Seasons of War

happened,’ Maati wheezed.
    ‘We have a problem,’ Otah said.
    ‘The Galts?’ Liat asked.
    ‘Ten thousand of them,’ Kiyan said, speaking for the first time since Sinja had begun his report. Her voice was solid as stone. ‘Foot soldiers and archers and horsemen. They won’t reach us today. But tomorrow, perhaps. Three days at the most.’
    Maati’s face went white and he sat down hard, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Liat and Cehmai didn’t move to help him. The room was silent except for the murmur of the fire. Otah let the moment pass. There was nothing he could say just now that they wouldn’t think for themselves in the next few heartbeats. Cehmai recovered the fastest, his brows rising, his mouth going tight and hard.
    ‘What do we do?’ the younger poet asked.
    ‘We have some advantages,’ Otah said. ‘We outnumber them. We know the city. We’re in a position to defend, and holding a city’s easier than forcing your way in.’
    ‘On the other hand,’ Sinja said, ‘they’re soldiers. You aren’t. They know that they need shelter from the cold and need it quickly. Taking Machi’s their only option. And they know a fair amount about the city as well.’
    ‘You told them that too?’ Otah asked.
    ‘They’ve had their agents and traders in all the cities for generations, ’ Kiyan said softly. ‘They’ve put their hands in our affairs. They’ve walked the streets and sat in the bathhouses. They have trading houses that wintered here when your father was Khai.’
    ‘Not to mention the several hundred native guides working for them who aren’t me,’ Sinja said. ‘I was leading a militia, you’ll recall. I’ve left as many as I could behind, but they’ve had a season to get any information they wanted.’
    Otah raised his hands in a pose that abandoned his point. He had the feeling of trembling that he remembered from the aftermath of his battles. From hearing Danat’s struggles to breathe when his cough had been at its worst. It wasn’t time to feel; he couldn’t afford to feel. He tried to push the fear and despair away; he couldn’t. It was in his blood now.
    ‘I can try,’ Maati said. ‘I’ll have to try.’
    ‘You have a binding ready?’ Sinja asked.
    ‘Not ready,’ Cehmai said. ‘We have it in outline. It would need weeks to refine it.’
    ‘I’ll try,’ Maati said. His voice was stronger now. His lips were pulled thin. ‘But I don’t know that it will help if it comes to a battle. If it works, I can see they never bear children, but that won’t stop them in the near term.’
    ‘You could make it hurt,’ Sinja suggested. ‘Men don’t fight as well newly gelded.’
    Maati frowned deeply, his fingers moving on their own, as if tracing numbers in the air.
    ‘Do what you can,’ Otah said. ‘If you think a change will make the binding less likely to work, don’t do it. We need an andat - any andat. The details aren’t important.’
    ‘Could we pretend?’ Liat asked. ‘Dress someone as an andat, and send them out with Maati. How would the Galts know it wasn’t true?’
    ‘The costume would have to involve not breathing,’ Cehmai said. Liat looked crestfallen.
    ‘Kiyan,’ Otah said. ‘Can we arm the people we have?’
    ‘We can improvise something,’ his wife said. ‘If we put men in the towers, we can rain stones and arrows on them. It would make it hard for them to keep to the streets. And if we block the stairways and keep the platforms locked at the top, it would be hard work to get them out.’
    ‘Until the cold kills them,’ Sinja said. ‘There’s not enough coal in the ground to keep those towers warm enough to live in.’
    ‘They can survive a few days,’ Otah said. ‘We’ll see to it.’
    ‘We can also block off the entrances to the tunnels,’ Liat said. ‘Hide the ventilation shafts and fill as many of the minor ways down as we can find with stones. It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if there were only one or two places that we needed to defend?’
    ‘There’s another option,’ Sinja said. ‘I don’t like to mention it, but . . . If you surrender, Balasar-cha will kill Otah and Eiah and Danat. Cehmai and Maati. The Khai Cetani and his family too, if they’re here. He’ll burn the books. But he’d accept surrender from the utkhaiem after that. It’s a dozen or so people. There’s no way to do this that kills fewer.’
    Otah felt himself rock back. A terrible weight seemed to fall on his shoulders. He