Steel rang on steel. Eustin closed and Sinja darted back, the snow
crackling under his boots. They were both smiling now, and one of the
bowmen had pulled out his quiver, prepared to act in case Eustin should
fail. Sinja took a deep breath of cold air, and felt strangely like
shouting.
He'd been wrong before; this was exactly how he'd hoped to die.
NIAATi CHANTED UNTIL HIS MOUTH WAS DRY, HIS EYES LACKED ON THE scrawled
note on the wall before him. Each time he began to feel his thoughts
taking shape, it distracted him. He would think that the binding was
beginning to work, and he would leap ahead to the battle outside and
what he could do, the fate of Gait, the future, what Eiah and Cehmai
were seeing, and the solidity that the binding had taken would slip away
again. It was hard to put the world aside. It was hard not to care.
He didn't pause, but he closed his eyes, picturing the wall and his
writing upon it. He knew the binding-knew the structures of it, the
grammars that formed the thoughts that put together everything he had
hoped and intended. And instead of reading it from the world, he read it
from the image in his own mind. Dreamlike, the warehouse wall seemed
more solid, more palpable, with his eyes closed. The sound of his voice
began to echo, syllables from different phrases blending together,
creating new words that also spoke to Maati's intention. The air seemed
thicker, harder to breathe. The world had become dense. He began his
chant again, though he could still hear himself speaking the words that
came halfway through it.
The wall in his mind began to sway, the image fading into a seedpeach
pit and flax seed and everything in between the two. And an egg. And a
womb. And the three images became a single object, still halfformed in
his mind. Bright as sunlight, but blasted, twisted. There was a scent
like a wound gone rancid, the sulfur scent of bad eggs. His fingers
seemed to touch the words, feeling them sliding out into the world and
collapsing back; they were sticky and slick. The echo of the chant
deepened until he found himself speaking the first phrase of the binding
at the same moment his remembered voice spoke the same phrase and the
whole grand complex, raucous song fell into him like a stone dropping
into the abyss. He could still hear it, and feel it. The smell of it was
thick in his nostrils, though he was also aware that the air smelled
only of dust and hot iron. So it wasn't truly the thick smell of rot;
only the idea of it, as compelling as the truth.
Maati balanced the storm in a part of his mind-hack behind his ears,
even with the point at which his spine met his skull. It balanced there.
He didn't know when he'd stopped chanting. He opened his eyes.
"Well, my dear," the andat said. "Who'd have thought we'd meet again?"
It sat before him, naked. The soft, androgynous face was the moonlight
pale that Seedless' had been. The long, flowing hair so black it was
blue. The rise and curve of a woman's body. Corrupting-the-Generative.
Sterile. He hadn't thought she would look so much like Seedless, but now
that he saw her, he found himself unsurprised.
Cehmai approached on soft feet. Maati could hear Eiah's breath behind
him, panting as if she'd run a race. Maati found himself exhausted but
also exhilarated, as if he could begin again from the start.
"You're here," Nlaati said.
"Am I? Yes, I suppose I am. I'm not really him, you know."
Seedless, it meant. The first andat he'd seen. The one he'd been meant for.
"lily memory of him is part of you," he said.
"And so the sense that I've seen you before," it said, smiling. "And of
being the slave you hoped to own."
Cehmai lifted the robe, unfolding the rich cloth. The andat looked up
and hack at him. There was something of Liat in the line of its jaw, the
way that it smiled. Sterile rose, and stepped into the waiting folds of
cloth. When Cehmai helped it with the stays, it answered with a pose of
thanks.
"We should call Otah-kvo," Nlaati said. "He should know we've succeeded."
Sterile took a pose that objected and smiled. Its teeth were sharper
than Nlaati had pictured them. Its cheeks higher. He felt a surge of
dread sweep through him.
"Tell me what you remember of Seedless," it said.
"What?"
"Oh," the andat said, taking a pose of apology. "Tell me what you
remember of Seedless, master. Is that an improvement?"
"Maati-kvo-" Cehmai began, but Maati raised a hand to quiet him. The
andat smiled. He felt its sorrow and rage in the back of his mind. It
was like knowing a woman, being so close to her that he had become part
of her and she part of him. It was the intimacy he had confused with the
physical act of love when he had been too young and naive to distinguish
between the two. He stepped close to it, raising a hand to caress its
pale cheek. The flesh was hard as marble, and cold.
"He was beautiful," Nlaati said.
"And clever," it said.
"And he loved me in his way."
"Heshai-kvo loved you. And he expressed that love by protecting you. By
dying."
"And you?" Maati said, though of course he knew the answer. It was an
andat. It wanted freedom the way water wanted to flow, the way rain
wanted to fall. It did not love him. Sterile smiled, the stone-hard
flesh moving under his fingertips. A living statue.
"Maati-kvo," Cehmai said again.
"It didn't work," Maati said. "The binding. It failed. Didn't it?"
"Yes," the andat said.
"What?" Cehmai said.
"But it's here!" Eiah said. Maati hadn't noticed her coming close to
them. "The andat's here, so you did it. If you didn't, it wouldn't be here."
Sterile tuned, smiling, and put its hand out to touch Eiah's shoulder.
Instinctively, Nlaati tried to force back the pale hand, to use his mind
to push it away. He might as well have been wishing the tide not to
turn. Sterile ran its fingers through Eiah's dark hair.
"But there's a price, little one. You know that. Uncle Maati told you
that, all those grim, terrible stories about failed poets dying hard.
You never heard the pleasure he took in those, did you? Can you imagine
why a man like your Uncle Maati might want to study the deaths of other
poets? Might want to revel in them?"
"Stop this," Maati said, but it kept speaking, its voice fallen to a murmur.
"He might have been a little bitter," it said, and grinned. "That's why
he romanced you too, you know. He didn't get to have a child of his own,
so he made you his friend. Made himself your confidant. Because if he
could take one of Otah-kvo's children away-even only a little hit-it
would balance the boy he'd lost."
Eiah frowned, a thousand tiny lines darkening her brow.