black sky.
'Does anyone ever fall from up there?' Nayiit asked.
'Once every year or so,' Maati said. 'There's winter storage up there, so there are laborers carrying things in the early spring and middle autumn. There are accidents. And the utkhaiem will hold dances at the tops of them sometimes. They say wine gets you drunk faster at the top, but I don't know if that's true. Then sometimes men kill themselves by stepping through the sky doors when the platform's gone down. It would happen more if there were people up there more often. Otah-kvo has a plan for channeling the air from the forges up through the center of one so it would he warm enough to use in the winter, but we've never figured out how to make the change without bringing the whole thing down.'
Nayiit shuddered, and Maati was willing to pretend it was the wind. He put his arm on the boy's shoulder and steered him farther down the street to a squat stone building with a copper roof gone as green as trees with time. Inside, the air was warmed by braziers. Two old men were playing tin-and-silver flutes while a young woman kept time on a small drum and sang. Half a hundred bodies were seated at long wooden tables or on benches. The place was rich with the smell of roast lamb even though the windows were unshuttered; it was as if no one in Machi would miss the chance for fresh air. Maati sympathized.
He and Nayiit took a bench in the hack, away from singers and song. The serving boy was hardly as old as F, iah, but he knew his trade. It seemed fewer than a dozen heartbeats before he brought them bowls of sweet wine and a large worked-silver bowl filled with tender slivers of green: spring peas fresh from the vines. Maati, hands full, nodded his thanks.
'And you've worked your whole life in House Kyaan, then?' Maati asked. 'What does Liat have you doing?'
'Since we've been traveling, I haven't been doing much at all. Before that, I had been working the needle trades,' Nayiit said as he tucked one leg up under him. It made him sit taller. 'The spinners, the dyers, the tailors, and the sailmakers and all like that. They aren't as profitable as they were in the days before Seedless was lost, but they still make up a good deal of the business in Saraykeht.'
'Habits,' Maati said. 'The cotton trade's always been in Saraykeht. People don't like change, so it doesn't move away so quickly as it might. Another generation and it'll all be scattered throughout the world.'
'Not if I do my work,' Nayiit said with a smile that showed he hadn't taken offense.
'Fair point,' Maati said. 'I only mean that's what you have to work against. It would be easier if there was still an andat in the city that helped with the cotton trade the way Seedless did.'
'You knew it, didn't you? Seedless, I mean.'
'I was supposed to take him over,' Maati said. 'The way Cehmai took Stone-Made-Soft from his master, I was to take Seedless from Heshai-kvo. In a way, I was lucky. Seedless was flawed work. Dangerously flawed. Brilliant, don't misunderstand. Heshai-kvo did brilliant work when he bound Seedless, but he made the andat very clever and profoundly involved with destroying the poet. They all want to be free-it's their nature-but Seedless was more than that. He was vicious.'
'You sound as though you were fond of it,' Nayiit said, only halfteasing.
'We were friendly enough, in our fashion,' Maati said. 'We wouldn't have been if things had gone by the I)ai- kvo's plan. If I'd become the poet of Saraykeht, Seedless would have bent himself to destroying me just the way he had to Ileshai-kvo.'
'Have you ever tried to bind one of the andat?'
'Once. When Heshai died, I had the mad thought that I could somehow retrieve Seedless. I had IIcshai-kvo's notes. Still have them, for that. I even began the ceremonies, but it would never have worked. What I had was too much like what Heshai had done. It would have failed, and I'd have paid its price.'
'And then I suppose I would never have been horn,' Nayiit said.
'You would have,' Nlaati said, solemnly. 'Liat-kya didn't know she was carrying you when she stopped me, but she was. I thought about it, afterward. About binding another of the andat, I mean. I even spent part of a winter once doing the basic work for one I called Returning to-True. I don't know what I would have done with it, precisely. Unbent things, I suppose. I'd have been brilliant repairing axles. But my mind was too fuzzy. There were too many things I meant, and none of them precisely enough.'
The musicians ended their song and stood to a roar of approving voices and bowls of wine bought by their admirers. One of the old men walked through the house with a lacquer begging box in his hand. Maati fumbled in his sleeve, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into the box with a satisfying click.
'And then, I also wasn't in the Dai-kvo's best graces,' Maati continued. 'After Saraykeht… Well, I suppose it's poor etiquette to let your master die and the andat escape. I wasn't blamed outright, but it was always hanging there. The memory of it.'
'It can't have helped that you brought back a lover and a child,' Nayiit said.
'No, it didn't. But I was very young and very full of myself. It's not easy, being told that you are of the handful of men in the world who might be able to control one of the andat. 'lends to create a sense of being more than you are. I thought I could do anything. And maybe I could have, but I tried to do everything, and that isn't the same.' He sighed and ate a pea pod. Its flesh was crisp and sweet and tasted of spring. When he spoke again, he tried to make his voice light and joking. 'I didn't wind up doing a particularly good job of either endeavor.'
'It seems to me you've done well enough,' Nayiit said as he waved at the serving boy for more wine. 'You've made yourself a place in the court here, you've been able to study in the libraries here, and from what Mother says, you've found something no one else ever has. That alone is more than most men manage in a lifetime.'
'I suppose,' Maati said. He wanted to go on, wanted to say that most men had children, raised them up, watched them become women and men. He wanted to tell this charming boy who stood now where Maati himself once had that he regretted that he had not been able to enjoy those simple pleasures. Instead, he took another handful of pea pods. He could tell that Nayiit sensed his reservations, heard the longing in the brevity of his reply. When the boy spoke, his tone was light.
'I've spent all my life-well, since I've been old enough to think of it as really mine and not something Mother's let me borrow-with House Kyaan. Running errands, delivering contracts. That's how I started, at least. Mother always told me I had to do better than the other boys who worked for the house because I was her son, and if people thought I was getting favors because of it, they wouldn't respect her or me. She was right. I can see that. At the time it all seemed monstrously unfair, though.'
'Do you like the work?' Maati asked.
The girl with the drum began tapping a low tattoo, her voice droning in a lament. Maati shifted to look at Nayiit. The boy's gaze was fixed on the singer, his expression melancholy. The urge to put his hand to Nayiit's shoulder, to offer some comfort, however powerless, moved through Maati and faded. He sat still and quiet as the chant rose, the anguish in the singer's voice growing until the air of the teahouse hummed with it, and then it faded into despair. The man with the lacquer box came past again, but Maati didn't put in any copper this time.
'You and Mother. You're lovers again?'
'I suppose so,' Maati said, surprised to feel a blush in his cheeks. 'It happens sometimes.'
'What happens when you're called away to the Dai-kvo?'
'Are we walking the same path a second time, you mean? We're waiting to hear two things from the Dal- kvo-whether he thinks my speculations about avoiding the price of a failed binding are worth looking into and whether to act against Galt. Either one puts me someplace away from Liat. But we aren't who we were then. I don't pretend that we can be. And anyway, I have all the habits of being without her. I've missed her for more years than I spent in her company.'
I have missed you, he thought but didn't say. I have missed you, and it's too late now for anything more than awkward conversations and late nights getting drunk together. Nothing will ever make that right.
'Do you regret that?' Nayiit asked. 'If you could go hack and do things again, would you want to love her less? Would you want to have gone to the Dai-kvo and been able to leave that… that longing behind you?'
'I don't know what you mean.'
Nayiit looked up.
'I would hate her, if I were you. I would think she'd taken my chance to be what I was supposed to be, to do what I could have done. 'There you were, a poet, and favored enough that you were expected to hold the andat, and because of her you fell into disfavor. Because of her, and because of me.' Nayiit's jaw clenched, his eyes only a half shade darker than the pale brown of his mother's staring at something that wasn't there, his attention turned
