Free Seasons of War by Daniel Abraham

spat. Otah shook his head, uncertain now how long he had been lost in his reverie. When he stood, his left leg had gone numb from being pressed too long against the bare stone. He took up the lantern and walked - moving slowly and carefully to protect his numbed foot - back toward the stairways that would return him to the surface and the day. By the time he regained the great halls, feeling had returned. The sky peeked through the windows, a pale gray preparing itself to blue. Voices echoed and the palaces woke, and the grand, stately beast that was the court of Machi stirred and stretched.

    His apartments, when he reached them, were a flurry of activity. A knot of servants and members of the utkhaiem gabbled like peahens, Kiyan in their center listening with a seriousness and sympathy that only he knew masked amusement. Her hand was on the shoulder of the body servant whom Otah had passed, the peace of sleep banished and anxiety in its place.

    ‘Gentlemen,’ Otah said, letting his voice boom, calling their attention to him. ‘Is there something amiss?’

    To a man, they adopted poses of obeisance and welcome. Otah responded automatically now, as he did half a hundred times every day.

    ‘Most High,’ a thin-voiced man said - his Master of Tides. ‘We came to prepare you and found your bed empty.’

    Otah looked at Kiyan, whose single raised brow told them that empty had only meant empty of him, and that she’d have been quite pleased to keep sleeping.

    ‘I was walking,’ he said.

    ‘We may not have the time to prepare you for the audience with the envoy from Tan-Sadar,’ the Master of Tides said.

    ‘Put him off,’ Otah said, walking through the knot of people to the door of his apartments. ‘Reschedule everything you have for me today.’

    The Master of Tides gaped like a trout in air. Otah paused, his hands in a query that asked if the words bore repeating. The Master of Tides adopted an acknowledging pose.

    ‘The rest of you,’ he said, ‘I would like breakfast served in my apartments here. And send for my children.’

    ‘Eiah-cha’s tutors . . .’ one of the others began, but Otah looked at the man and he seemed to forget what he’d been saying.

    ‘I will be taking the day with my family,’ Otah said.

    ‘You will start rumors, Most High,’ another said. ‘They’ll say the boy’s cough has grown worse again.’

    ‘And I would like black tea with the meal,’ Otah said. ‘In fact, bring the tea first. I’ll be in by the fire, warming my feet.’

    He stepped in, and Kiyan followed, closing the door behind her.

    ‘Bad night?’ she asked.

    ‘Sleepless,’ he said as he sat by the fire grate. ‘That’s all.’

    Kiyan kissed the top of his head where she assured him that the hair was not thinning, and stepped out of the room. He heard the soft rustle of cloth against stone and Kiyan’s low, contented humming, and knew she was changing her robes. The warmth of the fire pressed against the soles of his feet like a comforting hand, and he closed his eyes for a moment.

    No building stands forever, he thought. Even palaces fall. Even towers. He wondered what it would have been like to live in a world where Machi didn’t exist - who he might have been, what he might have done - and he felt the weight of stone pressing down upon the air he breathed. What would he do if the towers fell? Where would he go, if he could go anywhere?

    ‘Papa-kya!’ Danat’s bright voice called. ‘I was in the Second Palace, and I found a closet where no one had been in ever, and look what I found!’

    Otah opened his eyes, and turned to his son and the wood-and-string model he’d discovered. Eiah arrived a hand and a half later, when the thin granite shutters glowed with the sun. For a time, at least, Otah’s own father’s tomb lay forgotten.

     
    The problem with Athai-kvo, Maati decided, was that he was simply an unlikable man. There was no single thing that he did or said, no single habit