A Betrayal in Winter - By Daniel Abraham Page 0,15
As he saw her, his sleeping mind had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.
Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs felt softer than grass against Cehmai's bare feet. And the andat was waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it-black basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent's pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a windstorm sounded.
"Again?" the poet asked.
Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board, recalled the binding-the translation that had brought the thing across from him out of formlessness-and pushed a black stone into the empty field of the hoard. The game began again.
The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai's work. It had been done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding-the fluid lines of play and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru's had once touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part because the binding had also made StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-Soft glowered down on its failing line.
"You're going to lose," Cehmai said.
"I know," the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant rockslide-another evocation of flowing stone. "Being doomed doesn't take away from the dignity of the effort, though."
"Well said."
The andat shrugged and smiled. "One can afford to be philosophical when losing means outliving one's opponent. This particular game? You picked it. But there are others we play that I'm not quite so crippled at."
"I didn't pick this game. I haven't seen twenty summers, and you've seen more than two hundred. I wasn't even a dirty thought in my grandfather's head when you started playing this."
The andat's thick hands took a formal position of disagreement.
"We have always been playing the same game, you and I. If you were someone else at the start, it's your problem."
They never started speaking until the game's end was a forgone conclusion. That Stone-Made-Soft was willing to speak was as much a sign that this particular battle was drawing to its end as the silence in Cehmai's mind. But the last piece had not yet been pushed when a pounding came on the door.
"I know you're in there! Wake up!"
Cehmai sighed at the familiar voice and rose. The andat brooded over the board, searching, the poet knew, for some way to win a lost game. He clapped a hand on the andat's shoulder as he passed by it toward the door.
"I won't have it," the stout, red-checked man said when the opened door revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a copper tore of office. Not for the first time, Cehmai thought Baarath would have been better placed in life as the overseer of a merchant house or farm than within the utkhaiem. "You poets think that because you have the andat, you have everything. Well, I've come to tell you it isn't so."
Cehmai took a pose of welcome and stepped back, allowing the man in.
"I've been expecting you, Baarath. I don't suppose you've brought any food with you?"
"You have servants for that," Baarath said, striding into the wide room, taking in the shelves of books and scrolls and maps with his customary moment of lust. The andat looked up at him with its queer, slow smile, and then turned back to the board.
"I don't like having strange people wandering though my library," Baarath said.