speak at last. Once there was a hit of shared experience, a toehold,
Maati was able to make conversation, and Nayiit was an expert listener
to stories. For several nights in a row, Maati found himself telling
tales of the Dai-kvo and the school, the history of Machi and the perils
he had faced years ago when he'd been sent to hunt Otah-kvo down. In the
telling, he discovered that, to his profound surprise, his life had been
interesting.
The platform rested at the base of one of the lower towers, chains thick
as a man's arm clanking against it and against the stone as they rose up
into the sky like smoke. Nayiit paused to stare up at it, and Maati
followed his gaze. The looming, inhuman bulk of the tower, and beyond it
the full moon hanging like a lantern of rice paper in the black sky.
"Does anyone ever fall from up there?" Nayiit asked.
"Once every year or so," Maati said. "There's winter storage up there,
so there are laborers carrying things in the early spring and middle
autumn. There are accidents. And the utkhaiem will hold dances at the
tops of them sometimes. They say wine gets you drunk faster at the top,
but I don't know if that's true. Then sometimes men kill themselves by
stepping through the sky doors when the platform's gone down. It would
happen more if there were people up there more often. Otah-kvo has a
plan for channeling the air from the forges up through the center of one
so it would he warm enough to use in the winter, but we've never figured
out how to make the change without bringing the whole thing down."
Nayiit shuddered, and Maati was willing to pretend it was the wind. He
put his arm on the boy's shoulder and steered him farther down the
street to a squat stone building with a copper roof gone as green as
trees with time. Inside, the air was warmed by braziers. Two old men
were playing tin-and-silver flutes while a young woman kept time on a
small drum and sang. Half a hundred bodies were seated at long wooden
tables or on benches. The place was rich with the smell of roast lamb
even though the windows were unshuttered; it was as if no one in Machi
would miss the chance for fresh air. Maati sympathized.
He and Nayiit took a bench in the hack, away from singers and song. The
serving boy was hardly as old as F,iah, but he knew his trade. It seemed
fewer than a dozen heartbeats before he brought them bowls of sweet wine
and a large worked-silver bowl filled with tender slivers of green:
spring peas fresh from the vines. Maati, hands full, nodded his thanks.
"And you've worked your whole life in House Kyaan, then?" Maati asked.
"What does Liat have you doing?"
"Since we've been traveling, I haven't been doing much at all. Before
that, I had been working the needle trades," Nayiit said as he tucked
one leg up under him. It made him sit taller. "The spinners, the dyers,
the tailors, and the sailmakers and all like that. They aren't as
profitable as they were in the days before Seedless was lost, but they
still make up a good deal of the business in Saraykeht."
"Habits," Maati said. "The cotton trade's always been in Saraykeht.
People don't like change, so it doesn't move away so quickly as it
might. Another generation and it'll all be scattered throughout the world."
"Not if I do my work," Nayiit said with a smile that showed he hadn't
taken offense.
"Fair point," Maati said. "I only mean that's what you have to work
against. It would be easier if there was still an andat in the city that
helped with the cotton trade the way Seedless did."
"You knew it, didn't you? Seedless, I mean."
"I was supposed to take him over," Maati said. "The way Cehmai took
Stone-Made-Soft from his master, I was to take Seedless from Heshai-kvo.
In a way, I was lucky. Seedless was flawed work. Dangerously flawed.
Brilliant, don't misunderstand. Heshai-kvo did brilliant work when he
bound Seedless, but he made the andat very clever and profoundly
involved with destroying the poet. They all want to be free-it's their
nature-but Seedless was more than that. He was vicious."
"You sound as though you were fond of it," Nayiit said, only halfteasing.
"We were friendly enough, in our fashion," Maati said. "We wouldn't have
been if things had gone by the I)ai-kvo's plan. If I'd become the poet
of Saraykeht, Seedless would have bent himself to destroying me just the
way he had to Ileshai-kvo."
"Have you ever tried to bind one of the andat?"
"Once. When Heshai died, I had the mad thought that I could somehow
retrieve Seedless. I had IIcshai-kvo's notes. Still have them, for that.
I even began the ceremonies, but it would never have worked. What I had
was too much like what Heshai had done. It would have failed, and I'd
have paid its price."
"And then I suppose I would never have been horn," Nayiit said.
"You would have," Nlaati said, solemnly. "Liat-kya didn't know she was
carrying you when she stopped me, but she was. I thought about it,
afterward. About binding another of the andat, I mean. I even spent part
of a winter once doing the basic work for one I called Returning
to-True. I don't know what I would have done with it, precisely. Unbent
things, I suppose. I'd have been brilliant repairing axles. But my mind
was too fuzzy. There were too many things I meant, and none of them
precisely enough."
The musicians ended their song and stood to a roar of approving voices
and bowls of wine bought by their admirers. One of the old men walked
through the house with a lacquer begging box in his hand. Maati fumbled
in his sleeve, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into
the box with a satisfying click.
"And then, I also wasn't in the Dai-kvo's best graces," Maati continued.
"After Saraykeht ... Well, I suppose it's poor etiquette to let your
master die and the andat escape. I wasn't blamed outright, but it was
always hanging there. The memory of it."
"It can't have helped that you brought back a lover and a child," Nayiit
said.
"No, it didn't. But I was very young and very full of myself. It's not
easy, being told that you are of the handful of men in the world who
might be able to control one of the andat. "lends to create a sense of
being more than you are. I thought I could do anything. And maybe I
could have, but I tried to do everything, and that isn't the same." He
sighed and ate a pea pod. Its flesh was crisp and sweet and tasted of
spring. When he spoke again, he tried to make his voice light and
joking. "I didn't wind up doing a particularly good job of either endeavor."