and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally
reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion
beside the fire, legs crossed under him.
"I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning,"
Cehmai said. "The man who guards the library is ... he's a good man, but
he's protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the
ages."
"Like a poet," Maati said.
Cehmai grinned. "I suppose so. Only he'd have made a terrible poet. He's
puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the
keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people
in the city can read. If he'd ever been given something important to do,
he'd have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if
I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to
you, I expect he'll be fine. It's that first negotiation that's tricky."
Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.
"There's no call to take you from your duties," he said. "I expect the
order of the Khai will suffice."
"I wouldn't only be doing it as a favor to you, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said.
The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn't seem to
notice his reaction. "Baarath is a friend of mine, and sometimes you
have to protect your friends from themselves. You know?"
Maati took a pose that was an agreement and looked into the flames.
Sometimes men could be their own worst enemies. That was truth. He
remembered the last time he had seen Otah-kvo. It had been the night
Maati had admitted what Liat had become to him and what he himself was
to her. His old friend's eyes had gone hard as glass. Heshai-kvo, the
poet of Saraykeht, had died just after that, and Maati and Liat had left
the city together without seeing Otah-kvo again.
The betrayal in those dark eyes haunted him. He wondered how much the
anger had festered in his old teacher over the years. It might have
grown to hatred by now, and Maati had come to hunt him down. The fire
danced over the coal, flames turning the black to gray, the stone to
powder. He realized that the boy poet had been speaking, and that the
words had escaped him entirely. Maati took a pose of apology.
"My mind wandered. You were saying?"
"I offered to come by at first light," Cehmai said. "I can show you
where the good teahouses are, and there's a streetcart that sells the
best hot eggs and rice in the city. Then, perhaps, we can brave the
library?"
"That sounds fine. Thank you. But now I think I'd best unpack my things
and get some rest. You'll excuse me."
Cehmai bounced up in a pose of apology, realizing for the first time
that his presence might not be totally welcome, and Maati waved it away.
They made the ritual farewells, and when the door closed, Maati sighed
and rose. He had few things: thick robes he had bought for the journey
north, a few hooks including the small leatherbound volume of his dead
master's that he had taken from Saraykeht, a packet of letters from
Liat, the most recent of them years old now. The accumulated memories of