smiles carried a bewildered, permanent sorrow. The leaves on the trees had turned brown and yellow and fallen. The nights were long, and the dawns touched by frost.
The land was dead. He had known it. Being reminded brought him no joy.
They stopped for the night in a wayhouse nestled in a wooded valley. The walls were kiln-fired brick with a thick covering of ivy that the autumn chill had turned brown and brittle. News of his identity and errand had spread before him like a wave on water, making quiet investigation impossible. The keeper had cleared all his rooms before they knew where they meant to stop, had his best calf killed and hot baths drawn on the chance that Otah might stop to rest. Sitting now in the alcove of a room large enough to fit a dozen men, Otah felt his muscles slowly and incompletely unknotting. With the supplies carried on the steam wagons and the men shifting between tending the kilns and riding, Pathai was less than two days away. Without the Galtic machines, it would have been four, perhaps five.
Low clouds obscured moon and stars. When Otah closed the shutters against the cold night air, the room grew no darker. The great copper tub the keeper had prepared glowed in the light of the fire grate. The earthenware jar of soap beside it was half-empty, but at least Otah felt like his skin was his own again and not hidden under layers of dust and sweat. His traveling robes had vanished and he'd picked a simple garment of combed wool lined with silk. The voices of the armsmen rose through the floorboards. The song was patriotic and bawdy, and the drum that accompanied them kept missing the right time. Otah rose on bare feet and walked out to the stairs. No servants scuttled out of his way, and he noticed the absence.
Danat was not among the armsmen or out with the horses. It was only when Otah approached the room set aside for Ana Dasin that he heard his son's voice. The room was on the lower floor, near the kitchens. The floor there was stone. Otah's steps made no sound as he walked forward. Ana said something he couldn't make out, but when Danat answered, he'd come near enough to hear.
'Of course there are, it's only Papa-kya isn't one of them. When I was a boy, he told me stories from the First Empire about a half-Bakta boy. And he nearly married a girl from the eastern islands.'
'When was that?' Ana asked. Otah heard a sound of shifting cloth, like a blanket being pulled or a robe being adjusted.
'A long time ago,' Danat said. 'Just after Saraykeht. He lived in the eastern islands for years after that. They build their marriages in stages there. He's got the first half of the marriage tattoo.'
'Why didn't he finish it?' Ana asked.
Otah remembered Maj as he hadn't in years. Her wide, pale lips. Her eyes that could go from blue the color of the sky at dawn to slate gray. The stretch marks on her belly, a constant reminder of the child that had been taken from her. In his mind, she was linked with the scent of the ocean.
'I don't know,' Danat said. 'But it wasn't that he was trying to keep his bloodline pure. Really, there's a strong case that my lineage isn't par ticularly high. My mother didn't come from the utkhaiem, and for some people that's as much an insult as marrying a Westlander.'
'Or a Galt,' Ana said, tartly.
'Exactly,' Danat said. 'So, yes. Of course there are people in the court who want some kind of purity, but they've gotten used to disappointment over the last few decades.'
'They would never accept me.'
'You?' Danat said.
'Anyone like me.'
'If they won't, then they won't accept anyone. So it hardly matters what they think, because they won't have any sons or daughters at court. The world's changed, and the families that can't change with it won't survive.'
'I suppose,' Ana said. They were silent for a moment. Otah debated whether he should scratch on her door or back quietly away, and then Ana spoke again. Her voice had changed. It was lower now, and dark as rain on stone. 'It doesn't really matter, though, does it. There isn't going to be a Galt.'
'That's not true,' Danat said.
'Every day that we're like… like this, more of us are dying. It's harvest time. How are they going to harvest the grain if they can't see it? How do you raise sheep and cattle by sound?'
'I knew a blind man who worked leather in Lachi,' Danat said. 'His work was just as good as a man's with eyes.'
'One man doesn't signify,' Ana said. 'He wasn't baking his own bread or catching his own fish. If he needed to know what a thing looked like, there was someone he could ask. If everyone's sightless, it's different. It's all falling apart.'
'You can't know that,' Danat said.
'I know how crippled I am,' Ana said. 'It gives me room to guess. I know how little I can do to stop it.'
There was a soft sound, and Danat hushing her. Otah took a careful step back, away from the door. When Ana's voice came again, it was thick with tears.
'Tell me,' she said. 'Tell me one of those stories. The ones where a child with two races could still win out.'
'In the sixteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Adani Beh,' Danat said, his voice bright and soft, 'there came to court a boy whose blood was half-Bakta, his skin the color of soot, and his mind as clever as any man who had ever lived. When the Emperor saw him…'
Otah backed away, his son's voice becoming a murmur of sound, inflected like words but too faint to mean anything. Their whole journey, it had been like this. Each time Otah thought they might have a moment alone, Ana was near, or one of the armsmen, or Otah had brought himself to the edge of speech and then failed. Every courier they stopped along the road was another reminder to Otah that his son had to know, had to be told. But no word had come from Idaan, and Danat still didn't know that Eiah was involved in the slow death of Galt and, with it, the future Otah had fought for.
Before Pathai, Otah had told himself when they were on the road. During the journey itself, it hardly mattered whether Danat knew, but once they reached their destination, his son couldn't be set out without knowing what it was they were searching for and why. Otah had no faith that another, better chance would come the next day. He made his way back upstairs, found a servant woman, and had cheese, fresh bread, and a carafe of rice wine taken to Danat's room. Otah waited there until the Galtic clock, clicking to itself in a corner, marked the night as almost half-gone. Otah didn't notice that he was dozing until the opening door roused him.
Otah broke the news as gently as he could, outlining his own halfknowledge of Maati's intentions, Idaan's appearance in Saraykeht, Eiah's appearance on the list of possible backers, and his own decision to set his sister to hunt down his daughter. Danat listened carefully, as if picking through the words for clues to some deeper mystery. When, at length, Otah went silent, Danat looked into the fire in its grate, wove his fingers together, and thought. The flames made his eyes glitter like jewels.
'It isn't her,' he said at last. 'She wouldn't do this.'
'I know you love her, Danat-kya. I love her too, and I don't want to think this of her either, but-'
'I don't mean she didn't back Maati,' Danat said. 'We don't know that she did, but at least that part's plausible. I'm only saying that this blindness isn't her work.'
His voice wasn't loud or strident. He seemed less like a man fighting an unpalatable truth than a builder pointing out a weakness in an archway's design. Otah took a pose that invited him to elaborate.
'Eiah hates your plan,' Danat said. 'She even came to me a few times to argue that I should refuse it.'
'I didn't know that.'
'I didn't tell you,' Danat said, his hands taking a pose that apologized, though his voice held no regret. 'I couldn't see that it would make things between the two of you any better. But my point is that her arguments were never against Galts. She couldn't stand to see a generation of our own women ignored. Their pain was what she lived in. When you started allowing the import of bed slaves as… well
…'
'Brood mares,' Otah said. 'I do remember her saying that.'
'Well, that,' Danat agreed. 'Eiah took that as saying that none of the women here mattered. That she didn't matter. If the problems of the Empire could be solved by hauling in wombs that would bear, then all that was important to you about women was the children they could yield.'
'But if there's no children, there can't be-'
Danat shifted forward in his seat, putting his palm over Otah's mouth. The boy's eyes were dark, his mouth
