her."
Otah was halfway to objecting, but Sinja only tilted his head. Idaan had
killed Otah's brothers. His father. She was capable of casual slaughter,
and everyone knew it. There was no point in pretending the world was
something it wasn't. Otah took a pose that accepted the advice and
promised his best effort.
In point of fact, Idaan was waiting in his rooms when he returned from
his breakfast and the morning of audiences that he could not postpone.
She wore a borrowed robe of blue silk as dark as a twilight sky. Her
arms and shoulders were thicker than the robe allowed, the fabric
straining. Her hair was pulled back in a gray tail as thick as a mane.
She did not smile.
"Idaan-cha," he said.
"Brother," she replied.
He sat across from her. Her long face was cool and unreadable. She
touched the papers and scrolls on the low table between them. The scents
of cedar and apples should have made the room more comfortable.
"I'm not done," she said. "But I doubt a year and ten clerks would be
enough to do a truly thorough job. With just the pair of us, and you off
half the time at court, we can't really hope for more than a weighted
guess."
"Then we should get to work," he said. "I'll have them bring us food and-"
"Before that," Idaan said. "Before that, there's something we should
discuss. Alone."
Otah considered her eyes. They were the same black-brown as his own. Her
jaw was softer, her mouth pale and lined. He could still see the girl
she had been, whom he had drawn up from the deepest cells beneath Machi
and given freedom where she'd expected slavery or death.
"I'll send the servants away," he said. She took a pose that offered thanks.
When he returned, she was pacing before the windows, her hands clasped
behind her. The soft leather soles of her boots whispered against the
wood. The city spread below them, and then the sea.
"I never thought about them," she said. "The andat? I never gave them
half a thought when I was young. Stone-Made-Soft was something halfway
between a trained hunting cat and another courtier in a world full of
them. But they could destroy everything, couldn't they? If a poet bound
something like Steam or Fog, all that ocean could vanish in a moment,
couldn't it?"
"I suppose," Otah agreed.
"I would have controlled it. Stone-Made-Soft, I mean. And Cehmai. If all
the things I'd planned had happened as I planned them, I would have had
the command of that power."
"Your husband would have," he said. Otah had ordered her husband
executed. Adrah Vaunyogi's body had hung from the ruins of his family's
palace, food for the crows. Idaan smiled.
"My husband," she said, her voice warm and amused. "Even worse."
She shook herself and turned back to the table. Her thick fingers
plucked out a clerk's writing tablet. Otah could see letters carved into
the wax.
"I've made a list of those people who seem most likely," she said. "I
have a dozen, and I could give you a dozen more if you'd like it.
They've all traveled extensively in the past four years. They've all had
expenditures that look suspicious to one degree or another. And as far
as I can see, all of them oppose your treaty with the Galts or are
closely related to someone who does. And they all have the close
connections to the palace that Maati boasted of."
Otah held out his hand. Idaan didn't pass the tablet to him.
"I think about what would have happened if I had been given that kind of
power," she said. "I think of the girl I was back then. And the things I
did. Can you imagine what I might have done?"
"It wouldn't have happened," Otah said. "Cehmai only answered to you so
long as the Dai-kvo told him to. If you had started draining oceans or
melting cities, he would have forbidden it."
"The Dai-kvo is dead, though. Years dead, and almost forgotten."
"What are you saying, Idaan-cha?"
She smiled, but her eyes made it sorrow.
"All the restraints we had to keep the poets from doing as they saw fit?
They're gone now. I'm saying you should remember that when you see this
list. Remember the stakes we're playing for."
The tablet was heavy in his hand, the dark wax scored with white where
she had written on it. He frowned as his finger traced down the names.
Then he stopped, and the blood left his face. He understood what Idaan
had been saying. She was telling him to be ruthless, to be cold. She
meant to steel him against the pain of what he might have to sacrifice.
"My daughter's name is on this list," he said, keeping his voice low and
matter-of-fact.
His sister replied with silence.
12
"There," Vanjit said, her finger pointing up into a featureless blue
sky. "Right there."
On her hip, the andat squirmed and waved its tiny hands. She shifted her
weight, drawing the small body closer to her own, her outstretched
finger still indicating nothing.
"I don't see it," Maati said.
Vanjit smiled, her attention focusing on the babe. Clarity-of-Sight
mewled, shook its head weakly, and then stilled. Vanjit's lips pressed
thin, and the sky above Maati seemed to sharpen. Even where there was
nothing to see, the blue itself seemed legible. And then he caught sight
of it. Little more than a dot at first, and then a moment later, he made
out the shape of the outstretched wings. A hawk, soaring high above the
ground. Its beak was hooked and sharp as a knife. Its feathers, brown
and gold, trembled in the high air. A smear of old blood darkened its
talons. There were mites in its feathers.
Maati closed his eyes and looked away, shaken by vertigo.
"Gods!" he said. He heard Vanjit's delighted chuckle.
The spirit of elation filled the stone halls, the ruined gardens, the
spare meadows. All the days since the binding, it had felt to Maati as
if the world itself had taken a deep breath and then laughed aloud.
Whenever the chores and classes had allowed it, the girls had crowded
around Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, and himself along with them.
The andat itself was beautiful and fascinating. Its form was identical
to a true human child, but small things in its behavior showed Vanjit's
inexperience. She had not held a babe or seen one since she herself had
been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of
its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a
richness and variety of emotion that in Maati's experience children
rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination
that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit
delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.