'Always happens at the end of a campaign, sir. You fall into a black mood for a few weeks. Happened in Eddensea and after the siege at Malsam. All respect, sir, it's like watching my sister after she's birthed a babe.'

Balasar laughed. It felt good to laugh, and to smile, and to be reminded that the foul mood that had come on him was something he often suffered. In truth, he had forgotten. He took Eustin's hand in his own.

'Good to have you back,' Balasar said. 'I didn't know you'd returned.'

'I would have sent a runner to pa.s.s the news, but it seemed faster if I came myself.'

'Come up,' Balasar said. 'Tell me what's happened.'

'It might be best if I saw a bathhouse, sir . . .'

'Later,' Balasar said. 'If you can stand the reek, I can. And besides, you deserve some discomfort after that birthing comment. Come up, and I'll have them send us wine and food.'

'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 Tan-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 pa.s.sed 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. Tan-Sadar, the nearest city to the Dai-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 Tan-Sadar.

A letter in Coal's short, understated style had come south after Amnat-Tan 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 be 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 be 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 Utani?'

'Or send some downriver. Depends how much food there is. There's more than a few who'd be 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 be poor again in a season or two, but the dice stands in Kirinton will still be singing our praises when our grandsons are old,' Eustin said, then paused. 'What about our local man?'

'Captain Ajutani? He's here, in the city. Wintering here with the rest of us. He's done quite well for himself. And for us. He'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 army 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 alike - seemed 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 Tan-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.

He found his mind turning back 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 academies. 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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.

'They 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 Dai-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 b.u.t.tery 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,' Eustin 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 Dai-kvo's meat on a stick. Your man burned his books. They 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 Westlands if you go out there now.'

'You'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 between 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. Eustin coughed.

'Do you think he's lying?' Balasar said. 'He'd been living in Machi. If there were a place he didn't want captured, it would be there.'

Eustin frowned, arms folded across his chest. He looked older, Balasar thought. The grief of losing Coal was heavy on his shoulders too. In a sense, they were the last. There 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.

'He's not lying,' Eustin said. His voice was thick. Balasar could hear how much it had cost him to agree with Sinja. 'Everything 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 Machi's army?'

Eustin shrugged.

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

It would take them weeks to reach Machi, even if they started now. A bad storm would be worse than a battle. Tan-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. There was no army that could come to Machi'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 be 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.

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."' Otah paused, letting the half-Bakta boy hang in the air outside the prison tower. And this time Danat failed to object. His eyes were closed, his breathing heavy and regular. Otah sat for a moment, watching his boy sleep, then closed the book, tucked it in its place by the door, and put out the lantern. Danat murmured and snuggled more deeply into his blankets as Otah carefully opened the door and stepped out into the tunnel.

The physician set to watch over Danat 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 up to the higher chambers of the underground palace or else down to Otah's own rooms and the women's quarters. Small bra.s.s lanterns filled the air with their warmth and the scent of oil. The walls were lighter than sandstone and shone brighter than the flames seemed to warrant. At the stairway, he hesitated.

Above him, Machi 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 up 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 be calling, luring the curious and the hungry and the almost-hungry.

Only, of course, they wouldn't be 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sages 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.

He sighed and took the descending stairs. The women's quarters - designed 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 pa.s.sing 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.

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

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

'Really?'

'He 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 teahouse,' Otah said, and Kiyan chuckled.

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

'Oh G.o.ds,' 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.'

'He seems to forget that first battle where I got everyone killed. And that I didn't manage to keep the Dai-kvo from being slaughtered. '

'He doesn't forget. But he 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,' Otah said, and sighed. 'He seemed so reasonable when I first met him. Who'd have guessed he was so easily wooed.'

'He may not be 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 Dai-kvo. That would have to be Maati or Cehmai, wouldn't it?'

It was how all the conversations went now - how to rebuild, how to remake. The polite fiction that the poets were sure to succeed was the tissue that seemed to hold people together, and Otah couldn't bring himself to break it now.

'I suppose so,' Otah said. 'It'll be a life's work, though. Perhaps more. It was getting hard enough finding andat that could still be bound before this. We've lost so much now, going back will be harder than it was at the first. If we have a new Dai-kvo, he won't have time for anything more than that.'

'An emperor, then. One man protecting all the cities. With the poets answering to him. Even just one poet with one andat would be enough. It would protect us.'

'I recommend someone else do it. I've decided on a beach hut on Bakta,' Otah said, trying to make it a joke. He saw Kiyan's expression. 'It's too far ahead to think about now, love. Let it pa.s.s, and we'll solve it later if it still needs solving.'

Kiyan turned and took his hand. The days since he'd come home hadn't allowed them time together, not as they had had before the war. First, when he and his men had marched across the bridge to trumpets and drums and dancing, it had been a mad festival. They had come out to meet him. He had embraced her, and Eiah, and little Danat, whom he had danced around until they were both dizzy. Otah had found himself whirled from one pavilion to the next, balancing the giddy joy of survival with the surprisingly complex work of taking an army - even one as improvised and unformed as his own - apart. And afterward, he'd discovered that Kiyan was still as much in demand now tending the things she'd set in motion as when he had been gone.

Men and women of all cla.s.ses seemed to have need of her time and attention, coordinating the stores of food and the arrangements of the refugees and the movements of goods and trade that had once been the business of the merchant houses, and had become the work of a few coordinating minds. Kiyan had become the hand that moved Machi, that pushed it into line, that tucked its children into warm beds and kept it from eating all the best food and leaving nothing for tomorrow. It consumed her days.

And the utkhaiem and the high trading families had all wanted a moment of his day, to congratulate or express thanks or wheedle some favor in light of the changed circ.u.mstances of the world. To be here, in the warm light of candles, Kiyan's hand in his, her gaze on him, seemed like a dream badly wished for. And yet, now that he had it, he found himself troubled and unable to relax. She squeezed his hand.

'How bad was it?' she asked, and he knew what she meant. The battles. The Dai-kvo. The war.

Otah began to say something witty, something glib. The words got lost on the way to his lips. For long moment, silence was all he could manage.

'It was terrible,' he said. 'There were so many of them.'

'The Galts?'

'The dead. Theirs. Ours. I've never seen anything like it, Kiyan-kya. I've read the histories and I've heard the epics sung, and it's not the same. They were young. And . . . and they looked like they were sleeping. However badly they'd died, in the end, I kept thinking they'd wake up and speak or call for help or scream. I think about all the men I led out there. The ones who would have lived if we hadn't done this.'

'We didn't choose this, love. The Galts haven't given anyone much choice. The men who went with you would have died out there in the field, or here when the city fell. Would one have been better?'

'I suppose not. The other ways it could have gone might be just as bad, but the way it did happen, they died from following me. From doing what I asked.'

To his surprise, Kiyan chuckled low and mirthless.

'That's why he calls you Emperor, isn't it,' Kiyan said, and Otah took a pose of query. 'The Khai Cetani. It's from grat.i.tude. If you're the leader of the age, then it stops being his burden. Everything you're suffering, you've saved him.'

Otah looked at his hands, rubbing his palms together with a long, dry sound. His throat felt tight, and something deep in his chest ached with the suspicion that she was right. When he had asked the man to abandon his city and take the role of follower, he had also been asking for the right to choose whatever happened after. And the responsibility for it. For a moment, he was on the chill, gray field of the dead, and walking the cold, lifeless ruin where poets had once conspired to bind thoughts themselves. He remembered the Dai-kvo's dead eyes, looking at nothing. The bodies, the Galts' and his own both, and the voices calling him Emperor.

'I'm sorry,' Kiyan said, and he could tell from her voice that she knew how inadequate the words were. He pulled his mind back to his soft-lit room, the scent of the candles, the touch of this long-beloved hand.

'They've lived with it,' he said. 'Galt and Eddensea and the Westlands. It's always been like this for them. War and battle. We'll learn.'

'I don't think I'm looking forward to that.'

Otah raised her hand to his lips. Gently, she caressed his cheek. He drew her close, folding his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body against him, smelling the familiar scent of her hair, and willing the moment to not end. If only the future could never come.

Kiyan sensed it in the tension of his spine, the fierceness of his embrace. Something. She did not speak, but only breathed, softening against him with every exhalation, and in time he felt himself beginning to relax with her. One of the lanterns, burning the last of its oil, dimmed, spat, and went out. The smoke touched the air with a smell of endings.

'I missed you,' she said. 'Every night, I went to bed thinking you might not come back. I kept telling the children over and over that things would be fine, that you'd be home soon. And I was sick. I was sick with it.'

'I'm sorry.'