THE (tlpq-4) (24 page)

promised his best effort.

In point of fact, Idaan was waiting in his rooms when he returned from

his breakfast and the morning of audiences that he could not postpone.

She wore a borrowed robe of blue silk as dark as a twilight sky. Her

arms and shoulders were thicker than the robe allowed, the fabric

straining. Her hair was pulled back in a gray tail as thick as a mane.

She did not smile.

"Idaan-cha," he said.

"Brother," she replied.

He sat across from her. Her long face was cool and unreadable. She

touched the papers and scrolls on the low table between them. The scents

of cedar and apples should have made the room more comfortable.

"I'm not done," she said. "But I doubt a year and ten clerks would be

enough to do a truly thorough job. With just the pair of us, and you off

half the time at court, we can't really hope for more than a weighted

guess."

"Then we should get to work," he said. "I'll have them bring us food and-"

"Before that," Idaan said. "Before that, there's something we should

discuss. Alone."

Otah considered her eyes. They were the same black-brown as his own. Her

jaw was softer, her mouth pale and lined. He could still see the girl

she had been, whom he had drawn up from the deepest cells beneath Machi

and given freedom where she'd expected slavery or death.

"I'll send the servants away," he said. She took a pose that offered thanks.

When he returned, she was pacing before the windows, her hands clasped

behind her. The soft leather soles of her boots whispered against the

wood. The city spread below them, and then the sea.

"I never thought about them," she said. "The andat? I never gave them

half a thought when I was young. Stone-Made-Soft was something halfway

between a trained hunting cat and another courtier in a world full of

them. But they could destroy everything, couldn't they? If a poet bound

something like Steam or Fog, all that ocean could vanish in a moment,

couldn't it?"

"I suppose," Otah agreed.

"I would have controlled it. Stone-Made-Soft, I mean. And Cehmai. If all

the things I'd planned had happened as I planned them, I would have had

the command of that power."

"Your husband would have," he said. Otah had ordered her husband

executed. Adrah Vaunyogi's body had hung from the ruins of his family's

palace, food for the crows. Idaan smiled.

"My husband," she said, her voice warm and amused. "Even worse."

She shook herself and turned back to the table. Her thick fingers

plucked out a clerk's writing tablet. Otah could see letters carved into

the wax.

"I've made a list of those people who seem most likely," she said. "I

have a dozen, and I could give you a dozen more if you'd like it.

They've all traveled extensively in the past four years. They've all had

expenditures that look suspicious to one degree or another. And as far

as I can see, all of them oppose your treaty with the Galts or are

closely related to someone who does. And they all have the close

connections to the palace that Maati boasted of."

Otah held out his hand. Idaan didn't pass the tablet to him.

"I think about what would have happened if I had been given that kind of

power," she said. "I think of the girl I was back then. And the things I

did. Can you imagine what I might have done?"

"It wouldn't have happened," Otah said. "Cehmai only answered to you so

long as the Dai-kvo told him to. If you had started draining oceans or

melting cities, he would have forbidden it."

"The Dai-kvo is dead, though. Years dead, and almost forgotten."

"What are you saying, Idaan-cha?"

She smiled, but her eyes made it sorrow.

"All the restraints we had to keep the poets from doing as they saw fit?

They're gone now. I'm saying you should remember that when you see this

list. Remember the stakes we're playing for."

The tablet was heavy in his hand, the dark wax scored with white where

she had written on it. He frowned as his finger traced down the names.

Then he stopped, and the blood left his face. He understood what Idaan

had been saying. She was telling him to be ruthless, to be cold. She

meant to steel him against the pain of what he might have to sacrifice.

"My daughter's name is on this list," he said, keeping his voice low and

matter-of-fact.

His sister replied with silence.

12

"There," Vanjit said, her finger pointing up into a featureless blue

sky. "Right there."

On her hip, the andat squirmed and waved its tiny hands. She shifted her

weight, drawing the small body closer to her own, her outstretched

finger still indicating nothing.

"I don't see it," Maati said.

Vanjit smiled, her attention focusing on the babe. Clarity-of-Sight

mewled, shook its head weakly, and then stilled. Vanjit's lips pressed

thin, and the sky above Maati seemed to sharpen. Even where there was

nothing to see, the blue itself seemed legible. And then he caught sight

of it. Little more than a dot at first, and then a moment later, he made

out the shape of the outstretched wings. A hawk, soaring high above the

ground. Its beak was hooked and sharp as a knife. Its feathers, brown

and gold, trembled in the high air. A smear of old blood darkened its

talons. There were mites in its feathers.

Maati closed his eyes and looked away, shaken by vertigo.

"Gods!" he said. He heard Vanjit's delighted chuckle.

The spirit of elation filled the stone halls, the ruined gardens, the

spare meadows. All the days since the binding, it had felt to Maati as

if the world itself had taken a deep breath and then laughed aloud.

Whenever the chores and classes had allowed it, the girls had crowded

around Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, and himself along with them.

The andat itself was beautiful and fascinating. Its form was identical

to a true human child, but small things in its behavior showed Vanjit's

inexperience. She had not held a babe or seen one since she herself had

been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of

its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a

richness and variety of emotion that in Maati's experience children

rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination

that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit

delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.

"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