her hand and took a pose that asked clarification. There was anger in
her eyes. Maati chewed his lower lip, raised his eyebrows.
"He enjoys a duty that was designed, from what you told me, to he
enjoyable for him. To give him the sense of redeeming himself. He's made
friends with Otah's children-"
"I lis otherchildren," Liat said, but Nlaati had known her too long and
too well to let the barb turn him aside.
"And they're very easy to make friends with. Danat and Eiah are charming
in their ways. And Nayiit doesn't want to talk about plans he can't
really make. About his own child who might already he dead. About a wife
he doesn't love and a city that's fallen to the Galts. Why would he want
to talk about that? What is there in any of that to cause him anything
but pain?"
You think I'm an idiot," Hat said.
"I think he hasn't told you that he's staying. That's something you've
decided, and you don't reach conclusions that wild unless there's
something more going on," he said. "What it is, sweet?"
Hat's face squeezed tight, her brows and mouth and eyes seeming to hull
in together like those of a fighter bracing to take a blow.
"I'm frightened. Is that what you want to hear? All right, then. I'm
frightened."
"For him."
"For all of us!" I fiat stood and began to pace. "For the people I knew
in Saraykeht. For the people I've met here. And the ones I haven't met.
Do you know how many people the Galts have killed?"
"No, love."
"No one does. No one knows how bloody this has been. No one knows how
much more they'll want before it's over. I knew what the world was when
I came here."
"Thu came here to change the world by slaughtering all of Galt," \laati
said.
" 1'es, Nlaati. Yes, so that this wouldn't happen. So that u'e wouldn't
change!" She was weeping now, though he couldn't hear it in her voice.
The tears only ran unnoticed down her cheeks as she moved, restless as a
trapped bird. "I don't know the Galts. I don't love them. I don't care
if they all die. What's going to happen to us? What's going to happen to
him? What's already happened?"
"It hard, isn't it' When there's nothing to distract you from it,"
NIaati said. "I larder, I mean. It's not ever easy. You had the
organization of the city to keep your mind busy, but that's done, and
now there's nothing but the waiting. I've felt it too. If I didn't have
the binding to work on, I'd have sunk into it."
Liat stopped. 11cr hands worried at each other.
"I can't stop thinking about it," she said. "I keep half-expecting that
it will all go hack to what it was. That we'll go back to Saraykeht and
carry on with the business and talk about that terrible year when the
Galts came the way we talk about a bad cotton crop."
"It won't, though."
"Then what's going to happen to him?"