to Cehmai.
'Come on. '['here isn't time. Finish drawing those, then light the candles and close that blasted door. We'll all freeze to death before the andat can have its crack at us.'
'Or we'll have it all in place just in time for the Galts to take it.'
Maati scribbled out the rest of the binding. He'd wanted time to think on each word, each phrase; if he'd had time to paint each word like the portrait of a thought, it would have been better. 'There wasn't time. He finished just as Cehmai lit the final lantern and walked up the stone steps to the snow door. Before he closed it, the younger poet looked out, peering into the city.
'What do you see?'
'Smoke,' Cehmai said. 't'hen, 'Nothing.'
'Come back down,,, laati said. 'V'here are the robes for it?'
'In the back corner,' Cehmai said, pulling the wide wooden doors shut. 'I'll get them.'
Nlaati went to the cushion in the middle of the room, lowered himself with a grunt, and considered. The wall before him looked more like the scrihhlings of low-town vandals than a poet's lifework. But the words and phrases, the images and metaphors all shone brighter in his mind than the lanterns could account for. Cehmai passed before him briefly, laying robes of blue shot with black on the floor where, with luck, the next hands to hold them wouldn't be human.
laati glanced over his shoulder. Eiah was sitting against the back wall, her hands held in fists even with her heart. I Ic smiled at her. Reassuringly, he hoped. And then he turned to the words he had written, took five deep breaths to clear his mind, and began to chant.
Otah stood on the roof and looked down on Niachi as if it were a map. The great streets were marked by the lines of rooftops. Only those streets that led directly to house Siyanti's warehouses were at an angle that permitted him to see the black cobbles turning white beneath the snow. To the south, the army of the Galts was marching forward. The trumpet calls from the high towers told him that much. 'I'hey had worked out short signals for some eventualities-short melodies that signaled some part of the plans he had worked with Sinja and Ashua Radaani and the others. But in addition there was a code that let him phrase questions as if they were spoken words, and hear answers in the replies from the towers far above.
The trumpeter was a young man with a vast barrel chest and lips blue with cold. Whenever Otah had the man blow, the wide brass hell of the trumpet seemed as if it would deafen them all. And yet the responses were sometimes nearly too faint to hear. 'l'imes like now.
'What's he saying?' the Khai Cetani asked, and (bah held tip a hand to stop him, straining to hear the last trailing notes.
'The Galts are taking the bridge,' Otah said. 'I don't think they trust the ice.'
'That'll mean they're longer reaching us,' the Khai Cetani said. 'That's good. If we can keep them out of the warmth until sundown
…'
Otah took a pose of agreement, but didn't truly believe it. If they were able to trap the Galts above ground when night came, the invaders would take over the houses and burn whatever they could break small enough to fit in the fire grates. If the cold air moved in-a storm or the frigid winds that ended the gentle snows of autumn-then the Galts would be in trouble, but the snow graying the distance now wasn't prelude to a storm. Otah didn't say it, but he couldn't imagine keeping an army so close and still at bay long enough for the weather to change. The Galts would he defeated here in the streets, or they wouldn't he defeated.
Ile paced the length of the rooftop, his eyes tracing the routes that he had hoped to guide them toward the palaces and the forges. Behind him, his servants shivered from the cold and the need to remain respectfully still. The great iron fire grate that they'd hauled up and loaded with logs was burning merrily, but somehow the heat from it seemed to go out no more than a foot or two from the flames. The Khai Cetani stood near it, and the trumpeter. Otah couldn't imagine standing still. Not now.
The southern reaches of the city were essentially Galtic already; there was no way to make them safe against the coming army. The battle would he nearer the center, in the shadows of the towers, in the narrower ways where Otah's men could appear all along the Galtic line at once as they had in the forest. Another trumpet call came. The Galts had finished crossing the river. The march had begun on Nlachi itself.
I should he down there, Otah thought. I should get a sword or an axe and go down there.
It was an idiotic idea, and he knew it. One more blade or how in the streets wouldn't matter now, and getting himself killed would achieve nothing.
Trumpets sounded-half a dozen of them at once. And Galtic drums. Everyone sending signals, none of them listening. Otah squatted at the roof's edge with his eyes closed, trying to make out one message from another. Frustration built in his spine and neck. Something was happening-several things, and all at the same moment, and he couldn't hear what they were.
'Most high!' one the servants called. 'There!'
Otah and the Khai Cctani both looked to where the servant boy was pointing. A runner dashed along a roofline, down near the great, wide streets that led toward the forges. A great pillar of smoke was rising from the south. Something there, then. Otah felt the first small surge of hope; it was near where he had hoped the (; alts would go. The trumpets were calling again, fewer of them. Otah found himself better able to make sense of them. 'l'he Galts seemed to be moving in three directions at once-sweeping and holding the southern buildings, and then two large forces moving as Otah had hoped they would.
'Call to the towers,' Otah said. 'lull them to begin.'
The trumpeter took a great breath and blared out the melody they had set for the towers, and then the rising trill that was their signal to begin raining stones and arrows into the streets. It was less than a breath before Otah thought he saw something fly from the open sky doors far above them, plummeting toward the ground. The snow was tricky, though. It might only have been his imagination.
Otah felt himself trying to stretch out his will across the city, to inhabit it like a ghost, to become it. Time slowed to a terrible crawlyears seeming to pass between the short announcing blasts of the trumpets as they reported the Galts' progress. Muffled by the snow, there also came the sound of distant voices raised in anger. Otah's belly knotted. That wasn't right. 'There shouldn't be any fighting yet. Unless the Galts had found his men while they were sill in hiding. He almost signaled his trumpeter to sound the order to report, but the more the signals were used, the better the Galts would be able to find the trumpeters.
'You,' Otah said, pointing at one of the half-frozen servants. 'Send a runner to the east. I need to know what's happening there.'
The man took a pose of acknowledgment and walked quickly and awkwardly hack toward the stairs. Otah tapped his hand against the stone lip of the roof, already impatient for the word to come hack to him. His feet and face were numb. The snowfall seemed to be thickening, the world a darker gray though the unseen sun was still likely six or seven hands above the southern horizon.
From the west, the drums of Galt thundered, then were silent. Then thundered again. Otah heard the sudden sharp call-thousands of voices at once in a wild call that ended sharply. A boast. We are vast as the ocean and disciplined. We are soldiers. We have come to kill you. Fear us.
And he did.
'Signal the palace forces to take their places,' Otah said.
The trumpeter sang out the call, the wide bell of the trumpet playing over the western rooftops like a priest offering blessing to a crowd. The man was weeping, Otah saw. Tears streaking down his cheeks and into his heard. A terrible, rending crash came from the forges. Otah turned to peer through the rising smoke and the falling snow. He expected to see one of the great copper roofs sitting at an angle, but nothing seemed to have changed. The sound was a mystery.
'I can't stand this,' Otah said, stalking back to the Khai Cetani and the servants. There was snow gathering on the servants' shoulders. 'I don't know what's happening. I can't command a battle blind and guessing. Where are the runners?'
The eldest of the servants took a pose of apology.
'Then go find out,' Otah said.
But Otah felt in his bones what the runners would tell him. Before the signals came-trumpets struggling through the muffling snow. Before the Galtic drums broke out in their manic pounding. Nine thousand veterans led
