Daniel Abraham - An Autumn War

fill with worms.

"You might consider not binding us in the first place," Stone-MadeSoft

said. "If it's so dangerous as all that."

Maati ignored it. "I thought, you see, that there might be some way to

better understand whether a poet's work was likely to fail or succeed if

we knew more of how older failures presented themselves. It was an essay

Heshai Antaburi wrote examining his own binding of

Removingthe-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his

binding succeeded-he held Seedless for decades-hut in having done the

thing and then lived with the consequences, he could better see the

flaws in his original work. Here ..."

Maati rose up with a grunt and fished through his papers for a moment

until the old, worn leather-bound hook came to hand. Its cover was limp

from years of reading, the pages growing yellow and smudged. The envoy

took it and read a bit by the light of candles.

"But this is too much like his original work," Athai said as he thumbed

through the pages. "It could never be used."

"No, of course not," Maati agreed. "But he made the attempt to examine

the form of the binding, you see, in hopes that showing the kinds of

errors he'd made might help others avoid things that were similar.

Heshai-kvo was one of my first teachers."

"He was the one murdered in Saraykeht, ne?" Athai asked, not looking up

from the book in his hands.

"Yes," Maati said.

Athai looked up, one hand taking an informal pose asking excuse.

"I didn't mean anything by asking," he said. "I only wanted to place him."

Maati brought himself to smile and nod.

"The reason I wrote to the Dai-kvo," Cehmai said, "was the application

Maati-kvo was thinking of."

"Application?1"Tell

"It's too early yet to really examine closely," Maati said. He felt

himself starting to blush, and his embarrassment at the thought fueled

the blood in his face. "It's too early to say whether there's anything

in it."

him," Cehmai said, his voice warm and coaxing. The envoy put

Heshai-kvo's book down, his attention entirely on Maati now.

""There are ... patterns," Maati said. "There seems to be a structure

that links the form of the binding to its ... its worst expression. Its

price. The forms only seem random because it's a very complex structure.

And I was reading Catji's meditations-the one from the Second Empire,

not Catji Sano-and there are some speculations he made about the nature

of language and grammar that ... that seem related."

"He's found a way to shield a poet from paying the price," Cehmai said.

"I don't know that's true," Maati said quickly.

"But possibly," Cehmai said.

The envoy and the andat both shifted forward in their seats. The effect

was eerie.

"I thought that, if a poet's first attempt at a binding didn't have to

be his last-if an imperfect binding didn't mean death ..."

Maati gestured helplessly at the air. He had spent so many hours

thinking about what it could mean, about what it could bring about and

bring hack. All the andat lost over the course of generations that had

been thought beyond recapture might still he hound if only the men

binding them could learn from their errors, adjust their work as Heshai

had done after the fact. Softness. Water-Moving-Down. 't'hinking-in-

Words. All the spirits cataloged in the histories, the work of poets who

had made the Empire great. Perhaps they were not past redemption.

He looked at Athai, but the young man's eyes were unfocused and distant.

"May I see your work, Maati-kvo?" he asked, and the barely suppressed

excitement in his voice almost brought Maati to like him for the moment.

"Together, the three men stepped to Maati's worktable. 'T'hree men, and

one other that was something else.

2

Liat Chokavi had never seen seawater as green as the bays near

Amnat-Tan. The seafront at Saraykeht had always taken its color from the

sky-gray, blue, white, yellow, crimson, pink. The water in the far North

was different entirely; green as grass and numbing cold. She could no

more see the fish and seafloor here than read pages from a closed hook.

These waters kept their secrets.

A low fog lay on the hay; the white and gray towers of the low town

seemed to float upon it. In the far distance, the deep blue spire of the

Khai Amnat-Tan's palace seemed almost to glow, a lantern like a star

fallen to earth. Even the sailors, she noticed, would pause for a moment

at their work and admire it. It was the great wonder of Amnat-'Ian,

second only to the towers of Machi as the signature of the winter

cities. It would take them days more to reach it; the ports and low

towns were a good distance downriver of the city itself.

The wind smelled of smoke now-the scent of the low town coming across

the water, adding to the smells of salt and fish, crab and unwashed

humanity. They would reach port by midday. She turned and went down the

steps to their cabin.

Nayilt swung gently in his hammock, his eyes closed, snoring lightly.

Liat sat on the crate that held their belongings and considered her son;

the long face, the unkempt hair, the delicate hands folded on his belly.

He had made an attempt at growing a heard in their time in Yalakeht, but

it had come in so poorly he'd shaved it off with a razor and cold

seawater. Her heart ached, listening to him sleep. The workings of House

Kyaan weren't so complex that it could not run without her immediate

presence, but she had never meant to keep Nayiit so long from home and

the family he had only recently begun.

The news had reached Saraykeht last summer-almost a year ago now. It had

hardly been more than a confluence of rumors-a Galtic ship in Nantani

slipping away before its cargo had arrived, a scandal at the [)a[-kvo's

village, inquiries discreetly made about a poet. And still, as her

couriers arrived at the compound, Liat had felt unease growing in her.

"There were few enough people who knew as she did that the house she ran

had been founded to keep watch on the duplicity of the Gaits. Fewer

still knew of the books she kept, as her mentor Amat Kyaan had before

her, tracking the actions and strategies of the Galtic houses among the

Khaiem, and it was a secret she meant to keep. So when tales of a

missing poet began to dovetail too neatly with stories of Galtic

intrigue in Nantani, there was no one whom she trusted the task to more

than herself. She had been in Saraykeht for ten years. She decided to

leave again the day that Nayiit's son Tai took his first steps.

Looking back, she wondered why it had been so easy for Nayiit to come

with her. He and his wife were happy, she'd thought. The baby boy was

delightful, and the work of the house engaging. When he had made the

offer, she had hidden her pleasure at the thought and made only slight

objections. The truth was that the years they had spent on the road when

Nayiit had been a child-the time between her break with Maati Vaupathai

and her return to the arms of Saraykeht-held a powerful nostalgia for

her. Alone in the world with only a son barely halfway to manhood, she

had expected struggle and pain and the emptiness that she had always

thought must accompany a woman without a man.

The truth had been a surprise. Certainly the emptiness and struggle and

pain had attended their travels. She and Nayiit had spent nights

huddling under waxed-cloth tarps while chill rain pattered around them.