"I don't entirely know. It hasn't happened in my lifetime. It hasn't
happened in generations."
"But it has happened," Eiah said.
"There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was ...
what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we've translated
them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might
simply be that the poets' wills are set against each other's. A kind of
wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater
strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the
upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don't
coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the
world we inhabit. Or ..."
"Or?"
"Or something else could happen. The grammar and meaning in one binding
could relate to some structure or nuance in another. Imagine two singers
in competition. What if they chose songs that harmonized? What if the
words of one song blended with the words of the other, and something new
came from it? Songs are a poor metaphor. What are the odds that the
words of any two given songs would speak to each other? If the bindings
are related in concept, if the ideas are near, it's much more likely
that sort of resonance could happen. By chance."
"And what would that do?"
"I don't know," Maati said. "Nobody does. I can say that what was once a
land of palm trees and rivers and palaces of sapphire is a killing
desert. I can say that people who travel in the ruins of the Old Empire
tend to die there. It might be from physical expressions of that old
struggle. It might be from some interaction of bindings. There is no way
to be sure."
Eiah was silent. She turned the pages of her medical books until she
reached diagrams Maati recognized. Eyes cut through the center, eyes
sliced through the back. He had seen them all thousands of times when
Vanjit was preparing herself, and they had seemed like the keepers of
great secrets. He hadn't considered at the time that each image was the
result of some actual, physical orb meeting with an investigative blade,
or that all the eyes pictured there were sightless.
He felt Eiah's sigh as much as heard it.
"What happened out there?" he asked. "The truth, not what you said in
front of the others."
Eiah leaned forward. For a moment, Maati thought she was weeping, but
she straightened again. Her eyes were dry, her jaw set. She had pulled a
small box of carved oak from under the cot, and she handed it to him
now. He opened it, the leather hinge loose and soft. Six folded pages
lay inside, sewn at the edges and sealed with Eiah's personal sigil.
"You didn't send them?"
"It was true about the trade fair. We did find one. It wasn't very good,
but it was there, so we stopped. There are Galts everywhere now. They
came to Saraykeht at the start, and apparently the councillors and the
court are all still there. There are others who have fanned out. The
ones who believe that my father's plan is going to work."