the binding, pay the price, and dic badly. Except that by then, we'll
likely all have been slaughtered by the Galts."
"Well," Cehmai said and rubbed his hands together. "Are there any of
those raisins left?"
"A few," Maati said.
Nlaati could hear the joints in Cehmai's hack cracking as he stretched.
Maati leaned over and scooped up the fallen hook. It wasn't titled, nor
was the author named, but the grammar in the first page marked it as
Second Empire. Loyan Sho or Kodjan the Lesser. Nlaati let his gaze flow
down the page, seeing the words without taking in their meanings. Behind
him, Cehmai ate the raisins, lips smacking until he spoke.
""I'he second problem is solved if your technique works. It isn't
critical that we have all the histories if we can deflect the price of
failing. At worst, we'll have lost the time it took to compose the binding."
"Months," hlaati said.
"But not death," Cchmai went on. "So there's something to be said for that."
"And the first problem can be skirted by not starting wholly from scratch."
"You've been thinking about this, Nlaati-kvo."
Cehmai slowly walked back across the floor. His footsteps were soft and
deliberate. Outside, a pigeon cooed. Nlaati let the silence speak for
him. When Cehmai returned and sat again, his expression was abstracted
and his fingers picked idly at the cloth of his sleeves. hlaati knew
some part of what haunted the younger man: the danger faced by the city,
the likelihood of the Khai Machi retrieving the I)ai-kvo, the shapeless
and all-pervading fear of the Galtic army that had gathered in the South
and might now be almost anywhere. But there was another part to the
question, and that Maati could not guess. And so he asked.
"What is it like?"
Cehmai looked up as if he'd half-forgotten klaati was there. His hands
flowed into a pose that asked clarification.
"Stone-Made-Soft," Maati said. "What is it like with him gone?"
Cehmai shrugged and turned his head to look out the unshuttered windows.
The trees shifted their leaves and adjusted their branches like men in
conversation. The sun hung in the sky, gold in lapis.
"I'd forgotten what it was like to be myself," Cehmai said. His voice
was low and thoughtful and melancholy. "Just myself and not him as well.
I was so young when I took control of him. It's like having had someone
strapped to your back when you were a child and then suddenly lifting
off the burden. I feel alone. I feel freed. I'm shamed to have failed,
even though I know there was nothing I could have done to keep hold of
him. And I regret now all the years I could have stink Galt into ruins
that I didn't."
"But if you could have him back, would you?"
The pause that came before Cehmai's reply meant that no, he would have
chosen his freedom. It was the answer Maati had expected, but not the
one he was ready to accept.
"The Khai may be able to save the Dai-kvo," Cehmai said. "He may get
there before the Galts."
"But if he doesn't?"
"Then I would rather have Stone-Made-Soft back than decorate the end of
some Galtic spear," Cehmai said, a grim humor in his voice. "I have some
early work. Drafts from when I was first studying him. There are places
where the options ... branched. If we used those as starting points, it
would make the binding different from the one I took over, and we still
wouldn't have to begin from first principles."
"You have them here?"
"Yes. They're in that basket. There. You should take them back to the
library and look them over. If we keep them here I'm too likely to do
something unpleasant with them. I was half-tempted to burn them last night."
Maati took the pages-small, neat script on cheap, yellowing
parchment-and folded them into his sleeve. The weight of them seemed so
slight, and still Maati found himself uncomfortably aware of them and of
the return to a kind of walking prison that they meant for Cehmai.
"I'll look them over," Maati said. "Once I have an idea what would be
the best support for it, I'll put some reading together. And if things
go well, we can present it all to the Dai-kvo when he arrives.
Certainly, there's no call to do anything until we know where we stand."
"We can prepare for the worst," Cehmai said. "I'd rather be pleasantly
surprised than taken unaware."
The resignation in Cehmai's voice was hard to listen to. Maati coughed,
as if the suggestion he wished to make fought against being spoken.
"It might be better ... I haven't attempted a binding myself. If I were
the one ..."
Cehmai took a pose that was both gratitude and refusal. Maati felt a
warm relief at Cehmai's answer and also a twinge of regret.
"He's my burden," Cehmai said. "I gave my word to carry StoneMade-Soft
as long as I could, and I'll do that. I wouldn't want to disappoint the
Khai." Then he chuckled. "You know, there have been whole years when I
would have meant that as a sarcasm. Disappointing the Khaiem seems to be
about half of what we do as poets-no, I can't somehow use the andat to
help you win at tiles, or restore your prowess with your wives, or any
of the thousand stupid, petty things they ask of us. But these last
weeks, I really would do whatever I could, not to disappoint that man. I
don't know what's changed."
"Everything," Maati said. "Times like these remake men. They change what
we are. Otah's trying to become the man we need him to he."
"I suppose that's true," Cehmai said. "I just don't want this all to be
happening, so I forget, somehow, that it is. I keep thinking it's all a
sour dream and I'll wake out of it and stumble down to play a game of
stones against Stone-Made-Soft. That that will be the worst thing I have
to face. And not ..."
Cehmai gestured, his hands wide, including the house and the palaces and
the city and the world.
"And not the end of civilization?" Maati suggested.
"Something like that."
Nlaati sighed.
"You know," he said, "when we were young, the man who was Daikvo then
chose Otah to come train as a poet. He refused, but I think he would
have been good. He has it in him to do whatever needs doing."
Killing a man, taking a throne, marching an army to its death, Nlaati
thought but did not say. Whatever needs doing.