An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Read online

  It was bald flattery. Radaani was among the richest houses in the winter cities, and had agreements with dozens of houses, all through the cities of the Khaiem. The whole of House Kyaan would hardly have made up one of the Radaani compounds, and there were four such compounds that Liat knew of. Liat accepted it, though, as if it were true, as if the hospitality extended to her were more than etiquette.

  “I look forward to speaking with him,” Liat said. “I am most interested in hearing news of the winter cities.”

  “Oh, there’ll be quite a bit to say, I’m sure,” the girl laughed. “There always is once winter’s ended. I think people save up all the gossip of the winter to haul out in spring.”

  She opened a pair of wide wooden doors and led them into small, cozy apartments. A fire popped and murmured in the grate, bowls of mulled wine waited steaming on a low wooden table, and archways to either side showed rooms with real beds waiting for them. Liat’s body seemed drawn to the bed like a stone rolling downhill. She had not realized how much she loathed shipboard hammocks.

  She took a pose of thanks that the girl responded to neatly as the servant boy put the crate down gently by the fire.

  “I will let you rest,” the girl said. “If you have need of me, any of the servants can find me for you. And I will, of course, send word when my father returns.”

  “You’re very kind,” Nayiit said, smiling his disarming smile. “Forgive me, but is there a bathhouse near? I don’t think shipboard life has left me entirely prepared for good company.”

  “Of course,” the girl said. “I would be pleased to show you the way.”

  I’m sure you would, Liat thought. Was I so obvious at her age?

  “Mother,” Nayiit said, “would you care to…”

  Liat waved the offer away.

  “A basin and a sponge will be enough for me. I have letters to write before dinner. Perhaps, Ceinat-cha, if you would leave word with your couriers that I will have things to send south?”

  The girl took an acknowledging pose, then turned to Nayiit with a flutter of a smile and gestured for him to follow her.

  “Nayiit,” Liat said, and her son paused in the apartment’s doorway. “Find out what you can about the situation in Machi. I’d like to know what we’re walking into.”

  Nayiit smiled, nodded, and vanished. The servant boy also left, promising the basin and sponge shortly. Liat sighed and sat down, stretching her feet out toward the burning logs. The wine tasted good, though slightly overspiced to her taste.

  Machi. She was going to Machi. She let her mind turn the fact over again, as if it were a puzzle she had nearly solved. She was going to present her discoveries and her fears to the man she’d once called a lover, back when he’d been a seafront laborer and called himself Itani. Now he was the Khai Machi. And Maati, with whom she had betrayed him. The idea tightened her throat every time she thought of it.

  Maati. Nayiit was going to see Maati, perhaps to confront him, perhaps to seek the sort of advice that a son can ask only of a father. Something, perhaps, that touched on the finer points of going to foreign bathhouses with young women in snowfox robes. Liat sighed.

  Nayiit had been thinking about what it would be to walk away from his wife, the son he’d brought to the world. He’d said as much, and more than once. She had thought it was a question based in anger—an accusation against Maati. It only now occurred to her that perhaps there was also longing in it, and she thought to wonder how complex her quiet, pleasant son’s heart might be.

  BALASAR LEANED over the balcony and looked down at the courtyard below. A crowd had gathered, talking animatedly with the brown-skinned, almond-eyed curiosity he had spirited from across the sea. They peppered him with questions—why was he called a poet when he didn’t write poems, what did he think of Acton, how had he learned to speak Galtic so well. Their eyes were bright and the conversation as lively as water dropped on a hot skillet. For his part, Riaan Vaudathat drank it all in, answering everything in the slushy singsong accent of the Khaiem. When the people laughed, he joined in as if they were not laughing at him. Perhaps he truly didn’t know they were.

  Riaan glanced up and saw him, raising his hands in a pose that Balasar recognized as a form of greeting, though he couldn’t have said which of the half-thousand possible nuances it held. He only waved in return and stepped away from the edge of the balcony.

  “It’s like I’ve taught a dog to wear clothes and talk,” Balasar said, lowering himself onto a bench beside Eustin.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They don’t understand.”

  “You can’t expect them to, sir. They’re simple folk, most of ’em. Never been as far as Eddensea. They’ve been hearing about the Khaiem and the poets and the andat all their lives, but they’ve never seen ’em. Now they have the chance.”

  “Well, it’ll help my popularity at the games,” Balasar said, his voice more bitter than he’d intended.

  “They don’t know the things we do, sir. You can’t expect them to think like us.”

  “And the High Council? Can I expect it of them? Or are they in chambers talking about the funny brown man who dresses like a girl?”

  Eustin looked down, silent for long enough that Balasar began to regret his tone.

  “All fairness, sir,” Eustin said, “the robes do look like a girl’s.”

  It was six years now since he and Eustin and Coal had returned to the hereditary estate outside Kirinton, half a year since they had recruited the fallen poet of Nantani, and three weeks since Balasar had received the expected summons. He’d come to Acton with his best men, the books, the poet, the plans. The High Council 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.

  Since then, the Council had met without him. They might have been debating the plan he had laid out before them, or they might have moved to other business, leaving him to soak in his own sweat. He and Eustin and the poet Riaan had lived in the apartments assigned to them. Balasar had spent his days sitting outside the Council’s halls and meeting chambers, and his nights walking the starlit streets, restless as a ghost. Each hour that passed was wasted. Every night was one less that he would have in the autumn when the end of his army was racing against the snow and cold of the Khaiate North. If the Council’s intention had been to set him on edge, they had done their work.

  A flock of birds, black as crows but thinner, burst from the walnut trees beyond the courtyard, whirled overhead, and settled back where they had come from. Balasar wove his fingers together on one knee.

  “What do we do if they don’t move forward?” Eustin asked quietly.

  “Convince them.”

  “And if they can’t be convinced?”

  “Convince them anyway,” Balasar said.

  Eustin nodded. Balasar appreciated that the man didn’t press the issue. Eustin had known him long enough to understand that bloody-mindedness was how Balasar moved through the world. From the beginning, he’d been cursed by a small stature, a shorter reach than his brothers or the boys with whom he’d trained. He’d gotten used to working himself harder, training while other boys slept and drank and whored. Where he couldn’t make himself bigger or stronger, he instead became fast and smart and uncompromising.

  When he became a man of arms in the service of Galt, he had been the smallest in his cohort. And in time, they had named him general. If the High Council needed to be convinced, then he would by God convince them.

  A polite cough came from the archways behind them, and Balasar turned. A secretary of the Council stood in the shade of the wide colonnade. As Balasar and Eustin rose, he bowed slightly at the waist.

  “General Gice,” the secretary said. “The Lord Convocate requests your presence.”

  “Good,�
�� Balasar said, then turned to Eustin and spoke quickly and low. “Stay here and keep an eye on our friend. If this goes poorly, we may need to make good time out of Acton.”

  Eustin nodded, his face as calm and impassive as if Balasar asked him to turn against the High Council half the days of any week. Balasar tugged his vest and sleeves into place, nodded to the secretary, and allowed himself to be led into the shadows of government.

  The path beneath the colonnade led into a maze of hallways as old as Galt itself. The air seemed ancient, thick and dusty and close with the breath of men generations dead. The secretary led Balasar up a stone stairway worn treacherously smooth by a river of footsteps to a wide door of dark and carved wood. Balasar scratched on it, and a booming voice called him in.

  The meeting room was wide and long, with a glassed-in terrace that looked out over the city and shelves lining the walls with books and rolled maps. Low leather couches squatted by an iron fireplace, a low rosewood table between them with dried fruits and glass flutes ready for wine. And standing at the terrace’s center looking out over the city, the Lord Convocate, a great gray bear of a man.

  Balasar closed the door behind him and walked over to the man’s side. Acton spilled out before them—smoke and grime, broad avenues where steam wagons chuffed their slow way through the city taking on passengers for a half-copper a ride laced with lanes so narrow a man’s shoulders could touch the walls on either side. For a moment, Balasar recalled the ruins in the desert, placing the memory over the view before him. Reminding himself again of the stakes he played for.

  “I’ve been riding herd on the Council since you gave your report. They aren’t happy,” the Lord Convocate said. “The High Council doesn’t look favorably on men of…what should I call it? Profound initiative? None of them had any idea you’d gone so far. Not even your father. It was impolitic.”

  “I’m not a man of politics.”

  The Lord Convocate laughed.

  “You’ve led an army on campaign,” he said. “If you didn’t understand something of how to manage men, you’d be feeding some Westland tree by now.”

  Balasar shrugged. It wasn’t what he’d meant to do; it was the moment to come across as controlled, loyal, reliable as stone, and here he was shrugging like a petulant schoolboy. He forced himself to smile.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said.

  “But you know they would have refused you.”

  “Know is a strong word. Suspected.”

  “Feared?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “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 in Eddensea. 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. The binding has been discussed literally for centuries. I’ve found books of commentary and analysis dating back to the First Empire…”

  “All of it exploring exactly why it can’t be done, yes?” The Lord Convocate’s voice had gone as gentle and sympathetic as that of a medic trying to lead a man to realize his own dementia. It was a ploy. The old man wanted to see whether Balasar would lose his temper, so instead he smiled.

  “That depends on what you mean by impossible.”

  The Lord Convocate nodded and stepped to the windows, his hands clasped behind his back. Balasar waited for three breaths, four. The impulse to shake the old man, to shout that every day was precious and the price of failure horrible beyond contemplation, rose in him and fell. This was the battle now, and as important as any of those to come.

  “So,” the Lord Convocate said, turning. “Explain to me how cannot means can.”

  Balasar gestured toward the couches. They sat, leather creaking beneath them.

  “The andat are ideas translated into forms that include volition,” Balasar said. “A poet who’s bound something like, for example, Wood-Upon-Water gains control over the expression of that thought in the world. He could raise a sunken vessel up or sink all the ships on the sea with a thought, if he wished it. The time required to create the binding is measured in years. If it succeeds, the poet’s life work is to hold the thing here in the world and train someone to take it from him when he grows old or infirm.”

  “You’re telling me what I know,” the old man said, but Balasar raised a hand, stopping him.

  “I’m telling you what they mean when they say impossible. They mean that Freedom-From-Bondage can’t be held. There is no way to control something that is the essential nature and definition of the uncontrolled. But they make no distinction between being invoked and being maintained.”

  The Lord Convocate frowned and rubbed his fingertips together.

  “We can bind it, sir. Riaan isn’t the talent of the ages, but Freedom-From-Bondage should be easy compared with the normal run. The whole binding’s nearly done already—only a little tailoring to make it fit our man’s mind in particular.”

  “That comes back to the issue,” the Lord Convocate said. “What happens when this impossible binding works?”

  “As soon as it is bound it is freed.” Balasar clapped his palms together. “That fast.”

  “And the advantage of that?” the Lord Convocate said, though Balasar could see the old man had already traced out the implications.

  “Done well, with the right grammar, the right nuances, it will unbind every andat there is when it goes. All of this was in my report to the High Council.”

  The Lord Convocate nodded as he plucked a circle of dried apple from the bowl between them. When he spoke again, however, it was as if Balasar’s objection had never occurred.

  “Assuming it works, that you can take the andat from the field of play, what’s to stop the Khaiem from having their poets make another andat and loose it on Galt?”

  “Swords,” Balasar said. “As you said, fourteen cities in a single season. None of them will have enough time. I have men in every city of the Khaiem, ready to meet us with knowledge of the defenses and strengths we face. There are agreements with mercenary companies to support our men. Four well-equipped, well-supported forces, each taking unfortified, poorly armed cities. But we have to start moving men now. This is going to take time, and I don’t want to be caught in the North waiting to see which comes first, the thaw or some overly clever poet in Cetani or Machi managing to bind something new. We have to move quickly—kill the poets, take the libraries—”

  “After which we can go about making andat of our own at our leisure,” the Lord Convocate said. His voice was thoughtful, and still Balasar sensed a trap. He wondered how much the man had guessed of his own plans and intentions for the future of the andat.

  “If that’s what the High Council chooses to do,” Balasar said, sitting back. “All of this, of course, assuming I’m given permission to move forward.”

  “Ah,” the Lord Convocate said, lacing his hands over his belly. “Yes. That will need an answer. Permission of the Council. A thousand things could go wrong. And if you fail—”

  “The stakes are no lower if we sit on our hands. And we could wait forever and never see a better chance,” Balasar said. “You’ll forgive my saying it, sir, but you haven’t said no.”

  “No,” he said, slowly. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then I have the command, sir?”

  After a moment, the Lord Convocate nodded.

  “What’s th
e matter?” Kiyan asked. She was already dressed in the silk shift that she slept in, her hair tied back from her thin foxlike face. It occurred to Otah for the first time just how long ago the sun had set. He sat on the bed at her side and let himself feel the aches in his back and knees.

  “Sitting too long,” he said. “I don’t know why doing nothing should hurt as badly as hauling crates.”

  Kiyan put a hand against his back, her fingers tracing his spine through the fine-spun wool of his robes.

  “For one thing, you haven’t hauled a crate for your living in thirty summers.”

  “Twenty-five,” he said, leaning back into the soft pressure of her hands. “Twenty-six now.”

  “For another, you’ve hardly done nothing. As I recall, you were awake before the sun rose.”

  Otah considered the sleeping chamber—the domed ceiling worked in silver, the wood and bone inlay of the floor and walls, the rich gold netting that draped the bed, the still, somber flame of the lantern. The east wall was stone—pink granite thin as eggshell that glowed when the sun struck it. He couldn’t recall how long it had been since he’d woken to see that light. Last summer, perhaps, when the nights were shorter. He closed his eyes and lay back into the soft, enfolding bed. His weight pressed out the scent of crushed rose petals. Eyes closed, he felt Kiyan shift, the familiar warmth and weight of her body resting against him. She kissed his temple.

  “Our friend from the Dai-kvo will finally leave soon. A message came recalling him,” Otah said. “That was a bright moment. Though the gods only know what kept him here so long. Sinja’s likely halfway to the Westlands by now.”

  “The envoy stayed for Maati’s work,” Kiyan said. “Apparently he hardly left the library these last weeks. Eiah’s been keeping me informed.”

  “Well, the gods and Eiah, then,” Otah said.

  “I’m worried about her. She’s brooding about something. Can you speak with her?”