The physician was right. It would he easy to fix one thing, if there
were only one thing wrong. But there were so many was to break something
so delicate and so complex. Even the act of making one thing right
seemed destined to undo something else. And he was too tired and too
confused to say whether one way of being wounded was better than another.
There were so many ways to be wrong.
There were so many ways to break things.
hlaati felt the thought fall into place as if it were something
physical. It was the moment he was supposed to shout, to stand tip and
wave his hands about, possessed by insight as if by a demon. But
instead, he sat with it quietly, as if it was a gem only he of all
mankind had ever seen.
He'd spent too much time with Heshai's binding.
Removing-thePart-That-Continues had been made for the cotton
trade-pulling seeds from the fiber and speeding it on its way to the
spinners and the weavers and feeding all of the needle trades. But there
was no reason for h Iaati to he restricted by that. He only needed a way
to break Galt. To starve them. To see that no other generation of Galtic
children ever saw the world.
It wasn't Seedless he needed. It was only Sterile. And there were any
number of ways to say that.
He sank lower into the water as the sense of relief and peace consumed
him. Destroying-the-Part- That-Continues, he thought as the little waves
touched his lips. Shattering-the-Part-"That-Continues. Crushing it.
Rotting it. Corroding it.
Corrupting it.
In his mind, Galt died. And he, Maati Vaupathai, killed it. What, he
asked himself, was victory in a single battle compared with that? Otah
had saved the city. Nlaati saw now how he could save everything.
21
Sinja woke, stiff with cold, to the sound of chopping. Outside the tent,
someone with a hand axe was breaking the ice at the top of the barrels.
It was still dark, but morning was always dark these days. He kicked off
his blankets and rose. The undyed wool of his inner robes held a hit of
the heat as he pulled on first one outer robe and then another with a
wide leather cloak over the top that creaked when he fastened the wide
hone broochwork.
Outside his tent, the army was already breaking camp. Columns of smoke
and steam rose from the wagons. Horses snorted, their breath pluming
white in the light of a falling moon. In the southeast, the dawn was
still only a lighter shade of black. Sinja walked to the cook fire and
squatted down beside it, a howl of barley gruel sweetened with
winepacked prunes in his hands. The heat of it was better than the
taste. Wine could do strange things to prunes.
The army had been marching for two and a half weeks. At a guess, there
were another three before they reached Machi. If there was no storm,
Sinja guessed they would lose a thousand men to frostbite, most of those
in the last ten days. He squinted into the dark, implacable sky and
watched the faintest stars begin to fade. 't'here would still be over