the woman at her side.
"Kiyan-cha," the man said. "I am Kamath Vauamnat, voice of House
Vauamnat. The Khai Cetani has sent us here at your husband's invitation.
The army of Galt is still some days behind us, but it is coming. Our
city . . ."
Something changed in the courtier's face. It was unlike anything Liat
had seen before, except perhaps an actor who in the midst of declaiming
some epic has forgotten the words. The mask and distance of etiquette
failed, and the words he spoke became genuine.
"Our city's gone. We have what we're carrying. We need your help."
Only Liat was near enough to Kiyan to hear the tiny sigh that escaped
before she spoke.
"How could I refuse you?" she said. "I am utterly unprepared, but if you
will bring your people across the bridge and make them ready, I will
find them places here."
The man took a pose of gratitude, and Kiyan turned hack, Liat still at
her side, and walked back to the hank where her people waited.
"We'll need something like shelter for these people," Kiyan said, under
her breath. "Someplace we can keep them out of the rain until we can
find ... someplace."
""They won't all fit," Ifiat said. "We can put them in the tunnels, but
then there's no place for all of us to go when winter comes. "There's
too many of them, and they can't have carried enough food to see them
through until spring. And we're stretched thin as it is."
"We'll stretch thinner," Kiyan said.
The rest of the day was a single long emergency, events and needs and
decisions coming in waves and overlapping each other like the scales of
a snake. Liat found herself at the large and growing camp that was
forming as the refugees of Cetani reached the bridge. "Thankfully, the
bridge was only the width of eight men walking abreast, and it kept the
flow of humanity and cattle and carts to a speed that was almost
manageable. Liat only had to school herself not to look across the water
to the larger, shapeless mass of people still waiting to cross. Liat
motioned them to different places, the ones too frail or ill to survive
another night in the open, the ones robust enough that they might he put
to work. 'T'here were old men, children, babes hanging in their mothers'
exhausted arms.
Liat felt as if she were being asked to engineer a new city of tents and
cook fires. They came in the hundreds. In the thousands. Night had
fallen before the last man crossed, and Liat could see fires on the far
side, camps made by those who'd given tip hope of crossing today. Liat
sat on the smooth stone rail at the bridge's end and let the aches in
her feet and back and legs complain to her. It had been an excruciating
day, and the work was far from ended. But at least the refugees were in
tents sent out from Machi, safe from the cold. The food carts of Machi
had also come out from the city, making their way through the crowds
with garlic sausages and honeyed almonds and bowls of noodles and beef.
There were even songs. Over the constant frigid rushing of the water,
there was the sound of flutes and drums and voices. The temptation to