nothing more had happened. Word of the other lost andat and of the

massed army of Galt made what in other days would have been a cataclysm

seem a side issue. For half a week, it seemed, the city had been

paralyzed. Not from fear, but from the simple and profound lack of any

ritual or ceremony that answered the situation. Then, first from the

merchant houses below and Kiyan-cha's women's ban- (lucts above and then

seemingly everywhere at once, the utkhaiem had flushed with action.

Often disorganized, often at crossed purpose, but determined and intent.

Nlaati's own efforts were no less than any others.

Still, he left it behind him now-the books stacked in distinct piles,

scrolls unfurled to particular passages as if waiting for the copyist's

attention-and walked instead through the wide, bright paths of the

palaces. "There were fewer singing slaves, more stretches where the

gravel of the path had scattered and not yet been raked back into place,

and the men and women of the utkhaiem who he passed seemed to carry

themselves with less than their full splendor. It was as if a terrible

wind had blown through a garden and disarrayed those blossoms it did not

destroy.

The path led into the shade of the false forest that separated the

poet's house from the palaces. "There were old trees among these, thick

trunks speaking of generations of human struggle and triumph and failure

since their first tentative seedling leaves had pushed away this soil.

Moss clothed the bark and scented the air with green. Birds fluttered

over Nlaati's head, and a squirrel scolded him as he passed. In winter,

with these oaks bare, you could see from the porch of the poet's house

out almost to the palaces. In summer, the house might have been in a

different city. The door of the poet's house was standing open, and

Maati didn't bother to scratch or knock.

Cehmai's quarters suffered the same marks as his own-books, scrolls,

codices, diagrams all laid out without respect to author or age or type

of binding. Cehmai, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, held a

book open in his hand. With the brown robes of a poet loose around his

frame, he looked, Nlaati thought, like a young student puzzling over an

obscure translation. Cehmai looked up as Maati's shadow crossed him, and

smiled wearily.

"Have you eaten?" hlaati asked.

"Some bread. Some cheese," Cehmai said, gesturing to the back of the

house with his head. ""There's some left, if you'd like it."

It hadn't occurred to Maati just how hungry he was until he took up a

corner of the rich, sweet bread. He knew he'd had dinner the night

before, but he couldn't recall what it had been or when he'd eaten it.

He reached into a shallow ceramic howl of salted raisins. They tasted

rich and full as wine. Ile took a handful and sat on the chair beside

Cchmai to look over the assorted results of their labor.

"What's your thought?" Cehmai said.

"I've found more than I expected to," Nlaati said. "'T'here was a

section in Vautai's Fourth Meditations that actually clarified some

things I hadn't been certain of. If we were to put together all the

scraps and rags from all of the hooks and histories and scrolls, it

might be enough to support binding a fresh andat."

Cehmai sighed and closed the hook he'd been holding.

"That's near what I've come to," the younger poet agreed. Then he looked

up. "And how long do you think it would take to put those scraps and

rags into one coherent form?"

"So that it stood as a single work? I'm likely too old to start it,"

Maati said. "And without the full record from the Dai-kvo, there would

be no way to know whether a binding was dangerously near one that had

already been done."

"I hated those," Cehmai said.

"'They went hack to the beginning of the First Empire," Nlaati said.

"Some of the descriptions are so convoluted it takes reading them six

times to understand they're using fifty words to carry the meaning of

five. But they are complete, and that's the biggest gap in our resources."

Cehmai got to his feet with a grunt. Ilis hair was disheveled and there

were dark smudges under his eyes. Nlaati imagined he had some to match.

"So to sum up," Cehmai said, "if the Khai fails, we might be able to

hind a new andat in a generation or so."

"Unless we're unlucky and use some construct too much like something a

minor poet employed twenty generations back. In that case, we attempt

the binding, pay the price, and dic badly. Except that by then, we'll

likely all have been slaughtered by the Galts."

"Well," Cehmai said and rubbed his hands together. "Are there any of

those raisins left?"

"A few," Maati said.

Nlaati could hear the joints in Cehmai's hack cracking as he stretched.

Maati leaned over and scooped up the fallen hook. It wasn't titled, nor

was the author named, but the grammar in the first page marked it as

Second Empire. Loyan Sho or Kodjan the Lesser. Nlaati let his gaze flow

down the page, seeing the words without taking in their meanings. Behind

him, Cehmai ate the raisins, lips smacking until he spoke.

""I'he second problem is solved if your technique works. It isn't

critical that we have all the histories if we can deflect the price of

failing. At worst, we'll have lost the time it took to compose the binding."

"Months," hlaati said.

"But not death," Cchmai went on. "So there's something to be said for that."

"And the first problem can be skirted by not starting wholly from scratch."

"You've been thinking about this, Nlaati-kvo."

Cehmai slowly walked back across the floor. His footsteps were soft and

deliberate. Outside, a pigeon cooed. Nlaati let the silence speak for

him. When Cehmai returned and sat again, his expression was abstracted

and his fingers picked idly at the cloth of his sleeves. hlaati knew

some part of what haunted the younger man: the danger faced by the city,

the likelihood of the Khai Machi retrieving the I)ai-kvo, the shapeless

and all-pervading fear of the Galtic army that had gathered in the South

and might now be almost anywhere. But there was another part to the

question, and that Maati could not guess. And so he asked.

"What is it like?"

Cehmai looked up as if he'd half-forgotten klaati was there. His hands

flowed into a pose that asked clarification.

"Stone-Made-Soft," Maati said. "What is it like with him gone?"

Cehmai shrugged and turned his head to look out the unshuttered windows.

The trees shifted their leaves and adjusted their branches like men in