sun peeked out between the low clouds and the high peaks in the west,
brightness flaring gold for a long moment before the city fell into its
long twilight. Alone again, Nlaati told himself that the darkness was
only about the accidents of sunlight, and not his young friend's absence.
He could still remember the first time he'd seen Eiah. She'd been tiny,
a small, curious helplessness in her mother's arms, and he had been
deeply in disfavor with the Dai-kvo and sent to Machi in half-exile for
treading too near the line between the poets and the politics of the
court. The poets were creatures of the Dai-kvo, lent to the Khaiem. The
Dai-kvo took no part in the courtly dramas of generational fratricide.
The Khaiem supported the Dai-kvo and his village, sent their excess sons
to the school from which they might be plucked to take the honor of the
brown robes, and saw to the administration of the cities whose names
they took as their own. The Khai Machi, the Khai Yalakeht, the Khai
"Ian-Sadar. All of them had been other men once, before their fathers
had died or become too feeble to rule. All of them had killed their own
brothers on the way to claiming their positions. All except Utah.
Otah, the exception.
A scratching at the door roused Maati, and he hauled himself from his
chair and went forward. The night had nearly fallen, but torches
spattered the darkness with circles of light. Even before he reached the
door, he heard music coming from one of the pavilions nearby, the young
men and women of the utkhaiem boiling up from the winter earth and
celebrating nightly, undeterred by chill or rain or heartbreak. And at
the door of his library were two familiar figures, and a third that was
only expected. Cehmai, poet of Machi, stood with a bottle of wine in
each hand, and behind him the hulking, bemused, inhuman andat
Stone-Made-Soft raised its wide chin in greeting. The other-a slender
young man in the same brown robes that Cehmai and Maati himself
wore-spoke to Cehmai. Athai Vauudun, the envoy from the Dai-kvo.
"He is the most arrogant man I have ever met," the envoy said to Cehmai,
continuing a previous conversation. "He has no allies, only one son, and
no pause at all at the prospect of alienating every other city of the
Khaiem. I think he's proud to ignore tradition."
"Our guest has met with the Khai," Stone-Made-Soft said, its voice low
and rough as a landslide. "They don't appear to have impressed each
other favorably."
"Athai-kvo," Cehmai said, gesturing awkwardly with one full bottle.
"This it Maati Vaupathai. NIaati-kvo, please meet our new friend."
Athai took a pose of greeting, and Maati answered with a welcoming pose
less formal than the one he'd been offered.
"Kvo?" Athai said. "I hadn't known you were Cehmai-cha's teacher."
"It's a courtesy he gives me because I'm old," Maati said. "Come in,
though. All of you. It's getting cold out."
Maati led the others back through the chambers and corridors of the
library. On the way, they traded the kind of simple, common talk that
etiquette required-the Dai-kvo was in good health, the school had given
a number of promising boys the black robes, there were discussions of a
possible new binding in the next years-and Maati played his part. Only
Stone-blade-Soft didn't participate, considering as it was the thick
stone walls with mild, distant interest. The inner chamber that Maati
had prepared for the meeting was dim and windowless, but a fire burned
hot behind iron shutters. Books and scrolls lay on a wide, low table.
Maati opened the iron shutters, lit a taper from the flames, and set a
series of candles and lanterns glowing around the room until they were
all bathed in shadowless warm light. The envoy and Cehmai had taken
chairs by the fire, and Maati lowered himself to a wide bench.
"My private workroom," Maati said, nodding at the space around them.
"I've been promised there's no good way to listen to us in here."
The envoy took a pose that accepted the fact, but glanced uneasily at
Stone-Made-Soft.
"I won't tell," the andat said, and grinned, baring its unnaturally
regular stone-white teeth. "Promise."
"If I lost control of our friend here, telling what happened in a
meeting wouldn't he the trouble we faced," Cehmai said.
The envoy seemed somewhat mollified. He had a small face, Maati thought.
But perhaps it was only that Maati had already taken a dislike to the man.
"So Cehmai has been telling me about your project," Athai said, folding
his hands in his lap. "A study of the prices meted out by failed
bindings, is it?"
"A hit more than that," Maati said. "A mapping, rather, of the form of
the binding to the form that its price took. What it was about this
man's work that his blood went dry, or that one's that made his lungs
fill with worms.
"You might consider not binding us in the first place," Stone-MadeSoft
said. "If it's so dangerous as all that."
Maati ignored it. "I thought, you see, that there might be some way to
better understand whether a poet's work was likely to fail or succeed if
we knew more of how older failures presented themselves. It was an essay
Heshai Antaburi wrote examining his own binding of
Removingthe-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his
binding succeeded-he held Seedless for decades-hut in having done the
thing and then lived with the consequences, he could better see the
flaws in his original work. Here ..."
Maati rose up with a grunt and fished through his papers for a moment
until the old, worn leather-bound hook came to hand. Its cover was limp
from years of reading, the pages growing yellow and smudged. The envoy
took it and read a bit by the light of candles.
"But this is too much like his original work," Athai said as he thumbed
through the pages. "It could never be used."
"No, of course not," Maati agreed. "But he made the attempt to examine
the form of the binding, you see, in hopes that showing the kinds of
errors he'd made might help others avoid things that were similar.
Heshai-kvo was one of my first teachers."
"He was the one murdered in Saraykeht, ne?" Athai asked, not looking up
from the book in his hands.
"Yes," Maati said.
Athai looked up, one hand taking an informal pose asking excuse.
"I didn't mean anything by asking," he said. "I only wanted to place him."
Maati brought himself to smile and nod.
"The reason I wrote to the Dai-kvo," Cehmai said, "was the application
Maati-kvo was thinking of."
"Application?1"Tell
"It's too early yet to really examine closely," Maati said. He felt
himself starting to blush, and his embarrassment at the thought fueled
the blood in his face. "It's too early to say whether there's anything
in it."