breeze. Otah touched his palm to the neck of his horse as if to steady it more than himself, then dismounted.
Smoke still rose from the fire, thin gray reeking clouds. He paced the length and breadth of the pyre. Here and there, embers still glowed. He saw more than one bone laid bare and black. Men had died here. Poets and books. Knowledge that could never be replaced. He leaned against the rough bark of a half-burned tree. There had been no battle here. This had been slaughter.
'Most High?'
Ashua Radaani was at his side. Might have been at his side for some time, for all Otah could say. The man's face was drawn, his eyes flat.
'We've taken down the Dai-kvo,' he said.
'Five groups of four men,' Otah said. 'If you can find any lanterns still intact, use them. If not, we'll make torches from something. I can't say how deep into the mountain these hallways go, but we'll walk through the whole thing if we have to.'
Radaani glanced over his shoulder at the red and swollen sun that was just now touching the horizon. The others were silhouetted against it, standing in a clot at the mouth of the hall. Radaani turned back and took a pose that suggested an alternative.
'Perhaps we might wait until morning-'
'What if there's a man still alive in there,' Otah said. 'Will he he alive when the sun's back? If darkness is what we have to work in, we'll work in darkness. Anyone who survived this, I want him. And hooks. Anything. If it's written, bring it to me. Bring it here.'
Radaani hesitated, then fell into a pose of acceptance. Otah put his hand on the man's shoulder.
We've failed, he thought. Of course we failed. We never had a chance.
They didn't make camp, didn't cook food. The horses, nervous from the scent of death all around them, were taken hack from the village. Nayiit and his blacksmith friend Saya gleaned lanterns and torches from the wreckage. The long, terrible night began. In the flickering light, the hack halls and grand, destroyed chambers danced like things from children's stories of the deepest hells. Otah and the three men with him-Nayiit, Radaani, and a thin- faced boy whose name escaped him-called out into the darkness that they were friends. That help had arrived. Their voices grew hoarse, and only echoes answered them.
They found the dead. In the beds, in the stripped libraries, in the kitchens and alleyways, and floating facedown in the wide wooden tubs of the bathhouse. No man had been spared. 'There had been no survivors. Twice Otah thought he saw a flicker of recognition in Nayiit's eyes when they found a man lying pale and bloodless, eyes closed as if in sleep. In a meeting chamber near what Otah guessed had been the Dai-kvo's private apartments, Otah found the corpse of Athai-kvo, the messenger who had come in the long-forgotten spring to warn him against training men to fight. His eyes had been gouged away. Otah found himself too numb to react. Another detail to come into his mind and leave it again. As the night's chill stole into him, Otah's fingers began to ache, his shoulders and neck growing tight as if the pain could take the place of warmth.
They fell into their rhythm of walking and shouting and not being answered until time lost its meaning. They might have been working for half a hand, they might have been working for a sunless week, and so the dawn surprised him.
One of the other searching parties had quit earlier. Someone had found a firekeeper's kiln and stoked it, and the rich smell of cracked wheat and flaxseed and fresh honey cut through the smoke and death like a sung melody above a street fight. Otah sat on an abandoned cart and cradled a bowl of the sweet gruel in his hands, the heat from the bowl soothing his palms and fingers. He didn't remember the last time he'd eaten, and though he was bone-weary, he could not bring himself to think of sleep. He feared his dreams.
Nayiit walked to him carrying a similar bowl and sat at his side. He looked older. The horrors of the past days had etched lines at the corners of his mouth. Exhaustion had blackened his eyes. Exhaustion and guilt.
'There's no one, is there?' Nayiit said.
'No. They're gone.'
Nayiit nodded and looked down to the neat, carefully fitted bricks that made the road. No blade of grass pressed its way through those stony joints. It struck Otah as strangely obscene that a place of such carnage and destruction should have such well-maintained paving stones. It would be better when tree roots had lifted a few of them. Something so ruined should be a ruin. A few years, perhaps. A few years, and this would all be a wild garden dedicated to the dead. The place would be haunted, but at least it would be green.
'There weren't any children. Or women,' Nayiit said. 'That's something.'
'There were in Yalakeht,' Otah said.
'I suppose there were. And Saraykeht too.'
It took a moment to realize what Nayiit meant. It was so simple to forget that the boy had a wife. Had a child. Or once had, depending on how badly things had gone in the summer cities. Otah felt himself blush.
'I'm sorry. That wasn't… Forgive my saying that.'
'It's true, though. It won't change if we're more polite talking about it.'
'No. No, it won't.'
They were silent for a long moment. Off to their left, three of the others were laying out blankets, unwilling, it seemed, to seek shelter in the halls of the dead. Farther on, Sava the blacksmith was looking over the Galtic steam wagon with what appeared to be a professional interest. High in the robin's-egg sky, a double vee of cranes flew southward, calling to one another in high, nasal voices. Otah took two cupped fingers and lifted a mouthful of the wheat gruel to his lips. It tasted wonderful-sweet and rich and warm-and yet he didn't enjoy it so much as recognize that he should. His limbs felt heavy and awkward as wood. When Nayiit spoke, his voice was low and shaky.
'I know that I won't ever be able to make good for this. If I hadn't called the retreat-'
'This isn't your fault,' Otah said. 'It's the Dai-kvo's.'
Nayiit reared back, his mouth making a small 'o.' His hands fumbled toward a pose of query, but the porcelain howl defeated him. Otah took his meaning anyway.
'Not just this one. The last Dai-kvo. 'lahi, his name was. And the one before that. All of them. This is their fault. We trusted everything in the andat. Our power, our wealth, the safety of our children. Everything. We built on sand. We were stupid.'
'But it worked for so long.'
'It worked until it didn't,' Otah said. The response came from the back of his mind, as if it had always been there, only waiting for the time to speak. 'It was always certain to fail sometime. Now, or ten generations from now. What difference does it make? If we'd been able to postpone the crisis until my children had to face it, or my grandchildren, or your grandchildren-how would that have been better than us facing it now? The andat have always been an unreliable tool, and poets have always been men with all the vanity and frailty and weakness that men are born with. The Empire fell, and we built ourselves in its image and so now we've fallen too. 'There's no honor in a lesson half-learned.'
'Too had you hadn't said that to the I)ai-kvo.'
'I did. To all three of them, one way and another. 'They didn't take it to heart. And I… I didn't stay to press the point.'
'Then we'll have to learn the lesson now,' Nayiit said. It sounded like an attempt at resolution, perhaps even bravery. It sounded hollow as a drum.
'Someone will,' Otah said. 'Someone will learn by our example. And maybe the Galts burned all the hooks that would have let them teach more poets of their own. Perhaps they're already safe from our mistakes.'
'That would he ironic. To come all this way and destroy the thing that you'd come for.'
'Or wise. It might he wise.' Otah sighed and took another mouthful of the wheat. 'I'he Galts are likely almost to 'Ian-Sadar by now. As long as they're heading south, we may he able to reach Machi again before they do. There's no fighting them, I think we've discovered that, but we might be able to flee. Get people to Eddensca and the Westlands before the passes all close. It's probably too late to take a fast cart for Bakta.'
Nayiit shook his head.
'They aren't going south.'
Otah took another mouthful. The food seemed to he seeping into his blood; he felt only half-dead with exhaustion. Then, a breath or two later, Nayiit's words found their meaning, and he frowned, put down his bowl, and took a questioning pose. Nayiit nodded down toward the low towns at the base of the mountain village.
