A Shadow in Summer (Long Price Quartet, #1)

by Daniel Abraham

Dwelling in the misery of the school and hoping for nothing beyond survival was the only way to keep his soul from flying apart.

Dwelling in the misery of the school and hoping for nothing beyond survival was the only way to keep his soul from flying apart.

“There are no locks on hell,” Otah said. It was the first time he had tried to express this to someone else, and it proved harder than he had expected. “If there aren’t locks, then what can hold anyone there besides fear that leaving might be worse?”

The world is full of willing victims—people who embrace the cruelty meted out against them.

He had caused that pain, and he could not draw the line between the shame of having done it and the shame of being too weak to do it again.

There was no way for him to explain that he couldn’t lead the boys to strength because in his heart, he was still one of them.

“Just as no boy has taken the black robes without a show of his strength of will, no one has put the black robe away without renouncing the cruelty that power brings.

“Heshai is about to kill a child whose mother loves it. There isn’t anything worse than that. Not for him. Picture it. This island girl? He’s going to watch the light die in her eyes and know that without him, it wouldn’t have happened. You want to know will that break him? Wilsin-cha, it will snap him like a twig.”

house. She mustn’t go into this unsure of herself, and anger was a better mask than courtesy.

He laughed with a sound like choking—mirthless and painful.

“I know you want more from me than a laborer’s life. And I don’t imagine I’ll do this forever. But I’m not ashamed of it, and I won’t do something I like less so that someone someday might give me something that they think I’m supposed to want. When I want something, that will be different.”

“It’s a fallen age, boy. The great poets of the Empire ruined it for us. All that’s left is picking at the obscure thoughts and images that are still in the corners. We’re like dogs sniffing for scraps. We aren’t poets; we’re scholars.”

was too young and too foolish, and now I’m afraid I’ll never have the chance to be wise.”

“Yes,” Seedless agreed, smiling. “From the poet. Now. Picture our master as a boy not much older than you are now. He’s just lost a child that might otherwise have been his, a woman who might have loved him. The unspoken suspicion that his father hates him and the pain of his mother letting him be taken away gnaws at him like a cancer. And now he is called on to save Saraykeht—to bind the andat that will keep the wheels of commerce running. And he fashions me. “And look what he did, Maati,” the andat continued, spreading his arms as if he were on display. “I’m beautiful. I’m clever. I’m confident. In ancient days, Miyani-kvo made himself his perfect mate. Heshai-kvo created the self he wished that he were. In all my particulars, I am who he would have been, had it been given him to choose. But along with that, he folded in what he imagined his perfect self would think of the real man. Along with beauty and subtlety and wit, he gave me all his hatred of the toad-poet Heshai.”

“You make him sound like a very weak man.” “Oh no. He is what becomes of a very strong man who’s done to himself what Heshai did.”

Her first impulse had been to go to friends, but she found she had fewer than she’d thought.

The comfort house itself, when they reached it, was awash with activity. Even in the street outside it, men gathered, talking and drinking. She stood a little way down the street at the mouth of an alleyway while Kirath went in. The house itself was built in two levels. The front was the lower, a single story but with a pavilion on the roof and blue and silver cloths hanging down the pale stucco walls. The back part of the house carried a second story and a high wall that might encompass a garden in the back. Certainly a kitchen. There were, however, few windows, and those there were were thin and cut high in the wall. For privacy, perhaps. Or to keep anyone from climbing out them.

The city stretched below them. The gray and red roofs, the streets leading down to converge on the seafront, and beyond that the masts of the ships, and the sea, and the great expanse of sky dwarfing it all. It was like something from the imagination of a painter, too gaudy and perfect to be real.

The life he had built as Itani Noyga. All of it fell away, and he remembered the boy he had been, full of certainty and self-righteous fire trudging across cold spring fields to the high road. It was like being there again, and the strength of the memory frightened him.

“But I also don’t think you’ll end your life a laborer. You’re a strange man. You’re strong and clever and charming. And I think you know half again what you let on. But I don’t understand your choices. You could be so much, if you wanted to. Isn’t there anything you want?”

The city streets were gaudy with sunset. Orange light warmed the walls and roofs, even as the first stars began to glimmer in the deep cobalt of the western sky. Otah stood in the street and watched the change come. Fireflies danced like candles. The songs of beggars changed as the traffic of night came out.

“Is this really so bad, what I do?” Otah asked. “You, Liat. Everyone seems to think so. I started out as a child on the road with no family, no friends. I didn’t even dare use my real name. And I built something. I have work, and friends, and a lover. I have good food and shelter. And at night I can go and listen to poets or philosophers or singers, or I can go to bathhouses or teahouses, or out on the ocean in sailing boats. Is that so bad? It that so little?”

“Of course not,” Maati said. “Something doesn’t have to be great to be worthy. If you’ve followed the calling of your heart, then what does it matter what anyone else thinks?”

If the poet Heshai lost control of his creation, if Seedless escaped, the cotton trade in Saraykeht would lose its advantage over other ports in the islands and the Westlands and Galt. Even when a new andat came, it wasn’t likely that it would be able to fuel the cotton trade as Seedless or Petals-Falling had.

“Some errors you can only see once you’ve committed them.”

Her time since the sad trade and her banishment had felt like being ill. She’d moved through her days without feeling them, unable to concentrate, uninterested in her work. Something had broken in her, and pretending it back to fixed wasn’t working. She’d half known it wouldn’t, and her mind had made plans for her almost without her knowing it.

The man standing beside him wore robes of deep green. A beard shot with white belied an unlined, youthful face, and the bright, black eyes seemed amused but not unfriendly.

The water lapped at the boards of the ship below them, the seagulls cried, but Otah didn’t hear them. For a moment, he was atop a tower. To his left, dawn was breaking, rose and gold and pale blue of robin’s egg. To his right, the land was still dark. And before him, snow covered mountains—dark stone showing the bones of the land. He smelled something—a perfume or a musk that made him think of women. He couldn’t say if the vision was dream or memory or something of both, but a powerful sorrow flowed through him that lingered after the images had gone.

think it’s why I keep travelling even though I’m not really suited to it. Whenever I’m in one place, I remember another. So I’ll be in Udun and thinking about a black crab stew they serve in Chaburi-Tan. Or in Saraykeht, thinking of the way the rain falls in Utani. If I could take them all—all the best parts of all the cities—and bring them to a single place, I think that would be paradise. But I can’t, so I’m doomed. When the time comes I’m too old to do this, I’ll have to settle for one place and I truly believe the thought of never seeing the others again will break me.”

“You’re an interesting one, Itani Noyga. I thought I’d come make light with a young man on what looks like his first journey, and I find myself thinking about my final one. Do you always carry that cloud with you?”

< Maati woke to the sound of driving rain pattering against the shutters. The light that pressed in was cloud softened, with neither direction nor strength to tell him how long he’d slept. The night candle was now only a burnt wick. He pushed away the netting, shuddered, and rose. When he opened the shutters, it was as if the city was gone, vanished in gray. Even the outlines of the palaces were vague, but the surface of the pond was alive and dancing and the leaves of the nearby trees shone with bright wet green just turning to red at the veins. The rain against his face and chest was cool. Autumn was coming to Saraykeht.

“I’m a prisoner and a slave held against my will. I’m forced to work for my captor when what I want is to be free. Free of this box, of this flesh, of this consciousness. It’s no more a moral impulse than you wanting to breathe. You’d sacrifice anyone, Maati, if you were drowning.”

For his own life, Maati found himself floating. Unless he was engaged in the daily maintenance of his invalid master, there was no direction for him that he didn’t choose, and so he found that his days had grown to follow his emotions. If he felt frightened or overwhelmed, he studied Heshai’s brown book, searching for insights that might serve him later if he were called on to hold Seedless. If he felt guilty, he sat by Heshai and tried to coax him into conversation. If he felt lonesome—and he often felt lonesome—he sought out Liat Chokavi. Sometimes he dreamed of her, and of that one brief kiss.

“Where do you think he is?” Maati asked, calling up the spirit of their friend—his master, her heartmate—to show that he understood that this moment, her hand in his, wasn’t something inappropriate. It was only friendship.

He stopped in the gardens of the low palaces, sat on the grass, and pressed his fingertips to his mouth, as if making sure his lips were still there; that they were real. The world seemed suddenly uprooted, dreamlike. She kissed him—truly kissed him. She had touched his hair. It was impossible. It was terrible. It was like walking along a familiar path and suddenly falling off a cliff. And it was also like flying.

Despite the wealth and luxury of the road, the first sight of the Dai-kvo’s village took Otah’s breath away. Carved into the stone of the mountain, the village was something half belonging to the world of men, half to the ocean and the sun and the great forces of the world. He stopped in the road and looked up at the glittering windows and streets, stairways and garrets and towers. A thin golden ribbon of a waterfall lay just within the structures, and warm light of the coming sunset made the stone around it glow like bronze. Chimes light as birdsong and deep as bells rang when the breeze stirred them. If the view had been designed to humble those who came to it, the designer could rest well. Maati, he realized, had lived in this place, studied in it. And he, Otah, had refused it. He wondered what it would have been like, coming down this road as a boy coming to his reward; what it would have been like to see this grandeur set out before him as if it were his right.

Now, he wasn’t sure why he’d thought delivering a letter would mean more than delivering a letter.

“The past was a beautiful place, Marchat-kya,” she said. “I miss it already.”

this. She had always imagined it would be difficult, that people would stare at her in the streets and talk of her in scandalized whispers. In the event, it seemed no one cared.

Locking away a part of yourself—especially a shameful one—gives that part power over all the rest. It’s the danger of splitting yourself in two, don’t you find?”

WINTER CAME TO THE SUMMER CITIES. THE LAST LEAVES FELL, LEAVING bare trees to sleep through the long nights. Cold mists rose, filling the streets with air turned to milk.

In the front of the house a woman or a child began singing—the voice high and sweet and pure. The talking voices stilled and gave the song their silence. It was one that Maati had heard before many times, a traditional ballad of love found and lost that dated back to the days when the Empire still stood. Maati sat back, his spine pressing into the wall behind him, and laid his arm across Liat’s shoulders. His head swam with emotions that he could only partly name. He closed his eyes and let the ancient words and old grammars wash over him. He felt Liat shudder. When he looked, her face was flushed, her mouth drawn tight. Tears glistened in her eyes.

When he pulled the bowl back and helped her ease back down, Liat saw an odd expression on the poet’s face—tenderness, she thought. She had always thought of Heshai as an ugly man, but in that light, at that moment, the wide lips and thinning hair seemed to transcend normal ideas of beauty. He looked strong and gentle. His movements were protective as a mother’s and as fierce. Liat wondered why she’d never seen it before.

With her good hand, she took a pose of thanks. Maati replied with a simple response. Their eyes met, the gaze holding all the things they were not speaking. Her need, and his. His resolve. Morning rain tapped at the shutters like time passing behind them. Maati turned and left her, his back straight, his bearing formal and controlled.

Both boys sat. It was an interesting contrast, the pair or them. Both were clearly in earnest, both wore expressions of perfect seriousness, but Itani’s eyes reminded her more of her own—focused out, on her, on the room, searching, it seemed, for something. The poet boy was like his master—brooding, turned inward.

He walked back to the compound slowly. Not because of the dread, though the gods knew he wasn’t looking forward, but instead because his failure seemed to have washed his eyes. The sounds and scents of the city were fresh, unfamiliar. When he had been traveling as a young man, it had been like this coming home. The streets his family lived among had carried the same weight of familiarity and strangeness that Saraykeht now bore. At the time, he’d thought it was only that he had been away, but now he thought it was more that the travels he’d made back then had changed him, as the letter from Epani had changed him again just now. The city was the same, but he was a new man seeing it: The ancient stonework; the vines that rose on the walls and were pulled back every year only to crawl up again; the mixture of languages from all across the world that came to the seafront; the songs of the beggars and cry of birdcall.

She closed her eyes, felt the rise and fall of his breath like waves coming to shore. Felt him shift as he turned to her and put his arms around her. Her wounds ached with the force of his embrace, but she would have bitten her tongue bloody before she complained. Instead she stroked his hair and wept.

“Poor stupid rabbit. Am very sorry. The boy and you together. It makes me think of the man who I was . . . of the father. Before, I call you stupid and selfish and weak because I am forgetting what it is to be young. I am young once, too, and I am not my best mind now. What I say to hurt you, I take back, yes?”

One step at a time, Amat moved forward. There would be time later, she told herself, for all that. Later, when the Galts were revealed and her burden was passed on to someone else. When the child’s death was avenged and her city was safe and her conscience was clean. Then she could be herself again, if there was anything left of that woman. Or create herself again if there wasn’t.

Otah found himself telling the tale—his own secret and Wilsin’s, the source of Liat’s wounds and the prospect of Maati’s. Throughout, Heshai listened, his face clouded, nodding from time to time or asking questions that made Otah clarify himself. When the secret of Otah’s identity came out, the poet’s eyes widened, but he made no other comment. Twice, he passed the bottle of wine over, and Otah drank from it. It was strange, hearing it all spoken, hearing the thoughts he’d only half-formed made real by the words he found to express them. His own fate, the fate of others—justice and betrayal, loyalty and the changes worked by the sea. The wine and the fear and the pain and dread in Otah’s guts turned the old man into his confessor, his confidant, his friend even if only for the moment.