inward. 'I don't know how you stand the sight of us.'
'It wasn't like that,' Maati said. 'It was never like that. If it were all mine again, I would have followed her.'
The words struck the boy hard. His gaze lost its focus; his mouth tightened like that of a man in pain.
'What is it, Nayiit-kya?'
Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face. He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.
'Something's bothering you,' Maati said.
'It's nothing. I've only… It's not worth talking about.'
'Something's bothering you, son.'
He had never said the word aloud. Son. Nayiit had never heard it from his lips, not since he'd been too young for it to mean anything. Maati felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock on the boy's face. This was the moment, then, that he'd feared and longed for. Fie waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread the ground.
Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to hear over the music and the crowd, 'I'm trying to choose between what I am and what I want to be. I'm trying to want what I'm supposed to want. And I'm failing.'
'I see.'
'I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I want to want them. And I don't. I don't know whether to walk away from them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but…'
Maati settled hack on the bench, put down his howl still half full of wine, and took Naviit's hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father.
'Tell me,' Maati said. 'Tell me all of it.'
'It would take all night,' the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he didn't pull hack his hand.
'Let it,' Maati said. 'There's nothing more important than this.'
Balasar hadn't slept. The night had come, a late rain shower filling the air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn't come.
The orders waited in stacks on his desk in the library, commands to he issued to each of his captains, outlining the first stage of his campaign. There were two sets, of course, just as the Khaiate mercenary captain had surmised. 'T'hose he'd sealed in green would lead the army to the North, laying waste to the Westlands and sending the thin stream of gold and silver that could be wrung from them back to the coffers of the High Council. Those he'd sealed in red would wheel the army-twenty thousand armsmcn, three hundred steam wagons, six thousand horses, and God only knew how many servants and camp followers-to the east and the most glorious act of conquest the world had ever known.
If he succeeded, he would he remembered as the greatest general in history, at least in his audacity. The battles themselves he expected to he simple enough. The Khaiem had no experience in tactics and no armies to protect them. Balasar would he remembered for two things only: the unimaginable wealth he was about to pour into Galt and the ceremony that would come with the dawn. The plot that stripped the andat from the world.
As the dark hours passed, the thought pricked at him. He had put everything in place. The poet, the books that concerned FreedomFrom-Bondage, the army, the arms. There was nothing he would ever do that would match this season. Succeed or fail, this was the highwater mark of his life. He imagined himself an old man, sitting at a street cafe in Kirinton. He wondered what those years would be like, reaching from here to the grave. He wondered what it would he like to have his greatness behind him. He told himself that he would retire. 'There would he enough wealth to acquire anything he wanted. A reasonable estate of his own, a wife, children; that seemed enough. If he could not regain this season, he could at least not humiliate himself by trying. He thought of the war leaders who haunted the corridors and wineshops of Acton reliving triumphs the world had forgotten. He would not he one of those. He would he the great General who had done his work and then stepped hack to let the world he had made safe follow its path.
At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing, and then did it.
Or else he would fail and he and every Galtic man and woman would be a corpse or a refugee.
I Ic twisted in his sheets. The stars shone where the clouds were thin enough to permit it. Framed in the opened shutters, they glittered. The stars wouldn't care what happened here. And yet by the next time their light silvered these stones, the fate of the world would have turned one way or the other.
Once, he came near to sleep. His eyes grew heavy, his mind began to wander into the half-sense of dreams. And then, irrationally, he became certain that he had mixed one of the orders. The memory, at first vague but clearer as he struggled to capture it, of sealing a packet with red that should have been green swam through his mind. He thought he might have noted at the time that it would need changing. And yet he hadn't done it. The wrong orders would go out. A legion would start to the North while the others moved cast. They would lose time finding the error, correcting it. Or the poet would fail, and some stray company of armsmen would find its way to Nantani and reveal him to the Khaiem. Half a thousand stories plagued him, each less likely than the last. His sense of dread grew.
At last, half in distress and half in disgust, he rose, pulled on a heavy cotton shirt and light trousers, and walked barefoot from his room toward the library. He would have to open them all, check them, reseal them, and keep a careful tally so that the crazed monkey that had taken possession of his mind could be calmed. He wondered, as he passed through hallways lit only by his single candle, whether Uther Redcape had ever rechecked his own plans in the dead night like an old, fearful merchant rattling his own shutters to be sure they were latched. Perhaps these indignities were part of what any man suffered when the weight of so many lives was on his back.
The guards outside his library door stood at attention as he passed them, whatever gossip or complaint they had been using to pass the dark hours of the night forgotten at the first sight of him. Balasar nodded to them gravely before passing through the door. With the stub of his bedside candle, he lit the lanterns in the library until the soft glow filled the air. The orders lay where he had left them. With a sigh, he took out the bricks of colored wax and his private seal. 'T'hen he began the long, tedious task of cracking each seal, reviewing his commands, and putting the packets back in order again. The candle stub had fizzled to nothing and the lanterns' oil visibly dropped before he was finished. The memory had been a lie. Everything had been in place. Balasar stood, stretched, and went to the window. When he opened the shutters, the cool breeze felt fresh as a bath. Birds were singing, though there was no light yet in the east. The full moon was near to setting. The dawn was coming. 'There would be no sleep for him. Not now.
A soft scratch came at the door, and after Balasar called his permission, Eustin entered. There were dark pouches under the man's eyes, but that was the only sign that he had managed no better with his sleep. His uniform was crisp and freshly laundered, the marks of rank on his back and breast, his hair was tied back and fastened with a thick silver ceremonial bead, and there was an energy in all his movements that Balasar understood. Eustin was dressed to witness the change of the world. Balasar was suddenly aware of his rough clothes and bare feet.
'What news?' Balasar said.
'He's been up all through the night, sir. Meditating, reading, preparing. Truth is I don't know that half of what he's done is needed, but he's been doing it all the same.'
'Almost none of it's strictly called for,' Balasar said. 'But if it makes him feel better, let him.'
'Yes, sir. I've called for his breakfast. He says that he'll want to wait a half a hand for his food to go down, and then it's time. Says that dawn's a symbolic moment, and that it'll help.'
'I suppose I'll be getting prepared, then,' Balasar said. 'If this isn't a full-dress occasion, I don't know what is.'
'I've sent men to wait for the signal. We should know by nightfall.'
Balasar nodded. All along the highest hills from Nantani to Aren, bonfires were set. If all worked as they hoped, there would be a signal from the agents he had placed in the city, and they would be lit, each in turn. A thin line of fire would reach from the Khaiem to his own door.
'Have a mug of kafe and some bread sent to my rooms,' Balasar said. 'I'll meet you before the ceremony.'
