An Autumn War(5)

"Well, Danat won't die," Eiah said. "So it doesn't matter. Did you know him?"

"Who?"

"My real uncle. Danat. The one Danat's named for?"

"No," Maati said. "Not really. I met him once."

"Did you like him?"

Maati tried to remember what it had been like, all those years ago. The Dai-kvo had summoned him. That had been the old Dai-kvo- "Iahi-kvo. He'd never met the new one. 'Iahi-kvo had brought him to meet the two men, and set him the task that had ended with Otah on the chair and himself living in the court of Machi. It had been a different lifetime.

"I don't recall liking him or disliking him," Maati said. "He was just a man I'd met."

Eiah sighed impatiently.

""Tell me about another one," she said.

"Well. There was a poet in the First Empire before people understood that andat were harder and harder to capture each time they escaped. He tried to bind Softness with the same binding another poet had used a generation before. Of course it didn't work."

"Because a new binding has to be different," Isiah said.

"But he didn't know that."

"What happened to him?"

"His joints all froze in place. He was alive, but like a statue. He couldn't move at all."

"How did he cat?"

"He didn't. They tried to give him water by forcing it up his nostrils, and he drowned on it. When they examined his body, all the bones were fused together as if they had never been separate at all. It looked like one single thing."

"That's disgusting," she said. It was something she often said. Maati grinned.

They talked for another half a hand, Maati telling tales of failed bindings, of the prices paid by poets of old who had attempted the greatest trick in the world and fallen short. Eiah listened and passed her own certain judgment. They finished the last of the almond cakes and called a servant girl in to carry the plates away. Eiah left just as the sun peeked out between the low clouds and the high peaks in the west, brightness flaring gold for a long moment before the city fell into its long twilight. Alone again, Nlaati told himself that the darkness was only about the accidents of sunlight, and not his young friend's absence.

He could still remember the first time he'd seen Eiah. She'd been tiny, a small, curious helplessness in her mother's arms, and he had been deeply in disfavor with the Dai-kvo and sent to Machi in half-exile for treading too near the line between the poets and the politics of the court. The poets were creatures of the Dai-kvo, lent to the Khaiem. The Dai-kvo took no part in the courtly dramas of generational fratricide. The Khaiem supported the Dai-kvo and his village, sent their excess sons to the school from which they might be plucked to take the honor of the brown robes, and saw to the administration of the cities whose names they took as their own. The Khai Machi, the Khai Yalakeht, the Khai "Ian-Sadar. All of them had been other men once, before their fathers had died or become too feeble to rule. All of them had killed their own brothers on the way to claiming their positions. All except Utah.

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 StoneMade-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," StoneMade-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."