us a few months. Perhaps through the winter. If not, I think we can assume the Galts will be here shortly after the last of our cousins from Cetani have arrived.'
It was a casual way to express the raw fear that every one of them might die violently before the first frost came. Our lives are measured in days now, Liat thought. But Kiyan had not paused to let the thought grow.
'There is an old mine a day's ride to the North of Machi. It was dug when the first Khai Machi set up residence here. It's been tapped out for generations, but the tunnels are still there. I've been quietly moving supplies to it. A bit of food. Blankets. Coal. A few boxes of gold and jewels. Enough for a few people to survive a winter and still have enough to slip across the passes and into the Westlands when spring came.'
Nayiit took a pose that accepted all she said. Kiyan smiled and leaned forward to touch Nayiit's hands with her own. She seemed at ease except for the tears that had gathered in her eyes.
'If the Galts come,' she said, 'will you take F, iah and Danat there? Will you…'
Kiyan stopped, her smile crumbling. She visibly gathered herself. A long, slow breath. And even still, when she spoke, it was hardly more than a whisper.
'If they come, will you protect my children?'
You brilliant, vicious snake, Liar thought. You glorious bitch. You'd ask him to love your son. You'd make caring for I)anat the proof that my boy's a decent man. And you're doing it because I asked you to.
It's perfect.
'I would be honored,' Nayiit said. The sound of his voice and the awestruck expression in his eyes were all that Liat needed to see how well Kivan had chosen.
'Thank you, Nayiit-kya,' Kiyan said. She looked over to I, iat, and her eyes were guarded. They both knew what had happened here. Liat carefully took a pose of thanks, unsure as she did what precisely she meant by it.
The Library of Cetani was much smaller than Maciii's. Perhaps a third as many books and codices, not more than half as many scrolls. They arrived on Maati's doorway in sacks and baskets, crates and wooden boxes. A letter accompanied them, hardly more than a terse note with Otah's seal on it, telling him that there was no living poet to ask what texts would he of use, that as a result he'd sent everything, and expressing hope that these might help. There was no mention of the Galts or the Dai-kvo or the dead. Otah seemed to assume that Maati would understand how dire the situation was, how much depended on him and on Cehmai.
He was right. Maati understood.
He'd left Cehmai in the library, looking over their new acquisitions, while he sat in the main room of his apartments, marking out grammars and forms. How Heshai had hound Seedless, what he would have done differently in retrospect, and the variations that Maati could makedifferent words and structures, images and metaphors that would serve the same purpose without coming too near the original. His knuckles ached, and his mind felt woolly. It was hard to say how far into the work they'd come. Perhaps as much as a third. Perhaps less. The hardest part would come at the end; once the binding was mapped out and drafted, there was the careful process of going through, image by image, and checking to see that there were no ambiguities, no unintended meanings, no contradictions where the power of the andat might loop hack upon itself and break his hold and himself.
Outside, the wind was blowing cold as it had since the middle morning. The city of tents that had sprung up at Machi's feet would be an unpleasant place tonight. Liat had been entirely absent these last four days, helping to find Cetani a place within Machi. It was just as well, he supposed. If she were here, he'd only want to talk with her. Speak with her. He'd want to hold her. Enough time for those little pleasures when Seedless was bound and the world was set right. Whatever that meant anymore.
The scratch at his door was an annoyance and a relief both. lie called out his permission, and the door swung open. Nayiit ducked into the room, an apologetic smile on his face. Behind him, a small figure waddled-Danat wrapped in robes and cloaks until he seemed almost as wide as tall. Maati rose, his back and knees protesting from having been too long in one position.
'I'm sorry, Father,' Nayiit said. 'I told Danat-cha that you might be busy…'
'Nothing that can't wait a hand or two,' Maati said, waving them in. 'It might he best, really, if I step away from it all. After a while, it all starts looking the same.'
Nayiit chuckled and took a pose that expressed his sympathy. Danat, red-cheeked, shifted his gaze shyly from one man to the other. Maati nodded a question to Nayiit.
'Danat wanted to ask you something,' Nayiit said, and squatted down so that his eyes were on a level with the child's. His smile was gentle, encouraging. A favorite uncle helping his nephew over some simple childhood fear. Maati felt the sudden powerful regret that he had never met Nayiit's wife, never seen his child. 'Go ahead, Danat- kya. We came so that you could ask, and Maati-cha's here. Do it like we practiced.'
Danat turned to Maati, blushing furiously, and took a pose of respect made awkward by the thickness of cloth around his small arms; then he began pulling books out from beneath his robes and placing them one by one in a neat pile before Maati. When the last of them had appeared, Danat shot a glance at Nayiit who answered with an approving pose.
'Excuse me, Nlaati-cha,' Danat said, his face screwed into a knot of concentration, his words choppy from being rehearsed. 'Papa-kya's still not back. And I've finished all these. I wondered..
The words fell to a mumble. laati smiled and shook his head.
'You'll have to speak louder,' Nayiit said. 'Hc can't hear you.'
'I wondered if you had any others I could read,' the boy said, staring at his own feet as if he'd asked for the moon on a ribbon and feared to he mocked for it.
Behind him, where the boy couldn't see, Nayiit grinned. This is who he would be, Nlaati thought. This is the kind of father my boy would be.
'V'ell,' he said aloud. 'We might be able to find something. Come with me.'
He led them out and along the gravel path to the library's entrance. The air had a bite to it. I Ic could feel the color coming to his own checks. When he'd been young, a child-poet younger than Nayiit, he'd spent his terrible winter in Saraykeht with Seedless and Otah and Liat. In the summer cities, this chill would have been the depth of winter. In the North, it was only the first breath of autumn.
Cehmai looked tip when they came in, a scroll case of shattered silk in his hand. A smear of dust marked his check like ashes. Boxes and crates lay about the main room, stacked man-high. One of the couches was piled with scrolls that hadn't been looked over, two others with the ones that had. The air was thick with the smells of dust and parchment and old binder's paste. Uanat stood in the doorway, his eyes wide, his mouth open. Nayiit stepped around him and drew the boy in, sliding the doors closed behind them. Cehmai nodded his question.
'Uanat was asking if we had any other hooks,' NIaati said.
'You have nll of them,' the boy said, awe in his voice.
Maati chuckled, and then felt the mirth and simple pleasure fade. The shelves and crates, boxes and piled volumes surrounded them.
'Yes,' lie said. 'Yes, we have all of them.'
19
'I low many do we have?' Otah asked.
The bows had been made for killing bears. Each one stood taller than a man, the bow itself made of ash and horn, the drawstring of wire. It took a man sitting down and using both legs to draw it back. The arrows were blackened oak shafts as long as short spears. The tips-usually a wide, crossed head like twined knives-had been replaced by hard steel points made to punch through metal. The chief huntsman of the Khai Cetani nudged one with his toe, spat, and looked out through the trees toward the road below them.
''Iwo dozen,' he said. His voice had a Vestern drawl. 'Sixty shafts, more or Tess.'
'More or less the Khai Cetani demanded.
'We're fashioning more, Most I ligh,' the huntsman said.
'I low many men do we have who can use them?' (bah asked. 'It won't matter if we have a thousand bows if there's only five men who can aim them.'
