Seasons of War

precision was eerie. It was two days’ travel before Otah saw the smoke.
    They reached the village near evening. They found a ruin. Where glittering windows had been, ragged holes remained. The towers and garrets cut from the stone of the mountain were soot-stained and broken. The air smelled of burned flesh and smoke and the copper scent of spilled blood. Otah rode slowly, the clack of his mount’s hooves on pavement giving order to the idiot, tuneless wind chimes. The air felt thick against his face, and the place where his heart had once been seemed to gape empty. His hands didn’t tremble, he did not weep. His mind simply took in the details - a corpse in the street wearing brown robes made black with blood, a Galtic steam wagon with the wide metalwork on the back twisted open by some terrible force, a firekeeper’s kiln overturned and ashen, an arrow splintered against stone - and then forgot them. It was unreal.
    Behind him, the others followed in silence. They made their way to the grand office at the height of the village. The great hall, open to the west, caught the light of the setting sun. The white stone of the walls glowed, light where it had escaped the worst damage and a deeper, darker gold where smoke had marked it.
    And in the entrance of the hall, the Dai-kvo was tied to a stake. The hopes of the Khaiem lying dead at his feet.
    I could have stopped this, Otah thought. The Galts live because I spared them at Saraykeht. This is my fault.
    He turned to Nayiit.
    ‘Have him cut down,’ he said. ‘We can have them buried or burned. Anything but this.’
    Behind the gruesome sight squatted the remains of a great pyre. Logs as tall as a standing man had been hauled here and set to hold the flames, and had burned nearly through. The spines of ancient books lay stripped in the ashes of their pages and curled from the heat. Shredded ribbons that had held the codices closed shifted in the 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 be 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 books. 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 back 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 back 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