Seasons of War

streets. Only the metalworkers remained at the ground level, the green copper roofs of the forges free of snow and ice, the plumes of coal smoke rising almost as high as the towers all through the winter.
    At least all through this winter. This one last winter before the Galts came and butchered them all.
    If only there was some other way to phrase the idea of removing . Seedless’s true name would have been better translated as Removing-the-Part-That-Continues. Continuity was a fairly simple problem. The old grammars had several ways to conceptualize continuance. It was removal . . .
    Maati reached the thin red doorway at the back of the rooms, and started down the stairs. It was dark as night. Darker. He would need to talk with the palace servant masters about seeing that lanterns were lit here. With as many people as there were filling every available niche in the tunnels and, from what he heard, the mines as well, it seemed unlikely that no one could be spared to be sure there was a little light on his path.
    Or they might be rationing lamp oil already. There was a depressing thought.
    He descended, one hand on the smooth, cool stone of the wall to keep him steady. He moved slowly because going quickly would get him winded, and it was dark enough that he wanted to stay sure of his footing. His mind was only half concerned with walking anyway. Cehmai was right. The logical structure was the same whether he used nurat or something else. So that was another dead end.
    Removal.
    It was a concept of relative motion. Taking something enclosed and producing a distance between it and its - now previous - enclosure. Plucking out a seed, or a baby. A gemstone from its setting. A man from his bed or his home. Removing. Heshai’s work in framing Seedless was so elegant, so simple, that it seemed inevitable. That was the curse of second and third bindings of the same andat. Finding something equally graceful, but utterly different. It made his jaw ache just thinking about it.
    He reached the bottom of the stairs and the wide upper chamber of his winter quarters. The night candle burning there was hardly to its first quarter mark, which given the lengthening nights of autumn meant the city beneath him would likely still be awake and active. Rest for him, though. His day had been full already. He took up the candle, passed down a short, close corridor, and reached the second stairway, which led down to the bedchambers.
    The air was noticeably warmer here than in the library - in part from the heat of ten thousand people in the earth below him rising up, and in part from its stillness. Servants had prepared his bed with blankets and furs. A light meal of rice and spiced pork in one of the bowls of hand-thick iron that could hold the heat for the better part of a day waited on his writing table. Maati sat, ate slowly, not tasting the food, drinking rice wine as if it were water. Even as he sucked the pepper sauce off the last bit of pork, his feet and fingers were still cold. Removing-the-Chill-From-the-Old-Man’s-Flesh. There was an andat.
    Maati closed the lid of the great iron bowl, slipped out of his robes, hefted himself into his bed, and willed himself to sleep. For a time, he lay watching the candle burn, smelling the wax as it melted and dripped, and could not get comfortable. He couldn’t get the cold out of his toes and knuckles, couldn’t make his mind stop moving. He couldn’t avoid the growing fear that when he closed his eyes, the nightmares that had begun plaguing him would return.
    The images his mind held when his eyes were closed had become more violent, more anxious. Fathers weeping for sons who were also sacks of bloodied grain and dead mice; long, sleepless hours spent searching through bodies in a charnel house hoping to find his child still living and only finding Otah’s children again and again and again; the recurring dream of a tunnel that led down past the city, deeper than the mines, and into the earth until the stone itself grew fleshy and angry and bled. And the cry that woke him - a man’s voice shouting from a great distance that demanded to know whose child this was. Whose child?
    With this mind, Maati thought as he watched the single flame of the night candle, I’m intended to bind an andat. It’s like driving nails with rotten meat.
    The night candle had burned through three of its smallest marks when he abandoned his bed, pulled on his robes, and left his private chambers for the