The fever had taken dozens of people that year. Winter always changed the city, the cold driving them deep into the tunnels and hidden chambers below Machi. For months they lived by firelight and in darkness. By midwinter, the air itself could seem thick and stifling. And illnesses spread easily in the dark and close, and Baraath had grown ill and died, one man among many. Now he was only memory and ash. Maati was the master of the library, appointed by his old friend and enemy and companion Otah Machi. The Khai Machi, husband of Kiyan, and father to this almost-woman Eiah who shared his almond cakes, and to her brother Danat. And, perhaps, to one other.
‘Maati-kya? Are you okay?’
‘I was just wondering how your brother was,’ he said.
‘Better. He’s hardly coughing at all anymore. Everyone’s saying he has weak lungs, but I was just as sick when I was young, and I’m just fine.’
‘People tell stories,’ Maati said. ‘It keeps them amused, I suppose.’
‘What would happen if Danat died?’
‘Your father would be expected to take a new, younger wife and produce a son to take his place. More than one, if he could. That’s part of why the utkhaiem are so worried about Danat. If he died and no brothers were forthcoming, it would be bad for the city. All the most powerful houses would start fighting over who would be the new Khai. People would probably be killed.’
‘Well, Danat won’t die,’ Eiah said. ‘So it doesn’t matter. Did you know him?’
‘Who?’
‘My real uncle. Danat. The one Danat’s named for?’
‘No,’ Maati said. ‘Not really. I met him once.’
‘Did you like him?’
Maati tried to remember what it had been like, all those years ago. The Dai-kvo had summoned him. That had been the old Dai-kvo - Tahi-kvo. He’d never met the new one. Tahi-kvo had brought him to meet the two men, and set him the task that had ended with Otah on the chair and himself living in the court of Machi. It had been a different lifetime.
‘I don’t recall liking him or disliking him,’ Maati said. ‘He was just a man I’d met.’
Eiah sighed impatiently.
‘Tell me about another one,’ she said.
‘Well. There was a poet in the First Empire before people understood that andat were harder and harder to capture each time they escaped. He tried to bind Softness with the same binding another poet had used a generation before. Of course it didn’t work.’
‘Because a new binding has to be different,’ Eiah said.
‘But
he
didn’t know that.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘His joints all froze in place. He was alive, but like a statue. He couldn’t move at all.’
‘How did he eat?’
‘He didn’t. They tried to give him water by forcing it up his nostrils, and he drowned on it. When they examined his body, all the bones were fused together as if they had never been separate at all. It looked like one single thing.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ she said. It was something she often said. Maati grinned.
They talked for another half a hand, Maati telling tales of failed bindings, of the prices paid by poets of old who had attempted the greatest trick in the world and fallen short. Eiah listened and passed her own certain judgment. They finished the last of the almond cakes and called a servant girl in to carry the plates away. Eiah left just as the sun peeked out between the low clouds and the high peaks in the west, brightness flaring gold for a long moment before the city fell into its long twilight. Alone again, Maati told himself that the darkness was only about the accidents of sunlight, and not his young friend’s absence.
He could still remember the first time he’d seen Eiah. She’d been tiny, a small, curious helplessness in her mother’s arms, and he had been deeply in disfavor with the Dai-kvo and sent to Machi in half-exile for treading too near the line between the poets and the politics of the court. The poets were creatures of the Dai-kvo, lent to the Khaiem. The Dai-kvo took no part in the courtly dramas of generational fratricide. The Khaiem supported the Dai-kvo and his village, sent their excess sons to the school from which they might be plucked to take the honor of the brown robes, and saw to the administration of the cities whose names they took as their own. The Khai Machi, the Khai Yalakeht, the Khai Tan-Sadar. All of them had been other men once, before their fathers had died or become too feeble to rule. All of them had killed their own brothers on the way to claiming their positions. All except Otah.
Otah, the exception.
A scratching at the door roused Maati, and he hauled himself from his chair and went forward. The night had nearly fallen, but torches spattered the darkness with circles of light. Even before he reached the door, he heard music coming from one of the pavilions nearby, the young men and women of the utkhaiem boiling up from the winter earth and celebrating nightly, undeterred by chill or rain or heartbreak. And at the door of his library were two familiar figures, and a third that was only expected. Cehmai, poet of Machi, stood with a bottle of wine in each hand, and behind him the hulking, bemused, inhuman andat Stone-Made-Soft raised its wide chin in greeting. The other - a slender young man in the same brown robes that Cehmai and Maati himself wore - spoke to Cehmai. Athai Vauudun, the envoy from the Dai-kvo.
‘He is the most arrogant man I have ever met,’ the envoy said to Cehmai, continuing a previous conversation. ‘He has no allies, only one son, and no pause at all at the prospect of alienating every other city of the Khaiem. I think he’s
proud
to ignore tradition.’
‘Our guest has met with the Khai,’ Stone-Made-Soft said, its voice low and rough as a landslide. ‘They don’t appear to have impressed each other favorably.’
‘Athai-kvo,’ Cehmai said, gesturing awkwardly with one full bottle. ‘This is Maati Vaupathai. Maati-kvo, please meet our new friend.’
Athai took a pose of greeting, and Maati answered with a welcoming pose less formal than the one he’d been offered.
‘Kvo?’ Athai said. ‘I hadn’t known you were Cehmai-cha’s teacher.’
‘It’s a courtesy he gives me because I’m old,’ Maati said. ‘Come in, though. All of you. It’s getting cold out.’
Maati led the others back through the chambers and corridors of the library. On the way, they traded the kind of simple, common talk that etiquette required - the Dai-kvo was in good health, the school had given a number of promising boys the black robes, there were discussions of a possible new binding in the next years - and Maati played his part. Only Stone-Made-Soft didn’t participate, considering as it was the thick stone walls with mild, distant interest. The inner chamber that Maati had prepared for the meeting was dim and window-less, but a fire burned hot behind iron shutters. Books and scrolls lay on a wide, low table. Maati opened the iron shutters, lit a taper from the flames, and set a series of candles and lanterns glowing around the room until they were all bathed in shadowless warm light. The envoy and Cehmai had taken chairs by the fire, and Maati lowered himself to a wide bench.
‘My private workroom,’ Maati said, nodding at the space around them. ‘I’ve been promised there’s no good way to listen to us in here.’
The envoy took a pose that accepted the fact, but glanced uneasily at Stone-Made-Soft.
‘I won’t tell,’ the andat said, and grinned, baring its unnaturally regular stone-white teeth. ‘Promise.’
‘If I lost control of our friend here, telling what happened in a meeting wouldn’t be the trouble we faced,’ Cehmai said.
The envoy seemed somewhat mollified. He had a small face, Maati thought. But perhaps it was only that Maati had already taken a dislike to the man.
‘So Cehmai has been telling me about your project,’ Athai said, folding his hands in his lap. ‘A study of the prices meted out by failed bindings, is it?’
‘A bit more than that,’ Maati said. ‘A mapping, rather, of the form of the binding to the form that its price took. What it was about this man’s work that his blood went dry, or that one’s that made his lungs fill with worms.’
‘You might consider not binding us in the first place,’ Stone-Made-Soft said. ‘If it’s so dangerous as all that.’
Maati ignored it. ‘I thought, you see, that there might be some way to better understand whether a poet’s work was likely to fail or succeed if we knew more of how older failures presented themselves. It was an essay Heshai Antaburi wrote examining his own binding of Removing-the-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his binding succeeded - he held Seedless for decades - but in having done the thing and then lived with the consequences, he could better see the flaws in his original work. Here . . .’
Maati rose up with a grunt and fished through his papers for a moment until the old, worn leather-bound book came to hand. Its cover was limp from years of reading, the pages growing yellow and smudged. The envoy took it and read a bit by the light of candles.
‘But this is too much like his original work,’ Athai said as he thumbed through the pages. ‘It could never be used.’
‘No, of course not,’ Maati agreed. ‘But he made the attempt to examine the form of the binding, you see, in hopes that showing the kinds of errors he’d made might help others avoid things that were similar. Heshai-kvo was one of my first teachers.’
‘He was the one murdered in Saraykeht, ne?’ Athai asked, not looking up from the book in his hands.
‘Yes,’ Maati said.
Athai looked up, one hand taking an informal pose asking excuse.
‘I didn’t mean anything by asking,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to place him.’
Maati brought himself to smile and nod.
‘The reason I wrote to the Dai-kvo,’ Cehmai said, ‘was the application Maati-kvo was thinking of.’
‘Application?’
‘It’s too early yet to really examine closely,’ Maati said. He felt himself starting to blush, and his embarrassment at the thought fueled the blood in his face. ‘It’s too early to say whether there’s anything in it.’
‘Tell him,’ Cehmai said, his voice warm and coaxing. The envoy put Heshai-kvo’s book down, his attention entirely on Maati now.
‘There are . . . patterns,’ Maati said. ‘There seems to be a structure that links the form of the binding to its . . . its worst expression. Its price. The forms only seem random because it’s a very complex structure. And I was reading Catji’s meditations - the one from the Second Empire, not Catji Sano - and there are some speculations he made about the nature of language and grammar that . . . that seem related.’
‘He’s found a way to shield a poet from paying the price,’ Cehmai said.
‘I don’t know that’s true,’ Maati said quickly.
‘But
possibly
,’ Cehmai said.
The envoy and the andat both shifted forward in their seats. The effect was eerie.
‘I thought that, if a poet’s first attempt at a binding didn’t have to be his last - if an imperfect binding didn’t mean death . . .’
Maati gestured helplessly at the air. He had spent so many hours thinking about what it could mean, about what it could bring about and bring back. All the andat lost over the course of generations that had been thought beyond recapture might still be bound if only the men binding them could learn from their errors, adjust their work as Heshai had done after the fact. Softness. Water-Moving-Down. Thinking-in-Words. All the spirits cataloged in the histories, the work of poets who had made the Empire great. Perhaps they were not past redemption.
He looked at Athai, but the young man’s eyes were unfocused and distant.
‘May I see your work, Maati-kvo?’ he asked, and the barely suppressed excitement in his voice almost brought Maati to like him for the moment. Together, the three men stepped to Maati’s worktable. Three men, and one other that was something else.
2
L
iat Chokavi had never seen seawater as green as the bays near Amnat-Tan. The seafront at Saraykeht had always taken its color from the sky - gray, blue, white, yellow, crimson, pink. The water in the far North was different entirely; green as grass and numbing cold. She could no more see the fish and seafloor here than read pages from a closed book. These waters kept their secrets.
A low fog lay on the bay; the white and gray towers of the low town seemed to float upon it. In the far distance, the deep blue spire of the Khai Amnat-Tan’s palace seemed almost to glow, a lantern like a star fallen to earth. Even the sailors, she noticed, would pause for a moment at their work and admire it. It was the great wonder of Amnat-Tan, second only to the towers of Machi as the signature of the winter cities. It would take them days more to reach it; the ports and low towns were a good distance downriver of the city itself.
The wind smelled of smoke now - the scent of the low town coming across the water, adding to the smells of salt and fish, crab and unwashed humanity. They would reach port by midday. She turned and went down the steps to their cabin.
Nayiit swung gently in his hammock, his eyes closed, snoring lightly. Liat sat on the crate that held their belongings and considered her son; the long face, the unkempt hair, the delicate hands folded on his belly. He had made an attempt at growing a beard in their time in Yalakeht, but it had come in so poorly he’d shaved it off with a razor and cold seawater. Her heart ached, listening to him sleep. The workings of House Kyaan weren’t so complex that it could not run without her immediate presence, but she had never meant to keep Nayiit so long from home and the family he had only recently begun.