Seasons of War

by Daniel Abraham

  ‘I could have held all our enemies at bay just by the threat of Wounded,’ she said. ‘What army would take the field, knowing I could blow out their lives like so many candles? Who would conspire against us knowing that if their agents were discovered, I could slaughter their kings and princes without hope of defense?’

  ‘It would have been convenient,’ Otah agreed carefully.

  ‘I could have slaughtered the men who killed Sinja-kya,’ Eiah said. ‘I could have ended every man who had ever taken a woman against her will or hurt a child. Between one breath and the next, I could have wiped them from the world.’

  Eiah turned her gaze to him. In the cool moonlight, her eyes seemed lost in shadow.

  ‘I look at those things - all the things I might have done - and I wonder whether I would have. And if I had, would they have been wrong?’

  ‘And what do you believe?’

  ‘I believe I saved myself when I set that perversion free,’ she said. ‘I only hope the price the rest of the world pays isn’t too high.’

  Otah stepped forward and took her in his arms. Eiah held back for a moment, and then relaxed into the embrace. She smelled of herbs and vinegar and blood. And mint. Her hair smelled of mint, just as her mother’s had done.

  ‘You should go see him,’ she said. He knew who she meant.

  ‘Is he well?’

  ‘For now,’ she said. ‘He’s weathered the attacks so far. But his blood’s still slowing. I expect he’ll be fine until he isn’t, and then he’ll die.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Not another year,’ she said.

  Otah closed his eyes.

  ‘He misses you,’ she said. ‘You know he does.’

  He stepped back and kissed her forehead. In the distance, someone screamed. Eiah glanced over his shoulder with disgust.

  ‘That will be Yaniit,’ she said. ‘I’d best go tend to him. Tall as a tree, wide as a bear, and wails if you pinch him.’

  ‘Take care,’ Otah said.

  His daughter walked away with the steady stride of a woman about her own business, leaving the bare garden for him. He looked up at the moon, but it had lost its poetry and charm. His sigh was opaque in the cold.

  Maati’s cell was the most beautifully appointed prison in the cities, possibly in the world. The armsmen led Otah into a chamber with vaulted ceilings and carved cedar along the walls. Maati sat up, waving the servant at his side to silence. The servant closed the book she’d been reading but kept the place with her thumb.

  ‘You’re learning Galtic tales now?’ Otah asked.

  ‘You burned my library,’ Maati said. ‘Back in Machi, or don’t you recall that? The only histories your grandchild will read are written by them.’

  ‘Or by us,’ Otah said. ‘We can still write, you know.’

  Maati took a pose that accepted correction, but with a dismissive air that verged on insult. So this was how it was, Otah thought. He motioned to the armsmen to take the prisoner and follow him, then spun on his heel. The feeble sounds of protest behind him didn’t slow his pace.

  The highest towers of Utani were nothing in comparison to those in Machi; they could be scaled by stairways and corridors and didn’t require a rest halfway along. Under half the height, and Otah liked them better. They were built with humanity in mind, and not the raw boasting power of the andat.

  At the pinnacle, a small platform stood high above the world. The tallest place in the city. Wind whipped it, as cold as a bath of ice water. Otah motioned for Maati to be led forward. The poet’s eyes were wild, his breath short. He raised his thick chin.

  ‘What?’ Maati spat. ‘Decided to throw me off, have you?’

  ‘It’s almost the half-candle,’ Otah said and went to stand at the edge. Maati hesitated and then stepped to his side. The city spread out below them, the streets marked by lanterns and torches. A fire blazed in a courtyard down near the riverfront, taller than ten men with whole trees for logs. Otah could cover it with his thumbnail.

  The chime came, a deep ringing that seemed to shake the world. And then a thousand thousand bells rang out in answer to mark the deepest part of the longest night of the year.

  ‘Here,’ Otah said. ‘Watch.’

  Below, light spread through the city. Every window, every balcony, every parapet glowed with newly lit candles. Within ten breaths, the center of the Empire went from any large city in darkness to something woven from light, the perfect city - the idea of a city - made for a moment real. Maati shifted. When his voice came, it was little more than a whisper.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  A moment later, Maati said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Of course,’ Otah replied.

  They stood there for a long time, neither speaking nor arguing, concerned with neither future nor past. Below them, Utani glowed and rang, marking the moment of greatest darkness and celebrating the yearly return of the light.

  EPILOGUE

  We say that the flowers return every spring, but that is a lie.

  Calin Machi, eldest son of the Emperor Regent, knelt before his father, his gaze downcast. The delicate tilework of the floor was polished so brightly that he could watch Danat’s face and seem to be showing respect at the same time. Granted, Danat was reversed - wide jaw above gray temples - and it made the nuances of expression difficult to read. It was enough, though, for him to judge approximately how much trouble he was in.

  ‘I’ve spoken to the overseer of my father’s apartments. Do you know what he told me?’

  ‘That I’d been caught hiding in Grandfather’s private garden,’ Calin said.

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Yes, Father. I was hiding from Aniit and Gaber. It was a part of a game.’

  Danat sighed, and Calin risked looking up. When his father was deeply upset, his face turned red. He was still flesh-colored. Calin looked back down, relieved.

  ‘You know you’re forbidden from your grandfather’s apartments.’

  ‘Yes, but that was what made them a good place to hide.’

  ‘You’re sixteen summers old and you’re acting twelve of them. Aniit and Gaber look to you for how to behave. It’s your duty to set an example,’ Danat said, his voice stern. And then he added, ‘Don’t do it again.’

  Calin rose to his feet, trying to keep his rush of joy from being obvious. The great punishment had not fallen. He was not barred from the steam caravan’s arrival. Life was still worth living. Danat took a pose that excused his son and motioned to his Master of Tides. Before the woman could glide over and lead his father back into the constant business of negotiating with the High Council, Calin left the audience chamber, followed only by his father’s shouted admonition not to run. Aniit and Gaber were waiting outside, their eyes wide.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Calin said, as if his father’s lenience were somehow proof of his own cleverness. Aniit took an exaggerated pose of congratulations. Gaber clapped her hands. She was young, though. Only fourteen summers old and barely marriageable.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Calin said. ‘We can pick the best places for when the caravan comes.’

  The roadway had been five years in the building, a shallow canal of smooth worked iron that began at the seafront in Saraykeht and followed the river up to Utani. The caravan was the first of its kind, and the common wisdom in the streets and teahouses was evenly divided between those who thought it would arrive even earlier than expected and those who predicted they’d find splinters of blown boilers and nothing else.

  Calin dismissed the skeptics. After all, his grandmother was arriving from her plantations in Chaburi-Tan, and she would never put herself on the caravan if it was going to explode.

  The sweet days of early spring were short and cold. Frost still sent white fingers up the stones of the palaces in the morning and snow lingered in the deep shadows. A hundred times Calin and his friends had gone through the elaborate ritual of how they would greet the caravan, rehearsing it i
n their minds and conversations. The event, of course, was nothing like what they’d planned.

  When word came, Calin was with his tutor, an ancient man from Acton, working complex sums. They were seated in the sunlight of the spring garden. Almond blossoms turned the tree branches white even before the first leaves had ventured out. Calin frowned at the wax tablet on his knees, trying not to count on his fingers. Hesitating, he lifted his stylus and marked his answer. His tutor made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat and Gaber appeared at the end of the arcade, running full out.

  ‘It’s here!’ she screamed. ‘It’s here!’

  Before any adult could object, Calin joined her flight. Tablet, stylus, and sums were forgotten in an instant. They ran past the pavilions that marked palaces from merchants’ compounds, the squares and open markets that showed where the great compound gave way to the haunts of common labor. The streets were thick with humanity, and Calin threaded his way through the press of bodies aided by his youth, the quality of his robes, and the boyish instinct that saw all obstacles as ephemeral.

  He reached the Emperor’s platform just before the caravan arrived. Wide plumes of smoke and steam stained the southern sky, and the air smelled of coal. Danat and Ana were already there, seated in chairs of carved stone with silk cushions. Otah Machi - the Emperor himself - sat on a raised dais, his hands resting like fragile claws on the arms of a black lacquer chair. Calin’s grandfather looked over as he arrived and smiled. Danat’s expression was distracted in a way that reminded Calin of doing sums. His mother was craning her neck and trying not to seem that she was.

  It hardly mattered. The crowd that pressed and seethed around the yard at the caravan road’s end had eyes only for the great carts speeding toward them, faster than horses at full gallop. Calin sat at his mother’s feet, his intended perch nearest his friends forgotten. The first of the carts came near enough to make out the raised dais, twin of his grandfather’s, and the stiff-backed white-haired woman sitting atop it. Calin’s mother left all decorum, and stood, waving and calling to her mother.

  Calin felt his father’s hand on his shoulder and turned.

  ‘Watch this,’ Danat said. ‘Pay attention. That caravan reached us in half the time even a boat could have. What you’re seeing right now is going to change everything.’

  Calin nodded solemnly as if he understood.

  It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price.

  Cehmai Tyan sat across the meeting table from the High Council’s special envoy. The man was nondescript, his clothing of Galtic cut and unremarkable quality. Cehmai didn’t like the envoy, but he respected him. He’d known too many dangerous men in his life not to.

  The envoy read the letters - ciphered and sent between a fictional merchant in Obar State and Cehmai himself here in Utani. They outlined the latest advance in the poetmaster’s rebuilding of the lost libraries of Machi, which also had not happened. Cehmai sipped tea from an iron bowl and looked out the window. He couldn’t see the steam caravan from here, but he had a good view of the river. It was at the point he liked it most, the water freed by the thaw, the banks not yet overgrown by green. No matter how many years passed, he still felt a personal affinity with earth and stone.

  The envoy finished reading, his mouth in a smile that would have seemed pleasant and perhaps a bit simple on someone else.

  ‘Is any of this true?’ the envoy asked.

  ‘Danat-cha did send a dozen men into the foothills north of Machi,’ Cehmai said, ‘and Maati-kvo and I did spend a winter there. Past that, nothing. But it should keep Eddensea’s attention on sneaking through to search for it themselves. And we’re in the process of forging books that we can then “recover” in a year or so.’

  The envoy tucked the letters into a leather pouch at his belt. He didn’t look up as he spoke.

  ‘That brings a question,’ the man said. ‘I know we’ve talked about this before, but I’m not sure you’ve fully grasped the advantages that could come from leaning a little nearer the truth. Nothing that would be effective. We all understand that. But our enemies all have scholars working at these problems. If they were able to come close enough that the bindings cost them, if they paid the andat’s price—’

  Cehmai took a pose of query. ‘Wouldn’t that be doing your work for you?’ he asked.

  ‘My job is to see they don’t succeed,’ the envoy said. ‘A few mysterious, grotesque deaths would help me find the people involved.’

  ‘It would give away too much,’ Cehmai said. ‘Bringing them near enough to be hurt by the effort would also bring them near to succeeding.’

  The envoy looked at him silently. His placid eyes conveyed only a mild distrust.

  ‘If you have a threat to make, feel free,’ Cehmai said. ‘It won’t do you any good.’

  ‘Of course there’s no threat, Cehmai-cha,’ the envoy said. ‘We’re all on the same side here.’

  ‘Yes,’ the poetmaster said, rising from his chair with a pose that called the meeting to its close. ‘Try to keep it in mind.’

  His apartments were across the palaces. He made his way along the pathways of white and black sand, past the singing slaves and the fountain in the shape of the Galtic Tree that marked the wing devoted to the High Council. The men and women he passed nodded to him with deference, but few took any formal pose. A decade of joint rule had led to a thousand small changes in etiquette. Cehmai supposed it was small-minded of him to regret them.

  Idaan was sitting on the porch of their entranceway, tugging at a length of string while a gray tomcat worried the other end. He paused, watching her. Unlike her brother, she’d grown thicker with time, more solid, more real. He must have made some small sound, because she looked up and smiled at him.

  ‘How was the assassin’s conference?’ she asked.

  The tomcat forgot his string and trotted up to Cehmai, already purring audibly. He stopped to scratch its fight-ragged ears.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call it that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I wish my hair were still dark. It is what it is, love. Politics in action.’

  ‘Cynic,’ he said as he reached the porch.

  ‘Idealist,’ she replied, pulling him down to kiss him.

  Far to the east, an early storm fell from clouds dark as bruises, a veil of gray. Cehmai watched it, his arm around his lover’s shoulder. She leaned her head against him.

  ‘How was the Emperor this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine. Excited to see Issandra-cha again as much as anything about the caravan. I think he’s more than half infatuated with her.’

  ‘Oh please,’ Cehmai said. ‘This will be his seventy-ninth summer? His eightieth?’

  ‘And you won’t still want me when you’ve reached the age?’

  ‘Well. Fair point.’

  ‘His hands bother him most,’ Idaan said. ‘It’s a pity about his hands.’

  Lightning flashed on the horizon, less than a firefly. Idaan twined her fingers with his and sighed.

  ‘Have I mentioned recently how much I appreciate you coming to find me? Back when you were an outlaw and I was still a judge, I mean,’ she asked.

  ‘I never tire of hearing it,’ Cehmai said.

  The tomcat leaped on his lap, dug its claws into his robe twice, kneading him like bread dough, and curled up.

  For even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested.

  Eiah motioned for Otah to sit. She was gentle as always with his crippled hands. He sat back down slowly. The servants had brought his couches out to a wide garden, but with the coming sunset he’d have to be moved again. Eiah tried to impress on her father’s servants that what he needed and what he wanted weren’t always the same. She’d given up convincing Otah years earlier.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, sitting beside him. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘It was a long day,’ Otah said. ‘I
slept well enough, but I can never stay in bed past dawn. When I was young, I could sleep until midday. Now that I have the time and no one would object, I’m up with the birds. Does that seem right to you?’

  ‘The world was never fair.’

  ‘Truth. All the gods know that’s the truth.’

  She took his wrists as if it were nothing more than the contact of father and daughter. Otah looked at her impatiently, but he suffered it. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the subtle differences of his pulses.

  ‘I heard you woke confused again,’ she said. ‘You were calling for someone called Muhatia-cha?’

  ‘I had a dream. That’s all,’ Otah said. ‘Muhatia was my overseer back when I was young. I dreamed that I was late for my shift. I needed to get to the seafront before he docked my pay. That was all. I’m not losing my mind, love. My health, maybe, but not my mind. Not yet.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were. Turn here. Let me look at your eyes. Have the headaches come back?’

  ‘No,’ Otah said, and she knew by his voice he was lying. It was time to stop asking details. There was only so much physician’s attention her father would permit. She sat back on the couch, and he let out a small, satisfied breath.

  ‘You saw Issandra Dasin?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, yes. She spent the better part of the afternoon here,’ Otah said. ‘The things they’ve done with Chaburi-Tan are amazing. I was thinking I might go myself. Just to see them.’