it now.
'I suppose so,' Utah said. 'It'll be a life's work, though. Perhaps more. It was getting hard enough finding andat that could still be hound before this. We've lost so much now, going hack will be harder than it was at the first. If we have a new I)ai-kvo, he won't have time for am-thing more than that.'
'An emperor, then. One man protecting all the cities. With the poets answering to him. liven just one poet with one andat would he enough. It would protect us.'
'I recommend someone else do it. I've decided on a beach hut on Bakta,' Utah said, trying to make it a joke. I Ic saw Kivan's expression. 'It's too far ahead to think about now, love. Let it pass, and we'll solve it later if it still needs solving.'
Kiyan turned and took his hand. The days since he'd come home hadn't allowed them time together, not as they had had before the war. First, when he and his men had marched across the bridge to trumpets and drums and dancing, it had been a mad festival. 't'hey had cone out to meet him. I Ic had embraced her, and Eiah, and little [) gnat whom he had danced around until they were both dizzy. Otah had found himself whirled from one pavilion to the next, balancing the giddy joy of survival with the surprisingly complex work of taking an army-even one as improvised and unformed as his own-apart. And afterward, he'd discovered that Kiyan was still as much in demand now tending the things she'd set in motion as when he had been gone.
Men and women of all classes seemed to have need of her time and attention, coordinating the stores of food and the arrangements of the refugees and the movements of goods and trade that had once been the business of the merchant houses, and had become the work of a few coordinating minds. Kiyan had become the hand that moved Machi, that pushed it into line, that tucked its children into warm beds and kept it from eating all the best food and leaving nothing for tomorrow. It consumed her days.
And the utkhaicm and the high trading families had all wanted a moment of his day, to congratulate or express thanks or wheedle some favor in light of the changed circumstances of the world. To be here, in the warm light of candles, Kiyan's hand in his, her gaze on him, seemed like a dream badly wished for. And yet, now that he had it, he found himself troubled and unable to relax. She squeezed his hand.
'How bad was it?' she asked, and he knew what she meant. The battles. The Dai-kvo. The war.
Otah began to say something witty, something glib. The words got lost on the way to his lips. For long moment, silence was all he could manage.
'It was terrible,' he said. 'There were so many of them.'
'The Galts?'
''l'he dead. 'Theirs. Ours. I've never seen anything like it, Kiyan- kya. I've read the histories and I've heard the epics sung, and it's not the same. They were young. And… and they looked like they were sleeping. I lowever badly they'd died, in the end, I kept thinking they'd wake up and speak or call for help or scream. I think about all the men I led out there. The ones who would have lived if we hadn't done this.'
'We didn't choose this, love. The Galts haven't given anyone much choice. The men who went with you would have died out there in the field, or here when the city fell. Would one have been better?'
'I suppose not. The other ways it could have gone might be just as had, but the way it did happen, they died from following me. From doing what I asked.'
To his surprise, Kiyan chuckled low and mirthless.
'That's why he calls you Emperor, isn't it,' Kiyan said, and Otah took a pose of query. 'The Khai Cetani. It's from gratitude. If you're the leader of the age, then it stops being his burden. Everything you're suffering, you've saved him.'
Otah looked at his hands, rubbing his palms together with a long, dry sound. His throat felt tight, and something deep in his chest ached with the suspicion that she was right. When he had asked the man to abandon his city and take the role of follower, he had also been asking for the right to choose whatever happened after. And the responsibility for it. For a moment, he was on the chill, gray field of the dead, and walking the cold, lifeless ruin where poets had once conspired to hind thoughts themselves. He remembered the Dal-kvo's dead eyes, looking at nothing. The bodies, the Galts' and his own both, and the voices calling him Emperor.
'I'm sorry,' Kiyan said, and he could tell from her voice that she knew how inadequate the words were. He pulled his mind hack to his soft-lit room, the scent of the candles, the touch of this long-beloved hand.
'They've lived with it,' he said. 'Galt and Eddensea and the Westlands. It's always been like this for them. War and battle. We'll learn.'
'I don't think I'm looking forward to that.'
Otah raised her hand to his lips. Gently, she caressed his cheek. Ile drew her close, folding his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body against him, smelling the familiar scent of her hair, and willing the moment to not end. If only the future could never come.
Kiyan sensed it in the tension of his spine, the fierceness of his embrace. Something. She did not speak, but only breathed, softening against him with every exhalation, and in time he felt himself beginning to relax with her. One of the lanterns, burning the last of its oil, dimmed, spat, and went out. The smoke touched the air with a smell of endings.
'I missed you,' she said. 'Every night, I went to bed thinking you might not come hack. I kept telling the children over and over that things would he fine, that you'd he home soon. And I was sick. I was sick with it.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Don't. Don't apologize. Don't be sorry. Just know it. Just know we wanted you hack. Not the Khai and not the emperor. You. Remember that you are a good man and I love you.'
Ile raised her chin and kissed her, wondering how she knew so well the way to fill him with joy without asking him to abandon his sorrow.
'It's Nlaati's now,' Otah whispered. 'If he can bind Seedless before the spring thaw, this will all be over.'
He felt an odd relaxation in her body, as if by saying the thing, he'd freed her from some secret effort she'd been making.
'And if he can't?' she asked. 'If it's all going to fall apart anyway, can we run? You and me and the children? If I take them and go, are you going to come with us, or stay here and fight?'
He kissed her again. She rested her hands against his shoulders, leaning into him. Otah didn't answer, and he knew from the sound of her breath that she understood. 'We take the nuance of movement'-Annay in Ni 'rat and the symbol set you worked up for the senses of continuance,' Nlaati said, 'I think then we'll have something we can work with.'
Cehmai's eves were bloodshot, his hair wild from another long evening of combing frustrated fingers through it. Around them, the lamplight shone on a bedlam of paper. The library would have seemed a rat's nest to any but the two of them: books laid open; scrolls unfurled and weighted by other scrolls which were themselves unfurled; loose pages of a dozen codices stacked together. The mass of information and inference, grammar and poetry and history would have been overwhelming, laati thought, to anyone who didn't know how profoundly little it was. Cchnlai ran his fingertips down the notes laati had made and shook his head.
'It's still the same,' he said. 'Nurat is modified by the fourth case of a(/at, and then it's exactly the same logical structure as the one Fleshai used.'
'No, it isn't,' laati said, slapping the table with an open palm. 'It's differ r ut. '
Cchmai took a long, slow breath, raising his hands palms-out. It wasn't a formal gesture, but laati understood it all the same. They were both worn raw. I Ic sat hack in his chair, feeling the knots in his back and neck. The brazier in the corner made the wide room smell warm without seeming to actually heat it.
'Look,' Maati said. 'Let's put it aside for the day. We need to move the library underground soon anyway. It's going to he too cold tip here to do more than watch our fingers turn blue.'
Cehmai nodded, then looked around at the disarray. Nlaati could read the despair in his face.
'I'll put it hack together,' MIaati said. 'Then a dozen slaves with strong hacks, and I'll put it all together in the winter quarters in two days' time.'
'I should move the poet's house down too,' Cehmai said. 'I feel like I haven't been there in weeks.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Don't be. The place seems too big without Stone-Made-Soft anyway. 'loo quiet. It reminds me of… well, of everything.'
Nlaati rose, his knees aching. His feet tingled with the pins and needles that long motionlessness brought him these days. lie clapped his hand on Cehmai's Shoulder.
