head on a plate. Please, sit. I can have a fire lit if you're cold...."
Balasar sat on a low couch beside the window. He was a small man, more
than half a head shorter than Otah, with the force of personality that
made it easy to forget. The years had weathered his face, grooves at the
corners of his eyes and mouth that spoke as much of laughter as sorrow.
They had met a decade and a half ago in the snow-covered square that had
been the site of the last battle in the war between Galt and the Khaiem.
A war that they had both lost.
The years since had seen his status in his homeland collapse and then
slowly be rebuilt. He wasn't a member of the convocation, much less the
High Council, but he was still a man of power within Galt. When he sat
forward, elbows resting on his knees, Otah could imagine him beside a
campfire, working through the final details of the next morning's attack.
"Otah," the former general said, falling into his native tongue, "what
is your plan if the vote fails?"
Otah leaned back in his chair.
"I don't see why it should," Otah said. "All respect, but what Sterile
did, she did to both of us. Galt is in just as much trouble as the
cities of the Khaiem. Your men can't father children. Our women can't
bear them. We've gone almost fifteen years without children. The farms
are starting to feel the loss. The armies. The trades."
"I know all that," Balasar said, but Otah pressed on.
"Both of our nations are going to fall. They've been falling, but we're
coming close to the last chance to repair it. We might be able to
weather a single lost generation, but if there isn't another after that,
Galt will become Eymond's back gardens, and the Khaiem will be eaten by
whoever can get to us first. You know that Eymond is only waiting for
your army to age into weakness."
"And I know there are other peoples who weren't cursed," Balasar said.
"Eymond, certainly. And the Westlands. Bakta. Obar State."
"And there are a handful of half-bred children from matches like those
in the coastal cities," Otah said. "They're born to high families that
can afford them and hoarded away like treasure. And there are others
whose blood was mixed. Some have borne. Might that be enough, do you think?"
Balasar's smile was thin.
"It isn't," he said. "They won't suffice. Children can't be rarer than
silk and lapis. So few might as well be none. And why should Eymond or
Eddensea or the Westlands send their sons here to make families, when
they can wait a few more years and take what they want from a nation of
geriatrics? If the Khaiem and the Galts don't become one, we'll both be
forgotten. Our land will be taken, our cities will be occupied, and you
and I will spend our last years picking wild berries and stealing eggs
out of nests, because there won't be farm hands enough to keep us in bread."
"That was my thought as well," Otah said.
"So, no fallback position, eh?"
"None," Otah said. "It was raw hell getting the utkhaiem to agree to the
proposal I've brought. I take it the vote is going to fail?"
"The vote is going to fail," Balasar said.
Otah sat forward, his face cradled in his palms. The slight, acrid smell
of old ink on his fingers only made the darkness behind his closed lids
deeper.
Five months before, he had wrestled the last of the language in his
proposed treaty with Galt into shape. A hundred translators from the
high families and great trading houses had offered comment and
correction, and small wars had been fought in the halls and meeting
rooms of his palace at Utani, sometimes resulting in actual blows. Once,
memorably, a chair had been thrown and the chief overseer of House
Siyanti had suffered a broken finger.
Otah had set forth with an entourage of hundreds-court servants, guards,
representatives of every interest from Machi in the far, frozen north to
the island city of Chaburi-Tan, where ice was a novelty. The ships had
poured into the harbor flying brightly dyed sails and more banners and
good-luck pennants than the world had ever seen. For weeks and months,
Otah had made his arguments to any man of any power in the bizarre,
fluid government of his old enemy. And now, this.
"Can I ask why?" he said, his eyes still closed.
"Pride," Balasar said. Otah heard the sympathy in the softness of his
voice. "No matter how prettily you put it, you're talking about putting
our daughters in bed under your sons."
"And rather than that, they'll let everything die?" Otah said, looking
up at last. Balasar's gaze didn't waver. When the old Galt spoke, it was
with a sense of reason and consideration that might almost have made a
listener forget that he was one of the men he spoke of.
"You don't understand the depth to which these people have been damaged.
Every man on that council was hurt by you in a profound, personal way.
Most of them have been steeping in the shame of it since the day it
happened. They are less than men, and in their minds, it's because of
the Khaiem. If someone had humiliated and crippled you, how would you
feel about marrying your Eiah to him?"
"And none of them will see sense?"
"Some will," Balasar said, his gaze steady as stone. "Some of them think
what you've suggested is the best hope we have. Only not enough to win
the vote."
"So I have a week. How do I convince them?" Otah asked.
Balasar's silence was eloquent.
"Well," Otah said. And then, "Can I offer you some particularly strong
distilled wine?"
"I think it's called for," Balasar said. "And you'd mentioned something
about a fire against the cold."
Otah hadn't known, when the great panoply of Khaiate ships had come with
himself at the front, what his relationship with Balasar Gice would be.
Perhaps Balasar had also been uneasy, but if so it had never shown. The
former general was an easy man to like, and the pair of them had
experienced things-the profound sorrow of commanders seeing their
miscalculations lead loyal men to the slaughter, the eggshell diplomacy
of a long winter in close quarters with men who had been enemies in
autumn, the weight that falls on the shoulders of someone who has
changed the face of the world. There were conversations, they
discovered, that only the two of them could have. And so they had become
at first diplomats, then friends, and now something deeper and more
melancholy. Fellow mourners, perhaps, at the sickbeds of their empires.
The night wore on, the moon rising through the clouds, the fire in its
grate flickering, dying down to embers before being fed fresh coal and
coming to life again. They talked and they laughed, traded jokes and
memories. Otah was aware, as he always was, of a distant twinge of guilt
at enjoying the company of a man who had killed so many innocents in his