An Autumn War (41 page)

"Yes, sir," Eustin said.

They sat on couches while pine logs burned in the grate, sap hissing and popping and sending up sparks. True to his word, Balasar sent for rice wine infused with cherries and the stiff salty brown cheese that was a local delicacy of 'Ian-Sadar. Eustin recounted his season-the attack on Pathai, his decision to split the force before moving on to the poet's school. Pathai hadn't been as large or as wealthy as a port city like Nantani, but it was near the Westlands. Moving what wealth it had back to Galt would be simpler than the other inland cities.

"And the school?" Balasar said, and a cloud passed over Eustin's face.

""They were younger than I'd thought. It wasn't the sort of thing they sing about. Unless they're singing laments. Then, maybe."

"It was necessary."

"I know, sir. "That's why we did it."

Balasar poured him another cup of the wine, and then one for himself, and they drank in silence together before Eustin went on with his report. The men they'd sent to take the Southern cities had managed quite well, apart from an incident with poisoned grain in Lachi and a fire at the warehouses of Saraykeht. That matched with what Balasar himself had heard. All the poets had been found, all the books had been burned. No Khai had lived or left heir.

In return, Balasar shared what news he had from the North. TanSadar, the nearest city to the I)ai-kvo, had known about the destruction of the village for weeks before Balasar's prisoner-envoys had arrived. The story was also widely known of the battle; one of the Khaiem in the winter cities had fielded an army of sorts. The estimates of the dead went from several hundred to thousands. Few, if any, had been Coal's. The retelling of that tale as much as the sacking of Udun had broken the back of Utani and TanSadar.

A letter in Coal's short, understated style had conic south after Amnat-"Ian had fallen. Another courier was due any day bringing the news of Cetani and Machi. But if Coal had kept to the pace he'd intended, those cities were also fallen.

"It'll he good to know for certain, though," Eustin said.

"I trust him," Balasar said.

"Didn't mean anything else, sir."

"No. Of course not. You're right. It will he good to know it's done." Balasar took a bite of the brown cheese and stared at the dancing flames where the wood glowed and blackened and fell to ash. "You'll put your men in I'tani?"

"Or send some downriver. Depends how much food there is. There's more than a few who'd he willing to make a winter crossing if it meant getting home to start spending their shares."

"We have made a large number of very rich soldiers," Balasar said.

""They'll he poor again in a season or two, but the dice stands in Kirinton will still he singing our praises when our grandsons are old," Eustin said, then paused. "What about our local man?"

"Captain Ajutani? lie's here, in the city. Wintering here with the rest of us. He's done quite well for himself. And for us. I le's given me some very good advice."

Eustin grunted and shook his head.

"Still don't trust him, sir."

"He's more or less out of opportunities to betray us," Balasar said, and Eustin spat into the fire by way of reply.

Over the next days, the arms' shifted slowly from the rigorous discipline of the road to the bawdy, long, low riot that comes with wintering in a captured city. The locals-tradesmen and laborers and utkhaiem alikeseemed stunned by the change. They were polite and accommodating because Balasar's men were armed and practiced and thousands strong, but as Balasar walked down the long, winding red brick streets, he had the feeling that "Ian-Sadar was hoping to wake from this nightmare and find the world once again as it had been. A hard, bitter wind came from the North, and behind it, the season's first thin, tentative snow.

lie found his mind turning hack to the west and home. The darkness Eustin had seen in him grew with the prospect of returning. The years he had spent gathering the threads of his campaign had come to their end; that it was ending in triumph only partly forgave that it was ending. He found himself wondering who he would be now that he was no longer the man driven to destroy the andat. In the mornings, he imagined himself living on his hereditary estate near Kirinton, perhaps taking a wife. Perhaps teaching in one of the military academics. All his old dreams revisited. As the sun peaked low in the sky and scuttled toward the horizon, the fantasy darkened too. He would be a racing dog with nothing left to chase. And worst, in the dark of the nights, he tried to sleep, his mind pricked by another day gone by without word from the North and the sick fear that despite all their successes, something had gone wrong.

And then, on a cold, clear morning, the courier from Coal arrived. Only it wasn't from Coal. Not really. Because Coal was dead, and Balasar had another ghost at his heels.

""I'hey came without warning," Balasar said. ""They were hiding in the trees, like street bandits. He was the first to fall."

"I'm sorry to hear it," Sinja said. "It was a dishonorable attack. Not that the honorable one did them much good from what I've heard."

Eustin's face might have been carved from stone.

"You have a point to make, Captain?" Balasar asked.

"Only that he did make an honest man's try on the field outside the Dal-kvo's village, and he failed. "There's only so much you can count against him that he tried a different tack."

He killed my men, Balasar wanted to say. Wanted to shout. He killed Coal.

Instead, he paced the length of the wide parlor, staring at the maps he'd unrolled after he'd unsewn the letter from the remnants of the northern force. The oil lamps hung from their chains, adding a thick buttery light to the thin gray sunlight that filtered in from the windows. Cetani was occupied, but the library was emptied, Khai and poet missing along with the full population of the city. Machi remained. The last of the poets, the last of the books, the last of the Khaiem. His fingertips traced the route that would take him there.

"It's no use, General," Sinja said. "You can't put an army in the field this late in the season. It's too cold. One half-decent storm will freeze them to death."

"It's still autumn," Dustin said. "Winter's not come quite yet."

"It's a Northern autumn," Sinja said. "You're thinking it's like Eddensea, but I'll tell you it's not. There's no ocean nearby to hold the heat in. General, Machi isn't going anywhere between now and the first thaw. The Dal-kvo's meat on a stick. Your man burned his books. "I'hev have the same chance of binding a fresh andat before spring that I have of growing wings and flying. And you have every chance of killing more of your men than have died since we left the \Vestlands if you go out there now."

"' ou've always given me good advice, Captain Ajutani," Balasar said. "I appreciate your wisdom on this."

"I wouldn't call it wisdom particularly," Sinja said. "Just a common interest in not turning into ice sculpture in a bean field somewhere be-twwwecn here and there."

"Thank you," Balasar said, his tone making it clear that the meeting had ended. Sinja saluted Balasar, nodded to Eustin, and made his way out. The door closed with a click. F,ustin coughed.

"Do you think he's lying?" Balasar said. "I le'd been living in \lachi. If there were a place he didn't rant captured, it would be there."

Eustin frowned, arms folded across his chest. lie looked older, Balasar thought. The grief of losing Coal was heavy on his shoulders too. In a sense, they were the last. 'T'here were other men who had taken part in the campaign, but only the two of them had been there from the beginning. Only they had been to the desert. And so there was no one else who could have this conversation and truly understand it.

"I le's not lying," Eustin said. I lis voice was thick. Balasar could hear how much it had cost him to agree with Sinja. "h,verything I've heard says the cold up there is deadly. It's not a pleasant day out now, and the season's milder here."

"And Nlachi's army?"

Eustin shrugged.

"It wasn't an honorable fight," he said. "If we empty t'tani and "lan-Sadar, we've got something near three times the men Coal had at the end."

It would take them weeks to reach Nlachi, even if they started now. A bad storm would be worse than a battle. "Ian-Sadar, on the other hand, was a safe place to winter, and when the spring came, they could overwhelm Machi in safety. They could revenge Coal a thousand times over. 'T'here was no army that could come to \lachi's aid. Meaningful defenses for the city couldn't be built in that time.

Snow was the only armor the enemy had, and the turning seasons would he enough to remove it. Every strategist in Galt would counsel that he wait, plan, prepare, rest. But there were poets in Machi, and all the world to lose if he failed.

He looked up from the maps. His gaze met Eustin's, and they stood together in silence, the only two men in the world who would look at these facts, these odds, these stakes, and have no need to debate them.

"I'll break it to the men," Eustin said.

Chapter 20

"`And quietly, one foot sliding behind the other, for the parapet was too narrow to walk along, the half-Bakta boy went from his own prison chamber around to the bars of the Empress's cell."' Utah paused, letting the half-Bakta boy hang in the air outside the prison tower. And this time I)anat failed to object. I lis eyes were closed, his breathing heavy and regular. Utah sat for a moment, watching his boy sleep, then closed the hook, tucked it in its place by the door, and put out the lantern. [)gnat murmured and snuggled more deeply into his blankets as Utah carefully opened the door and stepped out into the tunnel.

The physician set to watch over I)anat took a pose of obeisance to Otah, and Otah replied with one of thanks before walking to the North, and to the broad spiral stairway that led tip to the higher chambers of the underground palace or else down to Otah's own rooms and the women's quarters. Small brass lanterns filled the air with their warmth and the scent of oil. The walls were lighter than sandstone and shone brighter than the Hanes seemed to warrant. At the stairway, he hesitated.

Above him, Nlachi was beginning its descent into the other city, washing down into the rooms and corridors reserved for the deep, long winter that was almost upon them. The bathhouses far above had emptied their pipes, shunting the water from their kilns down to lower pools. The towers were being filled with goods of summer, the great platforms crawling tip their tracks in the unforgiving stone, and then down again. In the wide, vaulted corridors that would become the main roads and public squares of the winter, beggars sang and food carts filled the air with rich, warm scents: beef soup and peppered pork, fish on hot rice, almond milk and honey cakes. The men and women pulling the carts would he calling, luring the curious and the hungry and the almost-hungry.

Only, of course, they wouldn't he there this winter. Food was no longer an item available for trade. It was being rationed out by the utkhaiem and by the exquisite mechanisms that Kiyan had put in place. The men and women of Cetani had been housed there or in the mines along the plain even before Otah and his army had returned with the news that the Galts had been turned back. Now, with the quarters being shared, there were two and sometimes three families sharing the space meant for one.

There was a part of him that wanted badly to take the stairs leading up, to go out of the palaces, and into the webwork of passages and tunnels one layered upon another that were his city. He knew it was an illusion to think that seeing things would improve them, make them easier to control and make right. But it was a powerful illusion.

Ile sighed and took the descending stairs. ']'he women's quartersdesigned to accommodate a Khai's dozen or more wives-had been changed over to smaller, more private rooms by the addition of a few planks of wood and tapestries taken from the palaces above. The utkhaiem of Cetani-husbands and wives together-found some accommodations there. It had seemed an obvious choice, and Kiyan had never particularly made use of her rooms there. And still it seemed odd to have people so close. Late in the night, he could sometimes hear the voices of people passing by.

The great blue and gold doors to his private apartments stood closed, two guards on either side. Otah noticed as he accepted their salutes how quickly he had come to think of these men as guards where before they had only been servants. "Their duties were no different, their robes just the same. It wasn't the world that had changed. It was him.

I IC found Kiyan sitting at a low table, combing her hair with a widetoothed comb. Wordless, he took it from her, sitting beside and behind her, and did the little task himself. Her hair was coarser than it had been once, and so shot with white that it seemed almost as much silver as black. I le saw the subtle curve in the shape of her cheek as she smiled.

"I heard the Khai Cetani speaking today," she said.

"Really?"

"l le was in one of the teahouses. And, honestly, not one of the best ones.

"I won't ask what you were doing in a third-rate tea house," Otah said, and Kiyan chuckled.

"Nothing more scandalous than listening to the Khai," she said. "But that might be enough. Ile thinks quite highly of you."

"Oh gods," Otah said. "Did the term come up again?"

"Yes, the word emperor figured highly in the conversation. He seems to think the sun shines brighter when you tell it to."

"Ile seems to forget that first battle where I got everyone killed. And that I didn't manage to keep the [)ai-kvo from being slaughtered."

"Ile doesn't forget. But lie does say you were the only man who tried to stop the Galts, who banded cities together instead of letting them fall one at a time, and in the end the only man who put them to flight."

"He should stop that," Utah said, and sighed. "Ile seemed so reasonable when I first met him. Who'd have guessed he was so easily wooed."

"He may not he wrong, you know. We'll need to do something when this is over. An emperor or a way to choose new families to act as Khaiem. A I)ai-kvo. That would have to be ylaati or Cehmai, wouldn't it:'