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