An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Read online

  An Audacious Plan

  Balasar Gice had come to Acton with his best men, the books, the poet, the plans. The High Council of Galt had heard him out—the dangers of the andat, the need to end the supremacy of the Khaiem. That part had gone quite well. No one seriously disputed that the Khaiem were the single greatest threat to Galt. It was only when he began to reveal his plans and how far he had already gone that the audience began to turn sour on him.

  Now the fate of all his work, the years of planning, of struggle, of battle, rested on what happened in the next moments.

  The Lord Convocate spoke. “Fourteen cities in a single season. It can’t be done, Balasar. Uther Redcape couldn’t have done it.”

  “Uther was fighting in Eddensea,” Balasar said. “They have walls around cities there. They have armies. The Khaiem haven’t got anything but the andat.”

  “The andat suffice.”

  “Only if they have them.”

  “Ah. Yes. That’s the center of the question, isn’t it? Your grand plan to do away with all the andat at a single blow. I have to confess, I don’t think I quite follow how you expect this to work. You have one of these poets here, ready to work with us. Wouldn’t it be better to capture one of these andat for ourselves?”

  “We will be. Freedom-From-Bondage should be one of the simplest andat to capture. It’s never been done, so there’s no worry about coming too near what’s been tried before. I’ve found books from the First Empire…”

  “All explaining why it’s impossible.” The old man’s voice was almost gentle. It was a ploy. He wanted to see whether Balasar would lose his temper, so instead Balasar smiled.

  “It all depends on what you mean by impossible.…”

  Turn the page to see what people are saying

  about An Autumn War.…

  People Are Raving About An Autumn War.…

  “Thanks to the dignity with which Abraham invests his characters, and the exquisite sensibility with which he details their inner states of mind and emotion, their tragedy offers us the kind of catharsis that marks a superior work of art. I was deeply moved by Abraham’s grim yet far from hopeless tale, whose conclusion in the forthcoming The Price of Spring I await with impatience.”

  —Realms of Fantasy

  “An Autumn War is, in its closing stages, heart-stoppingly surprising and exciting. Rarely does the penultimate volume in a series carry such a charge of its own.”

  —Locus

  “Daniel Abraham delighted fantasy readers with his brilliantly original and engaging first novel, A Shadow in Summer, and in A Betrayal in Winter penned a tragedy as darkly personal and violent as Shakespeare’s King Lear. Now in An Autumn War, the third volume in the Long Price Quartet, Daniel Abraham has written a spectacular epic fantasy of much wider scope and appeal that will thrill his fans and enthrall legions of new readers.”

  —Fantasy Book Critic

  “Daniel Abraham gets better with every book. A Shadow in Summer was among the strongest first novels of the last decade, and A Betrayal in Winter was a terrific second book, but in An Autumn War, Abraham puts both of them in the shade. This book really blows the top off, taking the world of the andat and the poets in new and unexpected directions. An Autumn War will keep you turning pages and break your heart in the bargain. If there’s any justice, this should be a contender for all the major awards.”

  —George R. R. Martin,

  New York Times #1 bestselling author

  “This book will land Abraham in the ranks of our greatest working fantasists, shoulder to shoulder with Robin Hobb, George R. R. Martin, and their peers. I urge you to buy, borrow, or check out from the library the first two books so you’ll be ready for An Autumn War. As for Abraham, he’s outdone himself and the rest of us with this book. I await the fourth book in the Long Price Quartet with a certain amount of awe.”

  —Jay Lake,

  author of Mainspring

  “New readers will find Abraham’s deft storytelling style accessible, but returning fans will most appreciate the growth of the world and the characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “There is much to love in the Long Price Quartet. It is epic in scope but character-centered. The setting is unique yet utterly believable. The storytelling is smooth, careful, and—best of all—unpredictable. The first two books impressed me, but An Autumn War surpassed them, leaving me stunned and wondering where Abraham will take me in the fourth book.”

  —Patrick Rothfuss, bestselling author

  of The Name of the Wind

  “I already knew Daniel Abraham was an excellent writer. An Autumn War is his best novel yet: his quiet compassion for humanity slams hard against his clear-eyed depiction of the ruthless progress of war and the bitter choices people must often make to protect their own. Highly recommended.”

  —Kate Elliott, bestselling author

  of the Crossroads trilogy and the Crown of Stars series

  Books by Daniel Abraham

  THE LONG PRICE QUARTET

  A Shadow in Summer*

  A Betrayal in Winter*

  An Autumn War*

  The Price of Spring *

  Hunter’s Run

  (with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois)

  George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards: The Hard Call

  (graphic novel)

  *Published by Tor Books

  Daniel Abraham

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  AN AUTUMN WAR: BOOK THREE OF THE LONG PRICE QUARTET

  Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Abraham

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  Maps by Jackie Aher

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-5189-0

  s

  First Edition: July 2008

  First Mass Market Edition: July 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Jim and Allison,

  without whom none of this would have been possible

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, I would like to extend my thanks to Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, S. M. Stirling, Terry England, Ian Tregillis, Ty Franck, George R. R. Martin, and the other members of the New Mexico Critical Mass Workshop.

  I also owe debts of gratitude to Shawna McCarthy and Danny Baror for their enthusiasm and faith in the project, to James Frenkel for his
unstinting support and uncanny ability to improve a manuscript, and to Tom Doherty and the staff at Tor for their kindness and support.

  Three men came out of the desert. Twenty had gone in.

  The setting sun pushed their shadows out behind them, lit their faces a ruddy gold, blinded them. The weariness and pain in their bodies robbed them of speech. On the horizon, something glimmered that was no star, and they moved silently toward it. The farthest tower of Far Galt, the edge of the Empire, beckoned them home from the wastes, and without speaking, each man knew that they would not stop until they stood behind its gates.

  The smallest of them shifted the satchel on his back. His gray commander’s tunic hung from his flesh as if the cloth itself were exhausted. His mind turned inward, half-dreaming, and the leather straps of the satchel rubbed against his raw shoulder. The burden had killed seventeen of his men, and now it was his to carry as far as the tower that rose up slowly in the violet air of evening. He could not bring himself to think past that.

  One of the others stumbled and fell to his knees on wind-paved stones. The commander paused. He would not lose another, not so near the end. And yet he feared bending down, lifting the man up. If he paused, he might never move again. Grunting, the other man recovered his feet. The commander nodded once and turned again to the west. A breeze stirred the low, brownish grasses, hissing and hushing. The punishing sun made its exit and left behind twilight and the wide swath of stars hanging overhead, cold candles beyond numbering. The night would bring chill as deadly as the midday heat.

  It seemed to the commander that the tower did not so much come closer as grow, plantlike. He endured his weariness and pain, and the structure that had been no larger than his thumb was now the size of his hand. The beacon that had seemed steady flickered now, and tongues of flame leapt and vanished. Slowly, the details of the stonework came clear; the huge carved relief of the Great Tree of Galt. He smiled, the skin of his lip splitting, wetting his mouth with blood.

  “We’re not going to die,” one of the others said. He sounded amazed. The commander didn’t respond, and some measureless time later, another voice called for them to stop, to offer their names and the reason that they’d come to this twice-forsaken ass end of the world.

  When the commander spoke, his voice was rough, rusting with disuse.

  “Go to your High Watchman,” he said. “Tell him that Balasar Gice has returned.”

  BALASAR GICE had been in his eleventh year when he first heard the word andat. The river that passed through his father’s estates had turned green one day, and then red. And then it rose fifteen feet. Balasar had watched in horror as the fields vanished, the cottages, the streets and yards he knew. The whole world, it seemed, had become a sea of foul water with only the tops of trees and the corpses of pigs and cattle and men to the horizon.

  His father had moved the family and as many of his best men as would fit to the upper stories of the house. Balasar had begged to take the horse his father had given him up as well. When the gravity of the situation had been explained, he changed his pleas to include the son of the village notary, who had been Balasar’s closest friend. He had been refused in that as well. His horses and his playmates were going to drown. His father’s concern was for Balasar, for the family; the wider world would have to look after itself.

  Even now, decades later, the memory of those six days was fresh as a wound. The bloated bodies of pigs and cattle and people like pale logs floating past the house. The rich, low scent of fouled water. The struggle to sleep when the rushing at the bottom of the stairs seemed like the whisper of something vast and terrible for which he had no name. He could still hear men’s voices questioning whether the food would last, whether the water was safe to drink, and whether the flood was natural, a catastrophe of distant rains, or an attack by the Khaiem and their andat.

  He had not known then what the word meant, but the syllables had taken on the stench of the dead bodies, the devastation where the village had been, the emptiness and the destruction. It was only much later—after the water had receded, the dead had been mourned, the village rebuilt—that he learned how correct he had been.

  Nine generations of fathers had greeted their new children into the world since the God Kings of the East had turned upon each other, his history tutor told him. When the glory that had been the center of all creation fell, its throes had changed the nature of space. The lands that had been great gardens and fields were deserts now, permanently altered by the war. Even as far as Galt and Eddensea, the histories told of weeks of darkness, of failed crops and famine, a sky dancing with flames of green, a sound as if the earth were tearing itself apart. Some people said the stars themselves had changed positions.

  But the disasters of the past grew in the telling or faded from memory. No one knew exactly how things had been those many years ago. Perhaps the Emperor had gone mad and loosed his personal god-ghost—what they called andat—against his own people, or against himself. Or there might have been a woman, the wife of a great lord, who had been taken by the Emperor against her will. Or perhaps she’d willed it. Or the thousand factions and minor insults and treacheries that accrue around power had simply followed their usual course.

  As a boy, Balasar had listened to the story, drinking in the tales of mystery and glory and dread. And, when his tutor had told him, somber of tone and gray, that there were only two legacies left by the fall of the God Kings—the wastelands that bordered Far Galt and Obar State, and the cities of the Khaiem where men still held the andat like Cooling, Seedless, Stone-Made-Soft—Balasar had understood the implication as clearly as if it had been spoken.

  What had happened before could happen again at any time and without warning.

  “And that’s what brought you?” the High Watchman said. “It’s a long walk from a little boy at his lessons to this place.”

  Balasar smiled again and leaned forward to sip bitter kafe from a rough tin mug. His room was baked brick and close as a cell. A cruel wind hissed outside the thick walls, as it had for the three long, feverish days since he had returned to the world. The small windows had been scrubbed milky by sandstorms. His little wounds were scabbing over, none of them reddened or hot to the touch, though the stripe on his shoulder where the satchel strap had been would doubtless leave a scar.

  “It wasn’t as romantic as I’d imagined,” he said. The High Watchman laughed, and then, remembering the dead, sobered. Balasar shifted the subject. “How long have you been here? And who did you offend to get yourself sent to this…lovely place?”

  “Eight years. I’ve been eight years at this post. I didn’t much care for the way things got run in Acton. I suppose this was my way of saying so.”

  “I’m sure Acton felt the loss.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t. But then, I didn’t do it for them.”

  Balasar chuckled.

  “That sounds like wisdom,” Balasar said, “but eight years here seems an odd place for wisdom to lead you.”

  The High Watchman smacked his lips and shrugged.

  “It wasn’t me going inland,” he said. Then, a moment later, “They say there’s still andat out there. Haunting the places they used to control.”

  “There aren’t,” Balasar said. “There are other things. Things they made or unmade. There’s places where the air goes bad on you—one breath’s fine, and the next it’s like something’s crawling into you. There’s places where the ground’s thin as eggshell and a thousand-foot drop under it. And there are living things too—things they made with the andat, or what happened when the things they made bred. But the ghosts don’t stay once their handlers are gone. That isn’t what they are.”

  Balasar took an olive from his plate, sucked away the flesh, and spat back the stone. For a moment, he could hear voices in the wind. The words of men who’d trusted and followed him, even knowing where he would take them. The voices of the dead whose lives he had spent. Coal and Eustin had survived. The others—Little Ott, Bes, M
ayarsin, Laran, Kellem, and a dozen more—were bones and memory now. Because of him. He shook his head, clearing it, and the wind was only wind again.

  “No offense, General,” the High Watchman said, “but there’s not enough gold in the world for me to try what you did.”

  “It was necessary,” Balasar said, and his tone ended the conversation.

  THE JOURNEY to the coast was easier than it should have been. Three men, traveling light. The others were an absence measured in the ten days it took to reach Lawton. It had taken sixteen coming from. The arid, empty lands of the East gave way to softly rolling hills. The tough yellow grasses yielded to blue-green almost the color of a cold sea, wavelets dancing on its surface. Farmsteads appeared off the road, windmills with broad blades shifting in the breezes; men and women and children shared the path that led toward the sea.

  Balasar forced himself to be civil, even gracious. If the world moved the way he hoped, he would never come to this place again, but the world had a habit of surprising him.

  When he’d come back from the campaign in the Westlands, he’d thought his career was coming to its victorious end. He might take a place in the Council or at one of the military colleges. He even dared to dream of a quiet estate someplace away from the yellow coal smoke of the great cities. When the news had come—a historian and engineer in Far Galt had divined a map that might lead to the old libraries—he’d known that rest had been a chimera, a thing for other men but never himself. He’d taken the best of his men, the strongest, smartest, most loyal, and come here. He had lost them here. The ones who had died, and perhaps also the ones who had lived.

  Coal and Eustin were both quiet as they traveled, both respectful when they stopped to camp for the night. Without conversation, they had all agreed that the cold night air and hard ground was better than the company of men at an inn or wayhouse. Once in a while, one or the other would attempt to talk or joke or sing, but it always failed. There was a distance in their eyes, a stunned expression that Balasar recognized from boys stumbling over the wreckage of their first battlefield. They were seasoned fighters, Coal and Eustin. He had seen both of them kill men and boys, knew each of them had raped women in the towns they’d sacked, and still, they had left some scrap of innocence in the desert and were moving away from it with every step. Balasar could not say what that loss would do to them, nor would he insult their manhood by bringing it up. He knew, and that alone would have to suffice. They reached the ports of Parrinshall on the first day of autumn.