talked me out of trying. She was right. It would have killed me."
"You mean this?" Cehmai said. "You're going to bind Seedless?"
"It was what the I)ai-kvo chose me for. Heshai wrote his binding, and
his analysis of its flaws. It's too close to the original. I know that.
But with the changes we'll need to make in order to include my scheme
for avoiding the price of a failed binding and your fresh perspective,
we can find another way."
In the first column of the wax tablet, Maati wrote Seedless.
"Forgive me, Maati-kvo, but will this really help? Stone-Made-Soft could
have dropped their army half into the ground. Water-Moving- I)own might
have flooded them. But Seedless? Removing-the-PartThat-Continues doesn't
have much power to stop an army."
"I can offer to kill all their crops," Maati said, writing Heshai-ko at
the top of the second column. "I can threaten to make every cow and pig
and lamb barren. I can make every Galtic woman who's bearing a child
lose it. Faced with that, they'll turn hack."
His stylus paused over the head of the third column, and then he wrote
his own name. He and Cehmai could outline the major points here; they
could add and remove aspects of Heshai's first vision, interpret the
corrections the old poet would have made, had he been given the chance.
They could remake the binding, because the binding was already
half-remade. If there was time. If they could find a way. If they were
clever enough to save the world from the armies of Galt.
"And if they don't turn hack?" Cehmai said.
"Then we'll all die. Their cities and ours. Check to see if that tea's
ready to brew up, will you? I need your help with this, and it will go
better if you're sober."
THE SCULPTURE GARDEN OF CETANI WAS THE WONDER OF THE CITY. TWO bronze
men in the dress of the Emperor's guard stood at the entrances at its
Northwest end, staring to the south and east, as if still looking to the
Empire they had failed to protect. In their great, inhuman shadows, the
finest work of the cities of the Khaiem had been gathered over the span
of generations. There were hundreds of them, each astounding in its own
fashion, under the wide branches of ash and oak with leaves the color of
gold. The dragons of Chaos writhed along one long wall, their scales
shining with red lacquer and worked silver, chips of lapis and enamel
white as milk. In a shadowed niche, Shian Sho, last of the E111- perors,
sat worked in white marble on a high dais, his head stink despairingly
in his hands. It was a piece done after the Empire's fall. If the
Emperor had seen himself shown with such little dignity, the sculptor
would have been lucky to have a fast death. But the drape of the final
Emperor's robes made the stone seem supple as linen, and the despair and
thoughtfulness of the dead man's expression spoke of a time nine
generations past when the world had torn itself apart. The sculptor who
had found Shian Sho in this stone had lived through that time and had
put the burden of his heart into this monument; this empty sepulcher for
his age. Otah suspected that no man since then had looked upon it and
understood. Not until now.
The Khai Cetani stood at the foot of a life-size bronze of a robed woman