Balasar blinked. He had had more to say, but the words seemed suddenly empty. The Emperor waited, his eyes on Balasar.
‘Ah,’ Balasar managed. ‘Well.’
‘So I’ll ask you again. How do we stop this?’
Far above, a crow cawed in the chill air. The fire kilns roared in their mindless voices. The world looked sharp and clear and strange, as if Balasar were seeing the city for the first time.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The poet?’
‘They’ve fled. For fear that I would kill them. Or that one of my people would. Or one of yours. I don’t have them, so I can’t give them over to you. But I have their books. The libraries of Machi and Cetani, and what we salvaged from the Dai-kvo. Give me your weapons. Give me your promise that you’ll go back to Galt and not make war against us again. I’ll burn the books and try to keep us all from starving next spring.’
‘I can’t promise you what the Council will do. Especially once . . . if . . .’
‘Promise me you won’t. You and your men. I’ll worry about the others later.’
There was strength in the man’s voice. And sorrow. Balasar thought of all the things he knew of this man, all the things Sinja had told him. A seafront laborer, a sailor, a courier, an assistant midwife. And now a man who negotiated the fate of the world over a meeting table in a snow-packed square while thousands of soldiers who’d spent the previous day trying to kill one another looked on. He was unremarkable - exhausted, grieving, determined. He could have been anyone.
‘I’ll need to talk to my men,’ Balasar said.
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll have an answer for you by sundown.’
‘If you have it by midday, we can get you someplace warm before night.’
‘Midday, then.’
They rose together, Balasar taking a pose of respect, and the Emperor Otah Machi returning it.
‘General,’ Otah said as Balasar began to turn away. His voice was gray as ashes. ‘One thing. You came because you believed the andat were too powerful, and the poet’s hearts were too weak. You weren’t wrong. The man who did this was a friend of mine. He’s a good man. Good men shouldn’t be able to make mistakes with prices this high.’
Balasar nodded and walked back across the square. The drummers matched the pace of his steps. The last of the books burned, the last of the poets fled into the wilderness, most likely to die, and if not then to live outcast for their crimes. The andat gone from the world. It was hard to think it. All his life he had aimed for that end, and still the idea was too large. His captains crowded around him as he drew near. Their faces were ashen and excited and fearful. Questions battered at him like moths at a lantern.
‘Tell the men,’ Balasar began, and they quieted. Balasar hesitated. ‘Tell the men to disarm. We’ll bring the weapons here. By midday.’
There was a moment of profound silence, and then one of the junior captains spoke.
‘How should we explain the surrender, sir?’
Balasar looked at the man, at all his men. For the first time in his memory, there seemed to be no ghosts at his back. He forced himself not to smile.
‘Tell them we won.’
27
The mine was ancient - one of the first to be dug when Machi had been a new city, the last Empire still unfallen. Its passages honeycombed the rock, twisting and swirling to follow veins of ore gone since long before Maati’s great-grandfather was born. Together, Maati and Cehmai had been raiding the bolt-hole that Otah had prepared for them and for his own children. It had been well stocked: dried meat and fruit, thick crackers, nuts and seeds. All of it was kept safe in thick clay jars with wax seals. They also took the wood and coal that had been set by. It would have been easier to stay there - to sleep in the beds that had been laid out, to light the lanterns set in the stone walls. But then they might have been found, and without discussing it, they had agreed to flee farther away from the city and the people they had known. Cehmai knew the tunnels well enough to find a new hiding place where the ventilation was good. They weren’t in danger of the fire igniting the mine air, as had sometimes happened. Or of the flames suffocating them.
The only thing they didn’t have in quantity was water; that, they could harvest. Maati or Cehmai could take one of the mine sleds out, fill it with snow, and haul it down into the earth. A trip every day or two was sufficient. They took turns sitting at the brazier, scooping handful after handful of snow into the flat iron pans, watching the perfect white collapse on itself and vanish into the black of the iron.
‘We did what we could,’ Maati said. ‘It isn’t as if we could have done anything differently.’
‘I know,’ Cehmai said, settling deeper into his cloak.
The rough stone walls didn’t make their voices echo so much as sound hollow.
‘I couldn’t just let the Galts roll through the city. I had to try,’ Maati said.
‘We all agreed,’ Cehmai said. ‘It was a decision we all reached together. It’s not your fault. Let it go.’
It was the conversation Maati always returned to in the handful of days they’d spent in hiding. He couldn’t help it. He could start with plans for the spring - taking gold and gems from the bolt-hole and marching off to Eddensea or the Westlands. He could start with speculations on what was happening in Machi or reminiscences of his childhood, or what sort of drum fit best with which type of court dance. He could begin anywhere, and he found himself always coming back to the same series of justifications, and Cehmai agreeing by rote with each of them. The dark season spread out before them - only one another for company and only one conversation spoken over and over, its variations meaningless. Maati took another handful of snow and dropped it into the iron melting pan.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to Bakta,’ Cehmai said. ‘I hear it’s warm all year.’
‘I’ve heard that too.’
‘Maybe next winter,’ Cehmai said.
‘Maybe,’ Maati agreed. The last icy island of snow melted and vanished. Maati dropped another handful in.
‘What part of the day is it, do you think?’ Maati asked.
‘After morning, I’d think. Maybe a hand or two either side of midday.’
‘You think so? I’d have thought later.’
‘Could be later,’ Cehmai said. ‘I lose track down here.’
‘I’m going to the bolt-hole again. Get more supplies.’
They didn’t need them, but Cehmai only raised his hands in a pose of agreement, then curled into himself and shut his eyes. Maati pulled the thick leather straps of the sled harness over his shoulders, lit a lantern, and began the long walk through the starless dark. The wood and metal flat-bottomed sled scraped and ground along the stone and dust of the mine floor. It was light now. It would be heavier coming back. But at least Maati was alone for a time, and the effort of pulling kept his mind clear.
An instrument of slaughter, made in fear. Sterile had called herself that. Maati could still hear her voice, could still feel the bite of her words. He had destroyed Galt, but he had destroyed his own people as well. He’d failed, and every doubt he had ever had of his own ability, or his worthiness to be among the poets, stood justified. He would be the most hated man in generations. And he’d earned it. The sled dragging behind him, the straps pulling back at his shoulders - they were the simplest burden he carried. They were nothing.
Cehmai had marked the turnings to take with piles of stone. Hunters searching the mines would be unlikely to notice the marks, but they were easy enough for Maati to follow. He turned left at a crossing, and then bore right where the tunnel forked, one passage leading up into darkness, the other down into air just as black.
The only comfort that the andat had offered - the only faint sliver of grace - was that Maati was not wholly at fault. Otah-kvo bore some measure of this guilt as well. He was the one who had come to Maati, all those years ago. He was the one who had hinted to Maati that the school to which they had both been sent had a h
idden structure. If he hadn’t, Maati might never have been a poet. Never have known Seedless or Heshai, Liat or Cehmai. Nayiit might never have been born. Even if the Galts had come, even if the world had fallen, it wouldn’t have fallen on Maati’s shoulders. Cehmai was right; the binding of Sterile had been a decision they had all made - Otah-kvo more than any of the rest. But it was Maati who was cast out to live in the dark and the cold. The sense of betrayal was as comforting as a candle in the darkness, and as he walked, Maati found himself indulging it.
The fault wasn’t his alone, and the punishment was. There was nothing fair in that. Nothing right. The terrible thing that had happened seemed nearly inevitable now that he looked back on it. He’d been given hardly any books, not half the time he’d been promised, and the threat of death at the end of a Galtic sword unless he succeeded. It would have been astounding it he hadn’t failed.
And for the price, that wasn’t something he’d chosen. That had been Sterile. Once the binding had failed, he’d had no control over it. He would never have hurt Eiah if he’d had the choice. It had simply happened. And still, he felt it in the back of his mind - the shape of the andat, the place in the realm of ideas that it had pressed down in him, like the flattened grass where a hunting cat has slept. Sterile came from him, was him, and even if she had only been brief, she had still learned her voice from him and visited her price upon the world through his mind and fears. The clever trick of pushing the price away from himself and onto the world had been his. The way in which the world had broken was his shadow - not him, not even truly shaped like him. But connected.
The tunnel before him came to a sudden end, and Maati had to follow his own track back to the turn he’d missed, angling up a steep slope and into the first breath of fresh, cold air, the first glimmer of daylight. Maati stood still a moment to catch his breath, then fastened all the ties on his cloak, pulled the furred hood up over his head, and began the long last climb.
The bolt-hole was perhaps half a hand’s walk from the entrance to the mines in which the poets hid. The snow was dry as sand, and the icy breeze from the North would be enough to conceal what traces of his footsteps the sled didn’t smooth over. Maati trudged through the world of snow and stone, his breath pluming out before him, his face stung and numbed. It was hellish. His feet first burned then went numb, and frost began to form on the fur around his hood’s mouth. Maati dragged himself and his sled. The numbness and the pain felt a bit like penance, and he was so caught up in them he nearly failed to notice the horse at the mouth of the bolt-hole.
It was a small animal, fit with heavy blankets and riding tack. Maati blinked at it, stunned by its presence, then scurried quickly behind a boulder, his heart in his mouth. Someone had come looking for them. Someone had found them. He turned to look back at the path he’d walked, certain that the footsteps in the snow were visible as blood on a wedding dress.
He waited for what seemed half a day but couldn’t have been more than half a hand’s width in the arc of the fast winter sun. A figure emerged from the tunnels - thick black cloak, and wide, heavy hood. Maati was torn between poking his head out to watch it and pulling back to hide behind his boulder. In the end caution won out, and he waited blind while the sound of horse’s hooves on snow began and then grew faint. He chanced a look, and the rider had its back to him, heading back south to Machi, a twig of black on the wide field of mourning white. Maati waited until he judged the risk of being seen no greater than the risk of frostbite if he stayed still, then forced himself - all his limbs aching with the cold - to scramble the last stretch into the tunnel.
The bolt-hole was empty. He was surprised to find that he’d half-expected it to be filled with men bearing swords, ready to take their vengeance out against him. He pulled off his gloves and lit a small fire to warm himself, and when his hands could move again without pain, he made an inventory of the place. Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing disturbed. Except this: a small wicker basket with two low stone wax-sealed jars where none had been before. Maati squatted over them, lifting them carefully. They were heavy - packed with something. And a length of scroll, curled like a leaf, had been nestled between them. Maati blew on his fingers and unfurled the scrap of parchment.
Maati-cha—
I thought you might be out in the hiding place where we were supposed to go when the Galts came, but you aren’t here, so I’m not sure anymore. I’m leaving this for you just in case. It’s peaches from the gardens. They were going to give them to the Galts, so I stole them.
Loya-cha says I’m not supposed to ride yet, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out again. If you find this, take it so I’ll know you were there.
It’s going to be all right.
It was signed with Eiah’s wide, uncontrolled hand. Maati felt himself weeping. He broke the seal of one jar and with numb fingers drew out a slice of the deep orange fruit, sweet and rich and thick with the sunshine of the autumn days that had passed.
The world changes. Sometimes slowly, sometimes all of an instant. But the world changes, and it doesn’t change back. A rockslide shifts the face of a mountain, and the stones never go back up to take their old places. War scatters the people of a city, and not all will return. If any.
A child cherished as a babe, clung to as a man, dies; a mother’s one last journey with her son at her side proves to be truly the last. The world has changed. And no matter how painful this new world is, it doesn’t change back.
Liat lay in the darkened room, as she had for days. Her belly didn’t bother her any longer. Even when it had, the pain hadn’t been deep. It was only flesh. The news of Nayiit’s death had been a more profound wound than anything the andat could do. Her boy had followed her on this last desperate adventure. He had left his own wife and child. And she had brought him here to die for a boy he hadn’t even known to be his brother.
Or perhaps he had known. Perhaps that was what had given him the courage to attack the Galtic soldiers and be cut down. She would have asked him; she still intended to ask him, when she saw him next. Even knowing that she never could, even trying consciously to force the impulse away, she found she could not stop intending it. When I see him again still felt like the future. A time would come when it would feel like the past. When he was here, when I could touch him, when he would smile at me and make me laugh, when I worried for him. When my boy lived. Back then. Before I lost him.
Before the world changed.
She sighed in the darkness, and didn’t bother to wipe away the tears. They were meaningless - her body responding without her. They couldn’t undo what had been done, and so they didn’t matter. Voices echoed in the hall outside her apartments here in the tunnels, and she ignored them. If they had been shouting warnings of fire, she would have ignored those too.
Sometimes she would think of all the people who had died. The amateur soldiers that Otah had led into battle outside the village of the Dai-kvo, the Galts dead on the road from Cetani. The sad rogue poet Riaan, slaughtered by the men he thought his friends. The innocent, naïve men and women and children in Nantani and Utani and Chaburi-Tan and all the other sacked cities. The children at the poets’ school.
Every one of them had a mother. Every mother who had not had the luck to die was trapped in the quiet desperation that imprisoned her now. Liat thought of all these other grieving women, held them up in her mind as proof that she was being stupid and weak. Mothers lost their sons all the time, all across the world. In every nation, in every city, in every age. Her suffering wasn’t so much compared with all of them.
And then she would hear someone cough in Nayiit’s voice, or she’d mistake the shape of a man’s back, and her idiot, traitor heart would sing for a moment. Even as her mind told her no it wasn’t, her heart would soar before it fell.
The scratch at her door was so faint and tentative, Liat thought at first it was only a rat tricked by the darkness into believing the room empty. But the sound came again, the intentional rhythm of a h
and against wood.
Likely it was Otah, coming again to hold her hand and sit quietly. He had done so several times, when he could free himself from the rigors of peace and war and Empire. They spoke little because there was too much to say, and no words adequate. Or perhaps one of his physicians, come to look in on her health. Or a servant sent to declaim poems or sing. Someone to distract her in the name of comfort. She wished they wouldn’t come.
The scratch repeated itself, more loudly.
‘Who?’ Liat managed to ask. For answer, the door slid open, and Kiyan stood framed in the doorway, a lantern in her hand. The expression on the woman’s fox-thin face seemed equally pity and unease.
‘Liat-kya,’ she said. ‘May I come in?’
‘If you like,’ Liat said.
The lantern cast a thousand broken shadows as Kiyan moved across the room. The tapestries on the wall, hidden so long in darkness, seemed to breathe. Liat considered the space in which she had been for so many days without seeing it. It was small. The furnishings were costly and exquisite. It didn’t matter. Kiyan went to the wall sconces, taking down the pale wax candles, touching them to the lantern flame, putting them back in their places glowing. The soft light slowly filled the air, the shadows smoothed away.
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