chair out to his balcony and sat in the starlight, looking south to the sea.
Thin clouds streaked the high air, and the ocean was a vast darkness.
The city that spilled down the hills before him glittered brighter than
the stars; torches and lanterns, candles and firekeepers' kilns. The
breeze smelled of smoke and salt and the lush flowers of early autumn.
He closed his eyes.
He could feel the palaces behind him, looming like a weight he'd shifted
off his back for a moment and would need to shoulder again. His mind ran
free without him, bouncing from one crisis to another without ever
pausing long enough to make sense of any one of them. And, intruding
upon all of it, he found himself replaying his conversation with Idaan,
searching for the cutting replies that hadn't occurred to him at the time.
Who was she to pity him? She'd made a low-town judge of herself, and now
a farmer. It was an improvement from traitor and murderer, but it didn't
give her moral authority over him. And to instruct him on the nature of
his feelings about Maati and Cehmai was ridiculous. She hardly knew him.
Coming to court in the first place had been a kind of madness on her
part. He could have had her killed outright rather than sit like a dog
while she heaped her abuse on him.
She thought he'd broken the world, did she? Well, what about the old way
had been worth saving? It hadn't brought justice. The peace it offered
had been purchased at the cost of lives of misery and struggle. And from
that first moment, more than forty summers earlier, when the Daikvo had
told him that they could not offer Saraykeht a replacement should
Seedless slip its leash, Otah had known it was doomed.
The genius of the Galts-of all the rest of the world, for that-was that
they had built their power on ideas that could grow one on another. A
better forge led to better metalwork led to stronger tools and so on to
the end of their abilities. By contrast, the Empire, the Second Empire,
the cities of the Khaiem: all of them had wielded unthinkable power and
fashioned wonders. And when the first poet had bound the first andat,
anything had been possible. Anything a mind could fathom could be
harnessed; anything that could be thought could be done.
But when the first andat had escaped and been harder to recapture, that
potential had dropped a degree. Once a binding failed, each one that
followed had to be different, and there were only so many ways to
describe a thing fully enough to hold it as a slave. It was the central
truth of the long, slow, dwindling of power that had brought them all here.
It was like a man's life. For a time in his youth, Otah had been capable
of anything. His body had been strong, his judgment so certain he'd been
willing to kill a man. And every day and every decision had narrowed
him. Every year had weakened his back and his knees, eaten at his sight
and wrinkled his skin. Time had taken Kiyan from him. His judgment had
lost him his daughter.
He could have done anything, and he had chosen this. Or had it chosen
for him.
And he wasn't yet dead, so there were other choices still to be made.
Other days and years to live through. Other duties and failures and
disappointments he would be responsible for not making right. His anger