The Other Lands (45 page)

So saying, Delivegu held his arms out. In his left was a small canvas bag, heavy with something. In his right was a delicate dagger. “A sack of coins or a blade. Which do you prefer? And, I assure you, I’m quite skilled with the blade. I was raised badly, you see. Don’t look at the blade too closely,” he added. “It’s sharp enough to cut your eyeball.”

“You’re mad,” the man said, though he did pull his gaze away from the knife. “The note is to his mother. A letter announcing his engagement, that’s all. That’s what he said.”

“If that’s true, there’s no reason not to show it to me. I’ll laugh and you’ll laugh, and the note will fly to Mother. No harm done.” Nodding at the dagger, he said, “I’ve nothing against you, but I will gut you like a hog and leave you wrapped in your entrails. Or I’ll leave you doubly enriched, and all before normal business hours. Think quickly.”

The man did. He valued his life more than his honor. A reasonable way of perceiving the world, Delivegu thought as he took the parchment from the man’s fingers, unrolled it, and read.

The note was not an announcement of an engagement, but by this point Delivegu knew it wouldn’t be. It was, at first reading, so deceptively simple that one might have wondered why it even needed to be sent. It stated:

B. All is progressing. Will have her confidence soon. G
.

Delivegu felt the blood rush through his body, tingling in his fingers and throbbing in his temples and even stirring in his groin.
G
. He was certain that stood for
Grae
, and just as certain that
she
was Queen Corinn. Who was the B? This was just the sort of evidence he had been looking for, though it meant little by itself. If it could lead to greater evidence …

“To whom is this to be sent?” he asked.

The proprietor had no idea. The bird’s destination was to be a similar messenger service in Aos, to be picked up by whoever knew to ask for it. Questioned as to whether that arrangement was strange, the man agreed it was but also admitted that he had sent several such notes in the past few weeks. “I don’t ask questions, just provide a service, you know.” He motioned vaguely with his hand.

Conveniently, the proprietor did not have a bird ready to send the message. It would not leave his shop until the next evening, at the earliest, and this only if his returning bird came back in good health later that day. The ones in the shop were convalescing. This fact had troubled the man who had left the note. The message would be delayed, possibly long enough for an earthbound traveler to beat it to its destination—if the traveler left immediately.

It took Delivegu only a few minutes to draw up his course of action. He returned the missive to the proprietor’s hand, weighted it with the sack of coins, and bade him a good day. He did not tell anyone that he was going. He sent no message to the queen, assuming that it was unlikely she would notice his absence anyway.

Late morning he took passage to Alecia, easily enough done, for many boats cut the waters between Acacia and the great city. He sailed through the day, overnight, and disembarked late the next morning. He haunted Alecia’s harbor most of the day before jumping aboard a merchant’s skiff heading north along the coast. He spent the night aboard that vessel, uncomfortably wet but determined, and the next morning found him leaping the gap onto the stone pier of the harbor in Aos. He had slept little, but he had made good time. He walked along the pier in something of a trance, confident now that he had arrived before the messenger bird could have.

For a time he watched the old men who were using long-necked birds to catch small fish. They sat talking among themselves as their black birds, sleek and dangerous looking, winged their way into the clear water, cutting through the schools of silver fish. Every so often, the men pulled the birds in by strings attached to harnesses on their bodies. The birds protested every time, coming up angry, their throats bulging with living fish, unable to swallow them because of the metal rings around the base of their necks. The old men talked on as they massaged the fish back up and out of the bird’s squawking mouths, plopping them into buckets.

Strange the way some people spend their time, Delivegu thought, and finally walked on.

He found the messenger bird shop with surprising ease. He was seated on a beach a little way down from it when it opened its doors. The street was much the same as its counterpart on Acacia. His stomach was set grumbling by the scent of onions boiling in seasoned oil and water, a soup for the common folk. He clamped a hand over his abdomen and breathed through his mouth. He had not eaten commoners’ food in years and did not plan to start again, no matter the lure.

He saw several birds descend toward the coops around the back of the building. One of them, he was certain, carried his message. He watched a few people enter the shop, but none drew his attention until a blond-haired boy strolled on to the scene. He would have ignored him, for he seemed as aimless as any street urchin. Up until the moment he bolted inside the shop. That he did with sudden purpose. When he left a few moments later, he feigned a casual air. Delivegu didn’t buy it, and he blended into the crowd in pursuit of the boy. He followed him toward the outskirts of the town, near enough to the farmlands that he could smell the cow and hog dung. He nearly turned back in disgust, fearing he had gotten something terribly wrong even as he continued forward. He was rewarded for staying with his hunch.

The boy met a man who appeared to be nothing but a farmer. The boy handed him something and stood a moment, conversing with him. And then Delivegu understood. B! There he was. There he really was! The infamous Barad the Lesser, the old rabble-rouser of the Kidnaban mines. The sight of him and the recognition of each detail—his bulky, stooped frame; the boulderlike head atop his thick neck; the low grumble of his voice, audible even from this distance—almost caused Delivegu to stumble over his own feet. The good fortune of it was too much to be believed. The man had been wanted for years. There had once been a bounty on his head. That was years ago, but he was still an enemy of the empire, Grae and Barad in secret conspiracy against the queen. Here was the key to all his desires, found walking down a street in a nothing crap hole of a village outside Aos, conversing with a shoeless peasant boy, leading a goat behind him.

With a few deft moves, he could capture the empire’s most elusive agitator and bring shame on Grae at the same time. These two strokes, he was sure, would strip away the queen’s haughty façade, and then there would be nothing between him and the rest of her. Delivegu walked on, his mouth flooded with saliva, a carnivore seeing a kill in reach.

I
t was always small things about his earlier life that Dariel thought of, moments that had otherwise been forgotten. Perhaps it was because they had been forgotten that they had the stealth to slip into his mind unbidden. He thought of the first time he had seen Aaden laugh. His nephew had been but a baby, propped upon a maid’s lap one afternoon. As he had done so many times before, Dariel danced about in an attempt to entertain the boy. But this time Aaden did not simply watch him. This time the boy’s mouth tilted with mirth, and the strangest barrage of sound escaped him. At first Dariel thought he was coughing, but then Aaden tilted his head back and waved one arm in the air in an unmistakable gesture. He was laughing! Never had that simple act seemed such a revelation of humanity.

Or he remembered a pair of felt slippers he had once bought as a gift for Val and then lost before actually giving them to him. How frustrating! Or he thought of how, as a boy, he had always stared at Aliver when he was not looking. More so than full-grown men, the shape of his brother’s arms and shoulders and ease with which he handled his training sword had shot Dariel through with admiration.

And instead of remembering Wren in battle aboard the
Ballan
, entwined with him in lovemaking, climbing over the railing of the league warship she helped destroy, or standing beside him during the wind-whipped funeral ceremony for his father and brother, he recalled swimming in the upper garden pools with her one blazingly hot afternoon. Saying she had had enough, she kissed him and rose out of the water and walked away. He watched her body, displayed as it was beneath a thin swimming shift that was somehow more erotic than actual nudity. But once she was out of sight his eyes fell on the line of dark footprints on the pale gray stone. Such perfectly curved imitations of her feet. The footprints had faded so quickly in the sun that he breathlessly watched them disappear.

Such were the things that crept into his mind now during the long hours of caged solitude. Each time he realized that he was daydreaming—and further realized where he was—it was like suddenly remembering something so bad that he could not believe he had forgotten it even for a moment. There really had been an entire sea full of corpses! He could have dived in among them and swum from one to the next to the next and never reached them all, not even if he came up for breath a hundred times. Long had he feared the Lothan Aklun; now he wished desperately that he had gotten the chance to speak with even one of them. Perhaps it was silly, but he could not help feeling they might have had important things to tell him about the world he was now trapped in.

When and how would word of this reach Corinn? Surely the
Ambergris
had sailed with news of the treachery. He did not have her gift for political wrestling, so he knew not how she might choose to respond. A small group sent back to parley with the Auldek? An army prepared to invade? What would the league men tell her? Even if they told the truth, the league did not know what had happened to him. In addition, they had every reason to transform the entire situation into some fanciful version that would suit their needs—whatever those were. Though Dariel worked himself into knots thinking about it, he could not imagine what was happening on the other side of the world. When he thought of Mena or Wren being told that he was dead or missing, it filled him with anguish.

Mór had come to him a second time. She entered, rigid with control, moving deliberately. Tunnel hovered near him, almost seeming like a protector should Mór attack him again. She said something to him in Auldek. The large man responded in the same language, shrugging as he spoke, ending with something that must have been a joke, since he grinned at his own words.

Mór did not acknowledge any humor. Dragging a stool in front of Dariel, she sat down and faced him directly. She switched to Acacian. “If it were up to me alone I’d just as soon feed you to the snow lions.”

“Is that an option?” Dariel asked. “Are there lions around here? I’m not saying I’d want to be eaten, but it’s possible the lions would treat me better than—”

He flinched when Mór reached for him. She clamped her hand over his mouth and said, “Shut your mouth and let me say what I must. Then I’ll go, and you can prattle on in your ignorance. Tunnel will listen. Won’t you?”

“He makes good prattle,” Tunnel said, tugging on one of his tusks.

“You cannot tell me anything right now,” Mór said. “Let me tell you a few things. Will you be quiet?”

Reluctantly, Dariel nodded. He would rather listen to whatever she had to say than have her turn away in anger again.

“Good.” She drew her hand from his lips. “I am going to assume that you know nothing. Let’s start at that point and nothing will be missed. You are in Ushen Brae, the place you call the Other Lands. We are in the tunnels beneath the city of Avina. I’m not entirely clear what happened when your party met the Auldek, but I can tell you that your people were slaughtered. A handful fled back to the league boats, but not many. You’re the only one we have. And who are we? We’re not the Auldek. I am Mór of the Free People. You know Tunnel and Skylene. We are all of the People. The ‘People’ are those you might refer to as quota. We are the slaves you sent here. Many of us are still in bondage. Some of us fight it.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “We are those who fight it. The Free People. You may think that this side of the world is just a place where you discard unwanted children. We don’t think so. Not anymore. Ushen Brae is the world. It’s here we make the future.”

“Wait.” Dariel tried to gesture with his hands, but as they were bound, he used his shoulders instead, shrugging apologetically. “Just wait a moment. I will stop interrupting. I will, really. I just mean for you to know that I am not your enemy. I’m an Akaran, yes, and … you are quota. I know that is a terrible crime of my family, but it’s nothing that I started. If anything, I hoped I might stop it. That’s why I came—to help.” Lest this sound too meek, he raised his chin as he concluded. “You do me wrong by chaining me.”

When he stopped, Mór continued as if he had not spoken. “You are a prisoner, Dariel Akaran, of the very children your family sent to slavery. We’ve grown up. We don’t stay children forever. In the coming days, we will decide what to do with you. Some believe you are here to save us. Some know better. But the elders of the Free People are patient and just. You will be tested. Perhaps—though it’s not likely—we will find some value in you. But if you can be no use to us, you will feed the earth, and none here will weep. That’s all I have to tell you right now.”

With that, Mór jumped up from her seat, sending it crashing over behind her. She turned and was halfway out of the room before Dariel spoke.

“Wait!” he said.

Mór froze.

“I’ll listen to it all,” Dariel continued. “Test me also, if that is my fate. Kill me after that, if you wish, but let me die knowing. You won’t understand me, but I know—in more ways than you even consider—that I have walked the world half blind. That was the way of my people, but it doesn’t have to continue. My brother, if he had lived and had met you—would have asked for the same. But he isn’t here. I am. So, in his place, tell me everything. Please.”

“Your ignorance would take a lifetime to erase.”