She stood and adopted a pose that she had clearly practiced with a
specialist in etiquette. It was in essence a greeting, with nuances of a
contract being formed and the informality that came with close relations.
"Welcome to my family, Most High," she said in his language. Otah
replied with a pose that accepted the welcome, and if its precise
meaning was lost on her, the gist was clear enough.
After she had left, Otah strolled through the gardens, insulated by his
rank from everyone he met. The trees seemed straighter than he
remembered, the birdsong more delicate. A weariness he only half-knew
had been upon him had lifted, and he felt warm and energetic in a way he
hadn't in months. He made his way at length to his suite, his rooms, his
desk.
Kiyan-kya, it seems something may have gone right after all...
2
Ten years almost to the day before word of Otah's pact with the Galts
reached him, Maati Vaupathai had learned of his son's death at the hands
of Galtic soldiers. A fugitive only just abandoned by his only
companion, he had made his way to the south like a wounded horse finding
its way home. It had not been the city itself he had been looking for,
but a woman.
Liat Chokavi, owner and overseer of House Kyaan, had received him.
Twice, they had been lovers, once as children, and then again just
before the war. She had told him of Nayiit's stand, of how he had been
cut down protecting the Emperor's son, Danat, as the final assault on
Machi began. She spoke with the chalky tones of a woman still in pain.
If Maati had held hopes that his once-lover might take him in, they did
not survive that conversation. He left her house in agony. He had not
spoken to her since.
Two years after that, he took his first student, a woman named Halit.
Since then, his life had become a narrow, focused thing. He had remade
himself as a teacher, as an agent of hope, as the Dai-kvo of a new age.
It was less glamorous than it sounded.
All that morning he had lain in the small room that was presently his
home, squinting at the dirty light that made its way through the
oiledparchment window and thinking of the andat. Thinking of thoughts
made flesh, of ideas given human form and volition. Little gods, held
tight to existence by the poets who knew them best and, by knowing,
bound them. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless.
WaterMoving-Down, called Rain or Seaward. Stone-Made-Soft who had no
other name. And his own-Corrupting-the-Generative, called Sterile, whom
Maati had not quite bound, and who had remade the world.
The lessons he had learned as a boy, the conversations he had had as a
man and a poet, they all came back to him dimly. Fragments and moments,
insights but not all the steps that had led him there. A mosquito whined
in the gloom, and Maati waved it away.
Teaching his girls was like telling the story of his life and finding
there were holes in it. He knew things-structures of grammar and
metaphor, anecdotes of long-dead poets and the bindings they had made,
occult relationships between abstractions like shapes and numbers and