"I've seen other things too," Vanjit said. "The greater the change, the
more difficult it is at first."
Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags
where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An
insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the
root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.
"Forgive me," he said. "Could I put upon you to undo some part of that?
It's distracting...."
He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again,
his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.
"Once I've made the change, I forget that it doesn't fall back on its
own," she said.
"Stone-Made-Soft was much the same," Maati said. "Once it had changed
the nature of a rock, it remained weakened until Cehmai-kvo put an
effort into changing it back. Then there was Water-Moving-Down, who
might stop a river only so long as its poet gave the matter strict
attention. The question rests on the innate capacity for change within
the object affected. Stone by nature resists change, water embraces it.
I suspect that whatever eyes you improve will still suffer the normal
effects of age."
"The change may be permanent, but we aren't," she said.
"Well put," Maati said.
The courtyard in which they sat showed only small signs of the decade of
ruin it had suffered. The weeds had all been pulled or cut, the broken
stones reset. Songbirds flitted between the trees, lizards scurried
through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk
circled in the high, distant air.
Maati could imagine that it wasn't the school that he had suffered in
his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he
recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A
cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and
judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself seemed remade, and
perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his
thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black
eyes on Maati, but did not cry.
"It's unlike anything I expected," Vanjit said. "I can feel him. All the
time, he's in the back of my mind."
"How burdensome is it?" Maati asked, sitting forward.
Vanjit shook her head.
"No worse than any baby, I'd imagine," she said. "He tires me sometimes,
but not so much I lose myself. And the others have all been kind. I
don't think I've cooked a meal for myself since the binding."
"That's good," Maati said. "That's excellent."
"And you? Your eyes?"
"Perfect. I've been able to write every evening. I may actually manage
to complete this before I die."
He'd meant it as a joke, but Vanjit's reply was grim, almost scolding.
"Don't say that. Don't talk about death lightly. It isn't something to
laugh at."
Maati took an apologetic pose, and a moment later the darkness seemed to
leave the girl's eyes. She shifted the andat again, freeing one hand to
take an apologetic pose.
"No," Maati said. "You're right. You're quite right."
He steered the conversation to safer waters-meals, weather,
reconstructing the finer points of Vanjit's successful binding.
Contentment seemed to come from the girl like heat from a fire. He
regretted leaving her there, and yet, walking down the wide stone
corridors, he was also pleased.
The years he had spent scrabbling in the shadows like a rat had been so
long and so thick with anger and despair, Maati had forgotten what it
was to feel simple happiness. Now, with the women's grammar proved and
the andat returned to the world, his flesh itself felt different. His
shoulders had grown straighter, his heart lighter, his joints looser and
stronger and sure. He had managed to ignore his burden so long he had
mistaken it for normalcy. The lifting of it felt like youth.
Eiah sat cross-legged on the floor of one of the old lecture halls,
untied codices, opened books, unfurled scrolls laid out around her like
ripples on the surface of a pond. He glanced at the pages-diagrams of
flayed arms, the muscles and joints laid bare as if by the most
meticulous butcher in history; Westlands script with its whorls and dots
like a child's angry scribble; notations in Eiah's own hand, outlining
the definitions and limitations and structure of violence done upon
flesh. Wounded. The andat at its origin. And all of it, he could make
out from where he stood without squinting or bending close.
Eiah looked up at him with a pose equal parts welcome and despair. Maati
lowered himself to the floor beside her.
"You look tired," he said.
Eiah gestured to the careful mess before her, and then sighed.
"This was simpler when I wasn't allowed to do it," she said. "Now that
my own turn has come, I'm starting to think I was a fool to think it
possible."
Maati touched one of the books with his outstretched fingers. The paper
felt thick as skin.
"There is a danger to it," Maati said. "Even if your binding is
perfectly built, there might have been another done that was too much
like it. These books, they were written by men. Your training was done
by men. The poets before Vanjit were all men. Your thinking could be too
little like a man's."
Eiah smiled, chuckling. Maati took a pose of query.
"Physicians in the Westlands tend to be women," she said. "I don't think
I have more than half-a-dozen texts that I could say for certain were
written by men. The problem isn't that."
"No?"
"No, it's that no matter what's between your thighs, a cut is a cut, a
burn is a burn, and a bruise is a bruise. Break a bone now, and it snaps
much the way it did in the Second Empire. Vanjit's binding was based on
a study of eyes and light that didn't exist back then. Nothing I'm
working from is new."
There was frustration in her voice. Perhaps fear.
"There is another way," Maati said. Eiah shifted, her gaze on his. Maati
scratched his arm.
"We have Clarity-of-Sight," he said. "It proves that we can do this
thing, and that alone gives us a certain power. If we send word to
Otahkvo, tell him what we've done and that he must turn away from his
scheme with the Galts, he would do it. He would have to. We could take
as much time as you care to take, consult as many scholars as we can
unearth. Even Cehmai would have to come. He couldn't refuse the Emperor."
It wasn't something he'd spoken aloud before. It was hardly something
he'd allowed himself to think. Before Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, the
idea of returning to the courts of the Khaiem-to Otah-in triumph would
have been only a sort of torture of the soul. It would have been like