habit," Maati said.
"Politics takes all the time you can give it," Kiyan said with distaste.
They walked through a wide gate and into a great subterranean hall. A
thousand lanterns glowed, their white light filling the air. Men and
women and children passed on their various errands, the gabble of voices
like a brook over stones. A beggar sang, his lacquered begging box on
the stone floor before him. Maati saw a waterseller's cart, and another
vendor selling waxpaper cones of rice and fish. It was almost like a
street, almost like a wide pavilion with a canopy of stone.
"Your rooms?" Kiyan asked. "Or would you rather have something to eat
first? There's not much fresh this deep into winter, but I've found a
woman who makes a hot barley soup that's simply lovely."
"Actually ... could I meet the child?"
Kiyan's smile seemed to have a light of its own.
"Can you imagine a world where I said no?" she asked.
She nodded to a branching in the wide hall, and led him west, deeper
into the underground. The change was subtle, moving from the public
space of the street to the private tunnels beneath the palaces. There
were gates, it was true, but they were open. There were armsmen here and
there, but only a few of them. And yet soon all the people they passed
wore the robes of servants or slaves of the Khai, and they had entered
the Khai's private domain. Kiyan stopped at a thin oak door, pulled it
open and gestured him to follow her up the staircase it revealed.
The nursery was high above the tunnel-world. The air was kept warm by a
roaring fire in a stone grate, but the light was from the sun. The
nurse, a young girl, no more than sixteen summers, sat dozing in her
chair while the baby cooed and gurgled to itself. Maati stepped to the
edge of the crib, and the child quieted, staring up at him with
distrustful eyes, and then breaking into a wide toothless grin.
"She's only just started sleeping through the night," Kiyan said,
speaking softly to keep from waking her servant. "And there were two
weeks of colic that were close to hell. I don't know what we'd have done
with her if it hadn't been for the nurses. She's been doing better now.
We've named her Eiah."
She reached down, scooped up her daughter, and settled her in her arms.
It was a movement so natural as to seem inevitable. Maati remembered
having done it himself, many years ago, in a very different place. Kiyan
seemed almost to know his mind.
" "Iani-kya said that if things went as you'd expected with the Daikvo
you were thinking of seeking out your son. Nayiit?"
"Nayiit," Maati agreed. "I sent letters to the places I knew to send
them, but I haven't heard hack yet. I may not. But I'll be here, in one
place. If he and his mother want to find me, it won't be difficult."
"I'm sorry," Kiyan said. "Not that it will be easy for them, only that ..."
Maati only shook his head. In Kiyan's arms, the tiny girl with deep
brown eyes grasped at air and gurgled, unaware, he knew, of all the
blood and pain and betrayal that had gone into bringing her here.
"She's beautiful," he said.
"BE REASONABLE!"
Cehmai lay back in his bath. Beside him, Stone-Made-Soft had put its
feet into the warm water and was gazing placidly out into the thick
salt-scented steam that rose from the water and filled the bathhouse.
Against the far wall, a group of young women was rising from the pool
and walking back toward the dressing rooms, leaving a servant to fish
the floating trays with their teapots and bowls from the small, bobbing
waves. Baarath slapped the water impatiently.
"You can look at naked girls later," he said. "This is important. If
Maati-cha's come back to help me catalog the library ..."
"He might quibble on `help you,'" Cehmai said, and might as well have
kept silent.
"... then it's clearly of critical importance to the Dai-kvo. I've heard
the rumors. I know the Vaunyogi were looking to sell the library to some
Westlands warden. That's why Maati was sent here in the first place."
Cehmai closed his eyes. Rumors and speculation had run wild, and perhaps
it would have been a kindness to correct Baarath. But Otah had asked him
to keep silent, and the letters from the Dai-kvo had encouraged this
strategy. If it were known what the Galts had done, what they had
intended to do, it would mean the destruction of their nation: cities
drowned, innocent men and women and children starved when a quiet word
heavy with threat might suffice instead. There was always recourse to
destruction. So long as one poet held one andat, they could find a path
to ruin. So instead of slaughtering countless innocents, Cehmai put up
with the excited, inaccurate speculation of his old friend and waited
for the days to grow longer and warmer.
"If the collection is split," Baraath went on, his voice dropping to a
rough whisper, "we might overlook the very thing that made the library
so important. You have to move your collection over to the library, or
terrible things might happen."
"Terrible things like what?"
"I don't know," Baraath said, his whisper turning peevish. "That's what
Maati-cha and I are trying to find out."
"Well, once you've gone through your collection and found nothing, the
two of you can come to the poet's house and look through mine."
"That would take years!"
"I'll make sure they're well kept until then," Cehmai said. "Have you
spoken with the Khai about his private collection?"
"Who'd want that? It's all copies of contracts and agreements from five
generations ago. Unless it's the most obscure etiquette ever to see
sunlight. Anyone who wants that, let them have it. You've got all the
good books. The philosophy, the grammars, the studies of the andat."
"It's a hard life you lead," Cehmai said. "So close and still, no."
"You are an arrogant prig," Baraath said. "Everyone knows it, but I'm
the only man in the city with the courage to say it to your face.
Arrogant and selfish and small-souled."
"Well, perhaps it's not too much to go over to the library. It isn't as
if it was that long a walk."
Baraath's face brightened for a moment, then, as the insincerity of the
comment came clear, squeezed as if he'd taken a bite of fresh lemon.
With a sound like an angry duck, he rose up and stalked from the baths
and into the fog.
"He's a terrible person," the andat said.
"I know. But he's a friend of mine."
"And terrible people need friends as much as good ones do," the andat
said, its tone an agreement. "More, perhaps."
"Which of us are you thinking of?"
Stone-Made-Soft didn't speak. Cehmai let the warmth of the water slip