The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(85)

They reached Pathai at midday. Silk banners streamed from the towers and the throng that met them at the western arch cheered and sang and played flutes and drums. Men and women hung from lattices of wood and rope to get a better view of Otah and Danat, their armsmen, the steamcarts. The air was thick with the scents of honeyed almonds and mulled wine and bodies. The armsmen of Pathai met them, made an elaborate ritual obeisance, and then cleared a path for them until they reached the palaces.

A feast had been prepared, and baths. Servants descended on the group like moths, and Otah submitted to being only emperor once again.

The celebration of his arrival was as annoying as it was pointless. Dish after dish of savory meat and sweet bread, hot curry and chilled fish, all accompanied by the best acrobats and musicians that could be scraped together with little notice. And Ana Dasin sitting at his table, her empty eyes a constant, unintentional reproach. Finding Maati and this new poet was going to be like hunting quail with a circus. He would have to do something to let them move discreetly. He didn't yet know what that would be.

The rooms he'd been given were blond stone, the ceiling vaulted and set with tiles of indigo and silver. A thousand candles set the air glowing and filled his senses with the scent of hot wax and perfume. It was, he thought, the sort of space that was almost impossible to keep warm. Danat, Ana, and the armsmen were all being seen to elsewhere. He sat on a long, low couch and hoped that Danat, at least, would be able to get out into the city and make a few inquiries.

When a servant came and announced Sian Noygu, Otah almost refused the audience before he recognized it as the name Idaan traveled under. His heart racing, he let himself be led to a smaller chamber of carved granite and worked gold. His sister sat between a small fountain and a shadowed alcove. She wore a gray robe under a colorless cloak, and her boots were soft with wear. A long scratch across the back of her hand was the dark red of scabs and old blood.

The servant made his obeisance and retreated. Otah took a pose of greeting appropriate to close family, and Idaan tilted her head like a dog hearing an unfamiliar sound.

"I had intended to meet you when you came into the city. I didn't know you were planning a festival."

"I wasn't," Otah said, sitting beside her. The fountain clucked and burbled. "Traveling quietly seems beyond me these days."

"It was all as subtle as a rockslide," Idaan agreed. "But there's some good in it. The louder you are, the less people are looking at me."

"You've found something then?" Otah asked.

"I have," Idaan said.

"What have you learned?"

A different voice answered from the darkness of the alcove at Idaan's side. A woman's voice.

"Everything," it said.

Otah rose to his feet. The woman who emerged was young: not more than forty summers and the white in her hair still barely more than an accent. She wore robes as simple as Idaan's but held herself with a mixture of angry pride and uncertainty that Otah had become familiar with. Her pupils were gray and sightless, but her eyes were the almond shape that marked her as a citizen of the Empire. This was a victim of the new poet, but she was no Galt.

"Idaan-cha knows everything," the blind woman said again, "because I told it to her."

Idaan took the woman's hand and stood. When she spoke, it was to her companion.

"This is my brother, the Emperor," Idaan said, then turned to him. "Otah-cha, this is Ashti Beg."

When before Maati had considered death, it had been in terms of what needed to be done. Before he died, he had to master the grammars of the Dai-kvo, or find his son again, or most recently see his errors with Sterile made right. It was never the end itself that drew his attention. He had reduced his mortality to the finish line of a race. This and this and this done, and afterward, dying would be like rest at the end of a long day.

With Eiah's pronouncement, his view shifted. No list of accomplishments could forgive the prospect of his own extinction. Maati found himself looking at the backs of his hands, the cracked skin, the dark blotches of age. He was becoming aware of time in a way he never had. There was some number of days he would see, some number of nights, and then nothing. It had always been true. He was no more or less a mortal being because his blood was slowing. Everything born, dies. He had known that. He only hadn't quite understood. It changed everything.

It also changed nothing. They traveled slowly, keeping to lesserknown roads and away from the larger low towns. Often Eiah would call the day's halt with the sun still five hands above the horizon because they had found a convenient wayhouse or a farm willing to board them for the night. The prospect of letting Maati sleep in cold air was apparently too much for her to consider.

On the third day, Eiah had parted with the company, rejoining them on the fifth with a cloth sack of genuinely unpleasant herbs. Maati suffered a cup of the bitter tea twice daily. He let his pulses be measured against one another, his breath smelled, his fingertips squeezed, the color of his eyes considered and noted. It embarrassed him.

The curious thing was that, despite all his fears and Eiah's attentions, he felt fine. If his breath was short, it was no shorter than it had been for years. He tired just when he'd always tired, but now six sets of eyes shifted to him every time he grunted. He dismissed the anxiety when he saw it in the others, however closely he felt it himself.

He would have expected the two feelings to balance each other: the dismissive self-consciousness at any concern over him and the presentiment of his death. He did not understand how he could be possessed by both of them at the same time, and yet he was. It was like there were two minds within him, two Maati Vaupathais, each with his own thoughts and concerns, and no compromise between them was required.