"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.
"StoneMade-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 StoneMade-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 StoneMade-Soft. That that will be the worst thing I have to face. And not ..."