but Stone-blade-Soft only smiled as if amused.
"I thought it was someone in the family. One of his brothers. It had to
be. Who else would benefit? I was stupid."
"Forgive me, N,laati-kvo. But no one did benefit."
"One of them did," he said, gesturing out at the mourners. "One of them
is going to he the new Khai. He'll tell you what to do, and you'll do
it. He'll live in the high palaces, and everyone else in the city will
lick his ass if he tells them to. That's what it's all about. Who has to
lick whose ass. And there's blood enough to fill a river answering
that." He took another long pull from the wineskin, then dropped it idly
to the ground at his feet. "I hate all of them."
"So do I," Stone-Made-Soft said, his tone light and conversational.
"You're drunk, Maati-kvo."
"Not half enough. Here, look at this. You know what this is?"
Cehmai glanced at the object Maati had pulled from his sleeve.
"A book."
"This is my teacher's masterwork. Heshai-kvo, poet of Saraykeht. The
Dai-kvo sent me to him when I was hardly younger than you are now. I was
going to study under him, take control of Seedless.
Removing-the-Part-ihat-Continues. We called him Seedless. This is
Heshai-kvo's examination of everything he'd done wrong. Every
improvement he could have made to his binding, if he'd had it to do over
again. It's brilliant."
"But it can't work, can it?" Cehmai said. "It would he too close...."
"Of course not, it's a refinement of his work, not how to bind Seedless
again. It's a record of his failure. I)o you understand what I'm saving?"
Cchmai grasped for a right answer to the question and ended with honesty.
"No," he said.
"Heshai-kvo was a drunkard. He was a failure. He was haunted his whole
life by the woman he loved and the child he lost, and every measure of
the hatred he had for himself was in his binding. I Ic imagined the
andat as the perfect man and implicit in that was the disdain he
imagined such a man would feel looking at him. But Heshai was strong
enough to look his mistake in the face. He was strong enough to sit with
it and catalog it and understand. And the I)ai-kvo sent me to him.
Because he thought we could he the same. tic thought I would understand
him well enough to stand in his place."
"Nlaati-kvo, I'm sorry. Have you seen Idaan?"
"Well," Maati said, ignoring the question as he swayed slightly and
frowned at the crowd. "I can face my stupidities just as well as he did.
The I)ai-kvo wants to know who killed Biitrah? I'll find out. He can
tell me it's too late and he can tell me to come home, but he can't make
me stop looking. Whoever gets that chair ... whoever gets it ..."
Maati frowned, confused for a moment, and a sudden racking sob shook
him. He leaned forward. Cehmai moved to him, certain for a moment that
Maati was about to pitch off the walkway and down to the distant ground,
but instead the older poet gathered himself and took a pose of apology.
"I'm ... making an ass of myself," he said. "You were saying something."
Cehmai was torn for a moment. He could see the red that lined Maati's