THE (tlpq-4) by Daniel Abraham

sacrifices he
    had demanded in order to remake the world according to his vision, how
    many other lovers would be parted to further his little scheme to save
    two empires. He would likely never know the full price of it. As if in
    answer, the candles guttered in the breeze, the reed organ took a
    mournful turn, and the sea through which they sailed grew darker.
     
     
    4
     
    The midday sun beat down on the lush green; gnats and flies filled the
    air. The river-not the Qiit proper but one of its tributariesthreaded
    its way south like a snake. Maati tied his mule under the wide leaves of
    a catalpa and squatted down on a likely-looking boulder. Pulling a pouch
    of raisins and seeds from his sleeve, he looked out over the summer. The
    wild trees, the rough wagon track he'd followed from the farmers' low
    town to the northwest, the cultivated fields to the south.
     
    A cluster of small farms made a loose community here, raising goats and
    millet and, near the water, rice. The land between the cities was dotted
    with low communities like this one: the rural roots that fed the great,
    blossoming cities of the Khaiem. The accents were rougher here, the
    effete taint of a high court as foreign as another language. Men might
    be born, grow, love, marry, and die without ever traveling more than a
    day's walk, birthing bed and grave marker no more distant than a thrown
    pebble.
     
    And one of those fields with its ripe green grasses had been plowed by
    the only other man in all the world who knew how to bind the andat.
    Maati took a mouthful of raisins and chewed slowly, thinking.
     
    Leaving the warehouse outside Utani had proven harder than he had
    expected. For over a decade, he had been rootless, moving from one city
    or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey-and this one
    heading south into the summer cities-hadn't seemed to signify anything
    more than a few weeks' time and, of course, the errand itself. But
    somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown
    accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked
    pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he
    had felt their absence.
     
    The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it.
    Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and
    the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he'd thought
    they would be.
     
    Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown
    quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people
    were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a
    once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of
    the war itself-the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and
    saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined
    Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed-had faded,
    but they had not disappeared.
     
    The distrust of the foreign was driven deep into the flesh here. He had
    heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns,
    thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their
    own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion.
    Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to
    marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid
    by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped,
    and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand's depth of water.
     
    And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the
    less certain he was.
     
    Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men
    at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were
    Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam
    rising from the river itself, a flat barge sitting low to the water and
    driven by the same chuffing, tarnished bulb as the wagons. Even