An Autumn War (Long Price Quartet #3)

An Autumn War (Long Price Quartet #3) Page 9

Twilight came after the long sunset, staining red the high clouds in the west. A light wind had come from the North, carrying the chill of mountaintop glaciers with it, though there was little snow left on even the highest peaks that could be seen from the city. It grabbed at the loose shutters, banging them open and closed like an idiot child in love with the noise. Banners rippled and trees nodded like old men. It was as if an errant breath of winter had stolen into the warm nights. Otah sat in his private chambers, still in his formal robes. He felt no drafts, but the candles flickered in sympathy with the wind.

The letters unfolded before him were in a simple cipher. The years he had spent in the gentleman's trade, carrying letters and contracts and information on the long roads between the cities of the Khaiem, returned to him, and he read the enciphered text as easily as if it had been written plainly. It was as Nlaati and Cehmai had said. The Wards of the Westlands were united in a state of panic. The doom of the world seemed about to fall upon them.

Since the letters had arrived, Otah's world had centered on the news. He had sent another runner to the Dai-kvo with a pouch so heavy with lengths of silver, the man could have bought a fresh horse at every low town he passed through if it would get him there faster. Otah had sat up long nights with Nlaati and Cehmai, even with Liat and Nayiit. I Jere was the plan, then. With the threat of an andat of their own, the Galts would roll through the Westlands, perhaps Eddensea as well. In a year, perhaps two, they might own Bakta and Eymond too. The cities of the Khaiem would find themselves cut off from trade, and perhaps the rogue poet would even become a kind of Galtic Dai-kvo in time. The conquest of the Westlands was the first campaign in a new war that might make the destruction of the Old Empire seem minor.

And still, Otah read the letters again, his mind unquiet. There was something there, something more, that he had overlooked. The certainty of the Gaits, their willingness to show their power. Whenever they tired of trade or felt themselves losing at the negotiating tables, Galt had been pleased to play raider and pirate. It had been that way for as long as Otah could remember. The Galtic High Council had schemed and conspired. It shouldn't have been odd that, emboldened by success, they would take to the field. And yet ...

Otah turned the pages with a sound as dry as autumn leaves. They couldn't be attacking the Khaiem; even with an andat in their possession, they would he overwhelmed. The cities might have their rivalries and disputes, but an attack on one would unite them against their common foe. "Thirteen cities each with its own poet added to whatever the Dai-kvo held in reserve in his village. At worst, more than a dozen to one, and each of them capable of destruction on a scale almost impossible to imagine. The Galts wouldn't dare attack the Khaiem. It was posturing. Negotiation. It might even be a bluff; the poet might have tried his binding, paid the price of failure, and left the Galts with nothing but bluster to defend themselves.

Otah had heard all these arguments, had made more than one of them himself. And still night found him here, reading the letters and searching for the thoughts behind them. It was like hearing a new voice in a choir. Somewhere, someone new had entered the strategies of the Gaits, and these scraps of paper and pale ink were all that Otah had to work out what that might mean.

Ile could as well have looked for words written in the air.

A scratching came at the door, followed by a servant boy. The boy took a pose of obeisance and Otah replied automatically.

"The woman you sent for, Most High. Liat Chokavi."

"Bring her in. And bring some wine and two bowls, then see we aren't disturbed."

"But, Most High-"

"We'll pour our own wine," Otah snapped, and regretted it instantly as the boy's face went pale. Otah pressed down the impulse to apologize. It was beneath the dignity of the Khai Machi to apologize for rudeness-one of the thousand things he'd learned when he first took his father's chair. One of the thousand missteps he had made. The boy backed out of the room, and Otah turned to the letters, folding them hack in their order and slipping them into his sleeve. The boy preceded Liat into the room, a tray with a silver carafe and two hand-molded bowls of granite in his hands. Liat sat on the low divan, her eyes on the floor in something that looked like respect but might only have been fear.

The door closed, and Otah poured a generous portion of wine into each bowl. Liat took the one he proffered.

"It's lovely work," Liat said, considering the stone.

"It's the andat," Otah said. "He turns the quarry rock into something like clay, and the potters shape it. One of the many wonders of Machi. Have you seen the bridge that spans the river? A single stone poured over molds and shaped by hand five generations hack. And there's the towers. Really, we're a city of petty miracles."

"You sound hitter," she said, looking up at last. Her eyes were the same tea-and-milk color he remembered. Otah sighed as he sat across from her. Outside, the wind murmured.

"I'm not," he said. "Only tired."

"I knew you wouldn't end as a seafront laborer," she said.

"Yes, well . . ." Otah shook his head and sipped from the howl. It was strong wine, and it left his mouth feeling clean and his chest warm. "It's time we spoke about Nayiit."

Liat nodded, took a long drink, and held the cup out for more. Otah poured.

"It's all my fault," she said as she sat hack. "I should never have brought him here. I never saw it. I never saw you in him. He was always just himself. If I'd known that ... that he resembled you quite so closely, I wouldn't have."

"Late for that," Otah said.

Liat sighed her agreement and looked up at him. It was hard to believe that they had been lovers once. The girl he had known hack then hadn't had gray in her hair, weariness in her eyes. And the boy he'd been was as distant as snow in summer. Yes, two people had kissed once, had touched each other, had created a child who had grown to manhood. And Otah remembered some of those moments nowshowering at the barracks while she spoke to him, the ink blocks at the desk in her cell at the compound of House Wilsin, the feel of a young body pressed against his own, when his flesh had also been new and unmarked. If those days long past had been foolish or wrong, the only evidence was the price they both paid now. It hadn't seemed so at the time.

"I've been thinking of it," Liat said. "I haven't told him. I wasn't sure how you wanted to address the problem. But I think the wisest thing to do is to speak with him and with Maati, and then have Nayiitkya take the brand. I know it's not something done with firstborn sons, but it's still a repudiation of his right to become Khai. It will make it clear to the world that he doesn't have designs on your chair."

"'T'hat isn't what I'd choose," Otah said. His words were slow and careful. "I'm afraid my son may die."

She caught her breath. It was hardly there, no more than a tremor in the air she took in, but he heard it.

"Itani," she said, using the name of the boy he'd been in Saraykeht, "please. I'll swear on anything you choose. Nayiit's no threat to Danat. It was only the Galts that brought us here. I'm not looking to put my son in your chair...."

Otah put down his bowl and took a pose that asked for her silence. Her face pale, she went quiet.

"I don't mean that," he said softly. "I mean that I don't ... Gods. I don't know how to say this. Danat's not well. His lungs are fragile, and the winters here are bad. We lose people to the cold every year. Not just the old or the weak. Young people. Healthy ones. I'm afraid that Danat may dic, and there'll be no one to take my place. The city would tear itself apart."

"But ... you want ..."

"I haven't done a good job as Khai. I haven't been able to put the houses of the utkhaiem together except in their distrust of me and resentment of Kiyan. There's been twice it came near violence, and I only held the city in place by luck. But keeping Machi safe is my responsibility. I want Nayiit unbranded, in case ... in case he becomes my successor.

Liat's mouth hung open, her eyes were wide. A stray lock of hair hung down the side of her face, three white hairs dancing in and out among the black. He felt the faint urge-echo of a habit long forgotten-to brush it back.

"'There," Otah said and picked up his wine bowl. "There, I've said it."

"I'm sorry," Liat said, and Otah took a pose accepting her sympathy without knowing quite why she was offering it. She looked down at her hands. The silence between them was profound but not uncomfortable; he felt no need to speak, to fill the void with words. Liat drank her wine, Otah his. The wind muttered to itself and to the stones of the city.

"It's not a job I'd want," Liat said. "Khai NIachi."

"It's all power and no freedom," Otah said. "If Nayiit were to have it, he'd likely curse my name. There are a thousand different things to attend to, and every one of them as serious as bone to someone. You can't do it all."

"I know how it feels," Liat said. "I only have a trading house to look after, and there's days I wish that it would all go away. Granted, I have men who work the books and the negotiations and appeals before the low judges and the utkhaiem ..

"I have all the low judges and the utkhaiem appealing to me," Otah said. "It's never enough."

""I'here's always the descent into decadence and self-absorption," Liat said, smiling. It was only half a joke. "They say the Khai Chaburi- 'Ian only gets sober long enough to bed his latest wife."

"Tcnipting," Otah said, "but somewhere between taking the chair to protect Kiyan and tonight, it became my city. I came from here, and even if I'm not much good at what I do, I'm what they have."

""That makes sense," Liat said.

"Does it? It doesn't to me."

Liat put down her bowl and rose. He thought her gaze spoke of determination and melancholy, but perhaps the latter was only his own. She stepped close and kissed him on the check, a firm peck like an aunt greeting a favorite nephew.

"Amat Kyaan would have understood," she said. "I won't tell Nayiit about this. If anyone asks, I'll deny it unless I hear differently from you."

""I'hank you, Liat-cha."

She stepped back. Otah felt a terrible weariness bearing him down, but forced a charming smile. She shook her head.

""Thank you, Most High."

"I don't think I've done anything worth thanking me."

"You let my son live," Liat said. "That was one of the decisions you had to make, wasn't it?"

She took his silence as an answer, smiled again, and left him alone. Otah poured the last of the wine from carafe to howl, and then watched the light die in the west as he finished it; watched the stars come out, and the full moon rise. With every day, the light lasted longer. It would not always. High summer would come, and even when the days were at their warmest, when the trees and vines grew heavy with fruit, the nights would already have started their slow expansion. He wondered whether Danat would get to play outside in the autumn, whether the boy would be able to spend a long afternoon lying in the sunlight before the snows came and drove them all down to the tunnels. He was raising a child to live in darkness and planning for his death.

There had been a time Otah had been young and sure enough of himself to kill. He had taken the life of a good man because they both had known the price that would have to be paid if he lived. He had been able to do that.

But he had seen forty-eight summers now. There were likely fewer seasons before him than there were behind. He'd fathered three children and raised two. He could no longer hold himself apart from the world. It was his to see that the city was a place that Danat and Eiah and children like them could live safe and cared for until they too grew old and uncertain.

He looked at the swirl of red at the bottom of his bowl. Too much wine, and too much memory. It was making him maudlin. He stopped at his private chambers and allowed the servants to switch his robes to something less formal. Kiyan lay on a couch, her eyes closed, her breath deep and regular. Otah didn't wake her, only slid one of the books from his bedside table into the sleeve of his robe and kissed her temple as he left.

The physician's assistant was seated outside Danat's door. The man took a pose of greeting. Otah responded in kind and then nodded to the closed door.

"Is he asleep?" he whispered.

"He's been waiting for you."

Otah slipped into the room. Candles flickered above two great iron statues that flanked the bed-hunting cats with the wings of hawks. Soot darkened their wings from a day spent in the fire grates, and they radiated the warmth that kept the cool night breeze at bay. Danat sat up in his bed, pulling aside the netting.

"Papa-kya!" he said. He didn't cough, didn't sound frail. It was a good day, then. Otah felt a tightness he had not known he carried loosen its grip on his heart. He pulled his robes up around his knees and sat on his son's bed. "Did you bring it?" Danat asked.

Otah drew the book from his sleeve, and the boy's face lit so bright, he might have almost read by him.

"Now, you lie back," Otah said. "I've come to help you sleep, not keep you up all night."

I)anat plopped down onto his pillow, looking like the farthest thing from sleep. Otah opened the book, turning through the ancient pages until he found his place.

"In the sixteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Adani Bch, there came to court a boy whose blood was half Bakta, his skin the color of soot, and his mind as clever as any man who has ever lived...."

"THIS IS SPRING?" NAYIIT SAID AS THEY WALKED. THE WIND HAD BLOWN away even the constant scent of forge smoke, and brought in a mild chill. Mild, at least, to Maati. Nayiit wore woolen robes, thick enough that they had hardly rippled. Maati's own were made for summer, and pressed against him, leaving, he was sure, no doubt to the shape of his legs and belly. He wished he'd thought to wear something heavier too.

"It's always like this," Maati said. "There's one last death throe, and then the heat will come on. Still nothing like the summer cities, even at its worst. I remember in Saraykeht, I had a trail of sweat down my hack for weeks at a time."

"We call that pleasantly warm," Nayiit said, and Maati chuckled.

In truth, the chill, moonless night was hardly anything to him now. For over a decade, he'd lived through the bone-cracking cold of Machi winters. He'd seen snowdrifts so high that even the second-story doors couldn't be opened. He'd been out on days so cold the men coated their faces with thick-rendered fat to keep their skin from freezing. "There was no way to describe those brief, bitter days to someone who had never seen them. So instead, he told Nayiit of the life below ground, the tunnels of Machi, the bathhouses hidden deep below the surface, the streets and apartments and warehouses, the glitter of winter dew turning to frost on the stone of the higher passages. He spoke of the choirs who took the long, empty weeks to compose new songs and practice old ones-weeks spent in the flickering, buttery light of oil lamps surrounded by music.

"I'm amazed people don't stay down there," Nayiit said as they turned a corner and left the white and silver paths of the palaces behind for the black-cobbled streets of the city proper. "It sounds like one huge, warm bed."

"It has its pleasures," Maati agreed. "But people get thirsty for sunlight. As soon as they can stand it, people start making treks up to the streets. "They'll go up and lie naked on an ice sheet sometimes just to drink in a little more light. And the river freezes, so the children will go skating on it. There's only about seven weeks when no one comes up. Here. This street. There's a sweet wine they serve at this place that's like nothing you've ever tasted."

It was less awkward than he'd expected, spending the evening with Nayiit. The first time the boy had come to the library alone-tentative and uncertain-Maati had been acutely aware of Liat's absence. She had always been there, even in the ancient days before they had parted. Maati knew how to speak with Liat whether she was alone or with their son, and Nlaati had discovered quickly how much he'd relied upon her to mediate between him and the boy. The silences had been awkward, the conversations forced. Nlaati had said something of how pleased he was that Nayiit had come to Machi and felt in the end that he'd only managed to embarrass them both.

It was going to the teahouses and bathhouses and epics that let them speak at last. Once there was a hit of shared experience, a toehold, Maati was able to make conversation, and Nayiit was an expert listener to stories. For several nights in a row, Maati found himself telling tales of the Dai-kvo and the school, the history of Machi and the perils he had faced years ago when he'd been sent to hunt Otah-kvo down. In the telling, he discovered that, to his profound surprise, his life had been interesting.

The platform rested at the base of one of the lower towers, chains thick as a man's arm clanking against it and against the stone as they rose up into the sky like smoke. Nayiit paused to stare up at it, and Maati followed his gaze. The looming, inhuman bulk of the tower, and beyond it the full moon hanging like a lantern of rice paper in the black sky.

"Does anyone ever fall from up there?" Nayiit asked.

"Once every year or so," Maati said. "There's winter storage up there, so there are laborers carrying things in the early spring and middle autumn. There are accidents. And the utkhaiem will hold dances at the tops of them sometimes. They say wine gets you drunk faster at the top, but I don't know if that's true. Then sometimes men kill themselves by stepping through the sky doors when the platform's gone down. It would happen more if there were people up there more often. Otah-kvo has a plan for channeling the air from the forges up through the center of one so it would he warm enough to use in the winter, but we've never figured out how to make the change without bringing the whole thing down."

Nayiit shuddered, and Maati was willing to pretend it was the wind. He put his arm on the boy's shoulder and steered him farther down the street to a squat stone building with a copper roof gone as green as trees with time. Inside, the air was warmed by braziers. Two old men were playing tin-and-silver flutes while a young woman kept time on a small drum and sang. Half a hundred bodies were seated at long wooden tables or on benches. The place was rich with the smell of roast lamb even though the windows were unshuttered; it was as if no one in Machi would miss the chance for fresh air. Maati sympathized.

He and Nayiit took a bench in the hack, away from singers and song. The serving boy was hardly as old as F,iah, but he knew his trade. It seemed fewer than a dozen heartbeats before he brought them bowls of sweet wine and a large worked-silver bowl filled with tender slivers of green: spring peas fresh from the vines. Maati, hands full, nodded his thanks.

"And you've worked your whole life in House Kyaan, then?" Maati asked. "What does Liat have you doing?"

"Since we've been traveling, I haven't been doing much at all. Before that, I had been working the needle trades," Nayiit said as he tucked one leg up under him. It made him sit taller. "The spinners, the dyers, the tailors, and the sailmakers and all like that. They aren't as profitable as they were in the days before Seedless was lost, but they still make up a good deal of the business in Saraykeht."

"Habits," Maati said. "The cotton trade's always been in Saraykeht. People don't like change, so it doesn't move away so quickly as it might. Another generation and it'll all be scattered throughout the world."

"Not if I do my work," Nayiit said with a smile that showed he hadn't taken offense.

"Fair point," Maati said. "I only mean that's what you have to work against. It would be easier if there was still an andat in the city that helped with the cotton trade the way Seedless did."

"You knew it, didn't you? Seedless, I mean."

"I was supposed to take him over," Maati said. "The way Cehmai took Stone-Made-Soft from his master, I was to take Seedless from Heshai-kvo. In a way, I was lucky. Seedless was flawed work. Dangerously flawed. Brilliant, don't misunderstand. Heshai-kvo did brilliant work when he bound Seedless, but he made the andat very clever and profoundly involved with destroying the poet. They all want to be free-it's their nature-but Seedless was more than that. He was vicious."

"You sound as though you were fond of it," Nayiit said, only halfteasing.

"We were friendly enough, in our fashion," Maati said. "We wouldn't have been if things had gone by the I)ai-kvo's plan. If I'd become the poet of Saraykeht, Seedless would have bent himself to destroying me just the way he had to Ileshai-kvo."

"Have you ever tried to bind one of the andat?"

"Once. When Heshai died, I had the mad thought that I could somehow retrieve Seedless. I had IIcshai-kvo's notes. Still have them, for that. I even began the ceremonies, but it would never have worked. What I had was too much like what Heshai had done. It would have failed, and I'd have paid its price."

"And then I suppose I would never have been horn," Nayiit said.

"You would have," Nlaati said, solemnly. "Liat-kya didn't know she was carrying you when she stopped me, but she was. I thought about it, afterward. About binding another of the andat, I mean. I even spent part of a winter once doing the basic work for one I called Returning to-True. I don't know what I would have done with it, precisely. Unbent things, I suppose. I'd have been brilliant repairing axles. But my mind was too fuzzy. There were too many things I meant, and none of them precisely enough."

The musicians ended their song and stood to a roar of approving voices and bowls of wine bought by their admirers. One of the old men walked through the house with a lacquer begging box in his hand. Maati fumbled in his sleeve, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into the box with a satisfying click.

"And then, I also wasn't in the Dai-kvo's best graces," Maati continued. "After Saraykeht ... Well, I suppose it's poor etiquette to let your master die and the andat escape. I wasn't blamed outright, but it was always hanging there. The memory of it."

"It can't have helped that you brought back a lover and a child," Nayiit said.

"No, it didn't. But I was very young and very full of myself. It's not easy, being told that you are of the handful of men in the world who might be able to control one of the andat. "lends to create a sense of being more than you are. I thought I could do anything. And maybe I could have, but I tried to do everything, and that isn't the same." He sighed and ate a pea pod. Its flesh was crisp and sweet and tasted of spring. When he spoke again, he tried to make his voice light and joking. "I didn't wind up doing a particularly good job of either endeavor."

"It seems to me you've done well enough," Nayiit said as he waved at the serving boy for more wine. "You've made yourself a place in the court here, you've been able to study in the libraries here, and from what Mother says, you've found something no one else ever has. That alone is more than most men manage in a lifetime."

"I suppose," Maati said. He wanted to go on, wanted to say that most men had children, raised them up, watched them become women and men. He wanted to tell this charming boy who stood now where Maati himself once had that he regretted that he had not been able to enjoy those simple pleasures. Instead, he took another handful of pea pods. He could tell that Nayiit sensed his reservations, heard the longing in the brevity of his reply. When the boy spoke, his tone was light.

"I've spent all my life-well, since I've been old enough to think of it as really mine and not something Mother's let me borrow-with House Kyaan. Running errands, delivering contracts. That's how I started, at least. Mother always told me I had to do better than the other boys who worked for the house because I was her son, and if people thought I was getting favors because of it, they wouldn't respect her or me. She was right. I can see that. At the time it all seemed monstrously unfair, though."

"Do you like the work?" Maati asked.

The girl with the drum began tapping a low tattoo, her voice droning in a lament. Maati shifted to look at Nayiit. The boy's gaze was fixed on the singer, his expression melancholy. The urge to put his hand to Nayiit's shoulder, to offer some comfort, however powerless, moved through Maati and faded. He sat still and quiet as the chant rose, the anguish in the singer's voice growing until the air of the teahouse hummed with it, and then it faded into despair. The man with the lacquer box came past again, but Maati didn't put in any copper this time.

"You and Mother. You're lovers again?"

"I suppose so," Maati said, surprised to feel a blush in his cheeks. "It happens sometimes."

"What happens when you're called away to the Dai-kvo?"

"Are we walking the same path a second time, you mean? We're waiting to hear two things from the Dal-kvo-whether he thinks my speculations about avoiding the price of a failed binding are worth looking into and whether to act against Galt. Either one puts me someplace away from Liat. But we aren't who we were then. I don't pretend that we can be. And anyway, I have all the habits of being without her. I've missed her for more years than I spent in her company."

I have missed you, he thought but didn't say. I have missed you, and it's too late now for anything more than awkward conversations and late nights getting drunk together. Nothing will ever make that right.

"Do you regret that?" Nayiit asked. "If you could go hack and do things again, would you want to love her less? Would you want to have gone to the Dai-kvo and been able to leave that ... that longing behind you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

Nayiit looked up.

"I would hate her, if I were you. I would think she'd taken my chance to be what I was supposed to be, to do what I could have done. "There you were, a poet, and favored enough that you were expected to hold the andat, and because of her you fell into disfavor. Because of her, and because of me." Nayiit's jaw clenched, his eyes only a half shade darker than the pale brown of his mother's staring at something that wasn't there, his attention turned inward. "I don't know how you stand the sight of us."

"It wasn't like that," Maati said. "It was never like that. If it were all mine again, I would have followed her."

The words struck the boy hard. His gaze lost its focus; his mouth tightened like that of a man in pain.

"What is it, Nayiit-kya?"

Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face. He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.

"Something's bothering you," Maati said.

"It's nothing. I've only ... It's not worth talking about."

"Something's bothering you, son."

He had never said the word aloud. Son. Nayiit had never heard it from his lips, not since he'd been too young for it to mean anything. Maati felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock on the boy's face. This was the moment, then, that he'd feared and longed for. Fie waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread the ground.

Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to hear over the music and the crowd, "I'm trying to choose between what I am and what I want to be. I'm trying to want what I'm supposed to want. And I'm failing."

"I see."

"I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I want to want them. And I don't. I don't know whether to walk away from them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but. . ."

Maati settled hack on the bench, put down his howl still half full of wine, and took Naviit's hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father.

"Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me all of it."

"It would take all night," the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he didn't pull hack his hand.

"Let it," Maati said. "There's nothing more important than this."

BALASAR HADN'T SLEPT. THE NIGHT HAD COME, A LATE RAIN SHOWER FILLing the air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn't come.

The orders waited in stacks on his desk in the library, commands to he issued to each of his captains, outlining the first stage of his campaign. There were two sets, of course, just as the Khaiate mercenary captain had surmised. 'T'hose he'd sealed in green would lead the army to the North, laying waste to the Westlands and sending the thin stream of gold and silver that could be wrung from them back to the coffers of the High Council. Those he'd sealed in red would wheel the army-twenty thousand armsmcn, three hundred steam wagons, six thousand horses, and God only knew how many servants and camp followers-to the east and the most glorious act of conquest the world had ever known.

If he succeeded, he would he remembered as the greatest general in history, at least in his audacity. The battles themselves he expected to he simple enough. The Khaiem had no experience in tactics and no armies to protect them. Balasar would he remembered for two things only: the unimaginable wealth he was about to pour into Galt and the ceremony that would come with the dawn. The plot that stripped the andat from the world.

As the dark hours passed, the thought pricked at him. He had put everything in place. The poet, the books that concerned FreedomFrom-Bondage, the army, the arms. There was nothing he would ever do that would match this season. Succeed or fail, this was the highwater mark of his life. He imagined himself an old man, sitting at a street cafe in Kirinton. He wondered what those years would be like, reaching from here to the grave. He wondered what it would he like to have his greatness behind him. He told himself that he would retire. "There would he enough wealth to acquire anything he wanted. A reasonable estate of his own, a wife, children; that seemed enough. If he could not regain this season, he could at least not humiliate himself by trying. He thought of the war leaders who haunted the corridors and wineshops of Acton reliving triumphs the world had forgotten. He would not he one of those. He would he the great General who had done his work and then stepped hack to let the world he had made safe follow its path.

At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing, and then did it.

Or else he would fail and he and every Galtic man and woman would be a corpse or a refugee.

I Ic twisted in his sheets. The stars shone where the clouds were thin enough to permit it. Framed in the opened shutters, they glittered. The stars wouldn't care what happened here. And yet by the next time their light silvered these stones, the fate of the world would have turned one way or the other.

Once, he came near to sleep. His eyes grew heavy, his mind began to wander into the half-sense of dreams. And then, irrationally, he became certain that he had mixed one of the orders. The memory, at first vague but clearer as he struggled to capture it, of sealing a packet with red that should have been green swam through his mind. He thought he might have noted at the time that it would need changing. And yet he hadn't done it. The wrong orders would go out. A legion would start to the North while the others moved cast. They would lose time finding the error, correcting it. Or the poet would fail, and some stray company of armsmen would find its way to Nantani and reveal him to the Khaiem. Half a thousand stories plagued him, each less likely than the last. His sense of dread grew.

At last, half in distress and half in disgust, he rose, pulled on a heavy cotton shirt and light trousers, and walked barefoot from his room toward the library. He would have to open them all, check them, reseal them, and keep a careful tally so that the crazed monkey that had taken possession of his mind could be calmed. He wondered, as he passed through hallways lit only by his single candle, whether Uther Redcape had ever rechecked his own plans in the dead night like an old, fearful merchant rattling his own shutters to be sure they were latched. Perhaps these indignities were part of what any man suffered when the weight of so many lives was on his back.

The guards outside his library door stood at attention as he passed them, whatever gossip or complaint they had been using to pass the dark hours of the night forgotten at the first sight of him. Balasar nodded to them gravely before passing through the door. With the stub of his bedside candle, he lit the lanterns in the library until the soft glow filled the air. The orders lay where he had left them. With a sigh, he took out the bricks of colored wax and his private seal. 'T'hen he began the long, tedious task of cracking each seal, reviewing his commands, and putting the packets back in order again. The candle stub had fizzled to nothing and the lanterns' oil visibly dropped before he was finished. The memory had been a lie. Everything had been in place. Balasar stood, stretched, and went to the window. When he opened the shutters, the cool breeze felt fresh as a bath. Birds were singing, though there was no light yet in the east. The full moon was near to setting. The dawn was coming. "There would be no sleep for him. Not now.

A soft scratch came at the door, and after Balasar called his permission, Eustin entered. There were dark pouches under the man's eyes, but that was the only sign that he had managed no better with his sleep. His uniform was crisp and freshly laundered, the marks of rank on his back and breast, his hair was tied back and fastened with a thick silver ceremonial bead, and there was an energy in all his movements that Balasar understood. Eustin was dressed to witness the change of the world. Balasar was suddenly aware of his rough clothes and bare feet.

"What news?" Balasar said.

"He's been up all through the night, sir. Meditating, reading, preparing. Truth is I don't know that half of what he's done is needed, but he's been doing it all the same."

"Almost none of it's strictly called for," Balasar said. "But if it makes him feel better, let him."

"Yes, sir. I've called for his breakfast. He says that he'll want to wait a half a hand for his food to go down, and then it's time. Says that dawn's a symbolic moment, and that it'll help."

"I suppose I'll be getting prepared, then," Balasar said. "If this isn't a full-dress occasion, I don't know what is."

"I've sent men to wait for the signal. We should know by nightfall."

Balasar nodded. All along the highest hills from Nantani to Aren, bonfires were set. If all worked as they hoped, there would be a signal from the agents he had placed in the city, and they would be lit, each in turn. A thin line of fire would reach from the Khaiem to his own door.

"Have a mug of kafe and some bread sent to my rooms," Balasar said. "I'll meet you before the ceremony."

"Not more than that, sir? The bacon's good here...."

"After," Balasar said. "I'll eat a decent meal after."

The room given them by the Warden had been in its time a warehouse, a meeting hall, and a temple, the last being the most recent. Tapestries of the Four Gods the Warden worshipped had been taken down, rolled up, and stacked in the corner like carpet. The smooth stone walls were marked with symbols, some familiar to Balasar, others obscure. The eastern wall was covered with the flowing script of the fallen Empire, like a page from a book of poetry. A single pillow rested in the center of the room, and beside it a stack of books, two with covers of ruined leather, one whose cover had been ripped from it, and one last closed in bright metal. It had been years since Balasar had carried those books out of the desert wastes. He nodded to them when he saw them, as if they were old friends or perhaps enemies.

Riaan himself was walking around the room with long, slow strides. He breathed in audibly with one step, blew the air out on the next. His face was deeply relaxed; his arms were swinging free at his sides. To look at the two of them, Balasar guessed he would look more like the man about to face death. He took a pose of respect and greeting. The poet came slowly to a halt, and returned the gesture.

"I trust all is well with you," Balasar said in the tongue of the Khaiem.

"I am ready," Riaan said, with a smile that made him seem almost gentle. "I wanted to thank you, Balasar-cha, for this opportunity. 't'hese are strange times that men such as you and I should find common cause. The structures of the I)ai-kvo have caused good men to suffer for too many generations. I honor you for the role you have played in bringing me here."

Balasar bowed his head. Over the years he had known many men whose minds had been touched by wounds-blows from swords or stones, or fevers like the one that had prompted Riaan's fall from favor. Balasar knew how impulsive and unreliable a man could become after such an injury. But he also knew that with many there was also a candor and honesty, if only because they lacked the ability they had once had to dissemble. Against his own will, he found himself touched by the man's words.

"We all do what fate calls us to," he said. "It's no particular virtue of mine.

The poet smiled because he didn't understand what Balasar meant. And that was just as well. Eustin arrived moments later and made formal greeting to them both.

"There's breakfast waiting for us, when we're done here," Eustin said, and even such mundane words carried a depth.

"Well then," Balasar said, turning to Riaan. The poet nodded and took a pose more complex than Balasar could parse, but that seemed to be a farewell from a superior to someone of a lower class. Then Riaan dropped his pose and walked with a studied grace to the cushion in the room's center. Balasar stood against the back wall and nodded for Eustin to join him. He was careful not to obscure the symbols painted there, though Riaan wasn't looking back toward them.

For what seemed half a day and was likely no more than two dozen breaths together, the poet was silent, and then he began, nearly under his breath, to chant. Balasar knew the basic form of a binding, though the grammars that were used for the deepest work were beyond him. It was thought, really. Like a translation-a thought held that became something like a man as a song in a Westlands tongue might take new words in Galt but hold the same meaning. The chant was a device of memory and focus, and Balasar remained silent.

Slowly, the sound of the poet's voice grew, filling the space with words that seemed on the edge of comprehension. The sound began to echo, as if the room were much larger than the walls that Balasar could see, and something like a wind that somehow did not stir the air began to twist through the space. For a moment, he was in the desert again, feeling the air change, hearing Little Ott's shriek. Balasar put his arm back, palm pressed against the stone wall. He was here, he was in Aren. The chanting grew, and it was as if there were other voices now. Beside him, Eustin had gone pale. Sweat stood on the man's lip.

Under Balasar's fingertips, the wall seemed to shift. The stone hummed, dancing with the words of the chant. The script on the front wall shifted restlessly until Balasar squinted and the letters remained in their places. The air was thick.

"Sir," Eustin whispered, "I think it might he best if we stepped out, left him to-"

"No," Balasar said. "Watch this. It's the last time it's ever going to happen."

lr,ustin nodded curtly and turned with what seemed physical strain to look ahead. Riaan had risen, standing where the cushion had been, or perhaps he was floating. Or perhaps he was sitting just as he had been. Something had happened to the nature of the space between them. And then, like seven flutes moving from chaos to harmony, the world itself chimed, a note as deep as oceans and pure as dawn. Balasar felt his heart grow light for a moment, a profound joy filling him that had nothing to do with triumph, and there, standing before the seated poet, was a naked man, bald as a baby, with eyes white as salt.

The blast pressed Balasar back against the wall. His ears rang, and Eustin's voice seemed to come from a great distance.

"Riaan, sir!"

Balasar fought to focus his eyes. Riaan was still seated where he had been, but his shoulders were slumped, his head bowed is if in sleep. Balasar walked over to him, the sound of his own footsteps lost in his half-deafened state. It was like floating.

He was breathing. The poet breathed.

"Did it work, sir?" Eustin yelled from half a mile away or else there at his shoulder. "Does that mean it worked?"