been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of
its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a
richness and variety of emotion that in Maati's experience children
rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination
that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit
delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.
"I've seen other things too," Vanjit said. "The greater the change, the
more difficult it is at first."
Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags
where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An
insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the
root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.
"Forgive me," he said. "Could I put upon you to undo some part of that?
It's distracting...."
He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again,
his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.
"Once I've made the change, I forget that it doesn't fall back on its
own," she said.
"Stone-Made-Soft was much the same," Maati said. "Once it had changed
the nature of a rock, it remained weakened until Cehmai-kvo put an
effort into changing it back. Then there was Water-Moving-Down, who
might stop a river only so long as its poet gave the matter strict
attention. The question rests on the innate capacity for change within
the object affected. Stone by nature resists change, water embraces it.
I suspect that whatever eyes you improve will still suffer the normal
effects of age."
"The change may be permanent, but we aren't," she said.
"Well put," Maati said.
The courtyard in which they sat showed only small signs of the decade of
ruin it had suffered. The weeds had all been pulled or cut, the broken
stones reset. Songbirds flitted between the trees, lizards scurried
through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk
circled in the high, distant air.
Maati could imagine that it wasn't the school that he had suffered in
his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he
recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A
cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and
judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself seemed remade, and
perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his
thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black
eyes on Maati, but did not cry.
"It's unlike anything I expected," Vanjit said. "I can feel him. All the
time, he's in the back of my mind."
"How burdensome is it?" Maati asked, sitting forward.
Vanjit shook her head.
"No worse than any baby, I'd imagine," she said. "He tires me sometimes,
but not so much I lose myself. And the others have all been kind. I
don't think I've cooked a meal for myself since the binding."
"That's good," Maati said. "That's excellent."