Kimia remained at the head of the council table after everyone else had gone.
Tarkhe did not ask her to move. The indrel did not know that movement was expected.
For a little while, the three of them remained in the room as though the council had not ended but merely become very small.
Kimia looked down at the table.
The polished surface of the dark wood returned a weak reflection. Her face appeared within it, distorted by grain and old repairs, but not offensively so. Red fur. Dark kaftan. Two almost-black eyes again.
She watched herself.
The reflected Kimia watched back.
Nothing moved incorrectly.
Good.
She leaned slightly to one side. So did the reflection.
Good.
There were days when such tests felt ridiculous only after she had completed them. Today was one.
Kimia sat upright.
At the opposite end of the council room hung several portraits.
The oldest occupied the largest frame.
A yinglet stood within it wearing a quilted Peshtulan kaftan far more elaborate than Kimia's own. Gold thread followed the seams. A red sash crossed his waist. One hand rested upon the hilt of a curved saber scaled to yinglet proportions, the other hanging loosely at his side. He stared outward with the practiced severity of a person who had paid an artist to preserve the correct version of himself.
Some predecessor.
Duke. Patriarch.
The plaque beneath the frame gave his name, dates, and titles.
Kimia had read them many times. She had never known him. No one alive had.
His face expressed the curious union of two cultures equally that have differing interpretations of face. Peshtulan dignity had collided with yinglet presentation and produced a small gray-furred being standing beside a saber with all the solemnity of a conquering emperor.
Kimia wondered whether he had actually been like that.
Perhaps he had laughed constantly. Perhaps he picked his nose when no one looked. Perhaps he had been terrified of thunderstorms or loved them and ran into the rain when it stormed.
Portraits were lies commissioned by dead people to instruct the living in how they should be remembered.
The next showed a human duke.
Peshtulan again. Different century. Different bloodline.
He stood aboard the deck of a ship beneath an impossible blue sky, dressed in formal clothes no reasonable navigator would have worn at sea. One hand held a brass sextant. Behind him lay islands reduced by the painter into green bumps surrounded by obedient water.
Explorer. Surveyor. Governor for a time. Founder of something.
Kimia remembered that much.
The sextant mattered more than the man.
It communicated intellect. Distance. Mastery over uncertain space.
The sea behind him did not appear capable of killing anyone.
Kimia had seen enough old reports to know that it had.
She studied the yinglet duke's face.
No relation.
Neither portrait belonged to her bloodline.
House Chityala had outlived blood more successfully than blood had outlived itself. Marriages, extinctions, adoptions, transfers of title, reorganizations, one disputed succession everyone now pretended had been obvious. The House persisted while the families occupying it changed.
Kimia inherited their rooms. Their portraits. Their debts. Their administrative habits.
Not their blood.
She found this comforting.
Blood was an irrational method of assigning responsibility to strangers.
The dead yinglet duke looked past her.
The human explorer held his sextant forever at the same angle.
Kimia looked back at the polished table.
The present did not seem more meaningful simply because she occupied it.
Her mind began moving.
Slowly at first.
Vehm.
That was one possibility.
She could find him.
He would probably be drinking by now with greater commitment than before. Vehm could obtain a bottle, close a door, put music on the televox and transform the evening into a sequence of events nobody would later be able to place in the proper order.
This sounded wonderful.
Kimia considered it seriously.
She could become drunk. Then more drunk. Perhaps whiteblood. Perhaps kilcane once the medication had begun loosening its hold. Vehm would understand, or enable.
Those two things had become difficult to separate.
She imagined his room. Glass on the table. Smoke. Some stupid old song from Peshtul. Vehm talking about Alsper while too intoxicated to pronounce half of his own argument. Kimia laughing, then waking somewhere else, or spending the night making love to Vehm again, exorcising her demons with all of these.
No.
She could also simply drink. No whiteblood. No kilcane. A respectable quantity. A duchess was permitted to drink.
This thought possessed the unmistakable structure of a lawyer hired by an addiction.
Kimia recognized it.
“No,” she said.
Tarkhe looked over.
“What?”
“Nozhing.”
“You spoke.”
“To myself.”
“What did you say?”
“No.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It was literally zhe answer.”
Tarkhe considered pursuing this. He didn't
Good physician.
Kimia stood.
The movement made her slightly lightheaded.
Not enough to matter.
She waited for the floor to finish deciding where it was and then adjusted her kaftan.
“Zhe library.”
Tarkhe closed the book he had not been reading.
“Again?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Kalgkur.”
“Ah.”
That was sufficient.
The indrel moved.
Kimia noticed this little exchange and disliked what it implied.