"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 it Maati Vaupathai. NIaati-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-blade-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 windowless, 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 he 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 hit 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-MadeSoft 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 Removingthe-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his binding succeeded-he held Seedless for decades-hut 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 hook 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? 1"Tell
"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." 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 hack. All the andat lost over the course of generations that had been thought beyond recapture might still he hound 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. 't'hinking-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. 'T'hree men, and one other that was something else.
2
Liat 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 hook. These waters kept their secrets.
A low fog lay on the hay; 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-'Ian, 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.
Nayilt 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 heard 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.