Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face.
He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.
"Something's bothering you," Maati said.
"It's nothing. I've only ... It's not worth talking about."
"Something's bothering you, son."
He had never said the word aloud. Son. Nayiit had never heard it from
his lips, not since he'd been too young for it to mean anything. Maati
felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock
on the boy's face. This was the moment, then, that he'd feared and
longed for. Fie waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the
polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of
strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread
the ground.
Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to
hear over the music and the crowd, "I'm trying to choose between what I
am and what I want to be. I'm trying to want what I'm supposed to want.
And I'm failing."
"I see."
"I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I
want to want them. And I don't. I don't know whether to walk away from
them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but. . ."
Maati settled hack on the bench, put down his howl still half full of
wine, and took Naviit's hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father.
"Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me all of it."
"It would take all night," the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he
didn't pull hack his hand.
"Let it," Maati said. "There's nothing more important than this."
BALASAR HADN'T SLEPT. THE NIGHT HAD COME, A LATE RAIN SHOWER FILLing the
air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had
lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn't come.
The orders waited in stacks on his desk in the library, commands to he
issued to each of his captains, outlining the first stage of his
campaign. There were two sets, of course, just as the Khaiate mercenary
captain had surmised. 'T'hose he'd sealed in green would lead the army
to the North, laying waste to the Westlands and sending the thin stream
of gold and silver that could be wrung from them back to the coffers of
the High Council. Those he'd sealed in red would wheel the army-twenty
thousand armsmcn, three hundred steam wagons, six thousand horses, and
God only knew how many servants and camp followers-to the east and the
most glorious act of conquest the world had ever known.
If he succeeded, he would he remembered as the greatest general in
history, at least in his audacity. The battles themselves he expected to
he simple enough. The Khaiem had no experience in tactics and no armies
to protect them. Balasar would he remembered for two things only: the
unimaginable wealth he was about to pour into Galt and the ceremony that
would come with the dawn. The plot that stripped the andat from the world.
As the dark hours passed, the thought pricked at him. He had put
everything in place. The poet, the books that concerned
FreedomFrom-Bondage, the army, the arms. There was nothing he would ever