Shadow and Betrayal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  BOOK ONE; A SHADOW IN SUMMER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  BOOK TWO: A BETRAYAL IN WINTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  EPILOGUE

  about the author

  interview

  Teaser chapter

  SHADOW AND BETRAYAL

  Marchat shook his wooly, white head slowly, his gaze never leaving hers. Amat felt the strength go out of his fingers.

  ‘If this comes out to anyone, I’ll be killed. At least me. Probably others. Some of them innocents.’

  ‘I thought there was only one innocent in this city,’ Amat said, biting her words.

  ‘I’ll be killed.’

  Amat hesitated, then withdrew her arm and took a pose of acceptance. He let her stand. Her hip screamed. And her stinging ointment was all at her apartments. The unfairness of losing that small comfort struck her ridiculously hard; one insignificant detail in a world that had turned from solid to nightmare in a day.

  At the door, she stopped, her hand on the water-thick wood. She looked back at her employer. At her old friend. His face was stone.

  ‘You told me,’ she said, ‘because you wanted me to find a way to stop it. Didn’t you?’

  ‘I made a mistake because I was confused and upset and felt very much alone,’ he said. His voice was stronger now, more sure of himself. ‘I hadn’t thought it through. But it was a mistake, and I see the situation more clearly now. Do what I tell you, Amat, and we’ll both see the other side of this.’

  ‘It’s wrong. Whatever this is, it’s evil and it’s wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

  Amat nodded and closed the door behind her when she went.

  BY DANIEL ABRAHAM

  The Long Price

  Shadow and Betrayal

  Seasons of War

  Shadow and Betrayal

  DANIEL ABRAHAM

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Abraham

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 7481 2076 5

  This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  To Fred Saberhagen,

  the first of my many teachers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book and this series would not be as good if I hadn’t had the help of Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass, Yvonne Coats, Sally Gwylan, Emily Mah-Tippets, S. M. Stirling, Terry England, Ian Tregillis, Sage Walker, and the other members of the New Mexico Critical Mass Workshop.

  I also owe debts of gratitude to Shawna McCarthy and Danny Baror for their enthusiasm and faith in the project, to James Frenkel for his unstinting support and uncanny ability to take a decent manuscript and make it better, and to Tom Doherty and the staff at Tor for their kindness and support of a new author.

  And I am especially indebted to Paul Park, who told me to write what I fear.

  The World

  The Cities of the Khaiem

  BOOK ONE; A SHADOW IN SUMMER

  PROLOGUE

  Otah took the blow on the ear, the flesh opening under the rod. Tahi-kvo, Tahi the teacher, pulled the thin lacquered wood through the air with a fluttering sound like bird wings. Otah’s discipline held. He did not shift or cry out. Tears welled in his eyes, but his hands remained in a pose of greeting.

  ‘Again,’ Tahi-kvo barked. ‘And correctly!’

  ‘We are honored by your presence, most high Dai-kvo,’ Otah said sweetly, as if it were the first time he had attempted the ritual phrase. The old man sitting before the fire considered him closely, then adopted a pose of acceptance. Tahi-kvo made a sound of satisfaction in the depths of his throat.

  Otah bowed, holding still for three breaths and hoping that Tahi-kvo wouldn’t strike him for trembling. The moment stretched, and Otah nearly let his eyes stray to his teacher. It was the old man with his ruined whisper who at last spoke the words that ended the ritual and released him.

  ‘Go, disowned child, and attend to your studies.’

  Otah turned and walked humbly out of the room. Once he had pulled the thick wooden door closed behind him and walked down the chill hallway toward the common rooms, he gave himself permission to touch his new wound.

  The other boys were quiet as he passed through the stone halls of the school, but several times their gazes held him and his new shame. Only the older boys in the black robes of Milah-kvo’s disciples laughed at him. Otah took himself to the quarters where all the boys in his cohort slept. He removed the ceremonial gown, careful not to touch it with blood, and washed the wound in cold water. The stinging cream for cuts and scrapes was in an earthenware jar beside the water basin. He took two fingers and slathered the vinegar-smelling ointment onto the open flesh of his ear. Then, not for the first time since he had come to the school, he sat on his spare, hard bunk and wept.

  ‘This boy,’ the Dai-kvo said as he took up the porcelain bowl of tea. Its heat was almost uncomfortable. ‘He holds some promise?’

  ‘Some,’ Tahi allowed as he leaned the lacquered rod against the wall and took the seat beside his master.

  ‘He seems familiar.’

  ‘Otah Machi. Sixth son of the Khai Machi.’

  ‘I recall his brothers. Also boys of some promise. What became of them?’

  ‘They spent their years, took the brand, and were turned out. Most are. We have three hundred in the school now and forty in the black under Milah-kvo’s care. Sons of the Khaiem or the ambitious families of the utkhaiem.’

  ‘So many? I see so few.’

  Tahi took a pose of agreement, the cant of his wrists giving it a nuance that might have been sorrow or apology.

  ‘Not many are both strong enough and wise. And the stakes are high.’

  The Dai-kvo sipped his tea and considered the fire.

  ‘I wonder,’ the old man said, ‘how many realize we ar
e teaching them nothing.’

  ‘We teach them all. Letters, numbers. Any of them could take a trade after they leave the school.’

  ‘But nothing of use. Nothing of poetry. Nothing of the andat.’

  ‘If they realize that, most high, they’re halfway to your door. And for the ones we turn away . . . It’s better, most high.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Tahi shrugged and looked into the fire. He looked older, the Dai-kvo thought, especially about the eyes. But he had met Tahi as a rude youth many years before. The age he saw there now, and the cruelty, were seeds he himself had cultivated.

  ‘When they have failed, they take the brand and make their own fates,’ Tahi said.

  ‘We take away their only hope of rejoining their families, of taking a place at the courts of the Khaiem. They have no family. They cannot control the andat,’ the Dai-kvo said. ‘We throw these boys away much as their fathers have. What becomes of them, I wonder?’

  ‘Much the same as becomes of anyone, I imagine. The ones from low families of the utkhaiem are hardly worse off than when they came. The sons of the Khaiem . . . once they take the brand, they cannot inherit, and it saves them from being killed for their blood rights. That alone is a gift in its way.’

  It was true. Every generation saw the blood of the Khaiem spilled. It was the way of the Empire. And in times when all three of a Khai’s acknowledged sons slaughtered one another, the high families of the utkhaiem unsheathed their knives, and cities were caught for a time in fits of violence from which the poets held themselves apart like priests at a dog fight. These boys in the school’s care were exempt from those wars at only the price of everything they had known in their short lives. And yet . . .

  ‘Disgrace is a thin gift,’ the Dai-kvo said.

  Tahi, his old student who had once been a boy like these, sighed.

  ‘It’s what we can offer.’

  The Dai-kvo left in the morning just after dawn, stepping through the great bronze doors that opened only for him. Otah stood in the ranks of his cohort, still holding a pose of farewell. Behind him, someone took the chance of scratching - Otah could hear the shifting sound of fingers against cloth. He didn’t look back. Two of the oldest of Milahkvo’s black robes pulled the great doors closed.

  In the dim winter light that filtered through high-set, narrow windows, Otah could see the bustle of the black robes taking charge of the cohorts. The day’s tasks varied. The morning might be spent working in the school - repairing walls or washing laundry or scraping ice from the garden walkways that no one seemed to travel besides the boys set to tend them. The evening would be spent in study. Numbers, letters, religion, history of the Old Empire, the Second Empire, the War, the cities of the Khaiem. And more often these last weeks, one of the two teachers would stand at the back of the room while one of the black robes lectured and questioned. Milah-kvo would sometimes interrupt and tell jokes or take the lecture himself, discussing things the black robes never spoke of. Tahi-kvo would only observe and punish. All of Otah’s cohort bore the marks of the lacquered stick.

  Riit-kvo, one of the oldest of the black robes, led Otah and his cohort to the cellars. For hours as the sun rose unseen, Otah swept dust from stones that seemed still cold from the last winter and then washed them with water and rags until his knuckles were raw. Then Riit-kvo called them to order, considered them, slapped one boy whose stance was not to his standards, and marched them to the dining hall. Otah looked neither forward nor back, but focused on the shoulders of the boy ahead of him.

  The midday meal was cold meat, yesterday’s bread, and a thin barley soup that Otah treasured because it was warm. Too soon, Riit called them to wash their bowls and knives and follow him. Otah found himself at the front of the line - an unenviable place - and so was the first to step into the cold listening room with its stone benches and narrow windows that had never known glass. Tahi-kvo was waiting there for them.

  None of them knew why the round-faced, scowling teacher had taken an interest in the cohort, though speculations were whispered in the dark of their barracks. The Dai-kvo had chosen one of them to go and study the secrets of the andat, to become one of the poets, gain power even higher than the Khaiem, and skip over the black robes of Milah-kvo entirely. Or one of their families had repented sending their child, however minor in the line of succession, to the school and was in negotiation to forgo the branding and take their disowned son back into the fold.

  Otah had listened, but believed none of the stories. They were the fantasies of the frightened and the weak, and he knew that if he clung to one, it would shatter him. Dwelling in the misery of the school and hoping for nothing beyond survival was the only way to keep his soul from flying apart. He would endure his term and be turned out into the world. This was his third year at the school. He was twelve now, and near the halfway point of his time. And today was another evil to be borne as the day before and the day ahead. To think too far in the past or the future was dangerous. Only when he let his dreams loose did he think of learning the secrets of the andat, and that happened so rarely as to call itself never.

  Riit-kvo, his eyes on the teacher at the back as much as on the students, began to declaim the parable of the Twin Dragons of Chaos. It was a story Otah knew, and he found his mind wandering. Through the stone arch of the window, Otah could see a crow hunched on a high branch. It reminded him of something he could not quite recall.

  ‘Which of the gods tames the spirits of water?’ Riit-kvo snapped. Otah pulled himself back to awareness and straightened his spine.

  Riit-kvo pointed to a thick-set boy across the room.

  ‘Oladac the Wanderer!’ the boy said, taking a pose of gratitude to one’s teacher.

  ‘And why were the spirits who stood by and neither fought with the gods nor against them consigned to a lower hell than the servants of chaos?’

  Again Riit-kvo pointed.

  ‘Because they should have fought alongside the gods!’ the boy shouted.

  It was a wrong answer. Because they were cowards, Otah thought, and knew he was correct. Tahi’s lacquered rod whirred and struck the boy hard on the shoulder. Riit-kvo smirked and returned to his story.

  After the class, there was another brief work detail for which Tahi-kvo did not join them. Then the evening meal, and then the end of another day. Otah was grateful to crawl into his bunk and pull the thin blanket up to his neck. In the winter, many of the boys slept in their robes against the cold, and Otah was among that number. Despite all this, he preferred the winter. During the warmer times, he would still wake some mornings having forgotten where he was, expecting to see the walls of his father’s home, hear the voices of his older brothers - Biitrah, Danat, and Kaiin. Perhaps see his mother’s smile. The rush of memory was worse than any blow of Tahi-kvo’s rod, and he bent his will toward erasing the memories he had of his family. He was not loved or wanted in his home, and he understood that thinking too much about this truth would kill him.

  As he drifted toward sleep, Riit-kvo’s harsh voice murmuring the lesson of the spirits who refused to fight spun through his mind. They were cowards, consigned to the deepest and coldest hell.

  When the question came, his eyes flew open. He sat up. The other boys were all in their cots. One, not far from him, was crying in his sleep. It was not an unusual sound. The words still burned in Otah’s mind. The coward spirits, consigned to hell.

  And what keeps them there? his quiet inner voice asked him. Why do they remain in hell?

  He lay awake for hours, his mind racing.

  The teachers’ quarters opened on a common room. Shelves lined the walls, filled with books and scrolls. A fire pit glowed with coals prepared for them by the most honored of Milah-kvo’s black-robed boys. The wide gap of a window - glazed double to hold out the cold of winter, the heat of the summer - looked out over the roadway leading south to the high road. Tahi sat now, warming his feet at the fire and staring out into the cold plain beyond. Milah opened the door
behind him and strode in.

  ‘I expected you earlier,’ Tahi said.

  Milah briefly took a pose of apology.

  ‘Annat Ryota was complaining about the kitchen flue smoking again,’ he said.

  Tahi grunted.

  ‘Sit. The fire’s warm.’

  ‘Fires often are,’ Milah agreed, his tone dry and mocking. Tahi managed a thin smile as his companion took a seat.

  ‘What did he make of your boys?’ Tahi asked.