Daniel Abraham - Autumn War

"I'll understand if it's too much," Balasar said, his voice soft. "It will make things easier for both sides and it won't change the way the battle falls, but that doesn't mean it isn't a terrible thing to ask of you. 'lake a few days to sit with it if you'd like."

"No," Sinja said. "I don't need time. I'll do the thing."

"You're sure?" Eustin asked.

Sinja drained his cup in a gulp. He could feel the flush starting to grow in his neck and cheeks, the nausea starting in his belly and the back of his throat. It was strong wine and a had night coming.

"It needs doing, and it's the price I asked," Sinja said. "So I'll do it."

Cehmai sat forward in his chair. The white marble walls of their workspace glowed with candlelight, but Nlaati didn't find the brightness reassuring. He was sitting as quietly as he could manage on a red and violet embroidered cushion, waiting. Cehmai lifted one of the wide yellow pages, paused, and turned it over. Nlaati saw the younger poet's lips moving as he shaped sonic phrase from the papers. Nlaati restrained himself from asking which. Interruptions wouldn't make this go any faster.

The simple insight that Eiah had given him that night in the baths had taken the better part of two weeks to work into a draft worthy of consideration. Fitting the grammars so that the nuances of corruption and continuance-destruction and creation, or more precisely the destruction of creation-reinforced one another had been tricky. And the extra obstacle of fitting in the structures to protect himself should things go amiss had likely tacked on an extra three or four days to the process.

And still, it had taken him only weeks. Not years, not even months. Weeks. The structure of the binding was laid out now. Corruption-of the-Generative, called Sterile. The death of the Gait's crops. The gelding of its men. The destruction of its women's wombs. Once he had seen the trick of it, the binding had flowed from his pen.

It had been as if some small voice at the back of his mind was whispering the words, and he'd only had to write them down. Even now, squatting on this damnable cushion, his hack aching, his feet cold, waiting for Cehmai to read over the last of the changes, he felt half drunk from the work. He was a poet. All the things that had happened in his life to bring him to this place at this time had built toward these days, and the dry pages that hissed and shushed as Cehmai slid them across each other. Maati bit his lip and did not interrupt.

It seemed like days, but Cehmai came to the final page, fingertips tracing the lines Maati had written there, paused, and set it down with the others. Maati leaned forward, his hands taking a querying pose. Cehmai frowned and gently shook his head.

"No?" Maati asked. Something between rage and dismay shot through his belly, only to vanish when Cehmai spoke.

"It's brilliant," he said. "It's a first draft, but it's a very, very good one. I don't think there are many things we'd have to adjust. A few to make it easier to pass on, perhaps. But we can work with those. No, Maatikvo, I think this is likely to work. It's just

…"

"Just?„

Cehmai's frown deepened. His fingertips tapped cautiously on the pages, as if he were testing an iron pot, afraid it would be hot enough to burn. He sighed.

"I've never seen an andat fashioned to be a weapon," he said. There was a hook that the Dal-kvo had that dated from the fall of the Second Empire, but he never let anyone look at it. I don't know."

"There's a war, Cehmai-kya," Maati said. "They killed the Dai-kvo and everyone in the village. The gods only know how many other men they've slaughtered. How many women they're raped. What's on those pages, they've earned."

"I know," Cehmai said. "I do know that. It's just I keep thinking of Stone-: Made-Soft. It was capable of terrible things. I can't count the times I had to hold it hack from collapsing a mine or a building. It had no respect for the lives of men. But there was no particular malice in it either. This… Sterile… it seems different."

Nlaati clamped his jaw. He was tired, that was all. "They both were. It was no reason to be annoyed with Cehmai, even if his criticism of the binding was something less than useful. Nlaati smiled the way he imagined a teacher at the school smiling. Or the Dai-kvo. He took a pose that offered instruction.

"Cutting shears and swords are both sharp. Before the war, you and I and the men like us? We made cutting shears," he said, and gestured to the papers. "That's our first sword. It's only natural that you'd feel uneasy with it; we aren't men of violence. If we were, the I)ai-kvo would never have chosen us, would he? But the world's a different place now, and so we have to be willing to do things that we wouldn't have before."

"Then it makes you uneasy too?" Cehmai asked. Nlaati smiled. It didn't make him uneasy at all, but he could see it was what the man needed to hear.

"Of course it does," he said. "But I can't allow that to stop me. The stakes are too high."

Cehmai seemed to collapse on himself. The dark eyes flickered, searching, \Iaati thought, for some other path. But in the end, the man only sighed.

"I think you've found the thing, \laati-kvo. There are some passages I'd want to think about. 'T'here might be ways we can refine it. But I think we'll he ready to try it well before the thaw."

A tension that Nlaati hadn't known he was carrying released, and he grinned like a boy. Ile could imagine himself as the controller of the only andat in the world. He and Cehmai would become the new teachers, and under their protection, they would raise up a new generation of poets to hind more of the andat. The cities would be safe again. Nlaati could feel it in his bones.

The rest of the meeting went quickly, as if Cehmai wanted to be away from the library as quickly as lie could. \laati supposed the prospect of binding Sterile was more disturbing to Cehmai than to him. lie hoped, as he walked back tip the stairways and corridors to his rooms, that Cchmai would be able to adjust to the new way of things. It couldn't be easy for him. lie was at heart a gentle man, and the world was a darker place than it had been.

\Iaati's mind was still involved in its contemplation of darkness when he stepped into his room. At first, he didn't notice that Liat was there, seated on his bed. She coughed-a wet, close sound close to a sob. lie looked up.

"What's the matter, sweet?" he asked, hurrying to her. "What's happened?"

In the steady glow of the lantern, Liat's face seemed veiled by shadows. Her eyes were reddened and swollen, her skin flushed with recent tears. She attempted a smile.

"I need something, Nlaati-kya. I need you to speak with Nayiit."

"Of course. Of course. What's happened?"

"He's…" Liat stopped, took a deep breath, and began again. "He isn't leaving with me. Whatever happens, he's decided to stay here and guard her children."

"What?"

"Kiyan," Liat said. "She set him to watch over Danat and Eiah, and now he's decided to keep to it. To stay in the North and watch over them instead of going home with me. He has a wife and a child, and Otah's family is more important to him than his own. And what if they see that he's… what if they see whose blood he is? What if he and Danat have to kill each other?"

Maati sat beside Liat and folded her hand in his. The corners of her mouth twitched down, a mask of sorrow. lie kissed her palm.

"He's said this? That tic's staying in \Iachi?"

"He doesn't have to," Liat said. "I've seen the way he looks at them. Whenever I talk about the spring and the South, he smiles that false, charming way he always smiles and changes the subject."

Nlaati nodded. The lantern flame hissed and shuddered, setting the shadows to sway.

"What is this really?" he asked, gently as he could. Liat pulled back her hand and took a pose that asked clarification. There was anger in her eyes. Maati chewed his lower lip, raised his eyebrows.