Seasons of War

Eustin. This is between the two of us.’
    ‘ What’s between the two of us?’
    Sinja raised the tip of his sword by a hand’s span in answer. Eustin nodded and dropped his own blade into guard position.
    ‘He’s mine,’ Eustin called. ‘Leave us be.’
    Sinja took a step back, away from the cart, and smiled. Eustin let himself be drawn. In the corner of his vision, Sinja saw Danat drop from the cart’s back. He took a hard grip on his sword, grinned, and swung. Steel rang on steel. Eustin closed and Sinja darted back, the snow crackling under his boots. They were both smiling now, and one of the bowmen had pulled out his quiver, prepared to act in case Eustin should fail. Sinja took a deep breath of cold air, and felt strangely like shouting.
    He’d been wrong before; this was exactly how he’d hoped to die.
     
    Maati chanted until his mouth was dry, his eyes locked on the scrawled note on the wall before him. Each time he began to feel his thoughts taking shape, it distracted him. He would think that the binding was beginning to work, and he would leap ahead to the battle outside and what he could do, the fate of Galt, the future, what Eiah and Cehmai were seeing, and the solidity that the binding had taken would slip away again. It was hard to put the world aside. It was hard not to care.
    He didn’t pause, but he closed his eyes, picturing the wall and his writing upon it. He knew the binding - knew the structures of it, the grammars that formed the thoughts that put together everything he had hoped and intended. And instead of reading it from the world, he read it from the image in his own mind. Dreamlike, the warehouse wall seemed more solid, more palpable, with his eyes closed. The sound of his voice began to echo, syllables from different phrases blending together, creating new words that also spoke to Maati’s intention. The air seemed thicker, harder to breathe. The world had become dense. He began his chant again, though he could still hear himself speaking the words that came halfway through it.
    The wall in his mind began to sway, the image fading into a seed - peach pit and flax seed and everything in between the two. And an egg. And a womb. And the three images became a single object, still half-formed in his mind. Bright as sunlight, but blasted, twisted. There was a scent like a wound gone rancid, the sulfur scent of bad eggs. His fingers seemed to touch the words, feeling them sliding out into the world and collapsing back; they were sticky and slick. The echo of the chant deepened until he found himself speaking the first phrase of the binding at the same moment his remembered voice spoke the same phrase and the whole grand complex, raucous song fell into him like a stone dropping into the abyss. He could still hear it, and feel it. The smell of it was thick in his nostrils, though he was also aware that the air smelled only of dust and hot iron. So it wasn’t truly the thick smell of rot; only the idea of it, as compelling as the truth.
    Maati balanced the storm in a part of his mind - back behind his ears, even with the point at which his spine met his skull. It balanced there. He didn’t know when he’d stopped chanting. He opened his eyes.
    ‘Well, my dear,’ the andat said. ‘Who’d have thought we’d meet again?’
    It sat before him, naked. The soft, androgynous face was the moonlight pale that Seedless’ had been. The long, flowing hair so black it was blue. The rise and curve of a woman’s body. Corrupting-the-Generative. Sterile. He hadn’t thought she would look so much like Seedless, but now that he saw her, he found himself unsurprised.
    Cehmai approached on soft feet. Maati could hear Eiah’s breath behind him, panting as if she’d run a race. Maati found himself exhausted but also exhilarated, as if he could begin again from the start.
    ‘You’re here,’ Maati said.
    ‘Am I? Yes, I suppose I am. I’m not really him, you know.’
    Seedless, it meant. The first andat he’d seen. The one he’d been meant for.
    ‘My memory of him is part of you,’ he said.
    ‘And so the sense that I’ve seen you before,’ it said, smiling. ‘And of being the slave you hoped to own.’
    Cehmai lifted the robe, unfolding the rich cloth. The andat looked up and back at him. There was something of Liat in the line of its jaw, the way that it smiled. Sterile rose, and stepped into the waiting folds of cloth. When Cehmai helped it with the stays, it answered with a pose