An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Read online

  “The court’s frightened,” he said. “There are a few people who came here from Yalakeht, and the stories…well, either they’ve grown in the telling, or it wasn’t pretty there. And the couriers from Amnat-Tan haven’t come the last two days.”

  “That’s bad,” Otah said. “Will we have time, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Ashua said. He seemed to search for more words, but in the end only shook his head.

  “Get the men ready,” Otah said. “We’ll give Cetani tomorrow to join us. After that, we’ll head home. With enough time, we might be able to tear up some sections of the road behind us. Slow down the Galts, even if we can’t do all we hoped against them.”

  “What about the books?” Saya asked. “If their poet’s dead, it isn’t as if they’ll have need of them. Perhaps ours would make something of them.”

  “I can ask,” Otah said. “With luck, we’ll have the books and the people and the food stores.”

  “But the Khai refused you, Most High,” Saya said.

  Otah smiled and shook his head. Only now that he found himself a moment to rest did the weariness drag at him. He tried to think how many days he’d been riding from first light to last. A lifetime, it felt like. He remembered the man who’d left Machi to save the Dai-kvo, but it no longer felt like something he’d done himself. He was changing. His heart still ached at the thought of Kiyan and Eiah and Danat. His apprehension at the struggle still before him was no less. And still, he was not the man he had once been, and to his surprise and unease, the man he was becoming seemed quite natural.

  “Most High?” Saya repeated.

  “Walking away from a negotiation isn’t the same as ending it,” Otah said. “Cetani’s proud and he’s lost, but he’s not a fool. He wants to do what we’re asking of him. He just hasn’t found the way to say yes.”

  “You sound sure of that,” Saya said.

  Otah chose his words carefully.

  “If someone had come to me after that battle and said that they knew what to do, that they would take the responsibility, I would have given it to them. And that’s just what I’ve offered him,” Otah said. “The Khai Cetani will call for me. Tonight.”

  He was wrong. The Khai Cetani didn’t send for him until the next morning.

  The man’s eyes were bloodshot, his face slack from worry and exhaustion. Otah doubted the Khai Cetani had slept since they had spoken, and perhaps not for days before that. Through the wide, unshuttered windows, the morning was cold and gray, low clouds seeming to bring the sky no higher than a sparrow might fly. Otah sat on the divan set for him—rich velvet cloth studded with tiny pearls and silver thread, but smelling of dust and age. The most powerful man in Cetani sat across from him on an identical seat. That alone was a concession, and Otah noted it without giving sign one way or the other.

  The Khai Cetani motioned the servants to leave them. From the hesitation and surprised glances, Otah took it that he’d rarely done so before. Some men, he supposed, were more comfortable with the constant attention.

  “Convince me,” the Khai Cetani said when the doors were pulled closed and they were alone.

  Otah took a pose of query.

  “That you’re right,” the Khai said. “Convince me that you’re right.”

  There was a hunger in the request, almost a need. Otah took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The fire in the grate popped and shifted while he gathered his thoughts. He had turned his plans over in his mind since he’d left the ruin of the Dai-kvo’s village. He’d honed them and tested them and stayed up late into the night despairing at their improbability only to wake in the morning convinced once more. The simplest answer was the best here, and he knew that, but still it was a struggle to find the words that made his mind clear.

  “On the field, we can’t match them,” he said. “If we stay here and face them, we’ll lose outright. There’s nothing that can keep Cetani from falling to them. But they have two weaknesses. First, the steam wagons. They let them move faster than any group their size should be able to, but they’re dangerous. It’s a price they’re prepared to pay, but they have underestimated the risks. If we start by breaking those—”

  “The coal?”

  Otah took a confirming pose.

  “They aren’t built for forge coal,” he said. “And the men we’re facing? They’re soldiers, not smiths and ironmongers. There’s no reason for them to look too closely at what they raid out of your stocks. Especially when they’re pushing to get to Machi before the winter comes. If we leave them mixed coal, it’ll burn too hot. The seams of their metalwork will soften, if the grates don’t simply melt out from underneath.”

  “And so they have to come on foot or by horse?”

  Otah remembered the twisted metal from the Dai-kvo’s village and allowed himself a smile.

  “When those wagons break, it’s more than only stopping. They’ll lose men just from that, and if we play it well, we can use the confusion to make things worse for them. And there’s the other thing. They know we’re going to lose. They have the strength, and we’re unprepared. The only time we’ve faced them head-on, we were slaughtered. They know that we can’t effectively fight them.”

  “That’s a weakness?” the Khai Cetani asked.

  “Yes. It keeps them from paying attention. To them, it’s already over. Everything’s certain but the details. That something else might happen isn’t likely to occur to them. Why should it?”

  The Khai Cetani looked into the fire. The flames seemed to glitter in his dark eyes. When he spoke, his voice was grim.

  “They’ve made all the same mistakes we did.”

  Otah considered that for a moment before nodding.

  “The Galts understand war,” he said. “They’re the best teachers I have. And so I’ll do to them what they did to us.”

  “And to do that, you would have me—Khai of my own city—abandon Cetani to follow your lead?”

  “Yes,” Otah said.

  The Khai sat in silence for a long time, then rose. The rustle of his robes as he walked to the window was the only sound. Otah waited as the man looked out over the city. Over Cetani, the city for which this man had killed his brothers, for which he had given up his name. Otah felt the tension in his own back and neck. He was asking this man to abandon everything, to walk away from the only role he had played in his life. Cetani would fall. It would be sacked. Even if everything went perfectly, there might be nothing to rebuild. And what would a Khai be if there was no city left him?

  Many years before, Otah had asked another man to do the right thing, even though it would cost him his honor and prestige and the only place he had in the world. Heshai-kvo had refused, and he had died for the decision.

  “Most High,” Otah began, but the Khai Cetani held up a hand to stop him without even so much as looking back. Otah could see it in the man’s shoulders in the moment the decision was made; they lifted as if a burden had been taken from him.

  Even the winter she had passed in Yalakeht had not prepared Liat for the fickleness of seasons in the North. Each day now was noticeably shorter than the one before, and even when the afternoons were warm, the sun pressing down benignly on her face, the nights were suddenly bitter. In the gardens, the leaves all lost their green at once, as if by conspiracy. It was unlike the near-imperceptible changes in the summer cities. In Saraykeht, autumn was a slow, lingering thing; the warmth of the world made a long good-bye. Things came faster here, and Liat found the pace disturbing. She was a woman of the South, and abrupt change uneased her.

  For instance, she thought as she sipped smoky tea in her apartments, she still imagined herself a businesswoman of Saraykeht. Had anyone asked of her work, she would have spoken of the combing rooms, the warehouses. Had anyone asked of her home, she would have described the seafront of Saraykeht, the scent of the ocean, the babble of a hundred languages. She would have pictured the brick-built house she’d taken over when Amat Kyaan had died, and the little bedroom
with its window half-choked with vines. She hadn’t seen that city in over a year, and wouldn’t go back now before the spring at best.

  At best.

  At worst, Saraykeht itself might be gone. Or she might not live to see summer again.

  The city in which she now passed her days was suffering from change as well. Small shrines with images of the vanished andat had begun to appear in the niches between buildings, as if a few flowers and candles could coax them back. The temples had been filled every day by men and women who might not have sat before a priest in years. The beggars singing with boxes at their feet all chose songs about redemption and the return of things lost.

  She sipped her tea. It was no longer hot enough to scald her lips, but it felt good drinking it. It warmed her throat like wine, only without the easing in her muscles or the softness in her mind. The morning before her was full—coordinating the movement of food and fuel into the tunnels below Machi, the raising of stores into the high towers where they would wait out the cold of winter. There wasn’t time for dark thoughts. And yet the darkness came whether she courted it or not.

  She looked up at the sound of the door. Nayiit stepped in. The nights were not so long or so cold as to keep him in his rooms. Liat put down her bowl.

  “Good morning, Mother,” he said as he sat on a cushion beside the fire. “You’re up early.”

  “Not particularly,” Liat said.

  “No?” Nayiit said, and then smiled the disarming, rueful smile that would always and forever mark him as the son of Otah Machi. “No, I suppose not. May I?”

  Liat gestured her permission, and Nayiit poured himself a bowl of the tea. He looked tired, and it was more than a night spent in teahouses and the baths. Something had changed while he’d been gone. She had thought at first that it was only exhaustion. When she’d found him asleep on Maati’s floor, he had been half-dead from his time on the road and visibly thinner. But since then he’d rested and eaten, and still there was something behind his eyes. An echo of her own bleak thoughts, perhaps.

  “I failed him,” Nayiit said. Liat blinked and sat back in her chair. Nayiit tilted his head. “It’s what you were wondering, ne? What’s been eating the boy? Why can’t he sleep anymore? I failed the Khai. I had his good opinion. There was a time that he valued my counsel and listened to me, even when I had unpleasant things to say. And then I failed him. And he sent me away.”

  “You didn’t fail—”

  “I did. Mother, I love you, and I know that you’d move the stars for me if you could, but I failed. Your son can fail,” Nayiit said. He put down his bowl with a sharp click, and Liat wondered if perhaps he was still just a bit tipsy from his night’s revelry. Drink sometimes made her maudlin too. “I’m not a good man, Mother. I’m not. I have left my wife and my child. I have slept with half the women I’ve met since we left home. I lost the Khai’s trust—”

  “Nayiit—”

  “I killed those men.”

  His face was still as stone, but a tear crept from the corner of his eye. Liat slid down from her seat to kneel on the floor beside him. She put her hand on his, but Nayiit didn’t move.

  “I called the retreat,” he said. “I saw them fighting, and the Galts were everywhere. They were all around us. All I could think was that they needed to get away. I was calling signals. I knew how to call the retreat, and I did it. And they died. Every man that fell because we ran is someone I killed. And he knew it. The Khai. He knew it, and it’s why he sent me back here.”

  “That battle was doomed from the start,” Liat said. “They outnumbered you; they were veterans. Your men were exhausted laborers and huntsmen. If what happened out there is anyone’s fault, it’s Otah’s.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. His voice wasn’t angry, only tired. “I want to be a good man. And I’m not. For a time, I thought I was. I thought I could be. I was wrong.”

  Liat felt a thickness at the back of her throat. She forced a smile, half-rose, and kissed him on the top of his head, where the bones hadn’t yet grown closed the first time she’d held him.

  “Then do better,” she said. “As long as you’re alive, the next thing you do can be a good one, ne? Besides which, of course you’re a good man. Only good men worry about whether they’re bad.”

  Nayiit chuckled. The darkness slid back to the place it had been. Not gone, but hidden.

  “And what do bad men worry about?” he asked.

  Liat shrugged and started to answer him, but the bells began to ring. It took half a breath for Liat to recall what the deep chiming alarm meant. She didn’t remember going to the window; she couldn’t say how Nayiit had come to be at her side. She squinted against the blue-yellow light of morning, trying to make out the banners hanging from the towers high above.

  “Is it red or yellow?” Liat asked.

  “Gods,” Nayiit said. “Look at that.”

  His gaze was nearer the ground. Liat looked to the south. The low cloud of dust seemed to cover half the horizon. Otah’s remaining men couldn’t have done that. It wasn’t him. The Galts had come to Machi. Liat stepped back from the window, her hands gripping the folds of her robe just over her heart.

  “We have to get Kiyan-cha,” she said. “We have to get Kiyan-cha and the children. And Maati. We have to get them out before—”

  “Red,” Nayiit said.

  Liat shook her head, uncertain for a moment what he meant. Nayiit pointed to the high dark tower and spoke over the still-ringing bells.

  “The banner’s red,” he said. “It’s not the Galts. It’s the Khai.”

  Only it wasn’t. The couriers reached Kiyan just before Liat did, so when she entered Kiyan-cha’s meeting rooms, she found Otah’s wife with a thick letter—seams ripped, seal broken—lying abandoned in her lap and an expression equal parts disbelief and outrage on her pale face.

  “He’s an idiot,” Kiyan said. “He’s a self-aggrandizing, half-blind idiot who can’t think two thoughts in a straight line.”

  Liat took a pose that asked the question.

  “My husband,” Kiyan said, color coming at last to her cheeks. “He’s sent us another whole city.”

  Cetani, nearest neighbor of Machi, had emptied itself. The couriers had arrived just before the fastest carts. The dust that Liat had mistaken for an army was only the first wave of tens of thousands of men and women—their stores of grains, their chickens and ducks and goats, whatever small precious things they could not bring themselves to leave behind. Otah’s letter explained that they were in need of shelter, that Machi should do its best for them. The tone of the words was apologetic, but only for someone who knew the man well. Only to women like themselves. Kiyan held Liat’s arm as if for support as they walked together to the bridge outside the city where they awaited her.

  The man who stood at the middle point in the bridge wore an elegant robe—black silk shot with yellow—that was only slightly disarrayed by his travels. Servants and armsmen of Machi parted for Kiyan, allowing her passage onto the bridge’s western end. Liat tried to disengage, but Kiyan’s grip didn’t lessen, and so they walked out together. On seeing them, the man took a pose of greeting appropriate for a man of lower rank to the wife of a more prestigious man. This was not the Khai Cetani, then, but some member of the Cetani utkhaiem.

  “I have been sent to speak to the first wife of the Khai Machi,” he said.

  “I am the Khai’s only wife,” Kiyan said.

  He took this odd information in stride, turning his attention wholly to Kiyan. Liat felt awkward and out of place, and oddly quite protective of the woman at her side.

  “Kiyan-cha,” the man said. “I am Kamath Vauamnat, voice of House Vauamnat. The Khai Cetani has sent us here at your husband’s invitation. The army of Galt is still some days behind us, but it is coming. Our city …”

  Something changed in the courtier’s face. It was unlike anything Liat had seen before, except perhaps an actor who in the midst of declaiming some epic has forgotten the
words. The mask and distance of etiquette failed, and the words he spoke became genuine.

  “Our city’s gone. We have what we’re carrying. We need your help.”

  Only Liat was near enough to Kiyan to hear the tiny sigh that escaped before she spoke.

  “How could I refuse you?” she said. “I am utterly unprepared, but if you will bring your people across the bridge and make them ready, I will find them places here.”

  The man took a pose of gratitude, and Kiyan turned back, Liat still at her side, and walked back to the bank where her people waited.

  “We’ll need something like shelter for these people,” Kiyan said, under her breath. “Someplace we can keep them out of the rain until we can find…someplace.”

  “They won’t all fit,” Liat said. “We can put them in the tunnels, but then there’s no place for all of us to go when winter comes. There’s too many of them, and they can’t have carried enough food to see them through until spring. And we’re stretched thin as it is.”

  “We’ll stretch thinner,” Kiyan said.

  The rest of the day was a single long emergency, events and needs and decisions coming in waves and overlapping each other like the scales of a snake. Liat found herself at the large and growing camp that was forming as the refugees of Cetani reached the bridge. Thankfully, the bridge was only the width of eight men walking abreast, and it kept the flow of humanity and cattle and carts to a speed that was almost manageable. Liat only had to school herself not to look across the water to the larger, shapeless mass of people still waiting to cross. Liat motioned them to different places, the ones too frail or ill to survive another night in the open, the ones robust enough that they might be put to work. There were old men, children, babes hanging in their mothers’ exhausted arms.

  Liat felt as if she were being asked to engineer a new city of tents and cook fires. They came in the hundreds. In the thousands. Night had fallen before the last man crossed, and Liat could see fires on the far side, camps made by those who’d given up hope of crossing today. Liat sat on the smooth stone rail at the bridge’s end and let the aches in her feet and back and legs complain to her. It had been an excruciating day, and the work was far from ended. But at least the refugees were in tents sent out from Machi, safe from the cold. The food carts of Machi had also come out from the city, making their way through the crowds with garlic sausages and honeyed almonds and bowls of noodles and beef. There were even songs. Over the constant frigid rushing of the water, there was the sound of flutes and drums and voices. The temptation to close her eyes was unbearable, and yet. And yet.