Seasons of War

stars themselves had changed positions.
    But the disasters of the past grew in the telling or faded from memory. No one knew exactly how things had been those many years ago. Perhaps the Emperor had gone mad and loosed his personal god-ghost - what they called andat - against his own people, or against himself. Or there might have been a woman, the wife of a great lord, who had been taken by the Emperor against her will. Or perhaps she’d willed it. Or the thousand factions and minor insults and treacheries that accrue around power had simply followed their usual course.
    As a boy, Balasar had listened to the story, drinking in the tales of mystery and glory and dread. And, when his tutor had told him, somber of tone and gray, that there were only two legacies left by the fall of the God Kings - the wastelands that bordered Far Galt and Obar State, and the cities of the Khaiem where men still held the andat like Cooling, Seedless, Stone-Made-Soft - Balasar had understood the implication as clearly as if it had been spoken.
    What had happened before could happen again at any time and without warning.
    ‘And that’s what brought you?’ the High Watchman said. ‘It’s a long walk from a little boy at his lessons to this place.’
    Balasar smiled again and leaned forward to sip bitter kafe from a rough tin mug. His room was baked brick and close as a cell. A cruel wind hissed outside the thick walls, as it had for the three long, feverish days since he had returned to the world. The small windows had been scrubbed milky by sandstorms. His little wounds were scabbing over, none of them reddened or hot to the touch, though the stripe on his shoulder where the satchel strap had been would doubtless leave a scar.
    ‘It wasn’t as romantic as I’d imagined,’ he said. The High Watchman laughed, and then, remembering the dead, sobered. Balasar shifted the subject. ‘How long have you been here? And who did you offend to get yourself sent to this . . . lovely place?’
    ‘Eight years. I’ve been eight years at this post. I didn’t much care for the way things got run in Acton. I suppose this was my way of saying so.’
    ‘I’m sure Acton felt the loss.’
    ‘I’m sure it didn’t. But then, I didn’t do it for them.’
    Balasar chuckled.
    ‘That sounds like wisdom,’ Balasar said, ‘but eight years here seems an odd place for wisdom to lead you.’
    The High Watchman smacked his lips and shrugged.
    ‘It wasn’t me going inland,’ he said. Then, a moment later, ‘They say there’s still andat out there. Haunting the places they used to control.’
    ‘There aren’t,’ Balasar said. ‘There are other things. Things they made or unmade. There’s places where the air goes bad on you - one breath’s fine, and the next it’s like something’s crawling into you. There’s places where the ground’s thin as eggshell and a thousand-foot drop under it. And there are living things too - things they made with the andat, or what happened when the things they made bred. But the ghosts don’t stay once their handlers are gone. That isn’t what they are.’
    Balasar took an olive from his plate, sucked away the flesh, and spat back the stone. For a moment, he could hear voices in the wind. The words of men who’d trusted and followed him, even knowing where he would take them. The voices of the dead whose lives he had spent. Coal and Eustin had survived. The others - Little Ott, Bes, Mayarsin, Laran, Kellem, and a dozen more - were bones and memory now. Because of him. He shook his head, clearing it, and the wind was only wind again.
    ‘No offense, General,’ the High Watchman said, ‘but there’s not enough gold in the world for me to try what you did.’
    ‘It was necessary,’ Balasar said, and his tone ended the conversation.
     
    The journey to the coast was easier than it should have been. Three men, traveling light. The others were an absence measured in the ten days it took to reach Lawton. It had taken sixteen coming from. The arid, empty lands of the East gave way to softly rolling hills. The tough yellow grasses yielded to blue-green almost the color of a cold sea, wavelets dancing on its surface. Farmsteads appeared off the road, windmills with broad blades shifting in the breezes; men and women and children shared the path that led toward the sea. Balasar forced himself to be civil, even gracious. If the world moved the way he hoped, he would never come to this place again, but the world