"I'd feel better if Balasar was leading the first command," Sinja said.
"I thought you'd decided that he'd be better staying to arrange your reinforcements."
"Agreed. I agreed. He decided. And it does make sense. Farrercha and the others who've followed his example will be able to swallow all this better if they're answering to a Galtic general."
"And waiting for them to be ready ..." Otah said.
"Madness," Sinja said, slipping the letters into his own sleeve. "We've been too long already. I'm not saying that it's a bad plan. I only wish that there was a brilliant, well-crafted scheme that had Balasar-cha going out and me following behind to see whether the raiders sank everyone. Any word from ChaburiTan?"
"Nothing new," Otah said.
"Fair enough. We'll send word once we get there."
A silence followed, the unasked questions as heavy in the air as smoke. Otah leaned forward. Sinja knew about Idaan's list; Otah had told him in a fit of candor and regretted it since. Sinja knew better than to raise the issue where they might be overheard, but disapproval haunted his expression.
"There is some movement on the question of Obar State," Otah said. "Ashua Radaani bribed their ambassador. He has a list of men who have been in negotiation to break the eastern cities from the Empire with backing from Obar State. Two dozen men in four families."
"That's good work," Sinja said.
"He's asking permission to kill them."
"Sounds very tidy, assuming it's true and Radaani isn't involved in the conspiracy himself."
"Very tidy then too," Otah said. "I'm ordering the men brought to Utani. I can speak with them there."
"And if Radaani refuses?"
"Then I'll invite just him," Otah said. Sinja took an approving pose. Otah thought for a moment that they might be done.
"The other matter?"
"Being addressed," Otah said.
Four of the members of Idaan's list had been quietly looked into, the irregularities of their behavior clarified. One had been hiding half-a-dozen mistresses from a wife with a notoriously short temper. Two others had been conspiring to undercut the glass trades in the north, setting up workshops nearer the alum mines of Eddensea. The fourth had also appeared on Ashua Radaani's list, and had no clear connection to Maati.
Sinja had made it perfectly clear that he thought examining Eiah's actions was the wisest course. If she was Maati's backer, better to find it quickly and put a stop to the whole affair. If she wasn't, best to know that and stop losing sleep. There was a cold logic to his argument, and Otah knew what his own reluctance meant. His daughter had turned to her Uncle Maati. Turned against her father. And the pain of that loss was almost more than he could bear.
"Well," Sinja said. "I suppose I'd better go before the sailors all get too drunk to know sunrise from sunset and land us all in Eymond. If I don't come back, make sure they put up statues of me."
"You'll come back," Otah said.
"You only say that because I always have before," Sinja replied, smiling. He sobered. "See that Balasar comes quickly, though. These ships will make a grand spectacle, but it would be a short fight."
"I'll see to it," Otah said.
Sinja rose and took a pose of leave-taking. It might be the last time Otah ever saw the man. It was a fact he'd known, but something in the set of Sinja's body or the studied blankness of his face drove the point home. For the space of a breath, Otah felt the loss as if the worst had already happened.
"I would have been lost without you, these last years," Otah said. "You know that."
"I know you think it," Sinja said, matching Otah's quiet tone. "Take care, Most High. Do what needs doing."
Sitting now on his dais, watching the ships recede and vanish, Otah thought the phrase had been intended as last words. Do what needs doing. Meaning, more specifically, find Eiah. The sun rose from its morning home in the east; the seafront surged with a hundred languages, creoles, pidgins. Where the armsmen of the palace ended, merchants set up their tall, thin stalls and proclaimed their wares. When Otah took his leave, they would do the same in the space he now inhabited. Returning to the palaces would be like taking his finger out of water. It wouldn't leave a hole. He wondered, sometimes, if the whole world wasn't the same.
Back at the palaces, Otah suffered through the ritual change of robes, the closing ceremony that followed seeing off the fleet. He dearly hoped that when Balasar's reinforcements departed, he could avoid repeating the entire pointless exercise. He hoped, but doubted it. Once the last cymbal had chimed, the last priest intoned the final passage, and Otah had done his duty as Emperor, he went back to his rooms. Danat and Issandra were waiting there.