leaves lined with silver by the moonlight. Eiah had her hand on the gate
before he spoke.
"Was that what you were looking for?" he asked.
She looked back, paused, and took a pose that asked for clarification.
There were too many things he might have meant.
"When you wrote, you said to watch for unusual cases," Parit said. "Was
she what you had in mind?"
"No," Eiah said. "That wasn't it." She passed from the garden to the street.
A decade and a half had passed since the power of the andat had left the
world. For generations before that, the cities of the Khaiem had been
protected by the poets-men who had dedicated their lives to binding one
of the spirits, the thoughts made flesh. Stone-Made-Soft, whom Eiah had
known as a child with its wide shoulders and amiable smile, was one of
them. It had made the mines around the northern city of Machi the
greatest in the world. Water-Moving-Down, who generations ago had
commanded the rains to come or else to cease, the rivers to flow or else
run dry. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless, who had
plucked the seeds from the cotton harvests of Saraykeht and discreetly
ended pregnancies.
Each of the cities had had one, and each city had shaped its trade and
commerce to exploit the power of its particular andat to the advantage
of its citizens. War had never come to the cities of the Khaiem. No one
dared to face an enemy who might make the mountains flow like rivers,
who might flood your cities or cause your crops to fail or your women to
miscarry. For almost ten generations, the cities of the Khaiem had stood
above the world like adults over children.
And then the Galtic general Balasar Gice had made his terrible wager and
won. The andat left the world, and left it in ruins. For a blood-soaked
spring, summer, and autumn, the armies of Galt had washed over the
cities like a wave over sandcastles. Nantani, Udun, Yalakeht,
Chaburi-Tan. The great cities fell to the foreign swords. The Khaiem
died. The Dai-kvo and his poets were put to the sword and their
libraries burned. Eiah still remembered being fourteen summers old and
waiting for death to come. She had been only the daughter of the Khai
Machi then, but that had been enough. The Galts, who had taken every
other city, were advancing on them. And their only hope had been Uncle
Maati, the disgraced poet, and his bid to bind one last andat.
She had been present in the warehouse when he'd attempted the binding.
She'd seen it go wrong. She had felt it in her body. She and every other
woman in the cities of the Khaiem. And every man of Galt.
Corruptingthe-Generative, the last andat had been named.
Sterile.
Since that day, no woman of the cities of the Khaiem had borne a child.
No man of Galt had fathered one. It was a dark joke. Enemy nations
locked in war afflicted with complementary curses. Yourhistory will be
written by half-breeds, Sterile had said, or it won't be written. Eiah
knew the words because she had been in the room when the world had been
broken. Her own father had taken the name Emperor when he sued for
peace, and Emperor he had become. Emperor of a fallen world.