mother. The room she brought Maati into had once been a storage pantry.
Her cot and brazier and a low table were all the furnishings. There was
no window, and the air was thick with the heat and smoke from the coals.
Papers and scrolls lay on the table beside a wax tablet half-whitened by
fresh notes. Medical texts in the languages of the Westlands, Eiah's own
earlier drafts of the binding of Wounded. And also, he saw, the
completed binding they had all devised for Clarity-of-Sight. Eiah sat on
the cot, the frail structure creaking under her. She didn't look up at him.
"Why did she leave?" Maati asked. "Truth, now"
"I told her to," Eiah said. "She was frightened to come back. I told her
that I understood. What happens if two poets come into conflict? If one
poet has something like Floats-in-Air and the other has something like
Sinking?"
"Or one poet can blind, and the other heal injury?"
"As an example," Eiah said.
Maati sighed and lowered himself to sit beside her. The cot complained.
He laced his fingers together, looking at the words and diagrams without
seeing them.
"I don't entirely know. It hasn't happened in my lifetime. It hasn't
happened in generations."
"But it has happened," Eiah said.
"There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was ...
what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we've translated
them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might
simply be that the poets' wills are set against each other's. A kind of
wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater
strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the
upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don't
coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the
world we inhabit. Or ..."
"Or?"
"Or something else could happen. The grammar and meaning in one binding
could relate to some structure or nuance in another. Imagine two singers
in competition. What if they chose songs that harmonized? What if the
words of one song blended with the words of the other, and something new
came from it? Songs are a poor metaphor. What are the odds that the
words of any two given songs would speak to each other? If the bindings
are related in concept, if the ideas are near, it's much more likely
that sort of resonance could happen. By chance."
"And what would that do?"
"I don't know," Maati said. "Nobody does. I can say that what was once a
land of palm trees and rivers and palaces of sapphire is a killing
desert. I can say that people who travel in the ruins of the Old Empire
tend to die there. It might be from physical expressions of that old
struggle. It might be from some interaction of bindings. There is no way
to be sure."
Eiah was silent. She turned the pages of her medical books until she
reached diagrams Maati recognized. Eyes cut through the center, eyes
sliced through the back. He had seen them all thousands of times when
Vanjit was preparing herself, and they had seemed like the keepers of
great secrets. He hadn't considered at the time that each image was the
result of some actual, physical orb meeting with an investigative blade,
or that all the eyes pictured there were sightless.
He felt Eiah's sigh as much as heard it.
"What happened out there?" he asked. "The truth, not what you said in
front of the others."
Eiah leaned forward. For a moment, Maati thought she was weeping, but
she straightened again. Her eyes were dry, her jaw set. She had pulled a
small box of carved oak from under the cot, and she handed it to him
now. He opened it, the leather hinge loose and soft. Six folded pages
lay inside, sewn at the edges and sealed with Eiah's personal sigil.
"You didn't send them?"
"It was true about the trade fair. We did find one. It wasn't very good,
but it was there, so we stopped. There are Galts everywhere now. They
came to Saraykeht at the start, and apparently the councillors and the
court are all still there. There are others who have fanned out. The
ones who believe that my father's plan is going to work."
"The ones who see a profit in it. Slavers?"
"Marriage brokers," Eiah said as if the terms were the same. "They've
been traveling the low towns making lists of men in want of Galtic
peasant girls to act as brood mares for their farms. Apparently eight
lengths of copper will put a man's name on the list to travel to Galt.
Two of silver for the list to haul a girl here."
Maati felt his belly twist. It had gone further than he had dared think.
"Most of them are lying, of course," Eiah said. "Taking money from the
desperate and moving on. I don't know how many of them there are out
there. Hundreds, I would guess. But, Maati-cha, the night I left? All of
the Galts lost their sight. All of them, and at once. No one cares any
longer what's happened with my brother and the girl he was supposed to
marry. No one talks about the Emperor. All anyone cares about is the
andat. They know that some poet somewhere has bound Blindness or
something like it and loosed it against the Galts."
It was as if the air had gone from the room, as if Maati were suddenly
on a mountaintop. His breath was fast, his heart pounding. It might have
been joy or fear or something of each.
"I see," Maati said.
"Uncle, they hate us. All those farmers and traders and shepherds? All
those men who thought that they would have wives and children? All those
women who thought that even if it hadn't come from their body, at least
there would be a baby nearby to care for? They think we've taken it from
them. And I have never seen so much rage."
Maati felt as if he'd been struck, caught in the moment between the blow
and the bloom of pain. He said something, words stringing together
without sense and trailing to silence. He put his face in his hands.
"You didn't know," Eiah said. "She didn't tell you."
"Vanjit's done this," Maati said. "She can undo it. I can . . ." He
stopped, catching his breath. He felt as if he'd been running. His hands
trembled. When Eiah spoke, her voice was as level and calm as a
physician's announcing a death.
"Twice."
Maati turned to her, his hands taking a pose of query. Eiah put her hand
on the table, papers shifting under her fingers with a sound like sand
against glass.
"This is twice, Maati-cha. First with Ashti Beg, and now ... Gods. Now
with all of Galt."
"Is this why Ashti Beg left?" Maati asked. "The true reason?"
"The true reason is that she was afraid of Vanjit," Eiah said. "And I
couldn't reassure her."