An Autumn War (4 page)

"I'll keep breathing, Otah-cha. You do the same."

The door closed softly behind him, and Otah took another sip of wine. It was fewer than a dozen breaths before a quiet scratching came at the door. Rising and straightening the folds of his robes, Otah prepared himself for the next appearance, the next performance in his ongoing, unending mummer's show. He pressed down a twinge of envy for Sinja and the men who would be slogging through cold mud and dirty snow. He told himself the journey only looked liberating to someone who was staying near a fire grate. He adopted a somber expression, held his body with the rigid grace expected of him, and called out for the servant to enter.

'T'here was a meeting to take with House Daikani over a new mine they were proposing in the South. Mikah Radaani had also put a petition with the Master of Tides to schedule a meeting with the Khai Machi to discuss the prospect of resurrecting the summer fair in Amnat- "Ian. And there was the letter to the Dai-kvo to compose, and a ceremony at the temple at moonrise at which his presence was required, and so on through the day and into the night. Otah listened patiently to the list of duties and obligations and tried not to feel haunted by the thought that sending the guard away had been the wrong thing to do.

EIAH TOOK A BITE OF THE ALMOND CAKE, WIPING HONEY FROM HER MOU"FH with the back of her hand, and Maati was amazed again by how tall she'd grown. He still thought of her as hardly standing high as his knees, and here she was-thin as a stick and awkward, but tall as her mother. She'd even taken to wearing a woman's jewelry-necklace of gold and silver, armbands of lacework silver and gems, and rings on half her fingers. She still looked like a girl playing dress-up in her mother's things, but even that would pass soon.

"And how did he die?" she asked.

"I never said he did," Maati said.

Eiah's lips bent in a frown. Her dark eyes narrowed.

"You don't tell stories where they live, Uncle Maati. You like the dead ones."

Maati chuckled. It was a fair enough criticism, and her exasperation was as amusing as her interest. Since she'd been old enough to read, Eiah had haunted the library of Machi, poking here and there, reading and being frustrated. And now that she'd reached her fourteenth summer, the time had come for her to turn to matters of court. She was the only daughter of the Khai Machi, and as such, a rare chance for a marriage alliance. She would be the most valued property in the city, and worse for her and her parents, she was more than clever enough to know it. Her time in the library had taken on a tone of defiance, but it was never leveled at Maati, so it never bothered him. In fact, he found it rather delightful.

"Well," he said, settling his paunch more comfortably in the library's deep silk-covered chair, "as it happens, his binding did fail. It was tragic. He started screaming, and didn't stop for hours. He stopped when he died, of course, and when they examined him afterwards, they found slivers of glass all through his blood."

"They cut him open?"

"Of course," Maati said.

"That's disgusting," she said. "l'hen a moment later, "If someone died here, could I help do it?"

"No one's likely to try a binding here, Eiah-kya. Only poets who've trained for years with the I)ai-kvo are allowed to make the attempt, and even then they're under strict supervision. Holding the andat is dangerous work, and not just if it fails."

"'T'hey should let girls do it too," she said. "I want to go to the school and train to he a poet."

"But then you wouldn't he your father's daughter anymore. If the I)ai-kvo didn't choose you, you'd he one of the branded, and they'd turn you out into the world to make whatever way you could without anyone to help you."

"That's not true. Father was at the school, and he didn't have to take the brand. If the Dai-kvo didn't pick me, I wouldn't take it either. I'd just come back here and live alone like you do."

"But then wouldn't you and I)anat have to fight?"

"No," Eiah said, taking a pose appropriate to a tutor offering correction. "Girls can't be Khai, so Danat wouldn't have to fight me for the chair."

"But if you're going to have women be poets, why not Khaiem too?"

"Because who'd want to he Khai?" she asked and took another piece of cake from the tray on the table between them.

The library stretched out around them-chamber after chamber of scrolls and books and codices that were Maati's private domain. The air was rich with the scent of old leather and dust and the pungent herbs he used to keep the mice and insects away. Baarath, the chief librarian and Maati's best friend here in the far, cold North, had kept it before him. Often when Maati arrived in the morning or remained long after dark, puzzling over some piece of ancient text or obscure reference, he would look up, half-wondering where the annoying, fat, boisterous, petty little man had gotten to, and then he would remember.

The fever had taken dozens of people that year. Winter always changed the city, the cold driving them deep into the tunnels and hidden chambers below Machi. For months they lived by firelight and in darkness. By midwinter, the air itself could seem thick and stifling. And illnesses spread easily in the dark and close, and Baraath had grown ill and died, one man among many. Now he was only memory and ash. Maati was the master of the library, appointed by his old friend and enemy and companion Otah Machi. The Khai Machi, husband of Kiyan, and father to this almost-woman Eiah who shared his almond cakes, and to her brother Danat. And, perhaps, to one other.

"Maatikya? Are you okay?"

"I was just wondering how your brother was," he said.

"Better. He's hardly coughing at all anymore. Everyone's saying he has weak lungs, but I was just as sick when I was young, and I'm just fine."

"People tell stories," Maati said. "It keeps them amused, I suppose."

"What would happen if Danat died?"

"Your father would be expected to take a new, younger wife and produce a son to take his place. More than one, if he could. "That's part of why the utkhaiem are so worried about Danat. If he died and no brothers were forthcoming, it would be had for the city. All the most powerful houses would start fighting over who would be the new Khai. People would probably be killed."

"Well, Danat won't die," Eiah said. "So it doesn't matter. Did you know him?"

"Who?"

"My real uncle. Danat. The one Danat's named for?"

"No," Maati said. "Not really. I met him once."

"Did you like him?"

Maati tried to remember what it had been like, all those years ago. The Dai-kvo had summoned him. That had been the old Dai-kvo- "Iahi-kvo. He'd never met the new one. 'Iahi-kvo had brought him to meet the two men, and set him the task that had ended with Otah on the chair and himself living in the court of Machi. It had been a different lifetime.

"I don't recall liking him or disliking him," Maati said. "He was just a man I'd met."

Eiah sighed impatiently.

""Tell me about another one," she said.

"Well. There was a poet in the First Empire before people understood that andat were harder and harder to capture each time they escaped. He tried to bind Softness with the same binding another poet had used a generation before. Of course it didn't work."

"Because a new binding has to be different," Isiah said.

"But he didn't know that."

"What happened to him?"

"His joints all froze in place. He was alive, but like a statue. He couldn't move at all."

"How did he cat?"

"He didn't. They tried to give him water by forcing it up his nostrils, and he drowned on it. When they examined his body, all the bones were fused together as if they had never been separate at all. It looked like one single thing."

"That's disgusting," she said. It was something she often said. Maati grinned.

They talked for another half a hand, Maati telling tales of failed bindings, of the prices paid by poets of old who had attempted the greatest trick in the world and fallen short. Eiah listened and passed her own certain judgment. They finished the last of the almond cakes and called a servant girl in to carry the plates away. Eiah left just as the sun peeked out between the low clouds and the high peaks in the west, brightness flaring gold for a long moment before the city fell into its long twilight. Alone again, Nlaati told himself that the darkness was only about the accidents of sunlight, and not his young friend's absence.

He could still remember the first time he'd seen Eiah. She'd been tiny, a small, curious helplessness in her mother's arms, and he had been deeply in disfavor with the Dai-kvo and sent to Machi in half-exile for treading too near the line between the poets and the politics of the court. The poets were creatures of the Dai-kvo, lent to the Khaiem. The Dai-kvo took no part in the courtly dramas of generational fratricide. The Khaiem supported the Dai-kvo and his village, sent their excess sons to the school from which they might be plucked to take the honor of the brown robes, and saw to the administration of the cities whose names they took as their own. The Khai Machi, the Khai Yalakeht, the Khai "Ian-Sadar. All of them had been other men once, before their fathers had died or become too feeble to rule. All of them had killed their own brothers on the way to claiming their positions. All except Utah.

Otah, the exception.

A scratching at the door roused Maati, and he hauled himself from his chair and went forward. The night had nearly fallen, but torches spattered the darkness with circles of light. Even before he reached the door, he heard music coming from one of the pavilions nearby, the young men and women of the utkhaiem boiling up from the winter earth and celebrating nightly, undeterred by chill or rain or heartbreak. And at the door of his library were two familiar figures, and a third that was only expected. Cehmai, poet of Machi, stood with a bottle of wine in each hand, and behind him the hulking, bemused, inhuman andat StoneMade-Soft raised its wide chin in greeting. The other-a slender young man in the same brown robes that Cehmai and Maati himself wore-spoke to Cehmai. Athai Vauudun, the envoy from the Dai-kvo.

"He is the most arrogant man I have ever met," the envoy said to Cehmai, continuing a previous conversation. "He has no allies, only one son, and no pause at all at the prospect of alienating every other city of the Khaiem. I think he's proud to ignore tradition."

"Our guest has met with the Khai," StoneMade-Soft said, its voice low and rough as a landslide. "They don't appear to have impressed each other favorably."

"Athai-kvo," Cehmai said, gesturing awkwardly with one full bottle. "This it Maati Vaupathai. NIaati-kvo, please meet our new friend."

Athai took a pose of greeting, and Maati answered with a welcoming pose less formal than the one he'd been offered.

"Kvo?" Athai said. "I hadn't known you were Cehmai-cha's teacher."

"It's a courtesy he gives me because I'm old," Maati said. "Come in, though. All of you. It's getting cold out."

Maati led the others back through the chambers and corridors of the library. On the way, they traded the kind of simple, common talk that etiquette required-the Dai-kvo was in good health, the school had given a number of promising boys the black robes, there were discussions of a possible new binding in the next years-and Maati played his part. Only Stone-blade-Soft didn't participate, considering as it was the thick stone walls with mild, distant interest. The inner chamber that Maati had prepared for the meeting was dim and windowless, but a fire burned hot behind iron shutters. Books and scrolls lay on a wide, low table. Maati opened the iron shutters, lit a taper from the flames, and set a series of candles and lanterns glowing around the room until they were all bathed in shadowless warm light. The envoy and Cehmai had taken chairs by the fire, and Maati lowered himself to a wide bench.

"My private workroom," Maati said, nodding at the space around them. "I've been promised there's no good way to listen to us in here."

The envoy took a pose that accepted the fact, but glanced uneasily at StoneMade-Soft.

"I won't tell," the andat said, and grinned, baring its unnaturally regular stone-white teeth. "Promise."

"If I lost control of our friend here, telling what happened in a meeting wouldn't he the trouble we faced," Cehmai said.

The envoy seemed somewhat mollified. He had a small face, Maati thought. But perhaps it was only that Maati had already taken a dislike to the man.

"So Cehmai has been telling me about your project," Athai said, folding his hands in his lap. "A study of the prices meted out by failed bindings, is it?"

"A hit more than that," Maati said. "A mapping, rather, of the form of the binding to the form that its price took. What it was about this man's work that his blood went dry, or that one's that made his lungs fill with worms.

"You might consider not binding us in the first place," Stone-MadeSoft said. "If it's so dangerous as all that."

Maati ignored it. "I thought, you see, that there might be some way to better understand whether a poet's work was likely to fail or succeed if we knew more of how older failures presented themselves. It was an essay Heshai Antaburi wrote examining his own binding of Removingthe-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his binding succeeded-he held Seedless for decades-hut in having done the thing and then lived with the consequences, he could better see the flaws in his original work. Here ..."

Maati rose up with a grunt and fished through his papers for a moment until the old, worn leather-bound hook came to hand. Its cover was limp from years of reading, the pages growing yellow and smudged. The envoy took it and read a bit by the light of candles.

"But this is too much like his original work," Athai said as he thumbed through the pages. "It could never be used."

"No, of course not," Maati agreed. "But he made the attempt to examine the form of the binding, you see, in hopes that showing the kinds of errors he'd made might help others avoid things that were similar. Heshai-kvo was one of my first teachers."

"He was the one murdered in Saraykeht, ne?" Athai asked, not looking up from the book in his hands.