Seasons of War

it carried the meaning. Sinja felt unpleasantly like he was looking down over a cliff. His head swam a little, and the tightness in his body fell to knotting his gut. He held out his bowl and Balasar refilled it.
    ‘I’ll understand if it’s too much,’ Balasar said, his voice soft. ‘It will make things easier for both sides and it won’t change the way the battle falls, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a terrible thing to ask of you. Take a few days to sit with it if you’d like.’
    ‘No,’ Sinja said. ‘I don’t need time. I’ll do the thing.’
    ‘You’re sure?’ Eustin asked.
    Sinja drained his cup in a gulp. He could feel the flush starting to grow in his neck and cheeks, the nausea starting in his belly and the back of his throat. It was strong wine and a bad night coming.
    ‘It needs doing, and it’s the price I asked,’ Sinja said. ‘So I’ll do it.’
     
    Cehmai sat forward in his chair. The white marble walls of their workspace glowed with candlelight, but Maati didn’t find the brightness reassuring. He was sitting as quietly as he could manage on a red and violet embroidered cushion, waiting. Cehmai lifted one of the wide yellow pages, paused, and turned it over. Maati saw the younger poet’s lips moving as he shaped some phrase from the papers. Maati restrained himself from asking which. Interruptions wouldn’t make this go any faster.
    The simple insight that Eiah had given him that night in the baths had taken the better part of two weeks to work into a draft worthy of consideration. Fitting the grammars so that the nuances of corruption and continuance - destruction and creation, or more precisely the destruction of creation - reinforced one another had been tricky. And the extra obstacle of fitting in the structures to protect himself should things go amiss had likely tacked on an extra three or four days to the process.
    And still, it had taken him only weeks. Not years, not even months. Weeks. The structure of the binding was laid out now. Corruption-of-the-Generative, called Sterile. The death of the Galt’s crops. The gelding of its men. The destruction of its women’s wombs. Once he had seen the trick of it, the binding had flowed from his pen.
    It had been as if some small voice at the back of his mind was whispering the words, and he’d only had to write them down. Even now, squatting on this damnable cushion, his back aching, his feet cold, waiting for Cehmai to read over the last of the changes, he felt half drunk from the work. He was a poet. All the things that had happened in his life to bring him to this place at this time had built toward these days, and the dry pages that hissed and shushed as Cehmai slid them across each other. Maati bit his lip and did not interrupt.
    It seemed like days, but Cehmai came to the final page, fingertips tracing the lines Maati had written there, paused, and set it down with the others. Maati leaned forward, his hands taking a querying pose. Cehmai frowned and gently shook his head.
    ‘No?’ Maati asked. Something between rage and dismay shot through his belly, only to vanish when Cehmai spoke.
    ‘It’s brilliant,’ he said. ‘It’s a first draft, but it’s a very, very good one. I don’t think there are many things we’d have to adjust. A few to make it easier to pass on, perhaps. But we can work with those. No, Maati-kvo, I think this is likely to work. It’s just . . .’
    ‘Just?’
    Cehmai’s frown deepened. His fingertips tapped cautiously on the pages, as if he were testing an iron pot, afraid it would be hot enough to burn. He sighed.
    ‘I’ve never seen an andat fashioned to be a weapon,’ he said. ‘There was a book that the Dai-kvo had that dated from the fall of the Second Empire, but he never let anyone look at it. I don’t know.’
    ‘There’s a war, Cehmai-kya,’ Maati said. ‘They killed the Dai-kvo and everyone in the village. The gods only know how many other men they’ve slaughtered. How many women they’re raped. What’s on those pages, they’ve earned.’
    ‘I know,’ Cehmai said. ‘I do know that. It’s just I keep thinking of Stone-Made-Soft. It was capable of terrible things. I can’t count the times I had to hold it back from collapsing a mine or a building. It had no respect for the lives of men. But there was no particular malice in it either. This . . . Sterile . . . it seems different.’
    Maati clamped his jaw. He was tired, that was all. They both were. It was no