Or they might be rationing lamp oil already. There was a depressing thought.
He descended, one hand on the smooth, cool stone of the wall to keep him
steady. He moved slowly because going quickly would get him winded, and
it was dark enough that he wanted to stay sure of his footing. His mind
was only half concerned with walking anyway. Cehmai was right. The
logical structure was the same whether he used nurat or something else.
So that was another dead end.
Removal.
It was a concept of relative motion. "faking something enclosed and
producing a distance between it and its-now previous-enclosure. Plucking
out a seed, or a baby. A gemstone from its setting. A man from his bed
or his home. Removing. Heshai's work in framing Seedless was so elegant,
so simple, that it seemed inevitable. That was the curse of second and
third bindings of the same andat. Finding something equally graceful,
but utterly different. It made his jaw ache just thinking about it.
I is reached the bottom of the stairs and the wide upper chamber of his
winter quarters. The night candle burning there was hardly to its first
quarter mark, which given the lengthening nights of autumn meant the
city beneath him would likely still he awake and active. Rest for him,
though. His day had been full already. He took up the candle, passed
down a short, close corridor, and reached the second stairway, which led
down to the bedchambers.
The air was noticeably warmer here than in the library-in part from the
heat of ten thousand people in the earth below him rising up, and in
part from its stillness. Servants had prepared his bed with blankets and
furs. A light meal of rice and spiced pork in one of the bowls of
handthick iron that could hold the heat for the better part of a day
waited on his writing table. Maati sat, ate slowly, not tasting the
food, drinking rice wine as if it were water. Even as he sucked the
pepper sauce off the last bit of pork, his feet and fingers were still
cold. Removing-the-ChillFrom-the-Old-Man's-Flesh. There was an andat.
Nlaati closed the lid of the great iron bowl, slipped out of his robes,
hefted himself into his bed, and willed himself to sleep. For a time, he
lay watching the candle burn, smelling the wax as it melted and dripped,
and could not get comfortable. IIe couldn't get the cold out of his toes
and knuckles, couldn't make his mind stop moving. He couldn't avoid the
growing fear that when he closed his eyes, the nightmares that had begun
plaguing him would return.
The images his mind held when his eyes were closed had become more
violent, more anxious. Fathers weeping for sons who were also sacks of
bloodied grain and dead mice; long, sleeping hours spent searching
through bodies in a charnel house hoping to find his child still living
and only finding Otah's children again and again and again; the
recurring dream of a tunnel that led down past the city, deeper than the
mines, and into the earth until the stone itself grew fleshy and angry
and bled. And the cry that woke him-a man's voice shouting from a great
distance that demanded to know whose child this was. Whose (hil<1.?
With this mind, Maati thought as he watched the single flame of the
night candle, I'm intended to hind an andat. It's like driving nails