Seasons of War

particularly,’ Sinja said. ‘Just a common interest in not turning into ice sculpture in a bean field somewhere between here and there.’
    ‘Thank you,’ Balasar said, his tone making it clear that the meeting had ended. Sinja saluted Balasar, nodded to Eustin, and made his way out. The door closed with a click. Eustin coughed.
    ‘Do you think he’s lying?’ Balasar said. ‘He’d been living in Machi. If there were a place he didn’t want captured, it would be there.’
    Eustin frowned, arms folded across his chest. He looked older, Balasar thought. The grief of losing Coal was heavy on his shoulders too. In a sense, they were the last. There were other men who had taken part in the campaign, but only the two of them had been there from the beginning. Only they had been to the desert. And so there was no one else who could have this conversation and truly understand it.
    ‘He’s not lying,’ Eustin said. His voice was thick. Balasar could hear how much it had cost him to agree with Sinja. ‘Everything I’ve heard says the cold up there is deadly. It’s not a pleasant day out now, and the season’s milder here.’
    ‘And Machi’s army?’
    Eustin shrugged.
    ‘It wasn’t an honorable fight,’ he said. ‘If we empty Utani and Tan-Sadar, we’ve got something near three times the men Coal had at the end.’
    It would take them weeks to reach Machi, even if they started now. A bad storm would be worse than a battle. Tan-Sadar, on the other hand, was a safe place to winter, and when the spring came, they could overwhelm Machi in safety. They could revenge Coal a thousand times over. There was no army that could come to Machi’s aid. Meaningful defenses for the city couldn’t be built in that time.
    Snow was the only armor the enemy had, and the turning seasons would be enough to remove it. Every strategist in Galt would counsel that he wait, plan, prepare, rest. But there were poets in Machi, and all the world to lose if he failed.
    He looked up from the maps. His gaze met Eustin’s, and they stood together in silence, the only two men in the world who would look at these facts, these odds, these stakes, and have no need to debate them.
    ‘I’ll break it to the men,’ Eustin said.

20
    ‘“ A nd quietly, one foot sliding behind the other, for the parapet was too narrow to walk along, the half-Bakta boy went from his own prison chamber around to the bars of the Empress’s cell.”’ Otah paused, letting the half-Bakta boy hang in the air outside the prison tower. And this time Danat failed to object. His eyes were closed, his breathing heavy and regular. Otah sat for a moment, watching his boy sleep, then closed the book, tucked it in its place by the door, and put out the lantern. Danat murmured and snuggled more deeply into his blankets as Otah carefully opened the door and stepped out into the tunnel.
    The physician set to watch over Danat took a pose of obeisance to Otah, and Otah replied with one of thanks before walking to the north, and to the broad spiral stairway that led up to the higher chambers of the underground palace or else down to Otah’s own rooms and the women’s quarters. Small brass lanterns filled the air with their warmth and the scent of oil. The walls were lighter than sandstone and shone brighter than the flames seemed to warrant. At the stairway, he hesitated.
    Above him, Machi was beginning its descent into the other city, washing down into the rooms and corridors reserved for the deep, long winter that was almost upon them. The bathhouses far above had emptied their pipes, shunting the water from their kilns down to lower pools. The towers were being filled with goods of summer, the great platforms crawling up their tracks in the unforgiving stone, and then down again. In the wide, vaulted corridors that would become the main roads and public squares of the winter, beggars sang and food carts filled the air with rich, warm scents: beef soup and peppered pork, fish on hot rice, almond milk and honey cakes. The men and women pulling the carts would be calling, luring the curious and the hungry and the almost-hungry.
    Only, of course, they wouldn’t be there this winter. Food was no longer an item available for trade. It was being rationed out by the utkhaiem and by the exquisite mechanisms that Kiyan had put in place. The men and women of Cetani had been housed there or in the mines along the plain even before Otah and his army had returned with the news that