heard that's endearing."
"She's drawn to you."
The andat shifted to look at him. Its wide mouth was smiling.
"That would be a first," it said. "I'd never thought of taking a lover. I don't think I'd know what to do with her."
"Not like that," Cehmai said. "She wants me because of you. Because I'm a poet. If I weren't, she wouldn't be here."
"Does that offend you?"
A gnat landed on the back of Cehmai's hand. The tiny wings tickled, but he looked at it carefully. A small gray insect unaware of its danger. With a puff of breath, he New it into the darkness. The andat waited silently for an answer.
"It should," Cehmai said at last.
"Perhaps you can work on that."
"Being offended?"
"If you think you should be."
The storm in the back of him mind shifted. The constant thought that was this thing at his side moved, kicking like a babe in the womb or a prisoner testing the walls of its cell. Cehmai chuckled.
"You aren't trying to help," he said.
"No," the andat agreed. "Not particularly."
"Did the others understand their lovers? The poets before me?"
"How can I say? They loved women, and were loved by them. They used women and were used by them. You may have found a way to put me on a leash, but you're only men."
THE IRONY WAS THAT, HIS WOUND NOT FULLY HEALED, MAATI SPENT MORE time in the library than he had when he had been playing at scholarship. Only now, instead of spending his mornings there, he found it a calm place to retire when the day's work had exhausted him; when the hunt had worn him thin. It had been fifteen days now since Itani Noygu had walked away from the palaces and vanished. Fourteen days since the assassin had put a dagger in Maati's own guts. Thirteen days since the fire in the cages.
He knew now as much as he was likely to know of Itani Noygu, the courier for House Siyanti, and almost nothing of Otah-kvo. Irani had worked in the gentleman's trade for nearly eight years. He had lived in the eastern islands; he was a charming man, decent at his craft if not expert. He'd had lovers in "Ian-Sadar and tltani, but had broken things off with both after he started keeping company with a wayhouse keeper in Udun. His fellows were frankly disbelieving that this could be the rogue Otah Machi, night-gaunt that haunted the dreams of Machi. But where he probed and demanded, where he dug and pried, pleaded and coddled and threatened, there was no sign of Otah-kvo. Where there should have been secrecy, there was nothing. Where there should have been meetings with high men in his house, or another house, or somebody, there was nothing. There should have been conspiracy against his father, his brothers, the city of his birth. There was nothing.
All of which went to confirm the conclusion that Maati had reached, bleeding on the paving stones. Otah was not scheming for his father's chair, had not killed Biitrah, had not hired the assassin to attack him.
And yet Otah was here, or had been. Maati had written to the Daikvo, outlining what he knew and guessed and only wondered, but he had received no word hack as yet and might not for several weeks. By which time, he suspected, the old Khai would be dead. That thought alone tired him, and it was the library that he turned to for distraction.
He sat back now on one of the thick chairs, slowly unfurling a scroll with his left hand and furling it again with his right. In the space between, ancient words stirred. The pale ink formed the letters of the Empire, and the scroll purported to be an essay by Jaiet Khai-a man named the Servant of Memory from the great years when the word Khai had still meant servant. The grammar was formal and antiquated, the tongue was nothing spoken now. It was unlikely than anyone but a poet would be able to make sense of it.
'T'here are two types of impossibility in the andat, the man long since dust had written. The first of these are those thoughts which cannot be understood. Time and Mind arc examples of this type; mysteries so profound that even the wise cannot do more than guess at their deepest structure. These bindings may someday become possible with greater understanding of the world and our place within it. For this reason they are of no interest to me.