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 say„ ing 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. "'T'here 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
hack 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 had a habit of
surprising him.
When he'd come back from the campaign in the Westlands, he'd thought his
career was coming to its victorious end. He might take a place in the
Council or at one of the military colleges. He even dared to dream of a
quiet estate someplace away from the yellow coal smoke of the great
cities. When the news had come-a historian and engineer in Far Galt had
divined a map that might lead to the old libraries-he'd known that rest
had been a chimera, a thing for other men but never himself. He'd taken
the best of his men, the strongest, smartest, most loyal, and come here.
He had lost them here. The ones who had died, and perhaps also the ones
who had lived.
Coal and Eustin were both quiet as they traveled, both respectful when
they stopped to camp for the night. Without conversation, they had all
agreed that the cold night air and hard ground was better than the
company of men at an inn or wayhouse. Once in a while, one or the other
would attempt to talk or joke or sing, but it always failed. "There was
a distance in their eyes, a stunned expression that Balasar recognized
from boys stumbling over the wreckage of their first battlefield. They
were seasoned fighters, Coal and Eustin. He had seen both of them kill
men and boys, knew each of them had raped women in the towns they'd
sacked, and still, they had left some scrap of innocence in the desert
and were moving away from it with every step. Balasar could not say what
that loss would do to them, nor would he insult their manhood by
bringing it up. He knew, and that alone would have to suffice. 't'hey
reached the ports of Parrinshall on the first day of autumn.
Half a hundred ships awaited them: great merchant ships built to haul
cargo across the vast emptiness of the southern seas, shallow fishing
boats that darted out of port and back again, the ornate three-sailed
roundboats of Bakta, the antiquated and changeless ships of the east
islands. It was nothing to the ports at Kirinton or Lanniston or
Saraykeht, but it was enough. Three berths on any of half a dozen of
these ships would take them off Far Gait and start them toward home.
"Winter'II be near over afore we see Acton," Coal said, and spat off the
dock.
"I imagine it will," Balasar agreed, shifting the satchel against his
hip. "If we sail straight through. We could also stay here until spring
if we liked. Or stop in Bakta."
"Whatever you like, General," Eustin said.
"Then we'll sail straight through. Find what's setting out and when.
I'll be at the harbor master's house."
"Anything the matter, sir?"
"No," l3alasar said.
The harbor master's house was a wide building of red brick settled on
the edge of the water. Banners of the Great "I gee hung from the archway
above its wide bronze doors. Balasar announced himself to the secretary
and was shown to a private room. He accepted the offer of cool wine and
dried figs, asked for and received the tools for writing the report now
required of him, and gave orders that he not be disturbed until his men
arrived. Then, alone, he opened his satchel and drew forth the hooks he
had recovered, laying them side by side on the desk that looked out over
the port. There were four, two hound in thick, peeling leather, another
whose covers had been ripped from it, and one encased in metal that
appeared to be neither steel nor silver, but something of each. Balasar