that had held the codices closed shifted in the breeze. Otah touched his
palm to the neck of his horse as if to steady it more than himself, then
dismounted.
Smoke still rose from the fire, thin gray reeking clouds. He paced the
length and breadth of the pyre. Here and there, embers still glowed. He
saw more than one bone laid bare and black. Men had died here. Poets and
books. Knowledge that could never be replaced. He leaned against the
rough bark of a half-burned tree. There had been no battle here. This
had been slaughter.
"Most High?"
Ashua Radaani was at his side. Might have been at his side for some
time, for all Otah could say. The man's face was drawn, his eyes flat.
"We've taken down the Dai-kvo," he said.
"Five groups of four men," Otah said. "If you can find any lanterns
still intact, use them. If not, we'll make torches from something. I
can't say how deep into the mountain these hallways go, but we'll walk
through the whole thing if we have to."
Radaani glanced over his shoulder at the red and swollen sun that was
just now touching the horizon. The others were silhouetted against it,
standing in a clot at the mouth of the hall. Radaani turned back and
took a pose that suggested an alternative.
"Perhaps we might wait until morning-"
"What if there's a man still alive in there," Otah said. "Will he he
alive when the sun's back? If darkness is what we have to work in, we'll
work in darkness. Anyone who survived this, I want him. And hooks.
Anything. If it's written, bring it to me. Bring it here."
Radaani hesitated, then fell into a pose of acceptance. Otah put his
hand on the man's shoulder.
We've failed, he thought. Of course we failed. We never had a chance.
They didn't make camp, didn't cook food. The horses, nervous from the
scent of death all around them, were taken hack from the village. Nayiit
and his blacksmith friend Saya gleaned lanterns and torches from the
wreckage. The long, terrible night began. In the flickering light, the
hack halls and grand, destroyed chambers danced like things from
children's stories of the deepest hells. Otah and the three men with
him-Nayiit, Radaani, and a thin-faced boy whose name escaped him-called
out into the darkness that they were friends. That help had arrived.
Their voices grew hoarse, and only echoes answered them.
They found the dead. In the beds, in the stripped libraries, in the
kitchens and alleyways, and floating facedown in the wide wooden tubs of
the bathhouse. No man had been spared. "There had been no survivors.
Twice Otah thought he saw a flicker of recognition in Nayiit's eyes when
they found a man lying pale and bloodless, eyes closed as if in sleep.
In a meeting chamber near what Otah guessed had been the Dai-kvo's
private apartments, Otah found the corpse of Athai-kvo, the messenger
who had come in the long-forgotten spring to warn him against training
men to fight. His eyes had been gouged away. Otah found himself too numb
to react. Another detail to come into his mind and leave it again. As
the night's chill stole into him, Otah's fingers began to ache, his