business of the merchant houses, and had become the work of a few
coordinating minds. Kiyan had become the hand that moved Machi, that
pushed it into line, that tucked its children into warm beds and kept it
from eating all the best food and leaving nothing for tomorrow. It
consumed her days.
And the utkhaicm and the high trading families had all wanted a moment
of his day, to congratulate or express thanks or wheedle some favor in
light of the changed circumstances of the world. To be here, in the warm
light of candles, Kiyan's hand in his, her gaze on him, seemed like a
dream badly wished for. And yet, now that he had it, he found himself
troubled and unable to relax. She squeezed his hand.
"How bad was it?" she asked, and he knew what she meant. The battles.
The Dai-kvo. The war.
Otah began to say something witty, something glib. The words got lost on
the way to his lips. For long moment, silence was all he could manage.
"It was terrible," he said. "There were so many of them."
"The Galts?"
"'l'he dead. "Theirs. Ours. I've never seen anything like it, Kiyan-
kya. I've read the histories and I've heard the epics sung, and it's not
the same. They were young. And ... and they looked like they were
sleeping. I lowever badly they'd died, in the end, I kept thinking
they'd wake up and speak or call for help or scream. I think about all
the men I led out there. The ones who would have lived if we hadn't done
this."
"We didn't choose this, love. The Galts haven't given anyone much
choice. The men who went with you would have died out there in the
field, or here when the city fell. Would one have been better?"
"I suppose not. The other ways it could have gone might be just as had,
but the way it did happen, they died from following me. From doing what
I asked."
To his surprise, Kiyan chuckled low and mirthless.
"That's why he calls you Emperor, isn't it," Kiyan said, and Otah took a
pose of query. "The Khai Cetani. It's from gratitude. If you're the
leader of the age, then it stops being his burden. Everything you're
suffering, you've saved him."
Otah looked at his hands, rubbing his palms together with a long, dry
sound. His throat felt tight, and something deep in his chest ached with
the suspicion that she was right. When he had asked the man to abandon
his city and take the role of follower, he had also been asking for the
right to choose whatever happened after. And the responsibility for it.
For a moment, he was on the chill, gray field of the dead, and walking
the cold, lifeless ruin where poets had once conspired to hind thoughts
themselves. He remembered the Dal-kvo's dead eyes, looking at nothing.
The bodies, the Galts' and his own both, and the voices calling him Emperor.
"I'm sorry," Kiyan said, and he could tell from her voice that she knew
how inadequate the words were. He pulled his mind hack to his soft-lit
room, the scent of the candles, the touch of this long-beloved hand.
"They've lived with it," he said. "Galt and Eddensea and the Westlands.
It's always been like this for them. War and battle. We'll learn."