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 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.'
