The sun was near the top of its arc, the remains of breakfast in
lacquered boxes with their lids shut, the day half gone. Liat was right,
of course. He hadn't been sleeping near enough-late to bed, waking
early, and with troubled rest between. He could feel it in his neck and
hack and see it in the slowness with which his vision cleared.
"Where's F,iah got to?" he asked.
"Back to her place with the physicians, I'd guess. I offered to wake you
so that she could say her good-byes, but she thought it would be better
if you slept." Liat smiled. "She said it would be restorative. Can you
imagine her using that kind of language a season ago? She already sounds
like a physician's apprentice."
Maati grinned. He'd resisted the idea of this little outing at first,
but Cehmai had joined F,iah's cause. A half-day's effort by a rested man
might do better for them than the whole day by someone drunk with
exhaustion and despair. And even now the library seemed to call to
him-the scrolls he had already read, the codices laid out and put away
and pulled out to look over again, the wax tablets with their notes cut
into them and smoothed clear again. And in the end, he had never been
able to refuse Eiah. Her good opinion was too precious and too fickle.
Liat slid her hand around his arm and leaned against him. She smelled of
grass and cherry paste on apples and musk. He turned without thinking
and kissed the crown of her head as if it were something he had always
done. As if there had not been a lifetime between the days when they had
first been lovers and now.
"How badly is it going?" she asked.
"Not well. We have a start, but Cehmai's notes are only beginnings. And
they were done by a student. I'm sure they all seemed terribly deep and
insightful when he was still fresh from the school. But there's less
there than I'd hoped. And ..."
"And?"
Maati sighed. The towers were visible now. The blades of grass stood out
one from another.
"He's not a great inventor," Maati said. "He never was. It's part of why
he was chosen to take over an andat that had already been captured
instead of binding something new. And I'm no better."
"You were chosen for the same thing."
"Cehmai's clever. I'm clever too, if it comes to that, but we're the
second pressing. There's no one we can talk with who's seen a binding
through from first principles to a completion. We need someone whose
mind's sharper than ours."
There were birds wheeling about the towers-tiny specks of black and gray
and white wheeling though the air as if a single mind drove them. Maati
pretended he could hear their calls.
"Perhaps you could train someone. "There's a whole city to choose from."
""There isn't time," Maati said. He wanted to say that even if there
were, he wouldn't. The andat were too powerful, too dangerous to be
given to anyone whose heart wasn't strong or whose conscience couldn't
be trusted. That was the lesson, after all, that had driven his own life
and Cehmai's and the Dai-kvo himself. It was what elevated each of the