mark of his life. He imagined himself an old man, sitting at a street
cafe in Kirinton. He wondered what those years would be like, reaching
from here to the grave. He wondered what it would he like to have his
greatness behind him. He told himself that he would retire. "There would
he enough wealth to acquire anything he wanted. A reasonable estate of
his own, a wife, children; that seemed enough. If he could not regain
this season, he could at least not humiliate himself by trying. He
thought of the war leaders who haunted the corridors and wineshops of
Acton reliving triumphs the world had forgotten. He would not he one of
those. He would he the great General who had done his work and then
stepped hack to let the world he had made safe follow its path.
At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing,
and then did it.
Or else he would fail and he and every Galtic man and woman would be a
corpse or a refugee.
I Ic twisted in his sheets. The stars shone where the clouds were thin
enough to permit it. Framed in the opened shutters, they glittered. The
stars wouldn't care what happened here. And yet by the next time their
light silvered these stones, the fate of the world would have turned one
way or the other.
Once, he came near to sleep. His eyes grew heavy, his mind began to
wander into the half-sense of dreams. And then, irrationally, he became
certain that he had mixed one of the orders. The memory, at first vague
but clearer as he struggled to capture it, of sealing a packet with red
that should have been green swam through his mind. He thought he might
have noted at the time that it would need changing. And yet he hadn't
done it. The wrong orders would go out. A legion would start to the
North while the others moved cast. They would lose time finding the
error, correcting it. Or the poet would fail, and some stray company of
armsmen would find its way to Nantani and reveal him to the Khaiem. Half
a thousand stories plagued him, each less likely than the last. His
sense of dread grew.
At last, half in distress and half in disgust, he rose, pulled on a
heavy cotton shirt and light trousers, and walked barefoot from his room
toward the library. He would have to open them all, check them, reseal
them, and keep a careful tally so that the crazed monkey that had taken
possession of his mind could be calmed. He wondered, as he passed
through hallways lit only by his single candle, whether Uther Redcape
had ever rechecked his own plans in the dead night like an old, fearful
merchant rattling his own shutters to be sure they were latched. Perhaps
these indignities were part of what any man suffered when the weight of
so many lives was on his back.
The guards outside his library door stood at attention as he passed
them, whatever gossip or complaint they had been using to pass the dark
hours of the night forgotten at the first sight of him. Balasar nodded
to them gravely before passing through the door. With the stub of his
bedside candle, he lit the lanterns in the library until the soft glow
filled the air. The orders lay where he had left them. With a sigh, he
took out the bricks of colored wax and his private seal. 'T'hen he began