. "It depends on the kind of rock. Some of them
you can almost reduce to putty if you're truly clear where you want it
to be. Then other times, you only want it to be easier to dig through.
Most often, that's when they're concerned about collapses."
"I see," Maati said. "And the pumps? How do those figure in?"
"That was actually an entirely different agreement. The Khai's eldest
son was interested in the problem. The mines here are some of the lowest
that are still in use. The northern mines are almost all in the
mountains, and so they aren't as likely to strike water."
"So the Daikani pay more for being here?"
"No, not really. The pumps he designed usually work quite well."
"But the payment for them?"
Cehmai grinned. His teeth and skin were yellowed by the lantern light.
"It was a different agreement," Cehmai said again. "The Daikani let him
experiment with his designs and he let them use them."
"But if they worked well ..."
"Other mines would pay the Khai for the use of the pumps if they wished
for help building them. Usually, though, the mines will help each other
on things like that. There's a certain . . . what to call it ...