"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
Stone-Made-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