But the disasters of the past grew in the telling or faded from memory.
No one knew exactly how things had been those many years ago. Perhaps
the Emperor had gone mad and loosed his personal god-ghostwhat they
called andat-against his own people, or against himself. Or there might
have been a woman, the wife of a great lord, who had been taken by the
Emperor against her will. Or perhaps she'd willed it. Or the thousand
factions and minor insults and treacheries that accrue around power had
simply followed their usual course.
As a boy, Balasar had listened to the story, drinking in the tales of
mystery and glory and dread. And, when his tutor had told him, somber of
tone and gray, that there were only two legacies left by the fall of the
God Kings-the wastelands that bordered Far Galt and Obar State, and the
cities of the Khaiem where men still held the andat like Cooling,
Seedless, Stone-Made-Soft-Balasar had understood the implication as
clearly as if it had been spoken.
What had happened before could happen again at any time and without warning.
"And that's what brought you?" the High Watchman said. "It's a long walk
from a little boy at his lessons to this place."
Balasar smiled again and leaned forward to sip bitter kafe from a rough
tin mug. His room was baked brick and close as a cell. A cruel wind
hissed outside the thick walls, as it had for the three long, feverish
days since he had returned to the world. The small windows had been
scrubbed milky by sandstorms. His little wounds were scabbing over, none
of them reddened or hot to the touch, though the stripe on his shoulder
where the satchel strap had been would doubtless leave a scar.
"It wasn't as romantic as I'd imagined," he said. The High Watchman
laughed, and then, remembering the dead, sobered. Balasar shifted the
subject. "How long have you been here? And who did you offend to get
yourself sent to this ... lovely place?"
"Eight years. I've been eight years at this post. I didn't much care for
the way things got run in Acton. I suppose this was my way of say„ ing so.
"I'm sure Acton felt the loss."
"I'm sure it didn't. But then, I didn't do it for them."
Balasar chuckled.
""That sounds like wisdom," Balasar said, "but eight years here seems an
odd place for wisdom to lead you."
The High Watchman smacked his lips and shrugged.
"It wasn't me going inland," he said. Then, a moment later, "They say
there's still andat out there. Haunting the places they used to control."
"There aren't," Balasar said. "'T'here are other things. Things they
made or unmade. There's places where the air goes bad on you-one
breath's fine, and the next it's like something's crawling into you.
There's places where the ground's thin as eggshell and a thousand-foot
drop under it. And there are living things too-things they made with the
andat, or what happened when the things they made bred. But the ghosts
don't stay once their handlers are gone. That isn't what they are."
Balasar took an olive from his plate, sucked away the flesh, and spat
hack the stone. For a moment, he could hear voices in the wind. The
words of men who'd trusted and followed him, even knowing where he would