this because it was worth the risk if it meant keeping you safe."
Eiah swallowed and her eyes shone with tears. Maati smiled at her, stood
again, and waved her back toward the stairs. Cehmai came close, frowning.
"I'm not sure that was a kind thing to tell her," he said, but a sudden
outburst of trumpet calls sounded before Maati could reply. Maati
thought could hear the distant tattoo of drums echoing against the city
walls. He gestured to Cehmai.
"Come on. "['here isn't time. Finish drawing those, then light the
candles and close that blasted door. We'll all freeze to death before
the andat can have its crack at us."
"Or we'll have it all in place just in time for the Galts to take it."
Maati scribbled out the rest of the binding. He'd wanted time to think
on each word, each phrase; if he'd had time to paint each word like the
portrait of a thought, it would have been better. "There wasn't time. He
finished just as Cehmai lit the final lantern and walked up the stone
steps to the snow door. Before he closed it, the younger poet looked
out, peering into the city.
"What do you see?"
"Smoke," Cehmai said. 't'hen, "Nothing."
"Come back down,,, \laati said. "\V'here are the robes for it?"
"In the back corner," Cehmai said, pulling the wide wooden doors shut.
"I'll get them."
Nlaati went to the cushion in the middle of the room, lowered himself
with a grunt, and considered. The wall before him looked more like the
scrihhlings of low-town vandals than a poet's lifework. But the words
and phrases, the images and metaphors all shone brighter in his mind
than the lanterns could account for. Cehmai passed before him briefly,
laying robes of blue shot with black on the floor where, with luck, the
next hands to hold them wouldn't be human.
\laati glanced over his shoulder. Eiah was sitting against the back
wall, her hands held in fists even with her heart. I Ic smiled at her.
Reassuringly, he hoped. And then he turned to the words he had written,
took five deep breaths to clear his mind, and began to chant.
O'EMI STOOD ON T11E 1.11' OF"17IF. ROOF AND LOOKE1) DOWN XI' 1NIACIII AS
IF IT were a map. The great streets were marked by the lines of
rooftops. Only those streets that led directly to I louse Siyanti's
warehouses were at an angle that permitted him to see the black cobbles
turning white beneath the snow. To the south, the army of the Galts was
marching forward. The trumpet calls from the high towers told him that
much. "I'hey had worked out short signals for some eventualities-short
melodies that signaled some part of the plans he had worked with Sinja
and Ashua Radaani and the others. But in addition there was a code that
let him phrase questions as if they were spoken words, and hear answers
in the replies from the towers far above.
The trumpeter was a young man with a vast barrel chest and lips blue
with cold. Whenever Otah had the man blow, the wide brass hell of the
trumpet seemed as if it would deafen them all. And yet the responses
were sometimes nearly too faint to hear. 'l'imes like now.
"What's he saying?" the Khai Cetani asked, and (bah held tip a hand to
stop him, straining to hear the last trailing notes.
"The Galts are taking the bridge," Otah said. "I don't think they trust
the ice."
"That'll mean they're longer reaching us," the Khai Cetani said.
""That's good. If we can keep them out of the warmth until sundown ..."
Otah took a pose of agreement, but didn't truly believe it. If they were
able to trap the Galts above ground when night came, the invaders would
take over the houses and burn whatever they could break small enough to
fit in the fire grates. If the cold air moved in-a storm or the frigid
winds that ended the gentle snows of autumn-then the Galts would be in
trouble, but the snow graying the distance now wasn't prelude to a
storm. Otah didn't say it, but he couldn't imagine keeping an army so
close and still at bay long enough for the weather to change. The Galts
would he defeated here in the streets, or they wouldn't he defeated.
Ile paced the length of the rooftop, his eyes tracing the routes that he
had hoped to guide them toward-the palaces and the forges. Behind him,
his servants shivered from the cold and the need to remain respectfully
still. The great iron fire grate that they'd hauled up and loaded with
logs was burning merrily, but somehow the heat from it seemed to go out
no more than a foot or two from the flames. The Khai Cetani stood near
it, and the trumpeter. Otah couldn't imagine standing still. Not now.
The southern reaches of the city were essentially Galtic already; there
was no way to make them safe against the coming army. The battle would
he nearer the center, in the shadows of the towers, in the narrower ways
where Otah's men could appear all along the Galtic line at once as they
had in the forest. Another trumpet call came. The Galts had finished
crossing the river. The march had begun on Nlachi itself.
I should he down there, Otah thought. I should get a sword or an axe and
go down there.
It was an idiotic idea, and he knew it. One more blade or how in the
streets wouldn't matter now, and getting himself killed would achieve
nothing.
Trumpets sounded-half a dozen of them at once. And Galtic drums.
Everyone sending signals, none of them listening. Otah squatted at the
roof's edge with his eyes closed, trying to make out one message from
another. Frustration built in his spine and neck. Something was
happening-several things, and all at the same moment, and he couldn't
hear what they were.
"Most high!" one the servants called. ""There!"
Otah and the Khai Cctani both looked to where the servant boy was
pointing. A runner dashed along a rooflinc, down near the great, wide
streets that led toward the forges. A great pillar of smoke was rising
from the south. Something there, then. Otah felt the first small surge
of hope; it was near where he had hoped the (;alts would go. The
trumpets were calling again, fewer of them. Otah found himself better
able to make sense of them. 'l'he Galts seemed to be moving in three
directions at once-sweeping and holding the southern buildings, and then
two large forces moving as Otah had hoped they would.
"Call to the towers," Otah said. ""lull them to begin."
The trumpeter took a great breath and blared out the melody they had set
for the towers, and then the rising trill that was their signal to begin
raining stones and arrows into the streets. It was less than a breath
before Otah thought he saw something fly from the open sky doors far
above them, plummeting toward the ground. The snow was tricky, though.
It might only have been his imagination.
Otah felt himself trying to stretch out his will across the city, to