Daniel Abraham - An Autumn War

cities, we gain a few more slaves. Yes, they're the richest cities in

the world. I know it. Sacking even one of the cities of the Khaiem would

put more gold in the High Council's coffers than a season in the

Westlands. But how much do they need to buy Little Ott back from hell?"

Eustin asked. "And why shouldn't I go there and get him myself, sir?"

"It's not about gold. I have enough gold of my own to live well and die

old. Gold's a tool we use-a tool I use-to make men do what must be done."

"And honor?"

"And glory. Tools, all of them. We're men, Eustin. We've no reason to

lie to each other."

lie had the man's attention now. Eustin was looking only at him, and

there was confusion in his eyes-confusion and pain-but the ghosts

weren't inside him now.

"\\'h-,, then, sir? Why are we doing this?"

Balasar sat back. He hadn't said these words before, he had never

explained himself to anyone. Pride again. He was haunted by his pride.

The pride that had made him take this on as his task, the work he owed

to the world because no one else had the stomach for it.

""I'he ruins of the Empire were made," he said. "God didn't write it

that the world should have something like that in it. Men created it.

Men with little gods in their sleeves. And men like that still live. The

cities of the Khaiem each have one, and they look on them like plow

horses. 'Fools to feed their power and their arrogance. If it suited

them, they could turn their andat loose on us. Hold our crops in

permanent winter or sink our lands into the sea or whatever else they

could devise. They could turn the world itself against us the way you or

I might hold a knife. And do you know why they haven't?"

F,ustin blinked, unnerved, Balasar thought, by the anger in his voice.

"No, sir."

"Because they haven't yet chosen to. That's all. They might. Or they

might turn against each other. They could make everything into

wastelands just like those. Acton, Kirinton, Marsh. Every city, every

town. It hasn't happened yet because we've been lucky. But someday, one

of them will grow ambitious or mad. And then all the rest of us are ants

on a battlefield, trampled into the mud. That's what I mean when I say

this is needed. You and I are seeing that it never happens," he said,

and his words made his own blood hot. He was no longer uncertain or

touched by shame. Balasar grinned wide and wolfish. If it was pride,

then let him be proud. No man could do what he intended without it.

"When I've finished, the god-ghosts of the Khaiem will be a story women

tell their babes to scare them at night, and nothing more than that.

That's what Little Ott died for. Not for money or conquest or glory.

"I'm saving the world," Balasar said. "So, now. Say you'd rather drown

than help me."

1

It had rained for a week, the cold gray clouds seeming to drape

themselves between the mountain ranges to the east and west of the city

like a wet canopy. The mornings were foggy, the afternoons chill. With

the snowdrifts of winter almost all melted, the land around hlachi

became a soupy mud whose only virtue was the spring crop of wheat and

snow peas it would bring forth. Travel was harder now even than in the

deadly cold of deep winter.

And still, the travelers came.

"With all respect, this exercise, as you call it, is ill-advised," the

envoy said. His hands still held a pose of deference though the

conversation had long since parted from civility. "I am sure your

intentions are entirely honorable, however it is the place of the I)ai-kvo-"

"If the I)ai-kvo wants to rule hfachi, tell him to come north," the Khai

NIachi snapped. "He can pull my puppet strings from the next room. I'll

make a bed for him."

The envoy's eyes went wide. He was a young man, and hadn't mastered the

art of keeping his mind from showing on his face. Utah, the Khai Machi,

waved away his own words and sighed. He had gone too far, and he knew

it. Another few steps and they'd he pointing at each other and yelling

about which of them wanted to create the 'T'hird Enr pire. The truth was

that he had ruled hlachi these last fourteen years only by necessity.

The prospect of uniting the cities of the Khaiem under his rule was

about as enticing as scraping his skin off with a rock.

The audience was a private one, in a small room lined with richly carved

hlackwood, lit by candles that smelled like rich earth and vanilla, and

set well away from the corridors and open gardens where servants and

members of the utkhaiem might unintentionally overhear them. This wasn't

business he cared to have shared over the dances and dinners of the

court. Otah rose from his chair and walked to the window, forcing his

temper back down. He opened the shutters, and the city stretched out

before him, grand towers of stone stretching up toward the sky, and

beyond them the wide plain to the south, green with the first crops of

the spring. He pressed his frustration back into yoke.

"I didn't mean that," he said. "I know that the Dai-kvo doesn't intend

to dictate to me. Or any of the Khaiem. I appreciate your concern, but

the creation of the guard isn't a threat. It's hardly an army, you know.

A few hundred men trained up to maybe half the level of a Westlands

garrison could hardly topple the world."

"We are concerned for the stability of all the cities," the envoy said.

"When one of the Khaiem begins to study war, it puts all the others on

edge."

"It's hardly studying war to hand a few men knives and remind them which

end's the handle."

"It's more than any of the Khaiem have done in the past hundred years.

And you must see that you haven't made it your policy to ally yourself

with ... well, with anyone."

\Vell, this is going just as poorly as I expected, Otah thought.

"I have a wife, thank you," Otah said, his manner cool. But the envoy

had clearly reached the end of his patience. Hearing him stand, Otah

turned. The young man's face was flushed, his hands folded into the

sleeves of his brown poet's robes.

"And if you were a shopkeeper, having a single woman would be

admirable," the envoy said. "But as the Khai Machi, turning away every

woman who's offered to you is a pattern of insult. I can't be the first

one to point this out. From the time you took the chair, you've isolated

yourself from the rest of the Khaiem, the great houses of the utkhaiem,

the merchant houses. Everyone."

Otah ran through the thousand arguments and responses-the treaties and

trade agreements, the acceptance of servants and slaves, all of the ways

in which he'd tried to bind himself and Machi to the other cities. They

wouldn't convince the envoy or his master, the Dai-kvo. They wanted

blood-his blood flowing in the veins of some boy child whose mother had

come from south or east or west. They wanted to know that the Khai

Yalakeht or Pathai or 'Ian-Sadar might be able to hope for a grandson on

the black chair in Machi once Otah had died. His wife Kiyan was past the

age to bear another child, but men could get children on younger women.

For one of the Khaiem to have only two children, and both by the same

woman-and her a wayhouse keeper from Udun.. They wanted sons from him,

fathered on women who embodied wise political alliances. They wanted to

preserve tradition, and they had two empires and nine generations of the

Khaiate court life to back them. Despair settled on him like a thick