28
Maati tramped through the overgrown streets, Idaan walking silently at
his side. The hunter's bow slung over her shoulder was meant more as
protection from feral dogs than to assassinate Vanjit, though Maati knew
Idaan could use it for either. To their left, an unused canal stank of
stale water and rotting vine. To the right, walls stood or leaned, roofs
sagged or had fallen in. Every twenty steps seemed to offer up a new
display of how war and time could erase the best that humanity achieved.
And above the ruins, rising like a mountain over the city, the ruined
palaces of the Khai Udun were grayed by the moisture in the air. The
towers and terraces of enameled brick as soft as visions.
He had lost Eiah too.
Squatting on the boat as they made their way upriver, he had watched her
turn to Otah, watched her become his daughter again where before she had
chosen the role of outcast. She had lost faith in Maati's dream, and he
understood why. She had delighted in the Galtic girl's condition as if
it weren't the very thing that they had feared and fought against.
Maati had wanted the past. He had wanted to make the world whole as it
had been when he was a boy, none of his opportunities squandered. And
she had wanted that too. They all had. But with every change that
couldn't be undone, the past receded. With every new tragedy Maati
brought upon the world, with each friend that he lost, with failure upon
failure upon failure, the dim light faded. With Eiah returned to her
father's cause, there was nothing left to lose. His despair felt almost
like peace.
"Left or right?" Idaan asked.
Maati blinked. The road before them split, and he hadn't even noticed
it. He wasn't much of a scout.
"Left," he said with a shrug.
"You think the canal bridge will hold?"
"Right, then," Maati said, and turned down the road before the woman
could raise some fresh objection.
It was only a decade and a half since the war. It seemed like days ago
that Maati had been the librarian of Machi. And yet the white-barked
tree that split the road before them, street cobbles shattered and
lifted by its roots, hadn't existed then. The canals he walked past had
run clean. There had been no moss on the walls. Udun had been alive,
then. The forest and the river were eating the city's remains, and it
seemed to have happened in the space between one breath and the next. Or
perhaps the library, the envoys from the Dai-kvo, the long conversations
with Cehmaikvo and Stone-Made-Soft had been part of some other lifetime.
The sound was low and violent-something thrashing against wood or stone.
Maati looked around him. The square they'd come to was paved in wide,
flat stones, tall grass a yellow gray at the joints. A ruined fountain
with black muck where clear water had been squatted in the center.
Idaan's bow was in her hands, an arrow between her fingers.
"What was that?" Maati asked.
Idaan's dark eyes swept over the ruins, and Maati tried to follow her
gaze. They might have been houses or businesses or something of both.