Seasons of War (44 page)
Authors: Daniel Abraham
The first skirmish, here at the head of the column, was the critical one. The way forward had to be blocked. If they could push the Galts back here, they could drive them into their own men, confuse their formations, keep their balance off. Or so they’d planned, so he hoped. And as he came down the hill, it seemed possible. The Galts were wide-eyed with surprise, confused, afraid. Otah shouted and waved an axe, but there was no one there to threaten with it. It had already happened. The Galts were pulling back.
A bodyguard formed around him as he walked down the road, soldiers falling in around him and marching back toward Cetani, cutting down Galts as they went. In the distance, a horn sounded the call for horsemen to attack. Small formations of Galts - two or three score at most - held the road’s center, confused, surrounded, and unable to retreat. A few ran to the trees for cover, only to find the forest alive with enemy blades. The rest fell to arrows and stones. Some engineer had made sense of Otah’s trick, and great white plumes of steam rose into the sky as the wagons spent their pressure. The air reeked of blood and hot metal and smoke; it tasted rank. Twice, a wave of Galts swung toward Otah and his steadily increasing guard, only to be thrown back. The Galt army was in disarray, surrounded, confused. Horsemen in the colors of the high families of Machi and Cetani raised their swords in salute when they saw Otah.
He walked over the dead and the dying, past steam wagons that had burst open or been spared, horses that lay dead or flailed and screamed as they died. The sun was almost at the top of its arc, the whole morning gone, when Otah reached the last of the wagons, his bodyguard now nearly the size of his entire force. They had followed him, pinching down on the Galts as he’d moved forward. The plains before them stretched out to Machi, stands of Galtic archers holding positions to cover the retreat. Otah raised his horn to his lips and called the halt. Others horns called the acknowledgment. The battle was ended. The Galts had come this far and would come no farther. Otah felt himself sag.
From the south, he saw a movement among the men like wind stirring tall grass. The Khai Cetani came barreling forward, a wide grin on his face, blood soaking the ornate silk sleeves of his robes. Otah found himself grinning back. He took a pose of congratulations, but the Khai Cetani whooped and wrapped his arms around Otah’s waist, lifting him like Otah was a child in his father’s arms.
‘You’ve done it!’ the Khai Cetani shouted. ‘You’ve beaten the bastards!’
We have, Otah tried to say, but he was being lifted upon the shoulders of his men. A roar passed through the assembled men - a thousand throats opening as one. Otah let himself smile, let the relief wash over him. The Galtic army was broken. They would not reach Machi before winter came. He had done it.
They carried him back and forth before the men, the shouts and salutes following him like a windstorm. As he came back to the main road, he was amazed to see the Khai Cetani - all decorum and rank forgotten - dancing arm in arm with common laborers and huntsmen. The Khai Cetani caught sight of him, raised a blade in salute, and called out words that Otah couldn’t hear. The men around him abandoned their dance, and drew their own blades, taking up the call, and Otah felt his throat close as he understood the words, as he heard them repeated, moving out through the men like a ripple in a pond.
To the Emperor.
Balasar stood in the great square of Tan-Sadar. The sky was white and chill, and the trees that stood in the eastern corners were nearly bare of leaves. A good day, Balasar thought, for endings. The representatives of the utkhaiem stood beneath square-framed colonnades, staring out at him and his company two hundred strong and in their most imposing array of arms and armor and at the Khai Tan-Sadar, bound and kneeling on the brickwork at Balasar’s feet. The poet of the city had burned to death among his books on the day Balasar had entered the city, but the disposition of the Khai was less important. A few days waiting in the public jail where men and women passing by could see him languishing posed no particular threat to the world, and the campaign that was now behind him had left Balasar tired.
‘Do you have anything you want to say?’ Balasar asked in the Khai’s own language.
He was a younger man than Balasar had expected. Perhaps no more than thirty summers. It seemed young to have the responsibility of a city upon him or to be slaughtered in front of the nobles who had betrayed him to a conqueror. The Khai shook his head once, a curt and elegant motion.
‘If you swear to serve the High Council of Galt, I’ll cut your bonds and we can both walk out of here,’ Balasar said. ‘I’ll have to keep you prisoner, of course. I can’t leave you free to gather up an army. But there are worse things than living under guard.’
The Khai almost smiled.
‘There are also worse things than dying,’ he said.
Balasar sighed. It was a shame. But the man had made his decision. Balasar raised his hand, and the drums and trumpets called out. The execution proceeded. When the soldier held up the Khai’s head for the crowd to see, a shudder seemed to run through them, but the faces that Balasar saw looking out at him seemed bright and excited.
They know they won’t die, he thought. If I’m not killing them, it all becomes another court spectacle. They’ll be talking about it in their bathhouses and winter gardens, vying for money and power now that the city’s fallen. Half of them will be wearing tunics with the Galtic Tree on it come spring.
He looked down at the body of the man he’d had killed and briefly felt the impulse to put Tan-Sadar to the torch. Instead, he turned and walked away, going back to the palaces he had taken for himself and for his men.
Eight thousand remained to him. Several hundred had been lost in battle or to the raids that had slowed his travel since Nantani. The rest he had left in conquered Utani. There was little enough left of Udun that he hadn’t bothered leaving men to occupy the city. There was no call to leave people there to guard ashes.
Utani had offered only token resistance and been for the most part spared. Tan-Sadar had very nearly set the musicians to playing and lined the roads with dancing girls. That wasn’t true, but as Balasar stalked back through the great vaulted hall of the Khai’s palace, his steps echoing off the blue and gold tilework high above him, his disgust with the place made it seem that way. They hadn’t fought, and while that might have been wise, it wasn’t something to celebrate. The only ones who had spines had been the poet and the Khai. Well, and the Khai’s wives and children, whom he’d had killed. So perhaps he wasn’t really in the best position to speak about what was honorable and noble after all.
‘Darkness has come on as usual, sir?’
Balasar looked up. Eustin stood in salute at the foot of a wide flight of stairs. His tunic was stained, his chin unshaven, and even from five paces away, he stank of horses. Balasar restrained himself from rushing over and embracing the man.
‘The darkness?’ Balasar asked through his grin.
‘Always happens at the end of a campaign, sir. You fall into a black mood for a few weeks. Happened in Eddensea and after the siege at Malsam. All respect, sir, it’s like watching my sister after she’s birthed a babe.’
Balasar laughed. It felt good to laugh, and to smile, and to be reminded that the foul mood that had come on him was something he often suffered. In truth, he had forgotten. He took Eustin’s hand in his own.
‘Good to have you back,’ Balasar said. ‘I didn’t know you’d returned.’
‘I would have sent a runner to pass the news, but it seemed faster if I came myself.’
‘Come up,’ Balasar said. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’
‘It might be best if I saw a bathhouse, sir . . .’
‘Later,’ Balasar said. ‘If you can stand the reek, I can. And besides, you deserve some discomfort after that birthing comment. Come up, and I’ll have them send us wine and food.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Eustin said.
They sat on couches while pine logs burned in the grate, sap hissing and popping and sending up sparks. True to his word, Balasar sent for rice wine infused with cherries and the stiff salty brown cheese that was a local delicacy of Tan-Sadar. Eustin recounted his season - the attack on Pathai, his decision to split the force before moving on to the poet’s school. Pathai hadn’t been as large or as wealthy as a port city like Nantani, but it was near the Westlands. Moving what wealth it had back to Galt would be simpler than the other inland cities.
‘And the school?’ Balasar said, and a cloud passed over Eustin’s face.
‘They were younger than I’d thought. It wasn’t the sort of thing they sing about. Unless they’re singing laments. Then, maybe.’
‘It was necessary.’
‘I know, sir. That’s why we did it.’
Balasar poured him another cup of the wine, and then one for himself, and they drank in silence together before Eustin went on with his report. The men they’d sent to take the southern cities had managed quite well, apart from an incident with poisoned grain in Lachi and a fire at the warehouses of Saraykeht. That matched with what Balasar himself had heard. All the poets had been found, all the books had been burned. No Khai had lived or left heir.
In return, Balasar shared what news he had from the North. Tan-Sadar, the nearest city to the Dai-kvo, had known about the destruction of the village for weeks before Balasar’s prisoner-envoys had arrived. The story was also widely known of the battle; one of the Khaiem in the winter cities had fielded an army of sorts. The estimates of the dead went from several hundred to thousands. Few, if any, had been Coal’s. The retelling of that tale as much as the sacking of Udun had broken the back of Utani and Tan-Sadar.
A letter in Coal’s short, understated style had come south after Amnat-Tan had fallen. Another courier was due any day bringing the news of Cetani and Machi. But if Coal had kept to the pace he’d intended, those cities were also fallen.
‘It’ll be good to know for certain, though,’ Eustin said.
‘I trust him,’ Balasar said.
‘Didn’t mean anything else, sir.’
‘No. Of course not. You’re right. It will be good to know it’s done.’ Balasar took a bite of the brown cheese and stared at the dancing flames where the wood glowed and blackened and fell to ash. ‘You’ll put your men in Utani?’
‘Or send some downriver. Depends how much food there is. There’s more than a few who’d be willing to make a winter crossing if it meant getting home to start spending their shares.’
‘We have made a large number of very rich soldiers,’ Balasar said.
‘They’ll be poor again in a season or two, but the dice stands in Kirinton will still be singing our praises when our grandsons are old,’ Eustin said, then paused. ‘What about our local man?’
‘Captain Ajutani? He’s here, in the city. Wintering here with the rest of us. He’s done quite well for himself. And for us. He’s given me some very good advice.’
Eustin grunted and shook his head.
‘Still don’t trust him, sir.’
‘He’s more or less out of opportunities to betray us,’ Balasar said, and Eustin spat into the fire by way of reply.
Over the next days, the army shifted slowly from the rigorous discipline of the road to the bawdy, long, low riot that comes with wintering in a captured city. The locals - tradesmen and laborers and utkhaiem alike - seemed stunned by the change. They were polite and accommodating because Balasar’s men were armed and practiced and thousands strong, but as Balasar walked down the long, winding red brick streets, he had the feeling that Tan-Sadar was hoping to wake from this nightmare and find the world once again as it had been. A hard, bitter wind came from the north, and behind it, the season’s first thin, tentative snow.
He found his mind turning back to the west and home. The darkness Eustin had seen in him grew with the prospect of returning. The years he had spent gathering the threads of his campaign had come to their end; that it was ending in triumph only partly forgave that it was ending. He found himself wondering who he would be now that he was no longer the man driven to destroy the andat. In the mornings, he imagined himself living on his hereditary estate near Kirinton, perhaps taking a wife. Perhaps teaching in one of the military academies. All his old dreams revisited. As the sun peaked low in the sky and scuttled toward the horizon, the fantasy darkened too. He would be a racing dog with nothing left to chase. And worst, in the dark of the nights, he tried to sleep, his mind pricked by another day gone by without word from the North and the sick fear that despite all their successes, something had gone wrong.
And then, on a cold, clear morning, the courier from Coal arrived. Only it wasn’t from Coal. Not really. Because Coal was dead, and Balasar had another ghost at his heels.
‘They came without warning,’ Balasar said. ‘They were hiding in the trees, like street bandits. He was the first to fall.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Sinja said. ‘It was a dishonorable attack. Not that the honorable one did them much good from what I’ve heard.’
Eustin’s face might have been carved from stone.
‘You have a point to make, Captain?’ Balasar asked.
‘Only that he did make an honest man’s try on the field outside the Dai-kvo’s village, and he failed. There’s only so much you can count against him that he tried a different tack.’
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