Daniel Abraham - Autumn War

Only, of course, they wouldn't he there this winter. Food was no longer an item available for trade. It was being rationed out by the utkhaiem and by the exquisite mechanisms that Kiyan had put in place. The men and women of Cetani had been housed there or in the mines along the plain even before Otah and his army had returned with the news that the Galts had been turned back. Now, with the quarters being shared, there were two and sometimes three families sharing the space meant for one.

There was a part of him that wanted badly to take the stairs leading up, to go out of the palaces, and into the webwork of passages and tunnels one layered upon another that were his city. He knew it was an illusion to think that seeing things would improve them, make them easier to control and make right. But it was a powerful illusion.

Ile sighed and took the descending stairs. ']'he women's quartersdesigned to accommodate a Khai's dozen or more wives-had been changed over to smaller, more private rooms by the addition of a few planks of wood and tapestries taken from the palaces above. The utkhaiem of Cetani-husbands and wives together-found some accommodations there. It had seemed an obvious choice, and Kiyan had never particularly made use of her rooms there. And still it seemed odd to have people so close. Late in the night, he could sometimes hear the voices of people passing by.

The great blue and gold doors to his private apartments stood closed, two guards on either side. Otah noticed as he accepted their salutes how quickly he had come to think of these men as guards where before they had only been servants. "Their duties were no different, their robes just the same. It wasn't the world that had changed. It was him.

I IC found Kiyan sitting at a low table, combing her hair with a widetoothed comb. Wordless, he took it from her, sitting beside and behind her, and did the little task himself. Her hair was coarser than it had been once, and so shot with white that it seemed almost as much silver as black. I le saw the subtle curve in the shape of her cheek as she smiled.

"I heard the Khai Cetani speaking today," she said.

"Really?"

"l le was in one of the teahouses. And, honestly, not one of the best ones.

"I won't ask what you were doing in a third-rate tea house," Otah said, and Kiyan chuckled.

"Nothing more scandalous than listening to the Khai," she said. "But that might be enough. Ile thinks quite highly of you."

"Oh gods," Otah said. "Did the term come up again?"

"Yes, the word emperor figured highly in the conversation. He seems to think the sun shines brighter when you tell it to."

"Ile seems to forget that first battle where I got everyone killed. And that I didn't manage to keep the [)ai-kvo from being slaughtered."

"Ile doesn't forget. But lie does say you were the only man who tried to stop the Galts, who banded cities together instead of letting them fall one at a time, and in the end the only man who put them to flight."

"He should stop that," Utah said, and sighed. "Ile seemed so reasonable when I first met him. Who'd have guessed he was so easily wooed."

"He may not he wrong, you know. We'll need to do something when this is over. An emperor or a way to choose new families to act as Khaiem. A I)ai-kvo. That would have to be ylaati or Cehmai, wouldn't it:'

It was how all the conversations went now-how to rebuild, how to remake. The polite fiction that the poets were sure to succeed was the tissue that seemed to hold people together, and Utah couldn't bring himself to break it now.

"I suppose so," Utah said. "It'll be a life's work, though. Perhaps more. It was getting hard enough finding andat that could still be hound before this. We've lost so much now, going hack will be harder than it was at the first. If we have a new I)ai-kvo, he won't have time for am-thing more than that."

"An emperor, then. One man protecting all the cities. With the poets answering to him. liven just one poet with one andat would he enough. It would protect us."

"I recommend someone else do it. I've decided on a beach hut on Bakta," Utah said, trying to make it a joke. I Ic saw Kivan's expression. "It's too far ahead to think about now, love. Let it pass, and we'll solve it later if it still needs solving."

Kiyan turned and took his hand. The days since he'd come home hadn't allowed them time together, not as they had had before the war. First, when he and his men had marched across the bridge to trumpets and drums and dancing, it had been a mad festival. 't'hey had cone out to meet him. I Ic had embraced her, and Eiah, and little [)gnat whom he had danced around until they were both dizzy. Otah had found himself whirled from one pavilion to the next, balancing the giddy joy of survival with the surprisingly complex work of taking an army-even one as improvised and unformed as his own-apart. And afterward, he'd discovered that Kiyan was still as much in demand now tending the things she'd set in motion as when he had been gone.

Men and women of all classes seemed to have need of her time and attention, coordinating the stores of food and the arrangements of the refugees and the movements of goods and trade that had once been the business of the merchant houses, and had become the work of a few coordinating minds. Kiyan had become the hand that moved Machi, that pushed it into line, that tucked its children into warm beds and kept it from eating all the best food and leaving nothing for tomorrow. It consumed her days.

And the utkhaicm and the high trading families had all wanted a moment of his day, to congratulate or express thanks or wheedle some favor in light of the changed circumstances of the world. To be here, in the warm light of candles, Kiyan's hand in his, her gaze on him, seemed like a dream badly wished for. And yet, now that he had it, he found himself troubled and unable to relax. She squeezed his hand.

"How bad was it?" she asked, and he knew what she meant. The battles. The Dai-kvo. The war.

Otah began to say something witty, something glib. The words got lost on the way to his lips. For long moment, silence was all he could manage.

"It was terrible," he said. "There were so many of them."

"The Galts?"

"'l'he dead. "Theirs. Ours. I've never seen anything like it, Kiyan- kya. I've read the histories and I've heard the epics sung, and it's not the same. They were young. And… and they looked like they were sleeping. I lowever badly they'd died, in the end, I kept thinking they'd wake up and speak or call for help or scream. I think about all the men I led out there. The ones who would have lived if we hadn't done this."

"We didn't choose this, love. The Galts haven't given anyone much choice. The men who went with you would have died out there in the field, or here when the city fell. Would one have been better?"

"I suppose not. The other ways it could have gone might be just as had, but the way it did happen, they died from following me. From doing what I asked."

To his surprise, Kiyan chuckled low and mirthless.

"That's why he calls you Emperor, isn't it," Kiyan said, and Otah took a pose of query. "The Khai Cetani. It's from gratitude. If you're the leader of the age, then it stops being his burden. Everything you're suffering, you've saved him."

Otah looked at his hands, rubbing his palms together with a long, dry sound. His throat felt tight, and something deep in his chest ached with the suspicion that she was right. When he had asked the man to abandon his city and take the role of follower, he had also been asking for the right to choose whatever happened after. And the responsibility for it. For a moment, he was on the chill, gray field of the dead, and walking the cold, lifeless ruin where poets had once conspired to hind thoughts themselves. He remembered the Dal-kvo's dead eyes, looking at nothing. The bodies, the Galts' and his own both, and the voices calling him Emperor.