“What is this?” Otah asked, though he already knew.
“My work,” Eiah said. “My binding. I hoped I’d have time. Before we actually came across Vanjit-cha, there was the chance she was spying on us. She’d always planned to kill me by distracting me during the binding. But now, and for I think at least the next hand and a half, her attention is going to be on Maati-kvo. So…”
Idaan shook her head, clearing some thought away, and gestured to the captain of the guard.
“We’ll need light,” she said. “Eiah may be able to work puzzles in the dark, but I’m better if I can see what I’m doing.”
“I thought you couldn’t do this,” Otah said, kneeling.
“Well, I haven’t managed it yet,” Eiah said with a wry smile. “On the other hand, I’ve studied to be a physician. Holding things in memory isn’t so difficult, once you’ve had the practice. And there’s enough here, I think, to guide me through it, no matter what Maati-kvo believes.”
Idaan made a low grunt of pleasure, reached across Eiah and shifted a stray chunk of wax into place. Eiah’s fingers caressed the new join, and she nodded to herself. Armsmen brought the wild, flickering light close, the waxwork lettering seeming to breathe in the shadows.
“Maati’s warnings,” Otah said. “You can’t know what will happen if you pit your andat against hers.”
“I won’t have to,” Eiah said. “I’ve thought this through, Papa-kya. I know what I’m doing. There was another section. It was almost square with one corner missing. Can anyone see that?”
“Check the satchel,” Idaan said as Otah plucked the piece from the hem of Eiah’s robe. He pressed it into her hand. Her fingertips traced its surface before she placed it at the bottom of the second almost-formed tablet. Her smile was gentler than he’d seen from her since he’d walked into the wayhouse. He touched her cheek.
“Maati doesn’t know you’re doing this, then?” Otah asked.
“We didn’t think we’d ask him,” Idaan said. “No disrespect to Eiah-cha, but that man’s about half again as cracked as his poet.”
“No, he isn’t mad,” Eiah said, her hands never slowing their dance across the face of the broken tablets. “He’s just not equal to the task he set himself. He always meant well.”
“And I’m sure the two dozen remaining Galts will feel better because of it,” Idaan said acidly. And then, in a gentler voice, “It doesn’t matter what story you tell yourself, you know. We’ve done what we’ve done.”
“I wish you would stop that,” Eiah said.
Idaan’s surprise was clear on her face, and apparently in her silence as well. Eiah shook her head and went on, her tone damning and conversational.
“Every third thing you say is an oblique reference to killing my grandfather. We all know you did the thing, and we all know you regret it. None of this is anything to do with that. Papa-kya and Maati love each other and they hate each other, and it doesn’t pertain either. Maati’s overwhelmed by the consequences of misjudging Vanjit, and he might not be if he weren’t hauling Nayiit and Sterile and Seedless along behind him.”
Idaan looked like she’d been slapped. The armsmen were crowded so close, Otah could hear the low flutter of the torches burning, but the men pretended not to have heard.
“The past doesn’t matter,” Eiah said. “A hundred years ago or last night, it’s all just as gone. I have a binding to work, and I’d like to make the attempt before Vanjit blinds Maati and walks him off something tall. I think we have something like half a hand.”
They worked together in silence, three pairs of hands putting the wax into place quickly. There were still sections missing, and some parts of the tablets were shattered so thoroughly that Eiah’s markings were all but lost. His daughter passed her fingertips slowly over each of the surfaces, her brow furrowed, her lips moving as if reciting something under her breath. Whether it was the binding or a prayer, Otah couldn’t guess.
Idaan leaned close to Otah, her breath a warm and whispering breeze against his ear.
“She takes the tact from her mother’s side, I assume?”
His tension and fear gave the words a hilarity they didn’t deserve, and he fought to contain his laughter. The quay was dark around them; the torches kept his eyes from adapting to the darkness. It was as if the world had narrowed to a few feet of lichen-slicked flagstone, a single unshuttered window in the distance, and countless, endless, unnumbered stars.
“All right,” Eiah said. “I can’t be disturbed while I do this. If we could have the armsmen set up a guard formation? It would be in keeping with my luck to have a stray boar stumble into us at the wrong moment.”
The captain didn’t wait for Otah’s approval. The men shifted, Idaan and Danat with them. Only Otah stayed. As if she saw him there, Eiah took a querying pose.
“You may die from this,” he said.
“I’m aware of it,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I have to try. And I think you have to let me.”
“I do,” Otah agreed. Smiling, she looked young.
“I love you too, Papa-kya.”
“May I sit with you?” he asked. “I don’t want to distract you, but it would be a favor.”
He brushed the back of her hand with his fingertips. She took him by the sleeve of his robe and pulled him down to sit beside her. The fingers of her left hand laced with his right. For a moment, the only sounds were the gentle lapping of the river against the stone, the diminished hush of torch fire, the cooing of owls. Eiah leaned forward, her fingertips on the first tablet. Otah let go, and both of her hands caressed the wax. She began to chant.
The words were only words. He recognized a few of them, some phrases. Her voice went out on the cool night air as she moved slowly across each of the shattered tablets. When she reached the end, she went back to the beginning.
Though there were no walls or cliffs to sound against, her voice began first to resonate and then to echo.
30
Maati traveled through the darkness alone. The sense of unreality was profound. He had refused Otah Machi, Emperor of the Khaiem. He had refused Otah-kvo. For years, perhaps a lifetime, he had admired Otah or else despised him. Maati had broken the world twice, once in Otah’s service, and now, through Vanjit, in opposition to him. But this once, Otah had been wrong, and he had been right, and Otah had acknowledged it.
How strange that such a small moment should bring him such a profound sense of peace. His body itself felt lighter, his shoulders more nearly square. To his immense surprise, he realized he had shed a burden he’d been carrying unaware for most of his life.
Maati traveled through the darkness of Udun alone, because he had chosen to.
The brown vines and bare branches stirred in a soft breeze. The flutter of wings came from all around him, from nowhere. The air was cold enough to make his breath steam, and the voice of the river was a constant hush. With each step, some new detail of his path would come clear: an axe consumed by rust, a door still hanging from rotten leather hinges, the green-glowing eyes of some small predator. Cracks appeared in the paving stones, running out before him as if his passage were corrupting the city rather than revealing the decay already there.
He and Vanjit carried a history together. They had known each other, had helped each other. She would see that it was the andat’s intervention that had turned him against her. The palaces of the Khai Udun grew taller and taller without ever seeming to come close until, it seemed between one breath and the next, he stepped into a grand courtyard. Moss and lichen had almost obscured the swirling design of white and red and gold stones. Maati paused, his lantern held over his head.
Once, it would have been a breathtaking testament to power and ingenuity and overwhelming confidence. Columns rose into the black air. Statues of women and men and beasts towered over the entranceway, the bronze lost under green and gray. He walked alone into a welcoming chamber too vast for his lantern to penetrate. There was no ceiling, no walls. The river was silent
here. Far above, wings fluttered in still air.
Maati took a deep breath—dust and rot and, after a decade and a half of utter ruin, still the faint scent of smoke. It smelled like the corpse of history.
He walked forward over parquet of ebony and oak, the pattern ruined and pieces pried up by water and time. He expected his footsteps to echo, but no sound he made returned to him.
A light glimmered high up and to his left. Maati stopped. He lowered his lantern and raised it again. The glimmer didn’t shift. Not a reflection, then. Maati angled toward it.
A great stone stairway swept up in the gloom, a single candle burning at its top. Maati made his way slowly enough to keep from tiring. The hall that opened before him was not as numbingly huge as the first chamber; Maati could make out the ceiling, and that the walls existed. And far down it, another light.
The carpets underfoot had rotted to scraps years before. The shattered glass and fallen crystal might have been the damage of the elements or of the city’s fall. The next flight of stairs—equally grand and equally arduous—could only have been a testament to that first violence, long ago. A human skull rested at the center of every step, shadows moving in the sockets as Maati passed them. He hoped the Galts had left the grim markers, but he didn’t believe it.
Here, Vanjit was saying, each of these is a life the soldiers of Galt ended. They were her justification. Her honor guard.
He should have guessed where the candles were leading him. The grand double doors of the Khai’s audience chamber stood closed, but light leaked through at the seams. After so long in the dark, he half-expected them to open onto a fire.
In its day, the chamber must have inspired awe. In its way, it still did. The arches, the angles of the walls, the thin ironwork as delicate as lace that held a hundred burning candles—everything was designed to draw the eyes to the dais, the black lacquer chair, and then out a wide, unshuttered window that reached from ceiling to floor. The Khai would have sat there, his city arrayed out behind him like a cloak. Now the cloak was only darkness, and in the black chair, Clarity-of-Sight cooed.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” Vanjit said from the shadows behind him. Maati startled and turned.
Exhaustion and hunger had thinned the girl. Her dark hair was pulled back, but what few locks had escaped the bond hung limp and lank, framing her pale face.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Fear of justice,” Vanjit said.
She stepped out into the candlelight. Her robes were silken rags, scavenged from some noble wardrobe, fourteen years a ruin. Her head was bowed beneath an invisible weight and she moved like an old woman bent with the pain for years. She had become Udun. The war, the damage, the ruin. It was her. The baby—the inhuman thing shaped like a baby—shrieked with joy and clapped its tiny hands. Vanjit shuddered.
“Vanjit-cha,” Maati said, “we can talk this through. We can…we can still end this well.”
“You tried to murder me,” Vanjit said. “You and your pet poisoner. If you’d had your way, I would be dead now. How, Maati-kvo, do you propose to talk that through?”
“I…” he said. “There must…there must be a way.”
“What was I supposed to be that I wasn’t?” Vanjit asked as she walked toward the black chair with its tiny beast. “You knew what the Galts had done to me. Did you want me to get this power, and then forget? Forgive? Was this supposed to be the compensation for their deaths?”
“No,” Maati said. “No, of course not.”
“No,” she said. “Because you didn’t care when I blinded them, did you? That was my decision. My burden, if I chose to take it up. Innocent women. Children. I could destroy them, and you could treat it as justice, but I went too far. I blinded you. For half a hand, I turned it against you, and for that, I deserved to die.”
“The andat, Vanjit-kya,” Maati said, his voice breaking. “They have always schemed against their poets. They have manipulated the people around them in terrible ways. Eiah and I…”
“You hear that?” Vanjit said, scooping up Clarity-of-Sight. The andat’s black eyes met hers. “This is your doing.”
The andat cooed and waved its arms. Vanjit smiled as if at some unspoken jest, shared only between those two.
“I thought I would make the world right again,” Vanjit said. “I thought I could make a baby. Make a family.”
“You thought you could save the world,” Maati said.
“I thought you could,” she said in a voice like cold vinegar. “Look at me.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Look.”
Her face sharpened. He saw the smudge of dust along her cheek, the stippled pores along her cheek, the individual hairs smaller than the thinnest threads. Her eyes were labyrinths of blood mapped on the whites, and the pupils glowed like a wolf’s where the candlelight reflected from their depths. Her skin was a mosaic, tiny scales that broke and scattered with every movement. Insects too small to see scuttled through the roots of her hair, her eyelashes.
Maati’s stomach turned, a deep nausea taking him. He closed his eyes, pressing his palms into the lids.
“Please,” he said, and Vanjit wrenched his hands away from his face.
“Look at me!” she shouted. “Look!”
Reluctantly, slowly, Maati opened his eyes. There was too much. Vanjit was no longer a woman but a landscape as wide as the world, moving, breaking, shifting. Looking at her was being tossed on an infinite sea.
“Can you see my pain, Maati-kvo? Can you see it?”
No, he tried to say, but his throat closed against his illness. Vanjit pushed him away, and he spun, a thousand details assaulting him in the space of a heartbeat. He fell to the stone floor and retched.
“I didn’t think you would,” she said.
“Please,” Maati said.
“You’ve taken it from me,” Vanjit said. “You and Eiah. All the others. I was ready to do anything for you. I risked death. I did. And you don’t even know me.”
Her laugh was short and brutal.
“My eyes,” he said.
“Fine,” Vanjit said, and Maati’s vision went away. He was once again in the fog of blindness. “Is that better?”
Maati reached toward the sound of her voice, then stumbled. Vanjit kicked him once in the ribs. The surprise was worse than the pain.
“There is nothing you have to teach me anymore, old man,” she said. “I’ve learned everything you know. I understand.”
“No,” Maati said. “There’s more. I can tell you more. I know what it is to lose someone you love. I know what it is to feel betrayed by the ones you thought closest to you.”
“Then you know the world isn’t worth saving,” Vanjit said.
The words hung in the air. Maati tried to rise, but he was short of breath, wheezing like he’d run a race. His racing heart filled his ears with the sound of rushing blood.
“It is,” he said. “It’s worth…”
“Ah. There’s Eymond. Everyone in Eymond, blind as a stone. And Eddensea. There. Gone. Bakta. But why stop there, Maati-kya? Here, the birds. All the birds in the world. There. The fish. The beasts.” She laughed. “All the flies are blind. I’ve just done that. All the flies and the spiders. I say we give the world to the trees and the worms. One great nation of the eyeless.”
“Vanjit,” Maati said. His back hurt like someone had stabbed him and left the blade in. He fought to find the words. “You mustn’t do this. I didn’t teach you this.”
“I did what you told me,” she said, her voice rising. The andat’s cry rose with her, an infantile rage and anguish and exultation at the world’s destruction. “I did what you wanted. More, Maati-kvo, I did what you couldn’t do yourself, and you hated me for it. You wanted me dead? Fine, then. I’ll die. And the world can come with me.”
“No!” Maati cried.
“I’m not a monster,” Vanjit said. Like a candle being snuffed, the andat’s wail ceased. Vanjit collapsed besid
e him, as limp as a puppet with cut strings.
There were voices. Otah, Danat, Eiah, Idaan, Ana. And others. He lay back, letting his eyes close. He didn’t know what had happened. For the moment, he didn’t care. His body was a single, sudden wash of pain. And then, his chest only ached. Maati opened his eyes. An unfamiliar face was looking down at him.
The man had skin as pale as snow and flowing ink-black hair. His eyes were deep brown, as soft as fur and as warm as tea. His robe was blue silk embroidered with thread of gold. The pale man smiled and took a pose of greeting. Maati responded reflexively. Vanjit lay on the floor, her arm bent awkwardly behind her, her eyes open and empty.
“Killed her,” Maati said. “You. Killed her.”
“Well. More precisely, we wounded her profoundly and then she died,” the pale man said. “But I’ll grant you it’s a fine point. The effect is much the same.”
“Maati!”
He lifted his head. Eiah was rushing toward him, her robes pressed back like a banner by her speed. Otah and Idaan followed her more slowly. Ana and Danat were locked in a powerful embrace. Maati lifted his hand in greeting. When she drew near, Eiah hesitated, her gaze on the fallen girl. The pale man—Wounded—took a pose that offered congratulations, and there was irony in the cant of his wrists. Eiah knelt, touching the corpse with a calm, professional air.
“Oh, yes,” the andat said, folding its hands. “Quite dead.”
“Good,” Eiah said.
“He isn’t standing,” Idaan said, nodding toward Maati.
Eiah’s attention shifted to him and her face paled.
“Just need. To catch my breath.”
“His heart’s stopping,” Eiah said. “I knew this would happen. I told you to drink that tea.”
Maati waved his hand, shooing her concerns away. Danat and Ana had come. He hadn’t noticed it. They were simply there. Ana’s eyes were brown and they were beautiful.
The Price of Spring (The Long Price Quartet Book 4) Page 38