An Autumn War (42 page)

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 he over."

I Ic 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?"

Ile 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.

"11: WE TAKE 'I'I I I: NI'ANCE 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," \laati 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 StoneMade-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 Removingthe- 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. Removingthe-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.