Daniel Abraham - An Autumn War

Daniel Abraham

AN AUTUMN WAR

Tor Books by Daniel Abraham

(The Long Price Quartet series):

A Shadow in Summer

A Betrayal in Winter

An Autumn War

The Price of Spring

Daniel Abraham

AN AUTUMN WAR

To Jim and Allison, without whom none of this would have been possible

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Once again, I would like to extend my thanks to Walter Jon Williams,

Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, S. NI. Stirling, Terry England, Ian

Tregillis, Ty Franck, George R. R. Martin, and the other members of the

New Mexico Critical Mass Workshop.

I also owe debts of gratitude to Shawna McCarthy and Danny Baror for

their enthusiasm and faith in the project, to James Frenkel for his

unstinting support and uncanny ability to improve a manuscript, and to

Tom Doherty and the staff at Tor for their kindness and support.

AN

AUTUMN

WAR

PROLOG

Three men came out of the desert. Twenty had gone in.

The setting sun pushed their shadows out behind them, lit their faces a

ruddy gold, blinded them. The weariness and pain in their bodies robbed

them of speech. On the horizon, something glimmered that was no star,

and they moved silently toward it. The farthest tower of Far Galt, the

edge of the Empire, beckoned them home from the wastes, and without

speaking, each man knew that they would not stop until they stood behind

its gates.

The smallest of them shifted the satchel on his back. His gray

commander's tunic hung from his flesh as if the cloth itself were

exhausted. His mind turned inward, half-dreaming, and the leather straps

of the satchel rubbed against his raw shoulder. The burden had killed

seventeen of his men, and now it was his to carry as far as the tower

that rose tip slowly in the violet air of evening. Ile could not bring

himself to think past that.

One of the others stumbled and fell to his knees on wind-paved stones.

The commander paused. He would not lose another, not so near the end.

And yet he feared bending down, lifting the man up. If he paused, he

might never move again. Grunting, the other man recovered his feet. The

commander nodded once and turned again to the west. A breeze stirred the

low, brownish grasses, hissing and hushing. The punishing sun made its

exit and left behind twilight and the wide swath of stars hanging

overhead, cold candles beyond numbering. The night would bring chill as

deadly as the midday heat.

It seemed to the commander that the tower did not so much come closer as

grow, plantlike. He endured his weariness and pain, and the structure

that had been no larger than his thumb was now the size of his hand. The

beacon that had seemed steady flickered now, and tongues of flame leapt

and vanished. Slowly, the details of the stonework came clear; the huge

carved relief of the Great Tree of Galt. He smiled, the skin of his lip

splitting, wetting his mouth with blood.

"We're not going to die," one of the others said. He sounded amazed. The

commander didn't respond, and some measureless time later, another voice

called for them to stop, to offer their names and the reason that they'd

come to this twice-forsaken ass end of the world.

When the commander spoke, his voice was rough, rusting with disuse.

"Go to your High Watchman," he said. "Tell him that Balasar Gice has

returned."

BALASAR GICE HAD BEEN IN HIS ELEVENTH YEAR WHEN HE FIRST HEARD THE word

andat. The river that passed through his father's estates had turned

green one day, and then red. And then it rose fifteen feet. Balasar had

watched in horror as the fields vanished, the cottages, the streets and

yards he knew. The whole world, it seemed, had become a sea of foul

water with only the tops of trees and the corpses of pigs and cattle and

men to the horizon.

His father had moved the family and as many of his best men as would fit

to the upper stories of the house. Balasar had begged to take the horse

his father had given him up as well. When the gravity of the situation

had been explained, he changed his pleas to include the son of the

village notary, who had been Balasar's closest friend. He had been

refused in that as well. His horses and his playmates were going to

drown. His father's concern was for Balasar, for the family; the wider

world would have to look after itself.

Even now, decades later, the memory of those six days was fresh as a

wound. The bloated bodies of pigs and cattle and people like pale logs

floating past the house. The rich, low scent of fouled water. The

struggle to sleep when the rushing at the bottom of the stairs seemed

like the whisper of something vast and terrible for which he had no

name. He could still hear men's voices questioning whether the food

would last, whether the water was safe to drink, and whether the flood

was natural, a catastrophe of distant rains, or an attack by the Khaiem

and their andat.

He had not known then what the word meant, but the syllables had taken

on the stench of the dead bodies, the devastation where the village had

been, the emptiness and the destruction. It was only much later-after

the water had receded, the dead had been mourned, the village

rebuilt-that he learned how correct he had been.

Nine generations of fathers had greeted their new children into the

world since the God Kings of the East had turned upon each other, his

history tutor told him. When the glory that had been the center of all

creation fell, its throes had changed the nature of space. The lands

that had been great gardens and fields were deserts now, permanently

altered by the war. Even as far as Galt and Eddensea, the histories told

of weeks of darkness, of failed crops and famine, a sky dancing with

flames of green, a sound as if the earth were tearing itself apart. Some

people said the 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-ghostwhat 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