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,