knowledge of long association. Idaan was hunting, Ashua Radaani was
hunting, Sinja was hunting. And he was alone and sleepless with nothing
to do.
He closed his eyes and tried to feel Kiyan's presence, tried to bring
some sense of her out of the scent of smoke and the sound of distant
singing. He tricked himself into thinking that she was here, but not so
well that he could forget it was a trick.
Tomorrow, there would be another wide array of men and women requesting
his time. Another schedule of ritual and audience and meeting. Perhaps
it would all go as well as today had, and he would end the day in his
rooms, feeling old and maudlin despite his success. There were so many
men and women in the court-in the world-who wanted nothing more than
power. Otah, who had it, had always known how little it changed.
He slept deeply and without dreams. When he woke, every man and woman of
Galt had gone blind.
16
It had been raining for two full days. Occasionally the water changed to
sleet or hail, and small accumulations of rotten ice had begun to form
in the sheltered corners of the courtyard. Maati closed his shutters
against the low clouds and sat close to the fire, the weather tapping on
wood like fingers on a table. It might almost have been pleasant if it
hadn't made his spine stiffen and ache.
The cold coupled with Eiah's absence had turned life quiet and slow,
like a bear preparing to sleep through the winter. Maati went down to
the kitchen in the morning and ate with the others. Large Kae and Irit
had started rehearsing old songs together to pass the time. They sang
while they cooked, and the harmonies were prettier than Maati would have
imagined. When Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight were there, the andat would
grow restive, its eyes shifting from one singer to the next and back
again until Vanjit started to fidget and took her charge away. Small Kae
had no ear for music, so instead spent her time reading the old texts
that Clarity-of-Sight had been built from and asking questions about the
finer points of their newly re-created grammar.
Most of the day, Maati spent alone in his rooms, or dressed in several
thick robes, walking through the halls. He would not say it, but the
space had begun to feel close and restricting. Likely it was only the
sense of winter moving in.
With the journey to Pathai and back, along with the trading and
provisioning, he couldn't expect Eiah's return for another ten days. He
hadn't expected to feel that burden so heavily upon him, and so both
delight and dread touched him when Small Kae interrupted his halfdoze.
"She's come back. Vanjit's been watching from the classroom, and she
says Eiah's come back. She's already turned from the high road, and if
the path's not too muddy, she'll be here by nightfall."
Maati rose and opened the shutters, as if by squinting at the gray he
could match Vanjit's sight. A gust of cold and damp pulled at the
shutter in his hand. He was half-tempted to find a cloak of oiled silk
and go out to meet her. It would be folly, of course, and gain him
nothing. He ran a hand through the thin remnants of his hair, wondering
how many days it had been since he'd bathed and shaved himself, and then
realized that Small Kae was still there, waiting for him to speak.
"Well," he said, "whatever we have that's best, let's cook it up.
Eiahcha's going to have fresh supplies, so there's no point in saving it."
Small Kae grinned, took a pose that accepted his instruction, and
bustled out. Maati turned back to the open window. Ice and mud and
gloom. And set in it, invisible to him, Eiah and news.
There was no sunset; Eiah arrived shortly after the clouds had faded
into darkness. In the light of hissing torches, the cart's wheels were
beige with mud and clay. The horse trembled with exhaustion, driven too
hard through the wet. Large Kae, clucking her tongue in disapproval,
took the poor beast off to be rubbed down and warmed while the rest of
them crowded around Eiah. She wrung the water from her hair with pale
fingers, answering the first question before it was asked.
"Ashti Beg's left. She said she didn't want to come back. We were in a
low town just south of here off the high road. She said we could talk
about it, but when I got up in the morning, she'd already gone." She
looked at Maati when she finished. "I'm sorry."
He took a pose that forgave and also diminished the scale of the thing,
then waved her in. Vanjit followed, and then Irit and Small Kae. The
meal was laid out and waiting. Barley soup with lemon and quail. Rice
and sausage. Watered wine. Eiah sat near the brazier and ate like a
woman starved, talking between mouthfuls.
"We never reached Pathai. There was a trade fair halfway to the city.
Tents, carts, the wayhouse so full they were renting out space on the
kitchen floor. There was a courier there gathering messages from all the
low towns."
"So the letters were sent?" Irit asked. Eiah nodded and scooped up
another mouthful of rice.
"Ashti Beg," Maati said. "Tell me more about her. Did she say why she left?"
Eiah frowned. Color was coming back to her cheeks, but her lips were
still pale, her hair clinging to her neck like ivy.
"It was me," Vanjit said, the andat squirming in her lap. "It's my doing."
"Perhaps, but it wasn't what she said," Eiah replied. "She said she was
tired, and that she felt we'd all gone past her. She didn't see that she
would ever complete a binding of her own, or that her insights were
particularly helping us. I tried to tell her otherwise, give her some
perspective. If she'd stayed on until the morning, perhaps I could have."
Maati sipped his wine, wondering how much of what Eiah said was true,
how much of it was being softened because Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight
were in the room. It seemed more likely to him that Ashti Beg had taken
offense at Vanjit's misstep and been unable to forgive it. He recalled
the woman's dry tone, her cutting humor. She had not been an easy woman
or a particularly apt pupil, but he believed he would miss her.
"Was there other news? Anything of the Galts?" Vanjit asked. There was
something odd about her voice, but it might only have been that
Clarity-of-Sight had started its wordless, wailing complaint. Eiah
appeared to notice nothing strange in the question.
"There would have been if I'd reached Pathai, I'd expect," she said.
"But since there would have been nothing to do about it and our business
was done early, I wanted to come back quickly."
"Ah," Vanjit said. "Of course."
Maati tugged at his fingers. There was something near disappointment in
the girl's tone. As if she had expected someone that had not arrived.
"You're ready to work again?" Small Kae said. Irit flapped a cloth at
her, and Small Kae took a pose that unasked the question. Eiah smiled.
"I've had a few thoughts," she said. "Let me look them over tonight
after we unload the cart, and we can talk in the morning."
"Oh, there's no more work for you tonight," Irit said. "You've been on
the road all this time. We can hand a few things down from a cart."
"Of course," Vanjit said. "You should rest, Eiah-kya. We'll be happy to
help."
Eiah put down her soup and took a pose that offered gratitude. Something
in the cant of her wrists caught Maati's attention, but the pose was
gone as quickly as it had come and Eiah was sitting back, drinking wine
and leaning her still-wet hair toward the fire. Large Kae rejoined them,
smelling of wet horse, and Eiah told the whole story again for her
benefit and then left for her rooms. Maati felt the impulse to follow
her, to speak in private, but Vanjit took him by the hand and led him
out to the cart with the others.
The supplies were something less than Maati had expected. Two chests of
salted pork, a few jars of lard and flour and sweet oil. Bags of rice.
It wasn't inconsiderable-certainly there was enough to keep them all
well-fed for weeks, but likely not months. There were few spices, and no
wine. Large Kae made a few small remarks about the failures of low-town
trade fairs, and the others chuckled their agreement. The rain
slackened, and then, as Vanjit balanced the last bag of rice on one hip
and Clarity-of-Sight on the other, snow began to fall. Maati went back
to his rooms, heated a kettle over his fire, and debated whether to try
to boil enough water for a bath. Immersion was the one way he was sure
he could chase the cold from his joints, but the effort required seemed
worse than enduring the chill. And there was an errand he preferred to
complete.
Light glowed through the cracks around Eiah's door. Dim and flickering,
it was still more than a single night candle would have made. Maati
scratched at the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Perhaps Eiah had
taken to her cot. Perhaps she was elsewhere in the school. A soft sound,
no more than a whisper, drew him back to the door.
"Eiah-kya?" he said, his voice low. "It's me."
Her door opened. Eiah had changed into a simple robe of thick wool, her
hair tied back with a length of twine. She looked powerfully like her
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.