The War With The Mein (55 page)

“Depends which tales you mean,” Thaddeus said. “Some are decidedly true. Others are decidedly not.”

“Is it true that they were forced out of their land?” Dariel asked. “I’ve heard that was why they came across the Ice Fields and joined with Hanish.”

Thaddeus nodded. “Those whom the Acacians never defeated on the field of battle came to this land as a vanquished people, fleeing forces they feared enough to trudge into the unknown.” He let the significance of this sit for a moment. “This world is larger than we know, with more in it to fear than we have yet imagined. Don’t let this cloud your thoughts, though. For the moment Hanish Mein is the enemy. If we don’t defeat him first, we’ll never have to worry about what might come after.”

“Well,” Dariel said, “if they were never defeated during the first war, how do we plan to defeat them now?”

He had asked Thaddeus the question, but the chancellor deferred to Aliver for the answer. The prince sat on a three-legged stool, his legs planted widely, leaning forward, an elbow propped on one of his knees as his fingers massaged his forehead. He indicated that he heard the question only by balling his hand into a fist and pressing his knuckles flat against his skull. Studying him, Thaddeus realized something was weighing on him more heavily than usual.

“I’m not sure,” Aliver finally said. “I hate that answer, but it’s the truth. I wish I could have all the pieces in place before putting any lives in danger….”

“But you cannot,” Kelis said, speaking Acacian for the others’ benefit. “If you waited to have everything in place, you’d be forever waiting. There are many things we have only partial knowledge of. Some speak of creatures the Meins received as presents from the Lothan Aklun. Antoks, they call them. But nobody can tell us what these are. We cannot know, but neither can we wait forever.”

Aliver let the interruption sit for a moment, showing neither agreement nor disagreement with it. “There are the Santoth. They are why I’ve not fought against how rapidly things are moving. I know their power. I believe they will help us. I don’t know exactly how, but if anybody can defeat the Numrek, they can. If they join us on the battlefield, they will find a way.”

Again, Dariel found something to question. “You said if the Santoth join the battle. Is it possible they won’t?”

“They promised they would, but there’s a condition attached. I told them that I’d give them The Song of Elenet. They need it, they say, in order to get the impurities out of their magic. They won’t leave the south until I tell them I have the book.”

“But we move farther north each day,” Dariel said.

“The distance doesn’t matter. I’m never out of contact with them. My bond with them is stretched by the miles, but it’s not broken. Believe me—they can hear my thoughts when I send them, and I can receive theirs when they wish. If the book dropped in my lap tomorrow I could summon them immediately. The problem is that the book isn’t going to drop into my lap. I’ve no idea where it is, and nobody has stepped forward to tell me. I’ve been too lax about this. I did not let everyone know how unequivocal they were…. I used to think I would simply summon them whether I found the book or not. Once they joined us, they’d have no choice but to help. Afterward—once we won—I’d find The Song of Elenet and give it to them. I’d honor the promise, just change the order of the events to get there. But I’m not sure of this anymore.”

“What is different now?” Thaddeus asked, feeling this might be the core of what troubled him, wishing that he himself had given all of this more thought. When he was younger, and his mind sharper, he would have probed everything. Waiting for the prince’s answer, he knew he had not done so as completely as he should.

Aliver looked up, straightened, and seemed to take in the room anew. He wiped under his eyes with his fingertips. “The way people have been coming off the mist…it’s because the Santoth are aiding them. I told them that I could not fight with an army drugged and groggy every night. In answer they whispered out a spell. I heard it inside my head and felt the way it slipped out across the sleeping land each night. It moved like a thousand serpents, each seeking a user.”

“That’s incredible,” Dariel murmured. “I heard how people were breaking free of the mist, but…”

“Yes, it is incredible,” Aliver said. Having agreed, though, he struggled a moment with how to express the further things he had to say. He illustrated his thoughts with his fingers a moment, but then gave up on the effort and let his hands rest on his knees. “I could sense that there was corruption in the spell. It’s what they always told me. I don’t know how to explain it. I could not actually understand the language. It barely even seemed a language at all. It’s a sort of music, as if voices plucked tunes from millions of different notes. The notes were like words. And they weren’t like words….”

He glanced around from face to face, searching them, hoping that they understood him better than his capacity to put it into words. He seemed disappointed by the incomprehension he saw looking back at him. Thaddeus felt he should say something, but he had already understood Aliver’s point. Instead of refuting it, he sat, feeling its import grow on him.

“I cannot explain it,” Aliver continued, “but the Santoth were right, of course. The spell was garbled at the edges. They didn’t intend to make the mist dream into a horror, but that’s what happened. They made the mist state a living nightmare that preyed on each person’s greatest fears and weaknesses. They made it such a torment that the users feared the drug more than the torture of withdrawal, more than losing forever the dreams that they always sought the mist for. Understand me? It may have worked, but that was not the song they wanted to sing. They would have gentled them off with a loving pressure. Instead, by the time the spell took hold, it had twisted into something malevolent. If that’s what happens when they’re reaching out to our allies to help them, what might they unleash when they strike out to slay our enemies, when the song they intend is one of death and destruction?”

What a question, Thaddeus thought. Exactly as he would have put it himself. He had no answer to it, and sat in silence with the others.

“You know,” Dariel eventually said, a tinge of humor in his voice, “if this all ends well for us, we’ll have a most amazing story to tell. A most amazing story. One to sit on the shelf beside The Tale of Bashar and Cashen, as father used to say. Remember how he said that? ‘The most amazing tale is yet to be written,’ he said. ‘But it will be, and it will deserve the space beside Bashar and Cashen.’”

Aliver said that he understood that tale differently now. He began to explain what the Santoth had taught him, but Thaddeus could not listen to him. He knew the instant the words were out of Dariel’s mouth that something crucial had been said. It sent a shiver up from his lower back that fanned out across his musculature. He’d heard Leodan use just those words, but in a different context.

Somebody approached the tent door. The guard posted there gruffly asked the person’s business. A woman’s voice piped up in answer. Thaddeus could not hear her words, but there was a confident tone to them. Thaddeus assumed he understood the situation. The princes were young men, handsome and powerful. There were certainly women who vied for their attention. It surprised him neither brother had paid much attention to—

The woman shouted something. Thaddeus did not catch it, but Aliver and Dariel both shot to their feet and rushed toward the tent flap. They were out past it before Thaddeus could make sense of it. He sat forward in his seat, listening to the excited sounds that followed, but it wasn’t until Dariel called for him that he actually rose. Pushing through the tent flap into the torch- and star-lit night, he saw the two princes sharing a multi-limbed embrace with a young woman. She was as sun-burnished as they, as lithe and strong. She wore the dual swords of the Punisari at her waist. The fact that she went thus armed drew so much of his attention that he failed to realize a far more important thing.

“Thaddeus,” Aliver said on noticing him, “look, it’s Mena.”

By the Giver—when had he become so dim-witted? So slow? When had his eyes lost their ability to see what mattered? Mena. It was Mena. She disentangled herself from her brothers and walked toward him. Her strides were so determined and the swords so prominent at her side that he half believed she was about to cut him down. Mena, who had always been so smart. Who’d always understood people intuitively, even as a child. Mena, whom he’d feared he’d lost, whom he’d spoken to sometimes in his dreams, who’d named his crimes in those nightmares by counting them off one by one on her small fingers…For that Mena he would stand still and accept whatever havoc she would wreak upon him.

But if this young woman remembered all the ways that Thaddeus had betrayed her, she gave no sign of it. She closed on him with open arms. She smashed against his chest, arms thrown around him, her head nestled beneath his chin. Thaddeus’s eyes moistened immediately. It took a great deal of effort to balance his head in such a way that the tears did not break over the rims of his eyes. She could have squeezed the air out of him and he’d not have moved until he lost consciousness and crumpled to the ground.

Drawing back from him, Mena slipped her hands up his neck and clamped them around his head. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She tilted his head forward, spilling the tears onto his cheeks. “You are exactly the same,” she said. Her voice had a foreign accent to it, a bit of the thickness of Vumu that she somehow transformed to music. “Not a new wrinkle on your face. Not a blemish or freckle I don’t remember.”

Thaddeus gave up all pretense at controlling his emotion. He let it flow, more completely even than he had on reuniting with Aliver or on embracing Dariel. Three of Leodan’s children were together now; all of them—all of them—were alive! It was simply too much joy, too much relief and sorrow to contain. He let it flow.

What he did later that night was not the rash action it might have seemed. Or so he told himself. At some level he had known for a while that he had done all he could to help Aliver onto the path of his destiny. That job was complete. Aliver would either fail or succeed, but he would not turn away from either result. He had everything he needed to win this war except for one thing. He needed the book that would help his sorcerers sing his cause to victory. Though others had been asked to hunt for the book, there was nobody more likely to actually find it than he himself.

In the early hours of the next morning, before the sun had risen, Thaddeus Clegg set out to find this book, marching north ahead of the army, toward Acacia and the palace in which he hoped the volume might still lie hidden.

Hanish had not enjoyed his last parting with Corinn. He’d looked her square in the face as he took his leave, unsure of how she would respond, prepared for a petulant show of emotion. Perhaps he even craved some such outpouring. Instead, she had been strangely reserved. She had not protested his leaving to meet Haleeven and the caravan transporting the Tunishnevre. Nor had she asked to come with him, which he’d anticipated. Though she wished him success and speed, her lips had no vigor during their final kisses. She had not pressed her body to his as she usually did. She gave him nothing but polite indifference. He half wondered if she’d started to tire of him already, but it was a silly thought that he brushed aside. The truth, he thought, was simply that she’d grown more adept at hiding her feelings, more like a Meinish woman.

As he sailed from the island toward Aos he convinced himself of this. She had been full of emotion she wished to hide, he decided: a trembling at the edges of her lips, an intensity in her eyes, something betrayed by the annoyed way she flicked at a lock of hair that fell over her forehead. Yes, it was all there. He could not pin it down in exact terms, but she was not so different from the fragile girl who’d experienced the loss of her family. She’d been abandoned and the shadow of it hung over her still. She did not like parting, though she’d tried stoically not to betray this. Ironic, he thought, considering that it was his return she needed to fear.

He also suspected she had heard about Aliver’s emergence in Talay. Perhaps she’d even heard rumors that Mena and Dariel were alive as well. He wasn’t sure how that would affect her. In truth, he struggled with the news himself. How was it possible that all the search parties over the years had not found them? Why had nobody betrayed them for the riches he would have gladly paid them? It had been a lasting frustration, and now it was an untimely annoyance. At least he had Maeander to rely upon. He and his love of mayhem, with his weapons of war and those warped creatures he was so enthusiastic about: he would take care of the Akarans.

Having ordered this in his mind, he did his best to box away any emotions he had for Corinn. He had ordered the Punisari to shadow her closely. He drew out clear boundaries beyond which she was not allowed to pass. The guards were not to make this obvious to her, of course. Let her feel as free as she pleased, but keep her caged within the safety of the palace. That was all she needed to do to be in place to fulfill her role. If none of the other Akarans could be made to stand in her place, Corinn would have to die upon the altar to release his ancestors. This would grieve him, yes, but he would reckon with that later. He was strong enough, full enough of purpose, that he could and would do what was necessary.

That was the purpose of this trip, after all. He was going to help Haleeven bear the Tunishnevre on the last leg of their journey to Acacia, to the chamber he had built especially for them. There was no greater responsibility now. There never had been and never would be after this work was complete. Even the pending war with Aliver and his growing hordes did not compare. Maeander was more than capable of handling that. He trusted his brother’s martial skills completely. Success in defeating Aliver was of crucial importance, certainly. That was why he had given Maeander leave to use all the resources he needed, including unveiling the antoks, creatures never used in battle in the Known World. But still, a poor outcome on the fields of Talay would not decide this contest. Releasing the Tunishnevre would.

He disembarked at Aos and walked up from the docks without pausing to take in the resplendent grandeur of the place. Under Acacian rule, the port town had been developed as a prosperous settlement. But that was before the war. Now a handful of Meinish nobles and quite a few elite Punisari resided here, ensconced in wealth and beauty unimagined back when they had huddled against the cold in Tahalian. Perhaps the memory of that was what kept Hanish moving without raising his eyes. His people had come so far, but they’d yet to transform themselves into a true imperial nation. They were still, in many ways, occupiers parading in the skins of those they’d conquered, adorned with their trappings. He hoped to change that soon with the aid of his liberated ancestors.

Fresh horses awaited him and his contingent of Punisari. They mounted and rode away from the city without pause, ignoring the magistrates waiting to greet them. For two days they rode through the patchwork of farmland that provided the empire so much of its food resources. They camped simply each night, not even erecting tents, as the summer weather was so fair, the skies so very blue and cloudless. On the third and fourth days they cut through the rolling grass country, riding past flocks of sheep and cattle tended by young men and women who stared at the Meins as if they were wolves in disguise.

It amazed Hanish—as it still always did—to ramble across the great expanse of riches he now controlled. It was all his, he reminded himself. All rightfully his and his people’s. The world belonged to those bold enough to take it, and who had ever been bolder than he?

That night, camped at the edge of the Eilavan Woodlands, Hanish pondered this question at some length. He searched in the generations of Meinish warriors for any whom he considered his equal. He had once viewed them all with awe, but now, as he ticked them off one by one, he found each of them lacking in one way or another. Only Hauchmeinish seemed a man of undeniable greatness. The times had been so tumultuous that Hauchmeinish was born into war and lived his entire life in the center of a whirlwind. He had certainly been a fierce fighter, a gifted leader upon whom fell great trials to test his mettle. Who else could have led the Meins as they had marched, desolate and beaten, into a frigid exile meant to destroy them? Hauchmeinish had made sure they persevered, but in the end his was a story of defeat. What would Hanish say to him when he looked him in the face? Should he bow before such an ancestor? Or should he bend his knee before him?

Hanish knew what they would expect: him with head bowed to them, humble, grateful. They had always spoken to him in whispers that said he was nothing without them. He was simply the product of their labors. All his achievements were owned by the collective. No single man mattered compared to the force they embodied together. He had lived his life by just this credo, and it had not failed him. So why did his mind seem to buck against his old certainties now, when he was so close to finishing his work?

It troubled him to realize that it was Acacian heroes he most respected. Edifus might have been his equal. Tinhadin surely was. Had he warred with them, he was not at all sure that he would have prevailed. Edifus had fought so doggedly, without flagging, scrapping with any and all who stood against him. He had not been a man of guile or cunning, but he had fought in the front ranks of every major battle of his career. Tinhadin had been a different sort, all treachery and betrayal, a model for cutthroat duplicity, a man willing to embrace the horrors of a vision so broad few others would even have conceived it. It struck Hanish that he had learned from these founders of Acacia. In a way, he revered them, even though they had been his people’s greatest foes. He fell asleep wrapped around the comforting—and disappointing—thought that there were no men such as those two to face him now.

Later, his eyes snapped open on the creamy splash of stars painted on the night sky. He cast around a moment, his senses screaming alertness throughout his body. He spotted the guards standing at eight points around him and others sleeping on the ground, the horses nearby. Everything quiet, just as peaceful as when he had drifted off, the air filled with cricket calls. It was not anything happening around him that had woken him. He had been dreaming of an Akaran female, a woman who looked exactly like Corinn. But she was not Corinn, and it had not been an amorous encounter. It had to have been…Mena. Sword-wielding Mena. A wrathful goddess: that was how she had described herself in the dream. She had raised her weapon to show it to him. The blade was drenched in blood. It dripped the stuff as if the metal were a spring of red liquid. It was the sight of that weapon and her woman’s hands on the hilt that had thrust him up from slumber. But why dream of her? Wasn’t Aliver the one leading the rebellion? Why awake fearing someone who in daylight hours he still considered a girl?

He knew little of Mena except that she had killed Larken with his own sword, slain several Punisari afterward, and stirred the crew into revolt. The last part was probably the easiest. It was an unfortunate reality of imperial life that each Mein had to depend upon a host of conquered peoples to keep the world functioning, to man ships and cook meals and build roads. Still, it should not have been possible for petite Mena to so completely elude them.

Hanish decided that if the opportunity presented itself, he would sacrifice Mena during the ceremony. Better to have her out of the way. Perhaps Corinn would even manage to forgive him. Perhaps at the end of it all they could have a life together. Hanish rolled to one side, feeling the contours of the ground beneath him. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep and tried not to think of Corinn. He achieved neither.

The next day, sitting on a rise that provided a view of the winding path of the road through the Eilavan Woodlands, Hanish caught sight of the approaching caravan. Cavalry rode in the fore and off through the woods along the flanks. Then followed units of Punisari, marching in tight formation, hemmed in by the narrow lane. Beyond them stretched a snaking length of wagons and laborers and priests, ox-drawn contraptions loaded with hundreds of sarcophagi. In each, Hanish knew, resided one of his ancestors. He heard the crack of the drivers’ whips carried to him on the breeze. It was actually happening, he thought. It was really going to happen.

Riding closer, through the cavalry and foot soldiers and on toward the body of the procession, he could not imagine how they had managed to traverse the rutted, abused, and sodden tundra of the Mein Plateau. In summer it would have been a jolting journey through a fetid landscape of bog land spread thinly over a rocky underlayer, with so many opportunities to tip to either side and spill their loads, such mires to get stuck in. Perhaps they would not have been able to do it at all without the aid of Numrek technology. It was they who had taught the Meins how to make wagons of such size, with those enormous wheels and with flexible undercarriages that did not snap under pressure. Still, the thought of these great contraptions negotiating the steep, switchback trail down from the Rim set tingles of trepidation through him. He would have to question Haleeven about it later, after thanking him, congratulating him. It was a feat he would have a poet write a ballad about.

Hanish’s uncle grinned like a madman when he saw his nephew. The two men greeted each other by crashing their heads together. Forehead impacted against forehead. They pressed skin to skin, each with their hands wrapped around the other’s skull. It was an old greeting, reserved for close relatives and for times of great emotion. It was meant to hurt. But the pain of it was nothing compared to the impact of Haleeven’s appearance. Hanish had never seen a man so haggard, save the beggars that roamed the back alleys of Alecia: unkempt of clothes, speckled with grime, lips chapped from his tongue that darted, darted, darted out to moisten them. His eyes hid behind low-hanging brows, and the skin of his face sagged, as if the tissue itself had been fatigued by the recent weeks’ work. His hair was shockingly white. Hanish tried to remember if it had been so before, even a little. He did not think so. It stood up from his scalp as if each hair were a tendril of silver thread frozen by an icy breeze.

Pulling back from him, Hanish said, “You look well.”

The lie was out of his mouth before he realized it. Haleeven let him know what he thought of it with a frown but was merry again the next moment. “No, you look well. I—I’m not so well. This is some mission you sent me on, Nephew. Some task…”

“But you’ve done it.”

Haleeven studied him a moment, then nodded. “Come, let me show you everything.”

At Haleeven’s side, Hanish visited each of the ancestors. He climbed upon the great wagons, touching the sarcophagi with his hands, whispering his greetings, invoking old prayers of praise. He felt the life within the containers palpably. They pulsed with an undeniable, ferocious energy. It lashed at the world in muted silence, as if each of them were screaming bloody murder inside a sound- and motion-proof chamber. Hanish noted the fatigue and unease in the laborers’ every gesture. They were hollow eyed with fear, wrung more by the emotional toll of their duties than by the physical labor. Even the oxen, usually calm creatures, were skittish and needed to be tightly controlled.

Haleeven’s description of the journey was a long tale of hardship and setbacks, told through the afternoon and continued that evening over supper in camp. When he was finished, the two men sat in silence, the night settling around them. Hanish could not see the stars for the trees blocking them, the undersides of the foliage glowing with firelight. Haleeven lit a pipe full of hemp leaf and drew on it, a habit Hanish had not known he had taken to. He almost said something disparaging. But it wasn’t as if Haleeven were smoking mist. Perhaps he’d earned a vice. Hanish had just begun to think of Corinn again, when his uncle broke the silence.

“They are so impatient,” Haleeven said.

Hanish didn’t need to ask whom he meant. “I know.”

“They are angry.”

“I know. I’ve made—”

The uncle snapped forward from his reclined position, shot out a hand, and grabbed his nephew by the wrist. He waited until Hanish met his eyes and then pegged them to his with a burning intensity. “You don’t know! You haven’t felt them like I have these many days. They’re fully awake now. They seethe with animus. They want revenge so badly they tremble with the nearness of it. I fear them, Hanish. I fear them like I’ve never feared anything on earth.”

Hanish pulled his wrist away, slowly but with a twist that broke the man’s grip. He spoke with the conviction he knew he should feel, trying to believe his own words. “Their anger is not directed at you, Uncle. We have nothing to fear from our own.”