Khaiem. I think he's proud to ignore tradition."
"Our guest has met with the Khai," Stone-Made-Soft said, its voice low
and rough as a landslide. "They don't appear to have impressed each
other favorably."
"Athai-kvo," Cehmai said, gesturing awkwardly with one full bottle.
"This it Maati Vaupathai. NIaati-kvo, please meet our new friend."
Athai took a pose of greeting, and Maati answered with a welcoming pose
less formal than the one he'd been offered.
"Kvo?" Athai said. "I hadn't known you were Cehmai-cha's teacher."
"It's a courtesy he gives me because I'm old," Maati said. "Come in,
though. All of you. It's getting cold out."
Maati led the others back through the chambers and corridors of the
library. On the way, they traded the kind of simple, common talk that
etiquette required-the Dai-kvo was in good health, the school had given
a number of promising boys the black robes, there were discussions of a
possible new binding in the next years-and Maati played his part. Only
Stone-blade-Soft didn't participate, considering as it was the thick
stone walls with mild, distant interest. The inner chamber that Maati
had prepared for the meeting was dim and windowless, but a fire burned
hot behind iron shutters. Books and scrolls lay on a wide, low table.
Maati opened the iron shutters, lit a taper from the flames, and set a
series of candles and lanterns glowing around the room until they were
all bathed in shadowless warm light. The envoy and Cehmai had taken
chairs by the fire, and Maati lowered himself to a wide bench.
"My private workroom," Maati said, nodding at the space around them.
"I've been promised there's no good way to listen to us in here."
The envoy took a pose that accepted the fact, but glanced uneasily at
Stone-Made-Soft.
"I won't tell," the andat said, and grinned, baring its unnaturally
regular stone-white teeth. "Promise."
"If I lost control of our friend here, telling what happened in a
meeting wouldn't he the trouble we faced," Cehmai said.
The envoy seemed somewhat mollified. He had a small face, Maati thought.
But perhaps it was only that Maati had already taken a dislike to the man.
"So Cehmai has been telling me about your project," Athai said, folding
his hands in his lap. "A study of the prices meted out by failed
bindings, is it?"
"A hit more than that," Maati said. "A mapping, rather, of the form of
the binding to the form that its price took. What it was about this
man's work that his blood went dry, or that one's that made his lungs
fill with worms.
"You might consider not binding us in the first place," Stone-MadeSoft
said. "If it's so dangerous as all that."
Maati ignored it. "I thought, you see, that there might be some way to
better understand whether a poet's work was likely to fail or succeed if
we knew more of how older failures presented themselves. It was an essay
Heshai Antaburi wrote examining his own binding of
Removingthe-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his
binding succeeded-he held Seedless for decades-hut in having done the