The Other Lands (16 page)

The thought of her siblings nagged at her. She would have to decide what to do about them. Neither seemed to fully understand the dangers of a sober populace. Sometimes she feared that they did not understand their responsibilities. The people could not be trusted! They would forever find fault, make mistakes, and give in to petty jealousies and shortsighted thinking. They would destroy themselves if they were allowed to. That was what Tinhadin had realized; that was why he had grasped all power in his hands and ruled with an iron will.

She would do so as well, and yet she would improve on his model. She would rule with her brain, not her emotions. She would use all the tools she could. She would make the world safe. Nobody would lie to her anymore. Nobody would betray her, steal from her, or abandon her. Nobody would die without her permission. The world would be as she wished it to be. And then she would know peace as well.

Yes, she thought, then I will know peace. If Mena and Dariel could not understand this, she would have to act for them. She loved them dearly, of course. That was why, she knew, they might have to drink the vintage as well. She was not sure yet, but that might be for the best.

Rhrenna returned, lit the incense as Corinn asked, and talked through the remaining matters of business. There was always more. This time it was the merchants of Bocoum who harried her. Their drought had grown dire. Northern Talay—and all the food production and trade it drove—was at the brink of collapse. “Your Majesty,” Rhrenna said, “they have really become quite insistent. They beseech you to come and see their plight. They say you will truly understand it only when you see it with your own eyes.”

“Fine. I’ve had enough of these offices anyway. Tell them I will come to them within the fortnight. Tell Aaden as well. He’ll be happy for a trip, even a short one.”

K
elis received the messenger outside his tent. The youth was barefoot and lean, his musculature barely adolescent, though he was likely older than he looked. The light of the setting sun caught twinkles in the dust that coated him, the result of the miles of travel that had brought him to Halaly. Kelis, hearing his message and the coded language he used to demonstrate its authenticity, stood a moment, unsure how to answer. He knew a summons when he heard it. There was no other word for it. Sangae Umae, his chieftain, demanded his presence. Though he was loyal to the Akarans and to Mena’s unfinished work, he could not ignore the order. Delay, perhaps, but not ignore.

Speaking Talayan, Kelis said, “Tell Sangae that when I am done here I will come to him in Umae. Tell him I have arrived here with Princess Mena only a week ago. We are to attack the foulthing in the lake, but we still have much to prepare. Once we have killed it, I will meet him in Umae.” He began to turn away, but the messenger made a clicking sound with his tongue. Apparently, he was not finished.

The boy’s left arm was stunted, half the size of the other. Perhaps this was part of why he was a messenger instead of warrior runner. He did not seem ashamed of it, though, and used the small limb to illustrate his words. “Not Umae,” he said. “Sangae awaits you in Bocoum. He is there now and prays your feet do not grow hot on the sand before you reach him.”

Bocoum? The bustling city of Bocoum was Talayan controlled, yes, but Sangae rarely visited there. He was a village chieftain, not a merchant prince. Respected as he was for having been Aliver’s surrogate father, Sangae had as little use for the rich men of Bocoum as they had for him.

“He is at the coast?”

“Even now,” the youth said, one corner of his mouth slightly crooked, as if Kelis were a disappointment for not knowing this already. “He stays in the care of Sinper of the family Ou. Sangae wishes me to take you there. I promised to return with you, as quickly as you can run.”

The boy had an attitude of playful condescension. He thought too much of his authority as a messenger—which was no authority at all, really. Kelis decided to ignore this show of self-importance for now. He held to a long silence as he thought. Sinper Ou was his host? That made little sense. The Ous were the most ambitious of the city’s merchant families. They were wealthy by any standard, and in the strange way of it, they earned their fortune without ever breaking a sweat. They owned the bulk of the rafts the floating merchants leased and took a considerable percentage of their profits. They also owned great swaths of the coastal farmlands, properties they had acquired piece by piece over the generations and now charged for the use of. They controlled more docks than any other family and imposed tariffs on all the goods that crossed them—both those grown on their land and those transported on their rafts. The Ous were not the type of company Sangae usually kept. None of this sounded right.

“Do you know why he summons me?” Kelis’s eyes inadvertently lingered on the youth’s stunted arm. “Why he sent you?”

“No, I don’t know why he wants you,” the youth answered, “but he sent me because I am fast. This arm does not slow my legs. It cuts the wind for me.”

“I am sure it does—”

“You will have to work to keep up with me,” the boy said.

Kelis smiled but said nothing. The boy had heart, at least. He told the messenger where to find food and drink and shelter for the evening, and he promised that he would run with him as soon as he had helped the princess. If she consented to let him go, that was.

A
lone later on the hard pallet on which he slept, Kelis could not stop himself from longing for all the possibilities ended by the point of Maeander’s blade. Even without outward reminders, being near Mena meant that memories of Aliver were always close. They lay like objects beneath a thin skin of water, sometimes standing out clearly, other times stirred by the current, shaded by clouds, or reflecting the world above like a moving mirror. Aliver’s death had never yet felt real to him. He often daydreamed of the boy he had grown strong with, the man he had loved in his quiet way. He contained within himself images and expressions and bits of recalled conversations that seemed more real than the years separating him from those joyful moments. And in his dreams Aliver lived. He stood before him, ironic, aware that he had escaped death and somehow embarrassed to have done so, beautiful in a way that no other person had ever been in Kelis’s eyes.

He always awoke from these dreams confounded. As a boy he had been a dreamer, one of the few who could predict the weather and turns of fortune and make sense of signs brought to him while he slept. His father had despised this gift, for it meant his firstborn son would not be a warrior and would therefore not secure the family’s council seat. Kelis’s father had managed to beat it out of the young man, jabbing him awake from sleep, making dreaming akin to pain, belittling him as if the gift were a slight to his manhood. Kelis had finally broken when his father adopted another youth to be his firstborn. To his father’s delight, Kelis killed the boy, reclaimed his position, and replaced his vision dreams with images of the way he had thrust his spear into his brother’s belly and twisted the organs around the point. That is what he had relived for years while sleeping: a nightly punishment.

After Aliver’s death, his dreams stopped for a time. He could not remember the moment of the prince’s death, either when awake or asleep. It was a blank spot into which he could not see, an emptiness he was reminded of every night, regardless of how filled with life and labor his days were. And when he did begin to dream again—a few months ago—it was of Aliver returned to life. What could that mean? Was there a sign in it that he needed to learn how to read? Might he now become the dreamer that his father—now also dead—had tried to extinguish? Surely, the prince should not be dead. He couldn’t be dead! There had been some mistake made, some Meinish treachery that everyone else had been foolish enough to accept.

The night after getting his summons and watching Mena try to comfort the aging chieftain, Kelis did not sleep. Instead, he lay on his mat with his eyes pinned open, imagining journeying south instead of heading north to Bocoum. What if he crossed the great river and sought out the Santoth in the far south? Perhaps Aliver was among them. Maybe that’s why he still seemed to live. Or perhaps they could bring him back into life. Maybe they just needed—wanted—to be asked. Aliver had been brave enough to seek the sorcerers out. Perhaps another needed to do the same.

He was thankful when the new day dawned. With the morning breeze and the slant of the sun, the world sprang to life. Mena was a whirlwind of energy, in among the Halaly men like one of them, her voice as loud as theirs and even more in command. She was a sensitive being, Kelis knew, troubled by things she rarely spoke of. But to the world she was at her best when danger neared, all certainty and poise and maybe even a hunger to be face-to-face with peril.

The Halaly had effectively formed a blockade to hem the beast in. Skimmers and other boats were spaced at even intervals, anchored in place and connected with ropes that made an unbroken line. The early hours were spent shuttling crossbowmen, warriors, fishermen, and others out to the various vessels. A steady wind white-capped the water and buffeted the boats, straining them against their anchors. They had chosen this day for the wind, knowing the rhythm by which the air currents shifted and when they blew strongest.

Once all were as near to being in place as they could be over such bobbing, moving expanse, the signal to lift anchor and unfurl their sails issued from the mouths of Halaly horns. The skimmer that Kelis rode in jumped to grab the wind. The sail snapped as it filled, and he had to hold on as the light vessel surged into motion. The craft—two narrow pontoons with a skin platform between and a simple rudder—had a shallow draft and was built for speed. The water they zipped over was no more than waist deep. He could have rolled into the water and stood half wet, risking only to be cut in two by another skimmer. Indeed, they sailed through reeds and marsh grasses, sliced over lily pads and spreading green muck.

It was an impressive sight, but it seemed suddenly wrong. Why hadn’t he considered this before? There are too many of us! How could a hundred ships coordinate an attack on one creature while moving at such speed? They would get tangled and crash into one another as they neared it. He wanted to shout out that the plan of attack was flawed. He wished he were with Mena. Surely she was thinking the same and must be trying to convince the Halaly of this. But he was just one of a few in this skimmer. He did not really even have a role here except to be with the Halaly, to do as they did, and to aid the crossbowmen who would be their main weapon.

The lookout perched at the prow of one of the pontoons shouted. He leaned over the water, his arm outstretched and finger pointing. Kelis tried to follow his direction, but he saw only water and a protrusion in the distance that he took to be a small island. But it was just a round mound of earth atop which reeds and perhaps a few short shrubs grew.

Why, then, did it move? Why did it change shape before his eyes, as if the entire island had rolled over and come up with a new topography? Nobody else seemed as confused as he was. They continued to hurtle toward it at all the wind’s speed, shouting to one another, their spray-splashed eyes fixed on their target.

He looked again down the line of moving vessels, having no idea anymore where the princess was, hating the knowledge that she could die here just like any of them, just as her brother had. The formation was ragged now, with some skimmers ahead of others. Kelis’s vessel was soon behind a few others, blocking his view of the island that was not an island. He wished—although he knew it was not a true wish but one sprung from the moment—that Mena was content to rule from a safe distance, like Corinn in one of her palaces. A strange thought to have here, and not one that he held for long.

When he next saw the creature it was near enough that he could doubt it no more. It dwarfed any living creature he had ever seen. It was comparable to nothing that walked or swam or squirmed. Its girth was like an outcropping of rock, like a hillside or like the island he had first thought it to be. But it was a flippered, scaled mountain of an undulating semi-aquatic monster, like no fish but with parts of fish in it, like no worm and yet wormlike in the grotesque rolling convulsions that propelled it forward. It bristled with scales that peeled as if it were diseased, no real protection as they opened and closed with its movements, the body beneath them as translucent and spotted and slick as the flesh of a squid. It did not swim at all, for the water was far too shallow. It wriggled away from them with the blubbery determination of a seal made huge. Its speed, though, was nothing compared to that of the skimmers.

The foremost of the vessels reached it. They raced along either side of it, tiny on the nearside and hidden altogether on the other. The first crossbowmen launched their barbed missiles made with a hinged construction designed especially for this task. Strong ropes trailed out behind the missiles. It only took a few moments after firing for the lengths of rope to unfurl behind the swift vessels and yank taut to the cleats secured to the skimmers’ prows. The line tugged on the missile, but instead of pulling free, the prongs carved quick trenches through the foulthing’s flesh. They sank deeper and stuck fast in a matter of seconds.