conversation. The sun hung in the sky, gold in lapis.

"I'd forgotten what it was like to be myself," Cehmai said. His voice

was low and thoughtful and melancholy. "Just myself and not him as well.

I was so young when I took control of him. It's like having had someone

strapped to your back when you were a child and then suddenly lifting

off the burden. I feel alone. I feel freed. I'm shamed to have failed,

even though I know there was nothing I could have done to keep hold of

him. And I regret now all the years I could have stink Galt into ruins

that I didn't."

"But if you could have him back, would you?"

The pause that came before Cehmai's reply meant that no, he would have

chosen his freedom. It was the answer Maati had expected, but not the

one he was ready to accept.

"The Khai may be able to save the Dai-kvo," Cehmai said. "He may get

there before the Galts."

"But if he doesn't?"

"Then I would rather have Stone-Made-Soft back than decorate the end of

some Galtic spear," Cehmai said, a grim humor in his voice. "I have some

early work. Drafts from when I was first studying him. There are places

where the options ... branched. If we used those as starting points, it

would make the binding different from the one I took over, and we still

wouldn't have to begin from first principles."

"You have them here?"

"Yes. They're in that basket. There. You should take them back to the

library and look them over. If we keep them here I'm too likely to do

something unpleasant with them. I was half-tempted to burn them last night."

Maati took the pages-small, neat script on cheap, yellowing

parchment-and folded them into his sleeve. The weight of them seemed so

slight, and still Maati found himself uncomfortably aware of them and of

the return to a kind of walking prison that they meant for Cehmai.

"I'll look them over," Maati said. "Once I have an idea what would be

the best support for it, I'll put some reading together. And if things

go well, we can present it all to the Dai-kvo when he arrives.

Certainly, there's no call to do anything until we know where we stand."

"We can prepare for the worst," Cehmai said. "I'd rather be pleasantly

surprised than taken unaware."

The resignation in Cehmai's voice was hard to listen to. Maati coughed,

as if the suggestion he wished to make fought against being spoken.

"It might be better ... I haven't attempted a binding myself. If I were

the one ..."

Cehmai took a pose that was both gratitude and refusal. Maati felt a

warm relief at Cehmai's answer and also a twinge of regret.

"He's my burden," Cehmai said. "I gave my word to carry StoneMade-Soft

as long as I could, and I'll do that. I wouldn't want to disappoint the

Khai." Then he chuckled. "You know, there have been whole years when I

would have meant that as a sarcasm. Disappointing the Khaiem seems to be

about half of what we do as poets-no, I can't somehow use the andat to

help you win at tiles, or restore your prowess with your wives, or any

of the thousand stupid, petty things they ask of us. But these last

weeks, I really would do whatever I could, not to disappoint that man. I

don't know what's changed."

"Everything," Maati said. "Times like these remake men. They change what

we are. Otah's trying to become the man we need him to he."

"I suppose that's true," Cehmai said. "I just don't want this all to be

happening, so I forget, somehow, that it is. I keep thinking it's all a

sour dream and I'll wake out of it and stumble down to play a game of

stones against Stone-Made-Soft. That that will be the worst thing I have

to face. And not ..."

Cehmai gestured, his hands wide, including the house and the palaces and

the city and the world.

"And not the end of civilization?" Maati suggested.

"Something like that."

Nlaati sighed.

"You know," he said, "when we were young, the man who was Daikvo then

chose Otah to come train as a poet. He refused, but I think he would

have been good. He has it in him to do whatever needs doing."

Killing a man, taking a throne, marching an army to its death, Nlaati

thought but did not say. Whatever needs doing.

"I hope the price he pays is smaller than ours," Cehmai said.

"I doubt it will he."

14

Balasar had not been raised to put faith in augury. His father had

always said that any god that could create the world and the stars

should he able to put together a few well-formed sentences if there was

something that needed saying; Balasar had accepted this wisdom in the

uncritical way of a boy emulating the man he most admires. And still,

the dream came to him on the night before he had word of the hunting party.

It was far from the first time he had dreamt of the desert. Ile felt

again the merciless heat, the pain of the satchel cutting into his

shoulder. The hooks he had home then had become ashes in the dream as

they had in life, but the weight was no less. And behind him were not

only Coal and Eustin. All of them followed him-Bes, NIayarsin, Little

Ott, and the others. The dead followed him, and he knew they were no

longer his allies or his enemies. They came to keep watch over him, to

see what work he wrought with their blood. They were his judges. As

always before, he could not speak. His throat was knotted. Ile could not

turn to see the dead; he only felt them.

But there seemed more now-not only the men he had left in the desert,

but others as well. Some of them were soldiers, some of them simple men,

all of them padding behind him, waiting to see him justify their

sacrifices and his own pride. The host behind him had grown.

He woke in his tent, his mouth dry and sticky. Dawn had not yet come. He

drank from the water flask by his bed, then pulled on a shirt and simple

trousers and went out to relieve himself among the bushes. The army was

still asleep or else just beginning to stir. The air was warm and humid

so near the river. Balasar breathed deep and slow. lie had the sense

that the world itself-trees, grasses, moon-silvered clouds-was heavy

with anticipation. It would he two weeks before they would come within

sight of the river city Udun. By month's end another poet would be dead,

another library burned, another city fallen.

"Thus far, the campaign had proved as simple as he had hoped, though

slower. He had lost almost no men in Nantani. The low towns that his

army had come across in their journey to the North had emptied before