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 it 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 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 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 Antaiburi 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.
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 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, s
econd 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.
The news had reached Saraykeht last summer—almost a year ago now. It had hardly been more than a confluence of rumors—a Galtic ship in Nantani slipping away before its cargo had arrived, a scandal at the Dai-kvo’s village, inquiries discreetly made about a poet. And still, as her couriers arrived at the compound, Liat had felt unease growing in her. There were few enough people who knew as she did that the house she ran had been founded to keep watch on the duplicity of the Galts. Fewer still knew of the books she kept, as her mentor Amat Kyaan had before her, tracking the actions and strategies of the Galtic houses among the Khaiem, and it was a secret she meant to keep. So when tales of a missing poet began to dovetail too neatly with stories of Galtic intrigue in Nantani, there was no one whom she trusted the task to more than herself. She had been in Saraykeht for ten years. She decided to leave again the day that Nayiit’s son Tai took his first steps.
Looking back, she wondered why it had been so easy for Nayiit to come with her. He and his wife were happy, she’d thought. The baby boy was delightful, and the work of the house engaging. When he had made the offer, she had hidden her pleasure at the thought and made only slight objections. The truth was that the years they had spent on the road when Nayiit had been a child—the time between her break with Maati Vaupathai and her return to the arms of Saraykeht—held a powerful nostalgia for her. Alone in the world with only a son barely halfway to manhood, she had expected straggle and pain and the emptiness that she had always thought must accompany a woman without a man.
The truth had been a surprise. Certainly the emptiness and struggle and pain had attended their travels. She and Nayiit had spent nights huddling under waxed-cloth tarps while chill rain pattered around them. They had eaten cheap food from low-town firekeepers. She had learned again all she’d known as a girl of how to mend a robe or a boot. And she had discovered a competence she had never believed herself to possess. Before that, she had always had a lover by whom to judge herself. With a son, she found herself stronger, smarter, more complete than she had dared pretend.
The journey to Nantani had been a chance for her to relive that, one last time. Her son was a man now, with a child of his own. There wouldn’t be many more travels, just the two of them. So she had put aside any doubts, welcomed him, and set off to discover what she could about Riaan Vaudathat, son of a high family of the Nantani utkhaiem and missing poet. She had expected the work to take a season, no more. They would be back in the compound of House Kyaan in time to spend the autumn haggling over contracts and shipping prices.
And now it was spring, and she saw no prospect of sleeping in a bed she might call her own any time soon. Nayiit had not complained when it became clear that their investigation would require a journey to the village of the Dai-kvo. As a woman, Liat was not permitted beyond the low towns approaching it. She would need a man to do her business within the halls of the Dai-kvo’s palaces. They had booked passage to Yalakeht, and then upriver. They had arrived at mid-autumn and hardly finished their investigation before Candles Night. So far North, there had been no ship back to Saraykeht, and Liat had taken apartments for them in the narrow, gated streets of Yalakeht for the winter.
In the long, dark hours she had struggled with what she knew, and with the thaw and the first ships taking passages North, she had prepared to travel to Amnat-Tan, and then Cetani. And then, though the prospect made her sick with anxiety, Machi.
A shout rose on the deck above them—a score of men calling out to each other—and the ship lurched and boomed. Nayiit blinked awake, looked over at her, and smiled. He always had had a good smile.
“Have I missed anything?” he asked with a yawn.
“We’ve reached the low towns outside Amnat-Tan,” Liat said. “We’ll be docked soon.”
Nayiit swung his legs around, planting them on the deck to keep his hammock from rocking. He looked ruefully around the tiny cabin and sighed.
“I’ll start packing our things, then,” he said.
“Pack them separate,” she said. “I’ll go the rest of the way myself. I want you back in Saraykeht.”
Nayiit took a pose that refused this, and Liat felt her jaw tighten.
“We’ve had this conversation, Mother. I’m not putting you out to walk the North Road by yourself.”
“I’ll hire a seat on a caravan,” she said. “Spring’s just opening, and there are bound to be any number of them going to Cetani and back. It’s not such a long journey, really.”
“Good. Then it won’t take too long for us to get there.”
“You’re going back,” Liat said.
Nayiit sighed and gathered himself visibly.
“Fine,” he said. “Make your argument. Convince me.”
Liat looked at her hands. It was the same problem she’d fought all through the long winter. Each time she’d come close to speaking the truth, something had held her back. Secrets. It all came back to secrets, and if she spoke her fears to Nayiit, it would mean telling him things that only she knew, things that she had hoped might die with her.
“Is it about my father?” he said, and his voice was so gentle, Liat felt tears gathering in her eyes.
“In a way,” she said.
“I know he’s at the court of Machi,” Nayiit said. “There’s no reason for me to fear him, is there? Everything you’ve said of him—”
“No, Maati would never hurt you. Or me. It’s just…it was so long ago. And I don’t know who he’s become since then.”
Nayiit leaned forward, taking her hands in his.
“I want to meet him,” he said. “Not because of who he was to you, or who he is now. I want to meet him because he’s my father. Ever since Tai came, I’ve been thinking about it. About what it would be for me to walk away from my boy and not come back. About choosing something else over my family.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Liat said. “Maati and I were…”
“I’ve come this far,” he said gently. “You can’t send me back now.”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“You can explain to me while I pack our things.”
In the end, of course, he won. She had known he would. Nayiit could be as soft and gentle and implacable as snowfall. He was his father’s son.
The calls of gulls grew louder as they neared the shore, the scent of smoke more present. The docks were narrower than the seafront of Saraykeht. A ship that put in here for the winter had to prepare itself to be icebound, immobile. Trade was with the eastern islands and Yalakeht; it was too far from the summer cities or Bakta or Galt for ships to come from those distant ports.
The streets were black cobbles, and ice still haunted the alleys where shadows held the cold. Nayiit carried their crate strapped across his back. The wide leather belt cut into his shoulders, but he didn’t complain. He rarely complained about anything, only did what he thought best with a pleasant smile and a calm explanation ready to hand.
Liat stopped at a firekeeper’s kiln to ask directions to the compound of House Radaani and was pleased to
discover it was nearby. Mother and son, they walked the fog-shrouded streets until they found the wide arches that opened to the courtyard gardens of the Radaani, torches flickering and guttering in the damp air. A boy in sodden robes rushed up and lifted the crate from Nayiit’s back to his own. Liat was about to address him when another voice, a woman’s voice lovely and low as a singer’s, came from the dim.
“Liat-cha, I must assume. I’d sent men to meet you at the docks, but I’m afraid they came too late.”
The woman who stepped out from the fog had seen no more than twenty summers. Her robes were white snowfox, eerie in the combination of pale mourning colors and the luxury of the fur. Her hair shone black with cords of silver woven in the braids. She was beautiful, and likely would be for another five summers. Liat could already see the presentiment of jowls at the borders of her jaw.
“Ceinat Radaani,” Liat said, taking a pose of gratitude. “I am pleased to meet you in person at last. This is my son, Nayiit.”
The Radaani girl adopted a welcoming pose that included them both. Nayiit returned it, and Liat couldn’t help noticing the way his eyes lingered on her and hers on him. Liat coughed, bringing their attention back to the moment. The girl took a pose of apology, and turned to lead them into the chambers and corridors of the compound.
In Saraykeht, the architecture tended to be open, encouraging the breezes to flow and cool. Northern buildings were more like great kilns, built to hold heat in their thick stone walls. The ceilings were low and fire grates burned in every room. The Radaani girl led them through a wide entrance chamber and back through a narrow corridor, speaking as she walked.
“My father is in Council with the Khai, but sends his regards and intends to join us as soon as he can return from the city proper. He would very much regret missing the opportunity to meet with the head of our trading partner in the South.”