An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Page 18

  A new rug was brought in, new pillows, and a plate of curried chicken and raisins, a flagon of wine. The servants all left, and Eustin still hadn’t spoken.

  “When you brought this to me,” Balasar said, “you said his hesitation would be proof of his guilt. Now you’re thinking his lack of hesitation might be just as damning.”

  “Seemed like he might be trying to keep the poor bastard from saying something,” Eustin said, his gaze cast down. Balasar laughed.

  “There’s no winning with you. You know that.”

  “I suppose not, sir.”

  Balasar took a knife and cut a slice from the chicken. It smelled lovely, sweet and hot and rich. But beneath it and the lemon candles, there was still a whiff of death and human blood. Balasar ate the food anyway. It tasted fine.

  “Keep watch on him,” Balasar said. “Be polite about it. Nothing obvious. I don’t want the men thinking I don’t believe in him. If you don’t see him plotting against us by the time we reach Nantani, perhaps you’ll sleep better.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “It’s nothing. Some chicken?”

  Eustin glanced at the plate, and then his eyes flickered toward the tent flap behind him.

  “Or,” Balasar said, “would you rather go set someone to shadow Captain Ajutani.”

  “If it’s all the same, sir,” Eustin said.

  Balasar nodded and waved the man away. In the space of two breaths, he was alone. He ate slowly. When the meal was almost done—chicken gone, flagon still over half full—a chorus of crickets suddenly burst out. Balasar listened. The poet was dead.

  There was no turning back now. The High Council back in Acton would be desperately angry with him when they heard the news, but there wasn’t a great deal they could do to breathe life back into a corpse. And if his work went well, by the time winter silenced these crickets, there would no longer be a man alive in the world who could take Riaan’s place. And yet, his night’s work was not complete.

  He wiped his hands clean, savored a last sip of wine, and took the leather satchel from under his cot. He put the books on his writing table, side by side by side. The ancient pages seemed alive with memory. He still bore the scars on his shoulder from hauling these four books out of the desert. He still felt the ghosts of his men at his back, watching in silence, waiting to see whether their deaths had been noble or foolish. And beyond that—beyond himself and his life and struggles—the worn paper and pale ink knew of ages. The hand that had copied these words had been dust for at least ten generations. The minds that first conceived these words had fallen into forgetfulness long before that. The emperor whose greater glory they had been offered to was forgotten, his palaces ruins. The lush forests and jungles of the Empire were dune-swept. Balasar put his hand on the cool metallic binding of the first of the volumes.

  Killing the man was nothing. Killing the books was more difficult. The poet, like any man, was born to die. Moving his transition from flesh to spirit forward by a few decades was hardly worth considering, and Balasar was a soldier and a leader of soldiers. Killing men was his work. It would have been as well to ask a farmer to regret the fate of his wheat. But to take these words which had lasted longer than the civilization that created them, to slaughter history was a task best done by the ignorant. Only a man who did not understand his actions would be callous enough to destroy these without qualm.

  And yet what must be done, must be done. And it was time.

  Carefully, Balasar laid the books open in the brazier. The pages shifted in the breeze, scratching one on another like dry hands. He ran his fingers along one line, translating as best he could, reading the words for the last time. The lemon candle spilled its wax across his knuckles as he carried it, and the flame leapt to twice its height. He touched the open leaves with the burning wick as a priest might give a blessing, and the books seemed to embrace the fire. He sat, watching the pages blacken and curl, bits of cinder rise and dance in the air. A pale smoke filled the air, and Balasar rose, opening the flap of the pavilion to the wide night air.

  The firefly darted past him, glowing. Balasar watched it fly out to freedom and the company of its fellows until it went dark and vanished. The cook fires were fewer, the stars hanging in the sky bright and steady. A strange elation passed through him, as if he had taken off a burden or been freed himself. He grinned like an idiot at the darkness and had to fight himself not to dance a little jig. If he’d been certain that none of his men were near, that no one would see, he would have allowed himself. But he was a commander and not a child. Dignity had its price.

  When he returned to the brazier, nothing was left but blackened hinges, split leather, gray ash. Balasar stirred the ruins with a stick, making sure no text had survived, and then, satisfied, turned to his cot. The day before him would be long.

  As he lay in the darkness, half asleep, he felt the ghosts again. The men he had left in the desert. The men still alive whom he would leave in the field. Riaan, books cradled in his arms. Balasar’s sacrifices filled the pavilion, and their presence and expectation comforted him until a small voice came from the back of his mind.

  Kya, it said. Sinja-kya, he called him. Sinja-cha would have been the proper form, wouldn’t it? Kya is used for a lover or a brother. Why would Riaan have thought of Sinja as a brother?

  And then, as if Eustin were seated beside the cot, his voice whispered, Seemed like he might be trying to keep the poor bastard from saying something.

  LIAT WALKED through darkness between the Khai’s palaces and the library where Maati, she hoped, was still awake and waiting for her. She felt like a washrag wrung out, soaked, and wrung out again. It was seven days now since Stone-Made-Soft had escaped, and she’d spent the time either meeting with the Khai Machi or waiting to do so. Long days spent in the gilded halls and corridors of the palaces were, she found, more tiring than travel. Her back ached, her legs were sore, and she couldn’t even think what she had done to earn the pain. Sitting shouldn’t carry such a price. If she’d lifted something heavy, there would at least be a reason.…

  The city seemed darker now than when she’d arrived. It might be only her imagination, but there seemed fewer lanterns lit on the paths, fewer torches at the doorways. The windows of the palaces that shone with light seemed dimmed. No slaves sang in the gardens, the members of the utkhaiem that she saw throughout her day all shared a tension that she understood too well.

  Candles flickered behind Maati’s closed shutters, a thin line of light where the wooden frames had warped over the years. Liat found herself more grateful than she had expected to be as she took the last steps down the path that led to his door.

  Maati sat on the low couch, a bowl of wine cradled in his fingers. A bottle less than half full sat on the floor at his feet. He smiled as she let herself in, but she saw at once that something wasn’t well. She took a pose of query, and he looked away.

  “Maati-kya?”

  “I’ve had a letter from the Dai-kvo,” Maati said. “The timing of all this isn’t what I’d hoped, you know. I’ve spent years puttering through the library here, looking for nothing in particular, and only stumbled on my little insight now. Just when the Galts have gotten out of hand. And now Cehmai. And…forgive me, love, and you. And our boy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Liat said. “The Dai-kvo. What did he say?”

  “He said that I should come.” Maati sighed. “There’s nothing in the letter about the Galts or the missing poet. There’s nothing about Stone-Made-Soft, of course. The courier won’t be there with that sorry news for days yet. It’s only about me. It’s the thing I’d always hoped for. It’s my absolution, Liat-kya. I have been out of favor since before Nayiit was born. After I took Otah’s cause in the succession, they almost forbade me from wearing the robes, you know. The old Dai-kvo made it very clear he didn’t consider me a poet.”

  Liat leaned against the cool stone wall. Her pains were forgotten. She watched Maati raise his brows, shake his head.
His lips shifted as if he were having some silent conversation to which she was only half welcome. A familiar heaviness touched her heart.

  “You must have hoped for this,” she said.

  “Dreamed of it, when I dared to. I’m welcomed back with honor and dignity. I’m saved.”

  “That’s a bitter tone for a saved man,” she said.

  “I’ve only just met you again. I’ve only just started to know Nayiit. And Otah-kvo’s in need. And the Galts are stirring trouble again. My shining hour has come to call me away from everyone who actually matters.”

  “You can’t refuse the Dai-kvo,” Liat said softly. “You have to go.”

  “Do I?”

  The air between them grew still. Half a hundred other conversations echoed in their words. Liat closed her eyes, weariness dragging her like rain-heavy robes.

  “It’s all happening again, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s all the things we’ve suffered before, coming back at once. The Galts. Stone-Made-Soft set free. Cehmai lost and mourning the way Heshai was that summer, after Seedless killed the baby. And then us. You and I.”

  “You and I, ending again,” Maati said. “All of history pressed into one season. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “How is Cehmai?” she asked, turning the conversation to safer ground, if only for a moment. “Has he been eating?”

  “A little. Not enough.”

  “Does he know yet what happened? How Stone-Made-Soft slipped free?”

  “No, but…but he suspects. And I do, too.”

  Liat moved forward, sat beside Maati, took the bowl from his hands and drank the wine. Her throat and chest warmed and relaxed. Maati took a bottle from the floor.

  “Not every poet is made for slaughter,” Maati said as he tipped rice wine clear as water into the bowl. “There was a part of him that rebelled at the prospect of turning the andat against the Galts. I know he struggled with it, and he and I both believed he’d made his peace with it.”

  “But now you think not?”

  “Now I think perhaps he wasn’t as certain as he told himself he was. He may not even have known what he meant to do. It would take so little, in a way. The decision of a moment, and then gone beyond retrieval. If he regretted it in the next breath, it would already be too late. But it can’t be a coincidence, the Galts and Stone-Made-Soft.”

  Liat sipped now, just enough to maintain the warmth in her body but not so much as to make her drunk. Maati drank directly from the bottle, wiping it with his sleeve after.

  “There’s another explanation,” she said. “The Galts could have done it.”

  “How? They can’t unmake a binding.”

  “They could have bought him.”

  Maati shook his head, frowning. “Not Cehmai. There’s not a man in the world less likely to turn against the Khaiem.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. I’m sure,” Maati said. “He was happy. He had his life and his place in the world, and he was happy.”

  “So much the worse for him,” Liat said. “At least we don’t have that to suffer, eh?”

  “And now who sounds bitter?”

  Liat chuckled and took a pose accepting the point that was made awkward by the bowl in one hand.

  “How are things with Otah-kvo?” Maati asked.

  “He’s like the wind on legs,” Liat said. “He wants to know everything at once, control all of it, and I think he’s driving the court half mad. And…don’t say I said it, but it’s almost as if he’s enjoying it. Everything’s falling apart except him. If simple force of will can hold a city together, I think Machi will be fine.”

  “It can’t, though.”

  “No,” she agreed. “It can’t.”

  The back of Maati’s hand brushed against her arm. It was a small, tentative gesture, familiar as breath. It was something he had always done when he was uncertain and in need of comfort. There had been times when she’d found it powerfully annoying and times when she’d found herself doing it too. Now, she shifted the wine bowl to her other hand, and resolutely laced her fingers with his.

  “I haven’t written back to the Dai-kvo,” Maati said. His voice was as low as a confession. “I’m not sure what I should…I haven’t been back to Saraykeht, you know. I could…I mean…Gods, I’m saying this badly. If you want it, Liat-kya, I could come back with you. You and Nayiit.”

  “No,” she said. “There isn’t room for you. My life there has a certain shape to it, and I don’t want you to be a part of it. And Nayiit’s a grown man. It’s too late to start raising him now. I love you. And Nayiit is better, I think, knowing you than he was before. But you can’t come back with us. You aren’t welcome.”

  Maati looked down at his knees. His hand seemed to relax into her palm.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  She raised his hand and kissed the wide, soft knuckles. And then his mouth. He touched her neck gently, his hand warm against her skin.

  “Put out the candles,” she said.

  Time had made him a better lover than when they had been young. Time and experience—his and her own both. Sex had been so earnest then; so anxious, and so humorless. She had spent too much time as a girl worried about whether her breasts looked pleasing or if her hips were too thin. In the years she had kept a house with him, Maati had tried to hold in his belly whenever his robes came off. Youth and vanity, and now that they were doomed to sagging flesh and loose skin and short breath, all of it could be forgiven and left behind.

  They laughed more now as they shrugged out of their robes and pulled each other down on the wide, soft bed. They paused in their passions to let Maati rest. She knew better now what would bring her the greatest pleasure, and had none of her long-ago qualms about asking for it. And when they were spent, lying wrapped in a soft sheet, Maati’s head on her breast, the netting pulled closed around them, the silence was deeper and more intimate than any words they had spoken.

  She would miss this. She had known the dangers when she had taken his hand again, when she had kissed him again. She had known there would be a price to pay for it, if only the pain of having had something pleasant and precious and brief. For a moment, her mind shifted to Nayiit and his lovers, and she was touched by sorrow on his behalf. He was too much her son and not enough Otah’s. But she didn’t want Otah in this room, in this moment, so she put both of these other men out of her mind and concentrated instead on the warmth of her own flesh and Maati’s, the slow, regular deepening of his breath and of hers.

  Her thoughts wandered, slowing and losing their coherence; turning into something close kin to dream. She had almost slipped into the deep waters of sleep when Maati’s sudden spasm brought her back. He was sitting up, panting like a man who’d run a mile. It was too dark to see his face.

  She called his name, and a low groan escaped him. He stood and for a moment she was afraid that he would stagger and fall. But she made out his silhouette, a deeper darkness, and he did not sway. She called his name again.

  “No,” he said, then a pause and, “No no no no no. Oh gods. Gods, no.”

  Liat rose, but Maati was already walking. She heard him bark his shin against the table in the front room, heard the wine bottle clatter as it fell. She wrapped her sheet around herself and hurried after him just in time to see him lumbering naked out the door and into the night. She followed.

  He trotted into the library, his hands moving restlessly. When he lit a candle, she saw his face etched deep with dread. It was as if he was watching someone die that only he could see.

  “Maati. Stop this,” she said, and the fear in her voice made her realize that she was trembling. “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  “I was wrong,” he said. “Gods, Cehmai will never forgive me doubting him. He’ll never forgive me.”

  Candle in hand, Maati lumbered into the next room and began frantically looking through scrolls, hands shaking so badly the wax spilled on the floor. Liat gave up hope that he would speak,
that he would explain. Instead, she took the candle from his hand and held it for him as he searched. In the third room, he found what he’d been seeking and sank to the floor. Liat came to his side, and read over his shoulder as he unfurled the scroll. The ink was pale, the script the alphabet of the Old Empire. Maati’s fingertips traced the words, looking for something, some passage or phrase. Liat found herself holding her breath. And then his hand stopped moving.

  The grammar was antiquated and formal, the language almost too old to make sense of. Liat silently struggled to translate the words that had caught Maati short.

  The second type is made up of those thoughts impossible to bind by their nature, and no greater knowledge shall ever permit them. Examples of this are Imprecision and Freedom-From-Bondage.

  “I know what they’ve done,” he said.

  Nantani had been one of the first cities built when the Second Empire reached out past its borders to put its mark on the distant lands they now inhabited. The palace of the Khai was topped by a dome the color of jade—a single stone shaped by the will of some long-dead poet. When the sunlight warmed it in just the right way, it would chime, a low voice rolling out wordlessly over the whitewashed walls and blue tile roofs of the city.

  Sinja had wintered in Nantani for a few seasons, retreating from the snowbound fields of the Westlands to wait in comfort for the thaw and spend the money he’d earned. He knew the scent of the sea here, the feel of the soft, chalky soil beneath his feet. He knew of an old man who sold garlic sausages from a stall near the temple that were the best he’d had in the world. He knew the sound of the great sun chime. He had not known that the deep, throbbing tone would also come when the palace below it burned.