An Autumn War

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:'

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 Utah couldn't bring himself to break it now.

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

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

"I recommend someone else do it. I've decided on a beach hut on Bakta," Utah said, trying to make it a joke. I Ic saw Kivan's expression. "It's too far ahead to think about now, love. Let it pass, 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. 't'hey had cone out to meet him. I Ic had embraced her, and Eiah, and little [)gnat 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 classes 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 utkhaicm 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 circumstances 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?"

"'l'he 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. I lowever 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 had, 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 gratitude. 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 hind thoughts themselves. He remembered the Dal-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 hack 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. Ile 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 hack. I kept telling the children over and over that things would he fine, that you'd he home soon. And I was sick. I was sick with it."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't. Don't apologize. Don't be sorry. Just know it. Just know we wanted you hack. Not the Khai and not the emperor. You. Remember that you are a good man and I love you."

Ile raised her chin and kissed her, wondering how she knew so well the way to fill him with joy without asking him to abandon his sorrow.

"It's Nlaati's now," Otah whispered. "If he can bind Seedless before the spring thaw, this will all be over."

He felt an odd relaxation in her body, as if by saying the thing, he'd freed her from some secret effort she'd been making.

"And if he can't?" she asked. "If it's all going to fall apart anyway, can we run? You and me and the children? If I take them and go, are you going to come with us, or stay here and fight?"

He kissed her again. She rested her hands against his shoulders, leaning into him. Otah didn't answer, and he knew from the sound of her breath that she understood. "We take the nuance of movement'-Annay in Ni 'rat and the symbol set you worked up for the senses of continuance," Nlaati said, "I think then we'll have something we can work with."

Cehmai's eves were bloodshot, his hair wild from another long evening of combing frustrated fingers through it. Around them, the lamplight shone on a bedlam of paper. The library would have seemed a rat's nest to any but the two of them: books laid open; scrolls unfurled and weighted by other scrolls which were themselves unfurled; loose pages of a dozen codices stacked together. The mass of information and inference, grammar and poetry and history would have been overwhelming, \laati thought, to anyone who didn't know how profoundly little it was. Cchnlai ran his fingertips down the notes \laati had made and shook his head.

"It's still the same," he said. "Nurat is modified by the fourth case of a(/at, and then it's exactly the same logical structure as the one Fleshai used."

"No, it isn't," \laati said, slapping the table with an open palm. "It's differ r ut. "

Cchmai took a long, slow breath, raising his hands palms-out. It wasn't a formal gesture, but \laati understood it all the same. They were both worn raw. I Ic sat hack in his chair, feeling the knots in his back and neck. The brazier in the corner made the wide room smell warm without seeming to actually heat it.

"Look," Maati said. "Let's put it aside for the day. We need to move the library underground soon anyway. It's going to he too cold tip here to do more than watch our fingers turn blue."

Cehmai nodded, then looked around at the disarray. Nlaati could read the despair in his face.

"I'll put it hack together," MIaati said. "Then a dozen slaves with strong hacks, and I'll put it all together in the winter quarters in two days' time."

"I should move the poet's house down too," Cehmai said. "I feel like I haven't been there in weeks."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. The place seems too big without Stone-Made-Soft anyway. "loo quiet. It reminds me of… well, of everything."

Nlaati rose, his knees aching. His feet tingled with the pins and needles that long motionlessness brought him these days. lie clapped his hand on Cehmai's Shoulder.

"Meet me in three days," he said. "I'll have the hooks in order. We'll start again fresh."

Cehmai took a pose of agreement, but he looked exhausted. Worn thin. The younger poet began snuffing the lanterns as %Iaati walked back toward his apartments, placing his feet carefully until normal feeling returned to them. Stepping the wrong way and breaking his ankle would he just the thing to make the winter even more miserable than it already promised to he.

The rooms in which he spent his summers were already bare. The fire grate was empty of everything but old soot. The tapestries were gone, the couches, the tables, the cabinets. Everything had been moved to the lower city. Winter are the middle of things in the North. The snows would come soon, blocking the doors and windows. The second-story snow doors would open out for anyone who needed to travel into the world. Below, in the warmth of the ground, all the citizens of Machi, and now of Cetani too, would huddle and talk and fight and sing and play at tiles and stones until winter lost its grip and the snows turned to meltwater and washed the black-cobbled streets. Only the metalworkers remained at the ground level, the green copper roofs of the forges free of snow and ice, the plumes of coal smoke rising almost as high as the towers all through the winter.

At least all through this winter. This one last winter before the Galts came and butchered them all.

If only there was some other way to phrase the idea of removing. Seedless's true name would have been better translated Removing-the- Part-"That-Continues. Continuity was a fairly simple problem. The old grammars had several ways to conceptualize continuance. It was removal…

Nlaati reached the thin red doorway at the back of the rooms, and started down the stairs. It was dark as night. Darker. He would need to talk with the palace servant masters about seeing that lanterns were lit here. With as many people as there were filling every available niche in the tunnels and, from what he heard, the mines as well, it seemed unlikely that no one could he spared to be sure there was a little light on his path.

Or they might be rationing lamp oil already. There was a depressing thought.

He descended, one hand on the smooth, cool stone of the wall to keep him steady. He moved slowly because going quickly would get him winded, and it was dark enough that he wanted to stay sure of his footing. His mind was only half concerned with walking anyway. Cehmai was right. The logical structure was the same whether he used nurat or something else. So that was another dead end.

Removal.

It was a concept of relative motion. "faking something enclosed and producing a distance between it and its-now previous-enclosure. Plucking out a seed, or a baby. A gemstone from its setting. A man from his bed or his home. Removing. Heshai's work in framing Seedless was so elegant, so simple, that it seemed inevitable. That was the curse of second and third bindings of the same andat. Finding something equally graceful, but utterly different. It made his jaw ache just thinking about it.

I is reached the bottom of the stairs and the wide upper chamber of his winter quarters. The night candle burning there was hardly to its first quarter mark, which given the lengthening nights of autumn meant the city beneath him would likely still he awake and active. Rest for him, though. His day had been full already. He took up the candle, passed down a short, close corridor, and reached the second stairway, which led down to the bedchambers.

The air was noticeably warmer here than in the library-in part from the heat of ten thousand people in the earth below him rising up, and in part from its stillness. Servants had prepared his bed with blankets and furs. A light meal of rice and spiced pork in one of the bowls of handthick iron that could hold the heat for the better part of a day waited on his writing table. Maati sat, ate slowly, not tasting the food, drinking rice wine as if it were water. Even as he sucked the pepper sauce off the last bit of pork, his feet and fingers were still cold. Removing-the-ChillFrom-the-Old-Man's-Flesh. There was an andat.

Nlaati closed the lid of the great iron bowl, slipped out of his robes, hefted himself into his bed, and willed himself to sleep. For a time, he lay watching the candle burn, smelling the wax as it melted and dripped, and could not get comfortable. IIe couldn't get the cold out of his toes and knuckles, couldn't make his mind stop moving. He couldn't avoid the growing fear that when he closed his eyes, the nightmares that had begun plaguing him would return.

The images his mind held when his eyes were closed had become more violent, more anxious. Fathers weeping for sons who were also sacks of bloodied grain and dead mice; long, sleeping hours spent searching through bodies in a charnel house hoping to find his child still living and only finding Otah's children again and again and again; the recurring dream of a tunnel that led down past the city, deeper than the mines, and into the earth until the stone itself grew fleshy and angry and bled. And the cry that woke him-a man's voice shouting from a great distance that demanded to know whose child this was. Whose (hil‹1.?

With this mind, Maati thought as he watched the single flame of the night candle, I'm intended to hind an andat. It's like driving nails with rotten meat.

The night candle had burned through three of its smallest marks when he abandoned his bed, pulled on his robes, and left his private chambers for the wide, arched galleries of the tunnels below the palaces. The bathhouses were at least warm. If he wasn't to sleep, he could at least be miserable in comfort.

The public spaces were surprisingly full with men and women in the glorious robes of the utkhaiem. It made sense, he supposed. Cetani had not only brought its merchants and craftsmen. There would be two courts living tinder the palaces this winter. And so twice the social intrigue. Who precisely was sleeping with whom would he even more complex, and even the threat of their death at the hands of a Galtic army wouldn't stop the courtiers playing for rank.

As he passed, the utkhaiem took poses of respect and welcome, the servants and slaves ones of abasement. hlaati repressed a swelling hatred of all of them. It wasn't their fault, after all, that he had to save them. And himself. And Liat and Nayiit and Otah and all the people he had ever known, all the cities he had ever seen. His world, and everything in it.

It was the Galts who deserved his anger. And they would feel it, by Al the gods. Failed crops, gelded men, and barren women until they rebuilt everything they'd broken and given back everything they took. If he could only think of a better way to say removing.

I Ic brooded his way along the dim galleries and through the great chambers until the air began to thicken with the first presentiment of steam, and the prospect of hot water, and of finally warming his chilled feet, intruded on him.

Ic found his way into the men's changing rooms, where he shrugged off his robes and hoots and let the servant offer him a howl of clear, cold water to drink before he went into the public baths and sweated it all out again. When he passed through the inner door, Maati shivered at the warmth. Voiccs filled the dim, gray space-conversations between people made invisible by the steam rising from the water. "There had been a time, Maati considered as he stepped gingerly down the submerged stairs and waded toward a low bench, when the idea of strangers wandering naked in the baths-men and women together-had held some erotic frisson. "Truth often disappoints.

He lowered himself to the thick, water-logged wood of the bench, the hot water rising past his belly, past his chest, until the small warm waves danced against the hollow of his throat. At last, his feet felt warm, and he leaned back against the warm stone, sighing with a purely physical contentment. He resolved to move down toward the warmer end before he went back to his rooms. If he boiled himself thoroughly enough, he might even carry the heat back to his bed.

Across the bath, hidden in the mist, two men talked of grain supplies and how best to address the problem of rats. Far away toward the hotter end of the bath, someone shouted, and there was a sound of splashing. Children, Nlaati supposed, and then fell into a long, gnawing plan for how best to move the volumes in the library. His concentration was so profound he didn't notice v%-hen the children approached.

"t'nclc Nlaati?"

F, iah was practically at his side, crouched low in the water to preserve her modesty. A gaggle of children of the utkhaiem behind her at what Maati supposed must be a respectful distance. He raised hands from the water and took a pose of greeting, somewhat cramped by being held high enough to be seen.

"I haven't seen you in ages, I? iah-kya," he said. "What's been keeping you?"

The girl shrugged, sending ripples.

"'T'here are a lot of new people from Cetani," she said. "There's a whole other Radaani family here now. And I've been studying with Loya-cha about how to fix broken bones. And… and 'Mama-kva said you were htisy and that I shouldn't bother you." "You should always bother me," \laati said with a grin. "Is it going well%"

"It's a complicated thing," \laati said. "But it's a long wait until spring. We'll have time."

"Complicated's hard," Eiah said. "Loya-cha says it's always easy to fix things when there's only one thing wrong. It's when there's two or three things at once that it's hardest."

"Smart man, Lova-cha," Nlaati said.

Flah shrugged again.

"I Ie's a servant," she said. "If you can't recapture Seedless, we can't heat the Galts can we?"

"Your father did once," Nlaati said. "He's a very clever man."

"But we might not."

" We might not," Nlaati allowed.

Flah nodded to herself, her forehead crinkling as she came to some decision. When she spoke, her voice had a seriousness that seemed out of place from a girl still so young, hardly half-grown.

"If we're all going to die, I wanted you to know that I think you were a very good father to Nayiit-cha."

Nlaati almost coughed from surprise, and then he understood. She knew. A warm sorrow filled him. She knew that Nayiit was Utah's son. That Nlaati loved the boy. That it mattered to him deeply that Nayiit love him hack. And the worst of it, she knew that he hadn't been a very good father.

"You're kind, love," he said, his voice thick.

She nodded sharply, embarrassed, perhaps, to have completed her task. One of her companions yelped and dropped under the water only to come back up spitting and shaking his head. Eiah turned toward them.

"heave him he!" Eiah shouted, then turned to Nlaati with an apologetic pose. lie smiled and waved her away. She went back to her group with the squared shoulders of an overseer facing a recalcitrant hand of laborers. Nlaati let his smile fade.

A good father to Nayiit. And to he told so by Otah's daughter. Perhaps binding the andat wasn't so complex after all. Not when compared with other things. Fathers and sons, lovers and mother and daughters. And the war. Saraykcht and Seedless. All of it touched one edge against another, like tilework. None of it existed alone. And how could anyone expect him to solve the thing when half of everything seemed to he broken, and half of what was broken was still beautiful.

The physician was right. It would he easy to fix one thing, if there were only one thing wrong. But there were so many was to break something so delicate and so complex. Even the act of making one thing right seemed destined to undo something else. And he was too tired and too confused to say whether one way of being wounded was better than another.

There were so many ways to be wrong.

There were so many ways to break things. hlaati felt the thought fall into place as if it were something physical. It was the moment he was supposed to shout, to stand tip and wave his hands about, possessed by insight as if by a demon. But instead, he sat with it quietly, as if it was a gem only he of all mankind had ever seen.

He'd spent too much time with Heshai's binding. Removing-thePart-That-Continues had been made for the cotton trade-pulling seeds from the fiber and speeding it on its way to the spinners and the weavers and feeding all of the needle trades. But there was no reason for h Iaati to he restricted by that. He only needed a way to break Galt. To starve them. To see that no other generation of Galtic children ever saw the world.

It wasn't Seedless he needed. It was only Sterile. And there were any number of ways to say that.

He sank lower into the water as the sense of relief and peace consumed him. Destroying-the-Part- That-Continues, he thought as the little waves touched his lips. Shattering-the-Part-"That-Continues. Crushing it. Rotting it. Corroding it.

Corrupting it.

In his mind, Galt died. And he, Maati Vaupathai, killed it. What, he asked himself, was victory in a single battle compared with that? Otah had saved the city. Nlaati saw now how he could save everything.