Above deck, he smiled and nodded at Issandra and pretended to turn his
attention back to the music. He wondered how many other sacrifices he
had demanded in order to remake the world according to his vision, how
many other lovers would be parted to further his little scheme to save
two empires. He would likely never know the full price of it. As if in
answer, the candles guttered in the breeze, the reed organ took a
mournful turn, and the sea through which they sailed grew darker.
4
The midday sun beat down on the lush green; gnats and flies filled the
air. The river-not the Qiit proper but one of its tributariesthreaded
its way south like a snake. Maati tied his mule under the wide leaves of
a catalpa and squatted down on a likely-looking boulder. Pulling a pouch
of raisins and seeds from his sleeve, he looked out over the summer. The
wild trees, the rough wagon track he'd followed from the farmers' low
town to the northwest, the cultivated fields to the south.
A cluster of small farms made a loose community here, raising goats and
millet and, near the water, rice. The land between the cities was dotted
with low communities like this one: the rural roots that fed the great,
blossoming cities of the Khaiem. The accents were rougher here, the
effete taint of a high court as foreign as another language. Men might
be born, grow, love, marry, and die without ever traveling more than a
day's walk, birthing bed and grave marker no more distant than a thrown
pebble.
And one of those fields with its ripe green grasses had been plowed by
the only other man in all the world who knew how to bind the andat.
Maati took a mouthful of raisins and chewed slowly, thinking.
Leaving the warehouse outside Utani had proven harder than he had
expected. For over a decade, he had been rootless, moving from one city
or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey-and this one
heading south into the summer cities-hadn't seemed to signify anything
more than a few weeks' time and, of course, the errand itself. But
somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown
accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked
pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he
had felt their absence.
The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it.
Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and
the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he'd thought
they would be.
Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown
quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people
were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a
once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of
the war itself-the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and
saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined
Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed-had faded,
but they had not disappeared.
The distrust of the foreign was driven deep into the flesh here. He had
heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns,
thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their
own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion.
Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to
marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid
by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped,
and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand's depth of water.
And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the
less certain he was.
Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men
at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were
Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam
rising from the river itself, a flat barge sitting low to the water and
driven by the same chuffing, tarnished bulb as the wagons. Even the
fields below him now were cultivated in a pattern he had never seen
before the Galts came. Perhaps Otah's betrayal of the cities colored all
of Maati's perceptions now, but it felt as if the Galts were invading
again, only slowly this time, burrowing under the ground and changing
all they touched in small, insidious ways.
Something tickled his arm. Maati plucked out the tick and cracked it
between his thumbnails. He was wasting time. His feet ached from walking
and his robe stuck to his back and legs, but the sooner this meeting
happened, the sooner he would know where he stood. He emptied the last
of the seeds into his hand, ate them, then put the pouch back in his
sleeve and untied his mule.
Seven years before, he and Cehmai had parted for the last time at a
wayhouse three days' walk northwest of the farms and the river and
catalpa-shaded hill. It had not been an entirely friendly parting, but
they had agreed to leave letters of their whereabouts at that house,
should the need ever arise to find each other.
Maati had found the place easily. In the intervening years, the kitchens
had burned, and the two huge trees in the courtyard. The boy who stabled
the horses had grown to be a man. The bricks that had been brown and
yellow had been painted white and blue. And the box they had paid the
keeper to hold for them had a letter in it, sewn and sealed, with
ciphered directions that would lead to the farmhouse Cehmai had taken
under his new false name. Jadit Noygu.
Jadit Noygu, and his wife Sian.
Maati took the letter out again, consulting the deciphered text he'd
marked in between the lines written in Cehmai's clean, clear hand.
Forward down the track until he passed the ruin of an old mill, then the
first east-turning pathway, and half a hand's walk to a low
mud-and-straw farmhouse with a brick cistern in front. Maati clucked at
the mule and resumed his walk.
He arrived in the heat of the afternoon; even the shade beneath the
trees sweltered. Maati helped himself to a bowl of water from the
cistern, and then another bowl for the mule. No one came out to greet
him, but the shutters on the windows looked recently painted and the
track that led around the side of the house was well-tended. There was
no sense that the farm stood empty. Maati made his way toward the back.
A small herd of goats bleated at him from their pen, the disturbing,
clever eyes considering him with as little joy as he had for them. The
low sound of whistling came to him from a tall, narrow building set
apart from both house and pen. A slaughterhouse.
He stepped into the doorway, blocking the light. The air was thick with
smoke to drive the flies away. The body of the sacrificed goat hung from