"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

Stone-Made-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," Stone-Made-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

Stone-Made-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