THE

breath fast.

"Danat Machi?" she said.

"Ana Dasin," he replied.

The girl took a deep breath. Her pretty, rodentlike face shone. When she

spoke, her voice was strong and certain.

"I will never consent to lay down with you, and if you rape me, I will

see the world knows it. My lover is Hanchat Dor, and I will have no other."

Otah felt his face go white. In the corner of his eye, he saw Farrer

Dasin rock back like a man struck by a stone and then raise a hand to

his face. Danat's mouth opened and closed like a fish's. The whisperers

paused, and then a heartbeat later, the words went out where they could

never be called back. The voice of the crowd rose up like the waters of

chaos come to drown them all.

6

Maati relived his conversation with Cehmai a thousand times in the weeks

that followed. He rose in the morning from whatever rough camp or

wayhouse bed he'd fallen into the night before, and he muttered his

arguments to Cehmai. He rode his weary mule along overgrown tracks thick

with heat and heavy with humidity, and he spoke aloud, gesturing. He ate

his evening meals with the late sunset of summer, and in his mind,

Cehmai sat across from him, dumbfounded and ashamed, persuaded at last

by the force of Maati's argument. And when Maati's imagination returned

him to the world as it was, his failure and shame poured in on him afresh.

Every low town he passed through, the mud streets empty of the sound of

children, was a rebuke. Every woman he met, an accusation. He had

failed. He had gone to the one man in the world who might have lightened

his burden, and he had been refused. The better part of the season was

lost to him now. It was time he should have spent with the girls,

preparing the grammar and writing his book. They were days he would

never win back. If he had stayed, perhaps they would have had a

breakthrough. Perhaps there would already be an andat in the world, and

Otah's plans ruined.

And what if by going after Cehmai, Maati had somehow lost that chance?

With every day, it seemed more likely. As the trees and deer of the

river valleys gave way to the high, dry plains between Pathai and ruined

Nantani, Maati became more and more sure that his error had been

catastrophic. Irretrievable. And so it was also another mark against

Otah Machi. Otah, the Emperor, to whom no rules applied.

Maati found the high road, and then the turning that would lead, given

half a day's ride, to the school. To his students. To Eiah. He camped at

the crossroads.

He was too old to be living on muleback. Lying in the thin folds of his

bedroll, he ached as if he'd been beaten. His back had been suffering

spasms for days; they had grown painful enough that he hadn't slept

deeply. And his exhaustion seemed to make his muscles worse. The high

plains grew cool at night, almost cold, and the air smelled of dust. He

heard the skittering of lizards or mice and the low call of owls. The

stars shone down on him, each point of light smeared by his aging eyes

until the whole sky seemed possessed by a single luminous cloud.

There had been a time he'd lain under stars and picked out

constellations. There was a time his body could have taken rest on

cobblestone, had the need arisen. There was a time Cehmai, poet of Machi

and master of Stone-Made-Soft, had looked up to him.

It was going to be hard to tell Eiah that he'd failed. The others as

well, but Eiah knew Cehmai. She had seen them work together. The others

might be disappointed, but Eiah alone would understand what he had lost.

His dread slowed him. At this, his last camp, he ate his breakfast and

watched the slow sunrise. He packed his mule slowly, then walked

westward, his shadow stretching out ahead and growing slowly smaller.

The shapes of the hills grew familiar, and the pauses he took grew

longer. Here was the dry streambed where he and the other black-robed

boys had sat in the evenings and told one another stories of the

families they had already half-forgotten. There, a grouping of stumps

showed where the stand of trees they had climbed had been felled by

Galtic axes and burned. A cave under an outcropping of rock where they'd

made the younger boys slither into the darkness to hunt snakes. The air

was as rich with memory as the scent of dust and wildflowers. His life

had been simpler then, or if not simpler, at least a thing that held

promise.

He managed to postpone his arrival at the school itself until the sun

was lowering before him. The grand stone buildings looked smaller than

he remembered them, but the great bronze door that had once been

reserved for the Dai-kvo was just as grand. The high, narrow windows

were marked black at the tops, the remnants of some long-dead fire. The

wall of one of the sleeping chambers had fallen, stones strewn on the

ground. The gardens were gone, marked only by low mounds where stones

had once formed their borders. Time and violence had changed the place,

but not yet beyond recognition. Another decade of rain washing mortar

from between the stones, another fire, and perhaps the roofs would

collapse. The ground would reclaim its own.

Maati tied his mule to a low, half-rotten post and made his way in. The

grand room where he and the other boys had stood in rows each morning

before marching off to their duties and classes. The wide corri dors

beyond it, lit only by the reddish rays of the evening sun. Where were

the bodies of the boys who had been here on the day the armies of Galt

arrived? Where had those bones been buried? And where, now, were Maati's

own students? Had something gone awry?

When he reached the i

paths were clear of dirt and dust, the weeds and grass had been pulled

from between the stones. And there, in the third window that had once

been the teachers' quarters, a lantern glowed already against the

falling night.

The door that opened to the wide central hall had been fitted with a new

leather hinge. The walls and floors, freshly washed, shone in the light

of a hundred candles. The scent of curry and the sound of women's voices

raised in conversation came through the air as if the one were part of

the other. Maati found himself disoriented for a moment, as if he'd

walked down a familiar street only to find it opening upon some unknown

city. He walked forward slowly, drawn in by the voices as if they were

music. There was Ashti Beg's dry voice, Large Kae's laughter. As he drew

nearer, the pauses between the louder voices were filled with the softer

voices of Vanjit and Irit. The first words he made out were Eiah's.

"Yes," she said, "but how would you fit that into a grammatic structure

that doesn't already include it? Or am I talking in a circle?"