Luo Yin counted the reports for the third time and arrived at the same number he'd gotten the first two times, which did nothing for his mood.
Forty-one. Forty-one reports from fourteen border stations spanning the northern frontier of Yi Ti, delivered over the course of twelve months by riders and foot messengers and, in one case, a patrol captain who had ridden his horse so hard that the animal collapsed in the courtyard of the Northern Administrative Hall and had to be put down by the stable master while the captain stood there looking embarrassed and exhausted and holding a leather satchel with three separate seals on it.
All of them said the same thing.
Nothing is happening.
Luo Yin sat at his desk in the Northern Administrative Hall and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathed through his nose and counted to five. The desk was lacquered pine, old and solid, its surface covered in a system of organized piles that his deputy Feng Chou called "a catastrophe arranged by a madman" and that Luo Yin called "functional." He knew where every document sat, which pile held the grain tallies and which held the garrison rotation schedules and which held the property tax disputes he'd been putting off for six weeks because the people involved would scream at him for three hours regardless of his ruling.
And he knew, without looking, which pile contained the reports from the border, because that pile sat at the center of his desk and it was the reason he hadn't slept properly in two weeks.
Qin Shue was a northern city of Yi Ti that bordered the Plains of the Jogos Nhai, walled and garrisoned, but still containing a central market. The city sat on the Shuen River at the base of the foothills where the cultivated lowlands gave way to scrub and dry grass and, beyond that, the vast rolling plains where the zorse riders roamed.
Luo Yin had held the post of Senior Administrator for eleven years. He'd taken it at thirty-two, young for the position, appointed by the Provincial Governor as a favor to his father. The appointment was supposed to be a stepping stone. Three years in the north, a clean record, and then a transfer to one of the eastern coastal cities where the trade was good and the food was better and you didn't have to spend every third council meeting discussing how many goats the Jogos Nhai had stolen this quarter.
Eleven years later, he was still here. He'd married a local woman named Mei Shu who ran a textile workshop on the river street. They had two daughters, both old enough to have lives of their own. He'd made his peace with the place, and with being a competent man doing a necessary job that nobody important cared about.
Until now.
He looked at the pile again. He'd read every one of them at least twice, some four or five times, searching for something that broke the pattern. He hadn't found it.
The pattern was simple and absolute. The Jogos Nhai had stopped raiding.
Luo Yin stood and walked to the window. The Administrative Hall sat on a bluff overlooking the river and the city, and below him the market quarter was thick with morning crowds, and beyond that the garrison compound in its blue and silver, and beyond that the northern gate where the road climbed into the foothills and disappeared.
Carts rolled through the market and soldiers drilled in the garrison yard and smoke rose from the foundry and children ran between the stalls. Everything looked normal.
But if you walked north through that gate and followed the road for sixty miles, you'd reach the border stations, and if you stood at any one of those stations and looked out across the plains, you'd see nothing. And that was the problem.
The door opened behind him. Feng Chou stepped in with a cup of tea in each hand, wearing that careful look he got when he had something to say.
Feng Chou was Luo Yin's deputy, a man of forty with a scholar's build and an accountant's disposition and a habit of being right about things that Luo Yin didn't want to hear. He'd been assigned to Qin Shue five years ago from the census bureau in Yin Tar, and he'd arrived with a letter of introduction that described him as "precise, reliable, and socially challenging." All three had proven accurate.
He set one cup on Luo Yin's desk, avoiding the reports, and held the other against his chest.
"You're staring at them again," Feng Chou said.
"I'm thinking." Luo Yin picked up the cup and sipped. The tea was good, as always.
"Sit down," Luo Yin said.
Feng Chou sat in the chair across from the desk and crossed his ankles and waited.
Luo Yin tapped the pile of reports. "I've gone through all of them again. Every station, every month, every patrol log. Do you know the last time all fourteen border stations reported zero contact with the Jogos Nhai in a single month?"
"Never," Feng Chou said.
"There has always been contact. A raid on a village. Stolen livestock. A skirmish at a ford. Something. The Jogos Nhai don't sit still. When they stop raiding our border, it's because something has pulled every band inward, and the historical precedent for that is..." He paused.
"Bad," Feng Chou said.
"Very bad."
Luo Yin sat back down and pulled the earliest report from the bottom of the pile. It was dated fourteen months ago, written by Captain Hong Wen-Dao of Station Seven, a man with a reputation for factual reporting that bordered on the terse.
He read the relevant passage aloud. "'Third month of patrol rotation complete. No contact with Jogos Nhai forces in the reporting period. Plains activity observed at extreme range; dust signatures consistent with band movement approximately forty miles north, direction and composition indeterminate. No approach to the border. Garrison strength nominal. No incidents to report.'"
He set it down and picked up the next one, from Station Three, dated a month later.
"'No contact. No contact. No contact.' That phrase appears in every single report from the fifth month onward. Before that, the station commanders tried to dress it up. 'Patrols conducted without incident.' 'Frontier remains secure.' By the fifth month they'd stopped pretending the silence was routine and just wrote 'no contact' and moved on."
Feng Chou sipped his tea. "What did they see?"
"The dust. All of them mention it in the early reports. Dust signatures to the north. Band-sized movements, sometimes larger, all heading in the same direction. Northwest, mostly, converging on a point well beyond our observation range. After the sixth month, even the dust stopped. The plains went still."
Feng Chou set his cup on his knee and looked at Luo Yin.
"You think they're unifying."
Luo Yin didn't answer right away. He went back to the window and looked north.
"I think there are two possibilities," he said. "The first is that this is some kind of internal affair. A ritual, a dispute that drew the bands together for a season. The Jogos Nhai have their own customs. There could be something happening out on the plains that has nothing to do with us, and the raids will start again in a few months, and I'll feel foolish for losing sleep over it."
"And the second?"
Luo Yin turned from the window. "They're choosing a Jhattar."
Feng Chou's cup stopped halfway to his mouth.
The word sat in the room between them.
In eleven years on the northern border, Luo Yin had dealt with the Jogos Nhai the way every administrator before him had. Raids were part of the landscape. You planned around them, the same way you planned around floods and droughts and rockslides. The border stations provided early warning, and the garrison at Qin Shue maintained two thousand soldiers whose primary purpose was to respond to incursions and to make the cost of raiding high enough that the zorse riders would look for easier targets. It worked, and it had worked for generations. The system was imperfect and people died and livestock was stolen and villages burned, but it was manageable. Raids were manageable.
A Jhattar was not manageable.
A Jhattar was a supreme warlord who bound every band and every jhat and every screaming rider on the plains into a single force that moved with one will. The last Jhattar had risen over three hundred years ago, and the records from that period described an invasion that had burned through the northern provinces and reached the walls of Tiqui before Imperial reinforcements arrived in numbers sufficient to break the advance. The campaign lasted four years, and the border fortifications were rebuilt twice, and three cities were sacked. The casualty figures in the provincial records ran to six digits, and Luo Yin had always assumed those numbers were inflated by the chroniclers, but even halved they were staggering.
The Jogos Nhai didn't choose a Jhattar for no reason. The bands existed in perpetual competition, and forcing them to submit to a single leader required either a threat so extreme or a leader so overwhelming that resistance stopped making sense. Either way, the fractured tribes of the plains would stop fighting each other and start fighting everyone else. And when they did, they fought with a ferocity and a discipline that individual bands couldn't match, because a Jhattar didn't just unify the bands. A Jhattar directed them.
"The timing is consistent," Feng Chou said. His voice had gone quiet. "If a unification campaign began on the plains roughly when the raids stopped, that's fourteen months of consolidation. Enough time to subdue the major bands and establish a command structure. The dust signatures moving northwest would fit with a gathering point. A seat of power."
"I know," Luo Yin said.
"It could also just be a ritual."
"Maybe."
Feng Chou looked at him steadily. "But you don't think it is."
Luo Yin sat back down and put his elbows on the desk and pressed his fingers together.
"When was the last time every band went silent for fourteen months, Feng Chou? Not a single raid, not even a scouting party?"
"The last Jhattar," Feng Chou said. "The records from Tiqui describe roughly eighteen months of silence preceding the invasion. The governor at the time dismissed it as a famine year."
"And then ten thousand zorse riders came through the passes and burned everything between the border and the Shuen."
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Luo Yin opened the drawer of his desk and took out a fresh sheet of paper and a brush and a stone ink block. He ground the ink with slow circular strokes.
"I'm sending a report to the Emperor," he said.
Feng Chou's eyebrows rose. "Directly to the Emperor?"
"Through the Provincial Governor's office, but flagged for Imperial attention. Fast carrier. I want it in the capital within the month."
"The Governor will want to review it first. He'll want to soften it."
"Then the Governor can add his own comments and forward it, but my name and my assessment go on the page unchanged. If I'm wrong, I look like an alarmist and I get a reprimand and my career takes a dent. If I'm right and I stayed quiet, people die." He dipped the brush. "Careers don't matter much when cities are burning."
Feng Chou nodded once and didn't argue. That was the thing about Feng Chou. The man would debate a grain tariff for three hours and make you want to throw him through the window, but when the stakes were real, he shut his mouth and let you work.
Luo Yin wrote. He laid out both possibilities with equal weight, because an administrator who presented only his worst fear was an administrator who got dismissed as a fool. He requested reinforcement, either direct troop deployment from the heartland or intervention from one of the regional Warlords. He kept the language formal and didn't use the word "urgent," because he'd learned years ago that the word scared bureaucrats into inaction rather than action.
He signed the report and pressed his seal into a circle of red wax at the bottom of the page, and set the brush in its stand and leaned back.
Feng Chou was standing at the window, looking north. His tea sat on the desk, cold.
"I'll have it copied and sealed for the carrier within the hour," Feng Chou said without turning. "Do you want an escort rider or a solo dispatch?"
"Solo. Faster. Take the eastern pass road; it'll be clear this time of year. I want the report in the Governor's hands within ten days."
Feng Chou nodded and left the room. His footsteps faded down the corridor, and then the outer door opened and closed and Luo Yin was alone.
He looked at the report on his desk, the ink still drying, and at the border reports beside it.
With any luck, the Governor would read it without softening it too much, and forward it to the capital, and someone at court, maybe someone attached to a Warlord's staff, would take it seriously and send men north.
With any luck.