head, murmuring reassurances.
Ah, Otah thought as he stepped back, unnoticed. That's how it is.
Above deck, he smiled and nodded at Issandra and pretended to turn his
attention back to the music. He wondered how many other sacrifices he
had demanded in order to remake the world according to his vision, how
many other lovers would be parted to further his little scheme to save
two empires. He would likely never know the full price of it. As if in
answer, the candles guttered in the breeze, the reed organ took a
mournful turn, and the sea through which they sailed grew darker.
4
The midday sun beat down on the lush green; gnats and flies filled the
air. The river-not the Qiit proper but one of its tributariesthreaded
its way south like a snake. Maati tied his mule under the wide leaves of
a catalpa and squatted down on a likely-looking boulder. Pulling a pouch
of raisins and seeds from his sleeve, he looked out over the summer. The
wild trees, the rough wagon track he'd followed from the farmers' low
town to the northwest, the cultivated fields to the south.
A cluster of small farms made a loose community here, raising goats and
millet and, near the water, rice. The land between the cities was dotted
with low communities like this one: the rural roots that fed the great,
blossoming cities of the Khaiem. The accents were rougher here, the
effete taint of a high court as foreign as another language. Men might
be born, grow, love, marry, and die without ever traveling more than a
day's walk, birthing bed and grave marker no more distant than a thrown
pebble.
And one of those fields with its ripe green grasses had been plowed by
the only other man in all the world who knew how to bind the andat.
Maati took a mouthful of raisins and chewed slowly, thinking.
Leaving the warehouse outside Utani had proven harder than he had
expected. For over a decade, he had been rootless, moving from one city
or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey-and this one
heading south into the summer cities-hadn't seemed to signify anything
more than a few weeks' time and, of course, the errand itself. But
somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown
accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked
pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he
had felt their absence.
The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it.
Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and
the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he'd thought
they would be.
Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown
quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people
were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a
once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of
the war itself-the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and
saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined
Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed-had faded,
but they had not disappeared.