"If you have it by midday, we can get you someplace warm before night."
"Midday, then."
They rose together, Balasar taking a pose of respect, and the Emperor
Otah Machi returning it.
"General," Otah said as Balasar began to turn away. His voice was gray
as ashes. "One thing. You came because you believed the andat were too
powerful, and the poet's hearts were too weak. You weren't wrong. The
man who did this was a friend of mine. He's a good man. Good men
shouldn't be able to make mistakes with prices this high."
Balasar nodded and walked hack across the square. The drummers matched
the pace of his steps. The last of the hooks burned, the last of the
poets fled into the wilderness, most likely to die, and if not then to
live outcast for their crimes. The andat gone from the world. It was
hard to think it. All his life he had aimed for that end, and still the
idea was too large. His captains crowded around him as he drew near.
"Their faces were ashen and excited and fearful. Questions battered at
him like moths at a lantern.
"'Ieil the men," Balasar began, and they quieted. Balasar hesitated.
"Tell the men to disarm. We'll bring the weapons here. By midday."
"There was a moment of profound silence, and then one of the junior
captains spoke.
"How should we explain the surrender, sir?"
Balasar looked at the man, at all his men. For the first time in his
memory, there seemed to be no ghosts at his back. He forced himself not
to smile.
"Tell them we won."
27
The mine was ancient-one of the first to be dug when Machi had been a
new city, the last Empire still unfallen. Its passages honeycombed the
rock, twisting and swirling to follow veins of ore gone since long
before Maati's great-grandfather was born. Together, Maati and Cehmai
had been raiding the bolt-hole that Otah had prepared for them and for
his own children. It had been well stocked: dried meat and fruit, thick
crackers, nuts and seeds. All of it was kept safe in thick clay jars
with wax seals. They also took the wood and coal that had been set by.
It would have been easier to stay there-to sleep in the beds that had
been laid out, to light the lanterns set in the stone walls. But then
they might have been found, and without discussing it, they had agreed
to flee farther away from the city and the people they had known. Cehmai
knew the tunnels well enough to find a new hiding place where the
ventilation was good. They weren't in danger of the fire igniting the
mine air, as had sometimes happened. Or of the flames suffocating them.
The only thing they didn't have in quantity was water; that, they could
harvest. MMlaati or Cehmai could take one of the mine sleds out, fill it
with snow, and haul it down into the earth. A trip every day or two was
sufficient. They took turns sitting at the brazier, scooping handful
after handful of snow into the flat iron pans, watching the perfect
white collapse on itself and vanish into the black of the iron.
"We did what we could," Maati said. "It isn't as if we could have done