THE (tlpq-4) (4 page)

remind him how little comfort it provided. Instead, he went to the

ornate writing desk and took what solace he could.

Kiyan-kya-

I have done what I said I would do. I have come to our old

enemies, I have pled my case and pled and pled and pled, and

now I suppose I'll plead some more. The full council is set

to make their vote in a week's time. I know I shouldgo out

anddo more, but I swear that I've spoken to everyone in this

city twice over, and tonight, I'd rather be herewith you. I

miss you.

They tell we that all widowers suffer this sense q f being

halved, and they tell me it fades. It hasn't faded. I

suspect age changes the nature of time. Four years may be an

epoch for young men, to me it's hardly the space between one

breath and the next. I want you to be here to tell me your

thoughts on the matter. I want you here. I want you back.

I've had word from Danat and Sinja. They seem to be running

the cities effectively enough in my absence, but apart from

our essentialproblem, there are a thousand other threats.

Pirates have raided Chaburi-Tan, and there are stories of

armed companies from Eddensea and the Westlands exacting

tolls on the roads outside the winter cities. The trading

houses are bleeding money badly; no one indentures

themselves as an apprentice anymore. Artisans are having to

pay for workers. Even seafront laborers are commanding wages

higher than anything I made as a courier. The high families

of the utkhaiem are watching their coffers drain like a

holed bladder. It makes them restless. I have had two

separate petitions to allow forced indenture for what they

call "critical labor. " I haven't given an answer. When Igo

home, I suppose I'll have to.

Otah paused, the tip of his pen touching the brick of ink. Something

with wide, pale wings the size of his hands and eyes as black and wet as

river stones hovered at the window and then vanished. A soft breeze

rattled the open shutters. He pulled back the sleeve of his robe, but

before the bronze tip touched the paper, a soft knock came at his door.

"Most High," the servant boy said, his hands in a pose of obeisance.

"Balasar-cha requests an audience."

Otah smiled and took a pose that granted the request and implied that

the guest should be brought to him here, the nuance only slightly

hampered by the pen still in his hand. As the servant scampered out,

Otah straightened his sleeves and stuck the pen nib-first into the ink

brick.

Once, Balasar Gice had led armies against the Khaiem, and only raw

chance had kept him from success. Instead of leading Galt to its

greatest hour, he had precipitated its slow ruin. That the Khaiem shared

that fate took away little of the sting. The general had spent years

rebuilding his broken reputation, and even now was less a force within

Galt than once he had been.

And still, he was a man to be reckoned with.

He came into the room, bowing to Otah as he always did, but with a wry

smile which was reserved for occasions out of the public eye.

"I came to inquire after your health, Most High," Balasar Gice said in

the language of the Khaiem. His accent hadn't lessened in the years

since they had met. "Councilman Trathorn was somewhat relieved by your

absence, but he had to pretend distress."

"Well, you can tell him his distress in every way mirrors my own," Otah

said. "I couldn't face it. I've been too much in the world. There is

only so much praise I can stand from people who'd be happy to see my

head on a plate. Please, sit. I can have a fire lit if you're cold...."

Balasar sat on a low couch beside the window. He was a small man, more

than half a head shorter than Otah, with the force of personality that

made it easy to forget. The years had weathered his face, grooves at the

corners of his eyes and mouth that spoke as much of laughter as sorrow.

They had met a decade and a half ago in the snow-covered square that had

been the site of the last battle in the war between Galt and the Khaiem.

A war that they had both lost.

The years since had seen his status in his homeland collapse and then

slowly be rebuilt. He wasn't a member of the convocation, much less the

High Council, but he was still a man of power within Galt. When he sat

forward, elbows resting on his knees, Otah could imagine him beside a

campfire, working through the final details of the next morning's attack.

"Otah," the former general said, falling into his native tongue, "what

is your plan if the vote fails?"

Otah leaned back in his chair.

"I don't see why it should," Otah said. "All respect, but what Sterile

did, she did to both of us. Galt is in just as much trouble as the

cities of the Khaiem. Your men can't father children. Our women can't

bear them. We've gone almost fifteen years without children. The farms

are starting to feel the loss. The armies. The trades."

"I know all that," Balasar said, but Otah pressed on.

"Both of our nations are going to fall. They've been falling, but we're

coming close to the last chance to repair it. We might be able to

weather a single lost generation, but if there isn't another after that,

Galt will become Eymond's back gardens, and the Khaiem will be eaten by

whoever can get to us first. You know that Eymond is only waiting for

your army to age into weakness."

"And I know there are other peoples who weren't cursed," Balasar said.

"Eymond, certainly. And the Westlands. Bakta. Obar State."

"And there are a handful of half-bred children from matches like those

in the coastal cities," Otah said. "They're born to high families that

can afford them and hoarded away like treasure. And there are others

whose blood was mixed. Some have borne. Might that be enough, do you think?"

Balasar's smile was thin.

"It isn't," he said. "They won't suffice. Children can't be rarer than

silk and lapis. So few might as well be none. And why should Eymond or

Eddensea or the Westlands send their sons here to make families, when

they can wait a few more years and take what they want from a nation of

geriatrics? If the Khaiem and the Galts don't become one, we'll both be

forgotten. Our land will be taken, our cities will be occupied, and you

and I will spend our last years picking wild berries and stealing eggs

out of nests, because there won't be farm hands enough to keep us in bread."

"That was my thought as well," Otah said.

"So, no fallback position, eh?"

"None," Otah said. "It was raw hell getting the utkhaiem to agree to the

proposal I've brought. I take it the vote is going to fail?"

"The vote is going to fail," Balasar said.

Otah sat forward, his face cradled in his palms. The slight, acrid smell

of old ink on his fingers only made the darkness behind his closed lids

deeper.

Five months before, he had wrestled the last of the language in his

proposed treaty with Galt into shape. A hundred translators from the

high families and great trading houses had offered comment and

correction, and small wars had been fought in the halls and meeting

rooms of his palace at Utani, sometimes resulting in actual blows. Once,

memorably, a chair had been thrown and the chief overseer of House

Siyanti had suffered a broken finger.

Otah had set forth with an entourage of hundreds-court servants, guards,

representatives of every interest from Machi in the far, frozen north to

the island city of Chaburi-Tan, where ice was a novelty. The ships had

poured into the harbor flying brightly dyed sails and more banners and

good-luck pennants than the world had ever seen. For weeks and months,

Otah had made his arguments to any man of any power in the bizarre,

fluid government of his old enemy. And now, this.

"Can I ask why?" he said, his eyes still closed.

"Pride," Balasar said. Otah heard the sympathy in the softness of his

voice. "No matter how prettily you put it, you're talking about putting

our daughters in bed under your sons."

"And rather than that, they'll let everything die?" Otah said, looking

up at last. Balasar's gaze didn't waver. When the old Galt spoke, it was

with a sense of reason and consideration that might almost have made a

listener forget that he was one of the men he spoke of.

"You don't understand the depth to which these people have been damaged.

Every man on that council was hurt by you in a profound, personal way.

Most of them have been steeping in the shame of it since the day it

happened. They are less than men, and in their minds, it's because of

the Khaiem. If someone had humiliated and crippled you, how would you

feel about marrying your Eiah to him?"

"And none of them will see sense?"

"Some will," Balasar said, his gaze steady as stone. "Some of them think

what you've suggested is the best hope we have. Only not enough to win

the vote."

"So I have a week. How do I convince them?" Otah asked.

Balasar's silence was eloquent.

"Well," Otah said. And then, "Can I offer you some particularly strong

distilled wine?"

"I think it's called for," Balasar said. "And you'd mentioned something

about a fire against the cold."

Otah hadn't known, when the great panoply of Khaiate ships had come with

himself at the front, what his relationship with Balasar Gice would be.

Perhaps Balasar had also been uneasy, but if so it had never shown. The

former general was an easy man to like, and the pair of them had

experienced things-the profound sorrow of commanders seeing their

miscalculations lead loyal men to the slaughter, the eggshell diplomacy

of a long winter in close quarters with men who had been enemies in

autumn, the weight that falls on the shoulders of someone who has

changed the face of the world. There were conversations, they

discovered, that only the two of them could have. And so they had become

at first diplomats, then friends, and now something deeper and more

melancholy. Fellow mourners, perhaps, at the sickbeds of their empires.

The night wore on, the moon rising through the clouds, the fire in its

grate flickering, dying down to embers before being fed fresh coal and

coming to life again. They talked and they laughed, traded jokes and

memories. Otah was aware, as he always was, of a distant twinge of guilt

at enjoying the company of a man who had killed so many innocents in his

war against the Khaiem and the andat. And as always, he tried to set the

guilt aside. It was better to forget the ruins of Nantani and the bodies

of the Dai-kvo and his poets, the corpses of Otah's own men scattered

like scythed wheat and the smell of book paste catching fire. It was

better, but it was difficult. He knew he would never wholly succeed.

He was more than half drunk when the conversation turned to his

unfinished letter, still on his desk.

"It's pathetic, I suppose," Otah said, "but it's the habit I've made."

"I don't think it's pathetic," Balasar said. "You're keeping faith with

her. With what she was to you, and what she still is. That's admirable."

"Tends toward the maudlin, actually," Otah said. "But I think she'd

forgive me that. I only wish she could write back. There were things

she'd understand in an instant that I doubt I'd ever have come to. If

she were here, she'd have found a way to win the vote."

"I can't see that," Balasar said ruefully.

Otah took a pose of correction that spilled a bit of the wine from his bowl.

"She had a different perspective," Otah said. "She was ... she ..."

Otah's mind shifted under him, struggling against the fog. There was

something. He'd just thought it, and now it was almost gone again.

Kiyan-kya, his beloved wife, with her fox-sharp face and her way of

smiling. Something about the ways that the world she'd seen were

different from his own experience. The way talking with her had been

like living twice...

"Otah?" Balasar said, and Otah realized it wasn't the first time.

"Forgive me," Otah said, suddenly short of breath. "Balasar-cha, I think

... will you excuse me? There's something I need to ..."

Otah put his wine bowl on the desk and walked to the door of his rooms.

The corridors of the suite were dark, only the lowest of servants still

awake, cleaning the carpets and polishing the latches. Eyes widened and

hands fluttered as Otah passed, but he ignored them. The scribes and

translators were housed in a separate building across a flagstone