the full moon hanging like a lantern of rice paper in the black sky.
"Does anyone ever fall from up there?" Nayiit asked.
"Once every year or so," Maati said. "There's winter storage up there,
so there are laborers carrying things in the early spring and middle
autumn. There are accidents. And the utkhaiem will hold dances at the
tops of them sometimes. They say wine gets you drunk faster at the top,
but I don't know if that's true. Then sometimes men kill themselves by
stepping through the sky doors when the platform's gone down. It would
happen more if there were people up there more often. Otah-kvo has a
plan for channeling the air from the forges up through the center of one
so it would he warm enough to use in the winter, but we've never figured
out how to make the change without bringing the whole thing down."
Nayiit shuddered, and Maati was willing to pretend it was the wind. He
put his arm on the boy's shoulder and steered him farther down the
street to a squat stone building with a copper roof gone as green as
trees with time. Inside, the air was warmed by braziers. Two old men
were playing tin-and-silver flutes while a young woman kept time on a
small drum and sang. Half a hundred bodies were seated at long wooden
tables or on benches. The place was rich with the smell of roast lamb
even though the windows were unshuttered; it was as if no one in Machi
would miss the chance for fresh air. Maati sympathized.
He and Nayiit took a bench in the hack, away from singers and song. The
serving boy was hardly as old as F,iah, but he knew his trade. It seemed
fewer than a dozen heartbeats before he brought them bowls of sweet wine
and a large worked-silver bowl filled with tender slivers of green:
spring peas fresh from the vines. Maati, hands full, nodded his thanks.
"And you've worked your whole life in House Kyaan, then?" Maati asked.
"What does Liat have you doing?"
"Since we've been traveling, I haven't been doing much at all. Before
that, I had been working the needle trades," Nayiit said as he tucked
one leg up under him. It made him sit taller. "The spinners, the dyers,
the tailors, and the sailmakers and all like that. They aren't as
profitable as they were in the days before Seedless was lost, but they
still make up a good deal of the business in Saraykeht."
"Habits," Maati said. "The cotton trade's always been in Saraykeht.
People don't like change, so it doesn't move away so quickly as it
might. Another generation and it'll all be scattered throughout the world."
"Not if I do my work," Nayiit said with a smile that showed he hadn't
taken offense.
"Fair point," Maati said. "I only mean that's what you have to work
against. It would be easier if there was still an andat in the city that
helped with the cotton trade the way Seedless did."
"You knew it, didn't you? Seedless, I mean."
"I was supposed to take him over," Maati said. "The way Cehmai took
Stone-Made-Soft from his master, I was to take Seedless from Heshai-kvo.
In a way, I was lucky. Seedless was flawed work. Dangerously flawed.
Brilliant, don't misunderstand. Heshai-kvo did brilliant work when he
bound Seedless, but he made the andat very clever and profoundly
involved with destroying the poet. They all want to be free-it's their