Daniel Abraham - THE

Maati's heart rang in sympathy, like a crystal bowl taking up the

ringing of a great bell. How many times had he dreamed that Nayiit

lived? That the world had not been broken, or, if it had, not by him?

"We'll bring him," Maati said. "Have faith. Every week, we come closer.

Once the grammar is built solidly enough, anything will be possible."

"Are we coming closer?" she asked. "Be honest, Maati-cha. Every week we

spend on this, I think we're on the edge, and every week, there's more

after it."

He tucked the chalk into his sleeve and sat at the girl's side. She

leaned forward, and he thought there was something in her expressionnot

despair and not shame, but something related to both.

"We are coming near, and we are close," he said. "I know it isn't

something you can see, but each of you knows more about the andat and

the bindings right now than I did after a year with the Dai-kvo. You're

smart and dedicated and talented. And together, we can make this work.

It sounds terrible, I know, but as soon as Siimat failed her binding and

paid the price ... I won't say I was pleased. I can't say that. She was

a brave woman, and she had a wonderful mind. I miss her. But that she

and all the others died means we are very close."

Ten bindings, ending in ten failures and ten corpses. His fallen

soldiers, Maati thought. His girls who had sacrificed themselves. And

here, wet as a canal rat and sad to her bones, Vanjit impatient to make

her own try, risk her own life. Maati took her small hand in his own.

The girl smiled at the wall.

"This will happen," he said.

"I know it," she said, her voice soft. "It's just so hard to wait when

the dream keeps coming."

Maati sat with her for a moment, only the tapping of raindrops and the

songs of birds between them. He stood, fished the chalk from his sleeve,

and went back to the wall.

"If you'd like, you could light a fire in the office grate," Maati said.

"We could surprise the others with some fresh tea."

It wasn't called for, but it gave the girl something to do. He squinted

at the figure he'd drawn until the lines came into focus. Ah, yes. Four

categories of being.

The rain slackened as the others arrived. Large Kae checked the

coverings over the windows, careful that no stray light betray their

presence, as Irit fluttered sparrowlike lighting the lanterns. Small Kae

and Ashti Beg adjusted the seats and benches, the younger woman's light

voice contrasting with her elder's dry one.

The scents of wood smoke and tea made their warehouse classroom seem

less furtive. Vanjit poured bowls for each of his students as they took

their places. The soft light darkened the stone so that the chalk marks

almost seemed written on air. Maati took a moment to himself to think of

his teachers, of their lectures. He willed himself to become one of

their number.

"The world," Maati began, "has two essential structures. There's the

physical"-he slapped the stone wall behind him-"and there's the

abstract. Two and two are always four, regardless of whether you're

talking about grains of sand or racing camels. Twelve could always be

broken into two sets of six or three sets of four long before anybody

noticed the fact. Abstract structure, you see?"

They bent toward him like flowers toward the sun. Maati saw the hunger

in their faces and the set of their shoulders.

"Now," Maati said. "Does the physical require the abstract? Come on.

Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract

structure?"

There was a moment's silence.

"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water

together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."

"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of

least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is

there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure?

Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one

correctly before I'd seen ten summers."

"No?" suggested Irit.

"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one

way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the

floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not

everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here.

That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."

In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression.

Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into

something stronger. It gave him hope.

After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then,

as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff

and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed

bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were

developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought

and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human

shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your

life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like

holding a stone over a well: slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see

the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the

questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan

when the small door to the street flew open again.

Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk

robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati,

standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and

graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.

"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."

Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them.

Eiah's expression was grim.

"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."

He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to

work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed

them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair

in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.

The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the

Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be

married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being

arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing

age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a

thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and

move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.

There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and

Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation.

In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy,

and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot

on Khaiate soil: talk and rumor, drunken rhetoric likely to come to nothing.

The greater mass of the utkhaiem were already gathering their best robes

and most garish jewelry in preparation for the journey south to

Saraykeht to greet the returning fleet and see this Galtic girl who

would one day be Empress. Maati listened to it all, his frown deepening

until his mouth began to ache.

"It doesn't change anything," he said. "Otah can sell us to our enemies