The War With The Mein (5 page)

How surprised he was by her response, then. She drew close to him and tilted her lovely, large-eyed face up toward his. There was no surprise on her features, no remorse, or judgment. She said, A king is the best and worst of men. Of course. Of course. She pushed her lips against his, so soft and full of hungry pressure that they took his breath away. That, perhaps, was the moment they were actually married, the moment the agreement between them was sealed. It was hard for him to decipher now which aspect of her love he was most drawn to. Was it the fact that she could forgive him all of it and love him because she understood his ultimate goodness? Or was it that she betrayed that she was just as capable of overlooking the truth and living a lie as he? Either way, having confessed to her and received her blessing, he loved her completely. He would never have been able to fulfill his role as monarch without her approval. This might or might not have been a good thing for the world, but to a man as unsure of rule as he had been, her devotion had been a great gift.

“Perhaps I do, Thaddeus,” Leodan said, responding belatedly to his statement. “Perhaps I honor you unduly. We all make that mistake at times. But what harm does it do?”

He did not hear the chancellor’s response, if, indeed, he offered any. He closed his eyes and felt the sensation of being pressed against an invisible wall. This mist had built in him, filled him. Now the moment of letting go of the physical world was finally his. This moment always came to him as pressure, as if his chest lay flat against a stone and a great force behind him gradually ground him into it. Just when he felt he could take the weight no more, he started to slip through the stone, to merge with it and pass through as if it were porous and he in liquid form. On the other side Aleera waited for him, the temporary delusion he craved almost more than true life. He went to her in reverence.

Rialus Neptos believed he had found a method whereby he could keep track of everyone who came into and went out of the northern fortress of Cathgergen. He believed such surveillance was essential for a governor, especially one with such a tentative grip on power as he. He had ordered a single sheet of glass cast in the furnaces at the base of the fortress. He knocked out a portion of the granite wall in his office and set the pane to form one enormous window. The glass was taller than a man and as wide as he could stretch his narrow arms out to either side. The workmanship was imperfect. It was uneven in thickness, milky in some places and dotted throughout with air bubbles. But there were a few patches of true clarity; Rialus had located each through long hours of inspection.

Alone in his chambers he would press his forehead to the pane. More often than not the touch of the glass would bring a chill on and fuel his cough, a torment that had racked his bird-frail chest all his life. For a time he even took to stretching out on the floor. A ribbon of glass along the lower edge of the pane distorted the world in such a way that he could study the entrance to the military headquarters at his leisure and thus keep track of just who came and went in Leeka Alain’s world. The best vantage came when he stood on a footstool and gazed down with a one-eyed squint that provided a view of the full reach of the western wall and the gate at its center. From this spot he had watched General Alain’s troops march out in defiance of his direct orders. From the same spot he observed the arrival of the second of the Mein brothers, Maeander, some weeks later.

Rialus pulled back from the glass. He was chilled again. The fortress was heated by steaming pools of hot water that bubbled up from the earth. An intricate network of pipes and air ducts channeled the warmth throughout the labyrinthine structure. The Cathgergen engineers claimed it was a wonder of complicated craftsmanship, but in truth the place was never warm enough. He sometimes suspected that his chambers were intentionally denied a full measure of heat, but he had no way of proving this.

He circled his desk one and a quarter times, then walked to the bookshelved wall and trailed a finger over the spines of the volumes there, dusty tomes full of records, accounting documents, and gubernatorial journals kept since the first installment of Acacian hegemony in the satrapy. His father had treated these records with sober reverence. He tried to instill the same in his only son, to no avail. Rialus was only the second generation of his family to oversee the Mein—not a long tenure in office, by Acacian standards. On the demise of the previous governing family, his father had been sent north in punishment for some malfeasance Rialus could not even recall anymore. As the years passed the other governors came to take the Neptos family for granted. The Akarans all but ignored them. It galled him that he was expected to pay indefinitely for a crime no one could even name. It tormented him that the outside world had no understanding of his razor-sharp mind, somehow held captive inside his stunted form, betrayed on every occasion by his jaw’s tendency to freeze up at just the wrong moments. If others would just see beyond these outward defects, they would realize that he was wasted on this posting.

Rialus was fond of saying that the Giver rewards her worthies, but he had yet to see any evidence that the divine forces in the world had even noted his existence. After ten years of being overlooked Rialus became a fertile ground for intrigue. The elder Mein brother had been quick to take advantage of this. Hanish was an eloquent speaker, a handsome man who spoke with such composure behind his gray eyes that one could not help but trust in him. Coming from his mouth, the strange belief system of the Mein seemed no thing of fancy at all. The world of the living was transient, Hanish had explained, but the force that was the Tunishnevre was constant. The Tunishnevre was composed of all the worthy men of his race who had once lived and breathed but did so no longer. It was their life force lingering outside their mortal vessels. It was the palpable energy of their rage, proof that the dead mattered more than the living. Life was the curse inflicted upon a soul before it rose to a higher plane. Like the body that is separate from the spirit within it and yet causes that spirit all manner of pain, so the fate of the living caused the ancestral core no end of suffering. The living kept the dead chained to them and in ignorance of it made the afterlife a burden, when it should have been the sweet fulfillment of life’s journey. The ancestors, Hanish had claimed, implored him to ease their torture.

When the governor had asked just what it was that the Tunishnevre wanted and exactly how were they to be freed of this suffering, Hanish had squeezed his shoulder as if they were close companions. He had a way of switching from a most serious tone to a casual one at a moment’s notice. “I do know that there are changes to be made to the order of the living world. That is the work I was born for. And you, Rialus Neptos, are an agent of my enemy.”

This also had been said lightly, but the list of crimes perpetuated by Acacia’s hegemony seemed long and foul when Hanish had detailed it. What nation did not suffer beneath their rule? From the pale men of the north to the black ones of the south, from east to west, so many different peoples, scores of races of men—all suffered grave injustices. Generations had lived and died under the yoke of Acacian “peace,” but the Mein had never forgotten who their enemy was. Now, finally, Acacia had a king grown lax enough that they could strike. Hanish believed that Leodan was the weakest heir in the long chain of his family’s history. A new age could begin, with a new calendar to mark the day, with new concepts of justice, with a redistribution of wealth, with privileges finally in the hands of those who had so long labored for other men’s gain. There was little in this that Rialus could refute. He was, after all, in a prime position to know just how deeply Acacia taxed its allies.

Rialus could not even remember just when the Mein brothers had brought him into their confidence, but he did recall his incredulity at the claims that Hanish made. He had said his league allies were more powerful than the Akarans. They had grown frustrated with the Akarans and angry with Leodan. They believed the king wanted to break the Quota and abolish the mist trade. Because of this they had decided his fate. He would be removed and replaced by another willing to more faithfully meet their needs. Hanish claimed that this had happened twice before in the twenty-two generations since Tinhadin, but this was different. The king was not merely being removed so that his son—younger, more easily molded and controlled—could take his place. This time the Lothan Aklun wanted the entire line extinguished and a new dynasty established, with the Mein upon the throne.

That was why Hanish had at his disposal a strange race of people willing to march across the Ice Fields and make war on the Mein’s behalf. That was why he possessed new weapons that hurled flaming balls of pitch like the sun, or that tossed boulders. Add to this a hidden Meinish army that had been hard at training in the mountains to the north of Tahalian, unknown to the outside world. With these tools and several other surprises, Hanish promised to sweep down upon an unsuspecting world and take it apart piece by piece.

The brothers had alluded to various positions of stature Rialus might occupy in the reshaped world they envisioned, but as yet he had seen no rewards. He had hoped to prove himself useful. Unfortunately, this business with Leeka had not gone as he wished. He knew that the general’s army had been mysteriously massacred, but he was not at all sure if this would bring Maeander the pleasure it should. After all, Rialus’s charge had been to keep the general caged and to do what he could to hide the foreigners’ arrival. He had failed on both accounts.

Maeander entered the governor’s chambers with a visible disdain for the formalities due an Acacian official. He walked past the secretary who was preparing to announce him and strode into the room with clipped steps that seemed both casual and sharp enough to split the stones beneath his boots. Maeander was several inches taller than his host. He was broad in the shoulders, with strength that showed in movements of his muscled thighs and in the sinewy bulges of his forearms and in the contours of his neck. He wore his hair long, below the shoulders, the straw-gold strands of it washed daily in icy water and combed out—an unusual thing, for most Meinish men let their hair knot and walked with a nest of snakes cascading down their shoulders. He was, in all outward forms, a model figure for the rough-hewn, virile men of his race, strapped into garments of tanned leather, legs covered by fitted trousers.

Maeander pulled off his fur-lined gloves and tossed them down on a table, making a loud thwack as they hit. He did a quick survey of the room, pausing on the window. “So this is your window,” he said, inspecting the sheet of glass. He spoke Acacian with the guttural tones of his native language, sounds that had always offended Rialus’s ear. “The guards joked with me on the way in. When I instructed them to send you word of my arrival, one of them said that you already knew, since you always had one eye pressed against this glass. Another said that you seemed not to realize that one can see both into and out of glass. Such impertinence, Governor, should not be allowed.”

Rialus flushed. The basic fact that he would be visible to people outside had never occurred to him. He imagined the absurdity of his image viewed from outside, twisted into different contortions, those below watching him from the corners of their eyes, hiding smirks, laughing at him…. And just like that, with a few casual words, he was made to feel a complete fool. He recalled a time when the Mein brothers spoke to him as befit his office, but all that had changed. He had no idea how to regain his former stature. In fact, he increasingly suspected that he had never held any.

Maeander turned from the window. The man’s eyes were strikingly gray. He did not so much look at someone as aim at them. Never, the governor thought, had he known a person to stare so fixedly, with such undisguised ill will. His gaze was that of a child upon a beetle he was about to squash beneath his heel. “Do you know what happened to Alain’s army?”

Rialus was not generally a fluent speaker. Before Maeander he became a sputtering mess, which he was sure gave the wrong impression. Fortunately, Maeander was more interested in talking himself than in giving a true interrogation. As he related it, Numrek scouts sent out to clear the way before the bulk of their nation had spotted the general’s column. Unseen, they shadowed them for several days, until they were positioned for ambush. They swept in on them upon the tail wind of a clearing storm and slaughtered them down to the last man and woman.

“You will be glad to hear that the Numrek are as skilled at killing as they claimed,” Maeander said. “They welcomed the test Alain’s army gave them. It warmed them, they said.” He turned and strolled around the room, directionless. He had three thin plaits of hair that stretched from the crown of his head down to the left side. Into two, ribbons of blue were woven, into the third a leather strap studded with silver beads. Rialus knew that these were some primitive accounting system: the blue standing for ten men killed, the leather strap for twenty. Or was it the other way around? The governor could not remember. “I have never seen anything quite like this Numrek army. They absorb and spit out everything they come up against. Their women and children take as much joy in slaughter as the men. I doubt very much that the combined forces of Acacia could match them on an open field.”

“Then it was all for the best,” Rialus said. “The Giver provides for all worthies. A great success!”

Maeander did not like being led. “Do not get ahead of yourself. You failed to keep your general shackled. You sat at your window here as he marched out to threaten everything my brother has been planning for years now. The outcome was not that bad, true, but you have forced us to speed up our plans. And is it true that your general sent out messengers—several of them?”

“He did, but not to worry. I had them all hunted and slain.”

“Not true. One of them got through. One of them met with the king’s chancellor, Thaddeus Clegg.”

“Oh,” Rialus said.

“Yes. ‘Oh.’ Again, however, you have been saved by a piece of fortune.” He paused to let Rialus squirm a moment, and then said, “Thaddeus is…conflicted, enough so that he may not see his interests as aligned with Leodan’s.”

Rialus’s mouth formed an oval. “Conflicted?”

“Just so,” Maeander said. He reached down and pushed the tips of his fingers through olives set in a bowl on Rialus’s desk, imported delicacies not easy to come by in the Mein. He popped a few in his mouth and watched the governor. “Actually, Rialus, the reasons for his conflicted state of mind intersect with your own situation. Would you like me to explain?”

Rialus nodded, hesitant but too curious to refuse. Maeander spoke as he chewed. He asked Rialus to step back in time with him and to imagine Leodan and Thaddeus as they were in their youth. Imagine the young prince: dreamy, idealistic, indecisive in his acceptance of the power he was being groomed to wield, smitten by a young beauty—Aleera—who seemed of more import to him than his throne. Beside him his chancellor: resolute, confident, disciplined, a gifted swordsman, ambitious in the ways that Leodan was not.

“Leodan was never exactly a jewel in his father’s eye,” Maeander said, grinning.

Gridulan, he claimed, thought his son weak. But a son is a son; Gridulan had no other. He could not be denied. This is why Gridulan did the best he could to harden Leodan, even as he watched Thaddeus from the corner of his eye. He wanted his son to have a strong chancellor, but he had reason to fear Thaddeus’s gifts. Thaddeus was an Agnate, after all. He could trace his lineage back to Edifus himself. He might, in certain circumstances, make a legitimate claim to the throne. This became a greater threat—from the old king’s perspective—when Thaddeus wed a young woman, Dorling, also from an Agnate family. They had a boy child their first year together, a full two years before Aleera would give birth to Aliver. So there was strong Thaddeus, an officer in the Marah, with a young wife and child, with a fine lineage and the adoration of the populace and support of the governors—who saw the chancellor as a shrewd advocate for their causes. In short, Thaddeus had become a threat that Gridulan could not ignore, even if Leodan was oblivious to it.