Daniel Abraham: An Autumn War

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 say„ ing 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. "'T'here 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

hack 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. 't'hey

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 Gait and start them toward home.

"Winter'II 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," l3alasar said.

The harbor master's house was a wide building of red brick settled on

the edge of the water. Banners of the Great "I gee 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 hooks he

had recovered, laying them side by side on the desk that looked out over

the port. There were four, two hound 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 he 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-hound 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.

Mere are two types of impossibility in the andat: those which cannot he

un- delstood, 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