Daniel Abraham - THE

through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk

circled in the high, distant air.

Maati could imagine that it wasn't the school that he had suffered in

his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he

recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A

cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and

judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself seemed remade, and

perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his

thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black

eyes on Maati, but did not cry.

"It's unlike anything I expected," Vanjit said. "I can feel him. All the

time, he's in the back of my mind."

"How burdensome is it?" Maati asked, sitting forward.

Vanjit shook her head.

"No worse than any baby, I'd imagine," she said. "He tires me sometimes,

but not so much I lose myself. And the others have all been kind. I

don't think I've cooked a meal for myself since the binding."

"That's good," Maati said. "That's excellent."

"And you? Your eyes?"

"Perfect. I've been able to write every evening. I may actually manage

to complete this before I die."

He'd meant it as a joke, but Vanjit's reply was grim, almost scolding.

"Don't say that. Don't talk about death lightly. It isn't something to

laugh at."

Maati took an apologetic pose, and a moment later the darkness seemed to

leave the girl's eyes. She shifted the andat again, freeing one hand to

take an apologetic pose.

"No," Maati said. "You're right. You're quite right."

He steered the conversation to safer waters-meals, weather,

reconstructing the finer points of Vanjit's successful binding.

Contentment seemed to come from the girl like heat from a fire. He

regretted leaving her there, and yet, walking down the wide stone

corridors, he was also pleased.

The years he had spent scrabbling in the shadows like a rat had been so

long and so thick with anger and despair, Maati had forgotten what it

was to feel simple happiness. Now, with the women's grammar proved and

the andat returned to the world, his flesh itself felt different. His

shoulders had grown straighter, his heart lighter, his joints looser and

stronger and sure. He had managed to ignore his burden so long he had

mistaken it for normalcy. The lifting of it felt like youth.

Eiah sat cross-legged on the floor of one of the old lecture halls,

untied codices, opened books, unfurled scrolls laid out around her like

ripples on the surface of a pond. He glanced at the pages-diagrams of

flayed arms, the muscles and joints laid bare as if by the most

meticulous butcher in history; Westlands script with its whorls and dots

like a child's angry scribble; notations in Eiah's own hand, outlining

the definitions and limitations and structure of violence done upon

flesh. Wounded. The andat at its origin. And all of it, he could make

out from where he stood without squinting or bending close.

Eiah looked up at him with a pose equal parts welcome and despair. Maati

lowered himself to the floor beside her.

"You look tired," he said.

Eiah gestured to the careful mess before her, and then sighed.

"This was simpler when I wasn't allowed to do it," she said. "Now that

my own turn has come, I'm starting to think I was a fool to think it

possible."

Maati touched one of the books with his outstretched fingers. The paper

felt thick as skin.

"There is a danger to it," Maati said. "Even if your binding is

perfectly built, there might have been another done that was too much

like it. These books, they were written by men. Your training was done

by men. The poets before Vanjit were all men. Your thinking could be too

little like a man's."

Eiah smiled, chuckling. Maati took a pose of query.

"Physicians in the Westlands tend to be women," she said. "I don't think

I have more than half-a-dozen texts that I could say for certain were

written by men. The problem isn't that."

"No?"

"No, it's that no matter what's between your thighs, a cut is a cut, a

burn is a burn, and a bruise is a bruise. Break a bone now, and it snaps

much the way it did in the Second Empire. Vanjit's binding was based on

a study of eyes and light that didn't exist back then. Nothing I'm

working from is new."

There was frustration in her voice. Perhaps fear.

"There is another way," Maati said. Eiah shifted, her gaze on his. Maati

scratched his arm.

"We have Clarity-of-Sight," he said. "It proves that we can do this

thing, and that alone gives us a certain power. If we send word to

Otahkvo, tell him what we've done and that he must turn away from his

scheme with the Galts, he would do it. He would have to. We could take

as much time as you care to take, consult as many scholars as we can

unearth. Even Cehmai would have to come. He couldn't refuse the Emperor."

It wasn't something he'd spoken aloud before. It was hardly something

he'd allowed himself to think. Before Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, the

idea of returning to the courts of the Khaiem-to Otah-in triumph would

have been only a sort of torture of the soul. It would have been like

wishing for his son to be alive, or Liat at his side, or any of the

thousand regrets of his past to be unmade.

Now it was not only possible but perhaps even wise. Another letter, sent

by fast courier, announcing that Maati had succeeded and made himself

the new Dai-kvo, and Otah would have no choice but to honor him. He

could almost hear the apology now, sweeter for coming from the lips of

an emperor.

"It's a kind thought, but no," Eiah said. "It's too big a risk."

"I don't see how," Maati said, frowning.

"Vanjit's one woman, and binding an andat doesn't mean that a good man

and a sharp knife can't end you," Eiah said. "And she may slip, at which

point half the world will want our heads on sticks, just to be sure it

doesn't happen again. Once we've managed a few more, it will be safe.

And Wounded can't wait."

"If you heal all the women of the cities, they'll know we've bound an

andat," Maati said. "It will be just as clear a message as sending a

letter. And by your argument, just as dangerous."

"If they wait until after I've given back the chance of bearing

children, the Galts can kill me," Eiah said. "It will be too late to

matter."

"You don't believe that," Maati said, aghast. Eiah smiled and shrugged.

"Perhaps not," she agreed. "Say rather, if I'm going to die, I'd rather

it was after I'd finished this."

Maati put a hand on her shoulder, then let his arm fall to his side.

Eiah described the issues of the binding that troubled her most. To pull

a thought from abstraction into concrete form required a deep

understanding of the idea's limits and consequences. To bind Wounded,

Eiah needed to find the common features of a cut finger and a burned

foot, the difference between a tattooing quill and a rose thorn, the

definitions that kept the thought small enough for a single mind to

encompass.

"Take Vanjit's work," Eiah said. "Your eyes were never burned. No one

cut them or bruised them. But they didn't see as well as when you were

young. So there must have been some damage to them. So are the changes

of age wounds? White hair? Baldness? When a woman loses her monthly

flow, is it because she's broken?"

"You can't consider age," Maati said. "For one thing, it muddies the