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robes, and saw to the administration of the cities whose names they took as their own. The Khai Machi, the Khai Yalakeht, the Khai Tan-Sadar. All of them had been other men once, before their fathers had died or become too feeble to rule. All of them had killed their own brothers on the way to claiming their positions. All except Otah.
    Otah, the exception.
    A scratching at the door roused Maati, and he hauled himself from his chair and went forward. The night had nearly fallen, but torches spattered the darkness with circles of light. Even before he reached the door, he heard music coming from one of the pavilions nearby, the young men and women of the utkhaiem boiling up from the winter earth and celebrating nightly, undeterred by chill or rain or heartbreak. And at the door of his library were two familiar figures, and a third that was only expected. Cehmai, poet of Machi, stood with a bottle of wine in each hand, and behind him the hulking, bemused, inhuman andat Stone-Made-Soft raised its wide chin in greeting. The other - a slender young man in the same brown robes that Cehmai and Maati himself wore - spoke to Cehmai. Athai Vauudun, the envoy from the Dai-kvo.
    ‘He is the most arrogant man I have ever met,’ the envoy said to Cehmai, continuing a previous conversation. ‘He has no allies, only one son, and no pause at all at the prospect of alienating every other city of the Khaiem. I think he’s proud to ignore tradition.’
    ‘Our guest has met with the Khai,’ Stone-Made-Soft said, its voice low and rough as a landslide. ‘They don’t appear to have impressed each other favorably.’
    ‘Athai-kvo,’ Cehmai said, gesturing awkwardly with one full bottle. ‘This is Maati Vaupathai. Maati-kvo, please meet our new friend.’
    Athai took a pose of greeting, and Maati answered with a welcoming pose less formal than the one he’d been offered.
    ‘Kvo?’ Athai said. ‘I hadn’t known you were Cehmai-cha’s teacher.’
    ‘It’s a courtesy he gives me because I’m old,’ Maati said. ‘Come in, though. All of you. It’s getting cold out.’
    Maati led the others back through the chambers and corridors of the library. On the way, they traded the kind of simple, common talk that etiquette required - the Dai-kvo was in good health, the school had given a number of promising boys the black robes, there were discussions of a possible new binding in the next years - and Maati played his part. Only Stone-Made-Soft didn’t participate, considering as it was the thick stone walls with mild, distant interest. The inner chamber that Maati had prepared for the meeting was dim and window-less, but a fire burned hot behind iron shutters. Books and scrolls lay on a wide, low table. Maati opened the iron shutters, lit a taper from the flames, and set a series of candles and lanterns glowing around the room until they were all bathed in shadowless warm light. The envoy and Cehmai had taken chairs by the fire, and Maati lowered himself to a wide bench.
    ‘My private workroom,’ Maati said, nodding at the space around them. ‘I’ve been promised there’s no good way to listen to us in here.’
    The envoy took a pose that accepted the fact, but glanced uneasily at Stone-Made-Soft.
    ‘I won’t tell,’ the andat said, and grinned, baring its unnaturally regular stone-white teeth. ‘Promise.’
    ‘If I lost control of our friend here, telling what happened in a meeting wouldn’t be the trouble we faced,’ Cehmai said.
    The envoy seemed somewhat mollified. He had a small face, Maati thought. But perhaps it was only that Maati had already taken a dislike to the man.
    ‘So Cehmai has been telling me about your project,’ Athai said, folding his hands in his lap. ‘A study of the prices meted out by failed bindings, is it?’
    ‘A bit more than that,’ Maati said. ‘A mapping, rather, of the form of the binding to the form that its price took. What it was about this man’s work that his blood went dry, or that