Read THE (tlpq-4) for Free Online Page B

his
    desk.
     
    Kiyan-kya, it seems something may have gone right after all...
     
     
    2
     
    Ten years almost to the day before word of Otah's pact with the Galts
    reached him, Maati Vaupathai had learned of his son's death at the hands
    of Galtic soldiers. A fugitive only just abandoned by his only
    companion, he had made his way to the south like a wounded horse finding
    its way home. It had not been the city itself he had been looking for,
    but a woman.
     
    Liat Chokavi, owner and overseer of House Kyaan, had received him.
    Twice, they had been lovers, once as children, and then again just
    before the war. She had told him of Nayiit's stand, of how he had been
    cut down protecting the Emperor's son, Danat, as the final assault on
    Machi began. She spoke with the chalky tones of a woman still in pain.
    If Maati had held hopes that his once-lover might take him in, they did
    not survive that conversation. He left her house in agony. He had not
    spoken to her since.
     
    Two years after that, he took his first student, a woman named Halit.
    Since then, his life had become a narrow, focused thing. He had remade
    himself as a teacher, as an agent of hope, as the Dai-kvo of a new age.
     
    It was less glamorous than it sounded.
     
    All that morning he had lain in the small room that was presently his
    home, squinting at the dirty light that made its way through the
    oiledparchment window and thinking of the andat. Thinking of thoughts
    made flesh, of ideas given human form and volition. Little gods, held
    tight to existence by the poets who knew them best and, by knowing,
    bound them. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless.
    WaterMoving-Down, called Rain or Seaward. Stone-Made-Soft who had no
    other name. And his own-Corrupting-the-Generative, called Sterile, whom
    Maati had not quite bound, and who had remade the world.
     
    The lessons he had learned as a boy, the conversations he had had as a
    man and a poet, they all came back to him dimly. Fragments and moments,
    insights but not all the steps that had led him there. A mosquito whined
    in the gloom, and Maati waved it away.
     
    Teaching his girls was like telling the story of his life and finding
    there were holes in it. He knew things-structures of grammar and
    metaphor, anecdotes of long-dead poets and the bindings they had made,
    occult relationships between abstractions like shapes and numbers and
    the concrete things of the world-without remembering how he'd learned
    them. Every lecture he gave, he had to half-invent. Every question he
    answered, he had to solve in his mind to be sure. On one hand, it was as
    awkward as using a grand palace as a lesson on how to build scaffolding.
    And on the other, it was making him a better poet and a better teacher
    than he would ever have been otherwise.
     
    He sat up, the canvas cot groaning as his weight shifted. The room was
    tiny and quiet; the stone walls wept and smelled of fungus. Halfaware of
    his surroundings and half in the fine points of ancient grammars, Maati
    rose and trundled up the short flight of stairs. The warehouse stood
    empty, the muted daylight and the sound of light rain making their way
    through the high, narrow windows. His footsteps echoed as he crossed to
    the makeshift lecture hall.
     
    Benches of old, splintering wood squatted near a length of wall smooth
    enough to take chalk. The markings of the previous evening still shone
    white against the stone. Maati squinted at them.
     
    Age was a thief. It took his wind, it made his heart race at odd times,
    and it stole his sleep. But the worst of all the little indignities was
    his sight. He hadn't thought about the blessing that decent vision was
    until his eyes started to fail. It made his head ache a bit, but he
    found the diagram he'd been thinking of, traced it with his fingertips,
    considered, and then took a rag from the pail of water beside his little
    podium and washed the marks away. He could start there tonight, with the
    four