lived? That the world had not been broken, or, if it had, not by him?
"We'll bring him," Maati said. "Have faith. Every week, we come closer.
Once the grammar is built solidly enough, anything will be possible."
"Are we coming closer?" she asked. "Be honest, Maati-cha. Every week we
spend on this, I think we're on the edge, and every week, there's more
after it."
He tucked the chalk into his sleeve and sat at the girl's side. She
leaned forward, and he thought there was something in her expressionnot
despair and not shame, but something related to both.
"We are coming near, and we are close," he said. "I know it isn't
something you can see, but each of you knows more about the andat and
the bindings right now than I did after a year with the Dai-kvo. You're
smart and dedicated and talented. And together, we can make this work.
It sounds terrible, I know, but as soon as Siimat failed her binding and
paid the price ... I won't say I was pleased. I can't say that. She was
a brave woman, and she had a wonderful mind. I miss her. But that she
and all the others died means we are very close."
Ten bindings, ending in ten failures and ten corpses. His fallen
soldiers, Maati thought. His girls who had sacrificed themselves. And
here, wet as a canal rat and sad to her bones, Vanjit impatient to make
her own try, risk her own life. Maati took her small hand in his own.
The girl smiled at the wall.
"This will happen," he said.
"I know it," she said, her voice soft. "It's just so hard to wait when
the dream keeps coming."
Maati sat with her for a moment, only the tapping of raindrops and the
songs of birds between them. He stood, fished the chalk from his sleeve,
and went back to the wall.
"If you'd like, you could light a fire in the office grate," Maati said.
"We could surprise the others with some fresh tea."
It wasn't called for, but it gave the girl something to do. He squinted
at the figure he'd drawn until the lines came into focus. Ah, yes. Four
categories of being.
The rain slackened as the others arrived. Large Kae checked the
coverings over the windows, careful that no stray light betray their
presence, as Irit fluttered sparrowlike lighting the lanterns. Small Kae
and Ashti Beg adjusted the seats and benches, the younger woman's light
voice contrasting with her elder's dry one.
The scents of wood smoke and tea made their warehouse classroom seem
less furtive. Vanjit poured bowls for each of his students as they took
their places. The soft light darkened the stone so that the chalk marks
almost seemed written on air. Maati took a moment to himself to think of
his teachers, of their lectures. He willed himself to become one of
their number.
"The world," Maati began, "has two essential structures. There's the
physical"-he slapped the stone wall behind him-"and there's the
abstract. Two and two are always four, regardless of whether you're
talking about grains of sand or racing camels. Twelve could always be
broken into two sets of six or three sets of four long before anybody
noticed the fact. Abstract structure, you see?"
They bent toward him like flowers toward the sun. Maati saw the hunger
in their faces and the set of their shoulders.
"Now," Maati said. "Does the physical require the abstract? Come on.
Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract
structure?"
There was a moment's silence.
"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water
together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."
"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of
least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is
there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure?
Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one
correctly before I'd seen ten summers."
"No?" suggested Irit.
"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one
way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the
floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not
everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here.
That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."
In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression.
Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into
something stronger. It gave him hope.
After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then,
as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff
and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed
bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were
developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought
and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human
shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your
life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like
holding a stone over a welclass="underline" slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see
the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the
questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan
when the small door to the street flew open again.
Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk
robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati,
standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and
graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.
"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."
Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them.
Eiah's expression was grim.
"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."
He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to
work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed
them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair
in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.
The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the
Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be
married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being
arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing
age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a
thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and
move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.
There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and
Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation.
In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy,
and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot