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Authors: Daniel Abraham

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BOOK: Seasons of War
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‘We’re not going to die,’ one of the others said. He sounded amazed. The commander didn’t respond, and some measureless time later, another voice called for them to stop, to offer their names and the reason that they’d come to this twice-forsaken ass end of the world.
When the commander spoke, his voice was rough, rusting with disuse.
‘Go to your High Watchman,’ he said. ‘Tell him that Balasar Gice has returned.’
 
Balasar Gice had been in his eleventh year when he first heard the word
andat
. The river that passed through his father’s estates had turned green one day, and then red. And then it rose fifteen feet. Balasar had watched in horror as the fields vanished, the cottages, the streets and yards he knew. The whole world, it seemed, had become a sea of foul water with only the tops of trees and the corpses of pigs and cattle and men to the horizon.
His father had moved the family and as many of his best men as would fit to the upper stories of the house. Balasar had begged to take the horse his father had given him up as well. When the gravity of the situation had been explained, he changed his pleas to include the son of the village notary, who had been Balasar’s closest friend. He had been refused in that as well. His horses and his playmates were going to drown. His father’s concern was for Balasar, for the family; the wider world would have to look after itself.
Even now, decades later, the memory of those six days was fresh as a wound. The bloated bodies of pigs and cattle and people like pale logs floating past the house. The rich, low scent of fouled water. The struggle to sleep when the rushing at the bottom of the stairs seemed like the whisper of something vast and terrible for which he had no name. He could still hear men’s voices questioning whether the food would last, whether the water was safe to drink, and whether the flood was natural, a catastrophe of distant rains, or an attack by the Khaiem and their andat.
He had not known then what the word meant, but the syllables had taken on the stench of the dead bodies, the devastation where the village had been, the emptiness and the destruction. It was only much later - after the water had receded, the dead had been mourned, the village rebuilt - that he learned how correct he had been.
Nine generations of fathers had greeted their new children into the world since the God Kings of the East had turned upon each other, his history tutor told him. When the glory that had been the center of all creation fell, its throes had changed the nature of space. The lands that had been great gardens and fields were deserts now, permanently altered by the war. Even as far as Galt and Eddensea, the histories told of weeks of darkness, of failed crops and famine, a sky dancing with flames of green, a sound as if the earth were tearing itself apart. Some people said the stars themselves had changed positions.
But the disasters of the past grew in the telling or faded from memory. No one knew exactly how things had been those many years ago. Perhaps the Emperor had gone mad and loosed his personal god-ghost - what they called andat - against his own people, or against himself. Or there might have been a woman, the wife of a great lord, who had been taken by the Emperor against her will. Or perhaps she’d willed it. Or the thousand factions and minor insults and treacheries that accrue around power had simply followed their usual course.
As a boy, Balasar had listened to the story, drinking in the tales of mystery and glory and dread. And, when his tutor had told him, somber of tone and gray, that there were only two legacies left by the fall of the God Kings - the wastelands that bordered Far Galt and Obar State, and the cities of the Khaiem where men still held the andat like Cooling, Seedless, Stone-Made-Soft - Balasar had understood the implication as clearly as if it had been spoken.
What had happened before could happen again at any time and without warning.
‘And that’s what brought you?’ the High Watchman said. ‘It’s a long walk from a little boy at his lessons to this place.’
Balasar smiled again and leaned forward to sip bitter kafe from a rough tin mug. His room was baked brick and close as a cell. A cruel wind hissed outside the thick walls, as it had for the three long, feverish days since he had returned to the world. The small windows had been scrubbed milky by sandstorms. His little wounds were scabbing over, none of them reddened or hot to the touch, though the stripe on his shoulder where the satchel strap had been would doubtless leave a scar.
‘It wasn’t as romantic as I’d imagined,’ he said. The High Watchman laughed, and then, remembering the dead, sobered. Balasar shifted the subject. ‘How long have you been here? And who did you offend to get yourself sent to this . . . lovely place?’
‘Eight years. I’ve been eight years at this post. I didn’t much care for the way things got run in Acton. I suppose this was my way of saying so.’
‘I’m sure Acton felt the loss.’
‘I’m sure it didn’t. But then, I didn’t do it for them.’
Balasar chuckled.
‘That
sounds
like wisdom,’ Balasar said, ‘but eight years here seems an odd place for wisdom to lead you.’
The High Watchman smacked his lips and shrugged.
‘It wasn’t me going inland,’ he said. Then, a moment later, ‘They say there’s still andat out there. Haunting the places they used to control.’
‘There aren’t,’ Balasar said. ‘There are other things. Things they made or unmade. There’s places where the air goes bad on you - one breath’s fine, and the next it’s like something’s crawling into you. There’s places where the ground’s thin as eggshell and a thousand-foot drop under it. And there are living things too - things they made with the andat, or what happened when the things they made bred. But the ghosts don’t stay once their handlers are gone. That isn’t what they are.’
Balasar took an olive from his plate, sucked away the flesh, and spat back the stone. For a moment, he could hear voices in the wind. The words of men who’d trusted and followed him, even knowing where he would take them. The voices of the dead whose lives he had spent. Coal and Eustin had survived. The others - Little Ott, Bes, Mayarsin, Laran, Kellem, and a dozen more - were bones and memory now. Because of him. He shook his head, clearing it, and the wind was only wind again.
‘No offense, General,’ the High Watchman said, ‘but there’s not enough gold in the world for me to try what you did.’
‘It was necessary,’ Balasar said, and his tone ended the conversation.
 
The journey to the coast was easier than it should have been. Three men, traveling light. The others were an absence measured in the ten days it took to reach Lawton. It had taken sixteen coming from. The arid, empty lands of the East gave way to softly rolling hills. The tough yellow grasses yielded to blue-green almost the color of a cold sea, wavelets dancing on its surface. Farmsteads appeared off the road, windmills with broad blades shifting in the breezes; men and women and children shared the path that led toward the sea. Balasar forced himself to be civil, even gracious. If the world moved the way he hoped, he would never come to this place again, but the world had a habit of surprising him.
When he’d come back from the campaign in the Westlands, he’d thought his career was coming to its victorious end. He might take a place in the Council or at one of the military colleges. He even dared to dream of a quiet estate someplace away from the yellow coal smoke of the great cities. When the news had come - a historian and engineer in Far Galt had divined a map that might lead to the old libraries - he’d known that rest had been a chimera, a thing for other men but never himself. He’d taken the best of his men, the strongest, smartest, most loyal, and come here. He had lost them here. The ones who had died, and perhaps also the ones who had lived.
Coal and Eustin were both quiet as they traveled, both respectful when they stopped to camp for the night. Without conversation, they had all agreed that the cold night air and hard ground was better than the company of men at an inn or wayhouse. Once in a while, one or the other would attempt to talk or joke or sing, but it always failed. There was a distance in their eyes, a stunned expression that Balasar recognized from boys stumbling over the wreckage of their first battlefield. They were seasoned fighters, Coal and Eustin. He had seen both of them kill men and boys, knew each of them had raped women in the towns they’d sacked, and still, they had left some scrap of innocence in the desert and were moving away from it with every step. Balasar could not say what that loss would do to them, nor would he insult their manhood by bringing it up. He knew, and that alone would have to suffice. They reached the ports of Parrinshall on the first day of autumn.
Half a hundred ships awaited them: great merchant ships built to haul cargo across the vast emptiness of the southern seas, shallow fishing boats that darted out of port and back again, the ornate three-sailed roundboats of Bakta, the antiquated and changeless ships of the east islands. It was nothing to the ports at Kirinton or Lanniston or Saraykeht, but it was enough. Three berths on any of half a dozen of these ships would take them off Far Galt and start them toward home.
‘Winter’ll be near over afore we see Acton,’ Coal said, and spat off the dock.
‘I imagine it will,’ Balasar agreed, shifting the satchel against his hip. ‘If we sail straight through. We could also stay here until spring if we liked. Or stop in Bakta.’
‘Whatever you like, General,’ Eustin said.
‘Then we’ll sail straight through. Find what’s setting out and when. I’ll be at the harbor master’s house.’
‘Anything the matter, sir?’
‘No,’ Balasar said.
The harbor master’s house was a wide building of red brick settled on the edge of the water. Banners of the Great Tree hung from the archway above its wide bronze doors. Balasar announced himself to the secretary and was shown to a private room. He accepted the offer of cool wine and dried figs, asked for and received the tools for writing the report now required of him, and gave orders that he not be disturbed until his men arrived. Then, alone, he opened his satchel and drew forth the books he had recovered, laying them side by side on the desk that looked out over the port. There were four, two bound in thick, peeling leather, another whose covers had been ripped from it, and one encased in metal that appeared to be neither steel nor silver, but something of each. Balasar ran his fingers over the mute volumes, then sat, considering them and the moral paradox they represented.
For these, he had spent the lives of his men. While the path back to Galt was nothing like the risk he had faced in the ruins of the fallen Empire, still it was sea travel. There were storms and pirates and plagues. If he wished to be certain that these volumes survived, the right thing would be to transcribe them here in Parrinshall. If he were to die on the journey home, the books, at least, would not be drowned. The knowledge within them would not be lost.
Which was also the argument
against
making copies. He took the larger of the leather-bound volumes and opened it. The writing was in the flowing script of the dead Empire, not the simpler chop the Khaiem used for business and trade with foreigners like himself. Balasar frowned as he picked out the symbols his tutor had taught him as a boy.
There are two types of impossibility in the
andat:
those which cannot be understood, and those whose natures make binding impossible
. His translation was rough, but sufficient for his needs. These were the books he’d sought. And so the question remained whether the risk of their loss was greater than the risk posed by their existence. Balasar closed the book and let his head rest in his hands. He knew, of course, what he would do. He had known before he’d sent Eustin and Coal to find a boat for them. Before he’d reached Far Galt in the first place.
It was his awareness of his own pride that made him hesitate. History was full of men who thought themselves to be the one great soul whom power would not corrupt. He did not wish to be among that number, and yet here he sat, holding in his hands the secrets that might remake the shape of the human world. A humble man would have sought counsel from those wiser than himself, or at least feared to wield the power. He did not like what it said of him that giving the books to anyone besides himself seemed as foolish as gambling with their destruction. He would not even have trusted them to Eustin or Coal or any of the men who had died helping him.
He took the paper he’d been given, raised the pen, and began his report and, in a sense, his confession.
 
Three weeks out, Eustin broke.
The sea surrounded them, empty and immense as the sky. So far south, the water was clear and the air warm even with the slowly failing days. The birds that had followed them from Parrinshall had vanished. The only animal was a three-legged dog the ship’s crew had taken on as a mascot. Nor were there women on board. Only the rank, common smell of men and the sea.
The rigging creaked and groaned, unnerving no one but Balasar. He had never loved traveling by water. Campaigning on land was no more comfortable, but at least when the day ended he was able to see that this village was not the one he’d been in the night before, the tree under which he slept looked out over some different hillside. Here, in the vast nothingness of water, they might almost have been standing still. Only the long white plume of their wake gave him a sense of movement, the visible promise that one day the journey would end. He would often sit at the stern, watch that constant trail, and take what solace he could from it. Sometimes he carved blocks of wax with a small, thin knife while his mind wandered and softened in the boredom of inaction.
BOOK: Seasons of War
10.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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