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one’s that made his lungs fill with worms.’
    ‘You might consider not binding us in the first place,’ Stone-Made-Soft said. ‘If it’s so dangerous as all that.’
    Maati ignored it. ‘I thought, you see, that there might be some way to better understand whether a poet’s work was likely to fail or succeed if we knew more of how older failures presented themselves. It was an essay Heshai Antaburi wrote examining his own binding of Removing-the-Part-That-Continues that gave me the idea. You see his binding succeeded - he held Seedless for decades - but in having done the thing and then lived with the consequences, he could better see the flaws in his original work. Here . . .’
    Maati rose up with a grunt and fished through his papers for a moment until the old, worn leather-bound book came to hand. Its cover was limp from years of reading, the pages growing yellow and smudged. The envoy took it and read a bit by the light of candles.
    ‘But this is too much like his original work,’ Athai said as he thumbed through the pages. ‘It could never be used.’
    ‘No, of course not,’ Maati agreed. ‘But he made the attempt to examine the form of the binding, you see, in hopes that showing the kinds of errors he’d made might help others avoid things that were similar. Heshai-kvo was one of my first teachers.’
    ‘He was the one murdered in Saraykeht, ne?’ Athai asked, not looking up from the book in his hands.
    ‘Yes,’ Maati said.
    Athai looked up, one hand taking an informal pose asking excuse.
    ‘I didn’t mean anything by asking,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to place him.’
    Maati brought himself to smile and nod.
    ‘The reason I wrote to the Dai-kvo,’ Cehmai said, ‘was the application Maati-kvo was thinking of.’
    ‘Application?’
    ‘It’s too early yet to really examine closely,’ Maati said. He felt himself starting to blush, and his embarrassment at the thought fueled the blood in his face. ‘It’s too early to say whether there’s anything in it.’
    ‘Tell him,’ Cehmai said, his voice warm and coaxing. The envoy put Heshai-kvo’s book down, his attention entirely on Maati now.
    ‘There are . . . patterns,’ Maati said. ‘There seems to be a structure that links the form of the binding to its . . . its worst expression. Its price. The forms only seem random because it’s a very complex structure. And I was reading Catji’s meditations - the one from the Second Empire, not Catji Sano - and there are some speculations he made about the nature of language and grammar that . . . that seem related.’
    ‘He’s found a way to shield a poet from paying the price,’ Cehmai said.
    ‘I don’t know that’s true,’ Maati said quickly.
    ‘But possibly ,’ Cehmai said.
    The envoy and the andat both shifted forward in their seats. The effect was eerie.
    ‘I thought that, if a poet’s first attempt at a binding didn’t have to be his last - if an imperfect binding didn’t mean death . . .’
    Maati gestured helplessly at the air. He had spent so many hours thinking about what it could mean, about what it could bring about and bring back. All the andat lost over the course of generations that had been thought beyond recapture might still be bound if only the men binding them could learn from their errors, adjust their work as Heshai had done after the fact. Softness. Water-Moving-Down. Thinking-in-Words. All the spirits cataloged in the histories, the work of poets who had made the Empire great. Perhaps they were not past redemption.
    He looked at Athai, but the young man’s eyes were unfocused and distant.
    ‘May I see your work, Maati-kvo?’ he asked, and the barely suppressed excitement in his voice almost brought Maati to like him for the moment. Together, the three men stepped to Maati’s worktable. Three men, and one other that was something else.

2
    L iat Chokavi had never seen seawater as green as the bays near Amnat-Tan. The seafront at Saraykeht had always taken