The Other Lands (67 page)

This time it was Corinn who took a while to respond. Though she had begun the conversation, it surprised Corinn to realize that Rhrenna had truly thought about this before. She had even spoken to other Mein about it. A culture forgotten? What a strange idea. To Corinn it had always been the opposite. She had feared the world would remember the Mein too well, feared that they might yet have some power, some way to shape the world. Hanish so often haunted her thoughts. How could he not when he so clearly lived on in Aaden? The Mein—in her own mind, at least—were far from being forgotten. That had seemed a problem before. Now, however, she sometimes wished she had not ordered Hanish killed. Perhaps there could have been some way for them to live together. What a powerful pair they would have been! Rulers for the ages.

Outside, a bone whistle announced the advancing hour. Other flutists and pipers picked up the melody and spread it down from the palace toward the lower town. Corinn listened until the music faded into the distance, reminded by it just how tired she was. “Rhrenna,” she said, “I am not going to destroy it all. You believe that, don’t you?”

The answer came back to her with welcome speed. “Yes, Your Majesty, I believe that.”

T
hat night, after visiting Aaden and singing healing into his sleeping form, Corinn tried to dream travel again. She waited even later than the night previous, and she aimed for a different target this time. Dariel might not be reachable. Maybe dead, or perhaps the connection would never snap tight between them. She tried not to think too much about it.
Think only until you know what to do. Then act
. This time, when her spirit lifted and pulled free of the shell of her body and began the long flight through the dark night, it was another man’s name she screamed out before her, racing behind it. This one, surprisingly easily, she found.

Her feet did not exactly touch the floor in the room, but she did reach stillness at the foot of a sleeping man’s bed. His face was hidden beneath a cushion, his arms thrown wide. He looked like a man recently suffocated, but the nasal grinding of his breathing testified to his continued life.

“Wake,” she said.

A form rolled in the sheets and then settled, still again. Nothing more.

“Wake!”

Corinn instilled all her will in the command, and this time a shape pulled away from the physical form hidden beneath the blankets. She could not have said whether the image was clothed or naked—no more than she could have detailed the same about herself. He simply was as he was. Many details of his form blurred, were unsteady, or translucent. At the same time, other identifying features showed clear. Thin shoulders. Bewildered. Muffled and ill at ease in a way that would have been expressed by disheveled hair on a physical body but was now a part of the impression of the spirit. His face, droopy and dull eyed, was just as she remembered, just as gape mouthed. How bizarre that she could reach around the world in spirit form and still find Rialus Neptos to be … well, Rialus Neptos.

“Queen Corinn?” he asked.

She did not answer. She looked around the room. She could not have said what she would have expected, but a grand bed was not part of it. Nor a chamber with finely constructed furniture, wall hangings, rugs so thick they must suck at the toes of one walking across them. Rialus had no finer quarters in Acacia!

Her eyes settled back on him. “This I find very strange,” she said.

His head snapped around from side to side, taking in the same sights she just had at double the speed. “This is—ah—difficult to explain.”

Corinn wanted to ask him to do so, but she knew her connection with him could not last long. She already felt the fatigue of being so far from her body. Felt the pull back toward it, and knew that it would grow stronger with each passing moment. And she knew somehow that she was in danger like this. If anything—or anybody—snipped the long thread that connected her to her corporeal self, she could be lost forever. Dead, even if her body lived for a time in a long sleep.

“Rialus Neptos,” she said, cutting into his stammering explanation, wanting to be direct and calm so that he would be as well, “is Dariel alive?”

“Dariel? Ah—”

“Just answer each question I ask you. Do no more or less. Just answer. Is Dariel alive?”

“I don’t know.” Rialus thought for a moment. “I—don’t think so. There was a terrible battle at—”

“You can tell me nothing of him?”

“No. I wish I could, but—”

Corinn flared with impatience. She realized from Rialus’s expression and from how the room snapped into greater focus that the intensity of her emotions showed. She had his attention again, waiting. “Are the Auldek planning to attack the Known World?”

“How did you know that?”

“Answer!”

“Yes,” Rialus said. “Yes. They’re brutes, Your Majesty. Not like the Numrek. I mean, not really. They’re more … dignified. Do you know they keep beasts like white lions in their palaces? Just let them walk around like they own—”

“Rialus, in the Giver’s name, do no more than answer my questions!” She gave him a moment of staring intensity to come to terms with this, and then asked, “How great a threat are they?”

“Very, I’d say.”

“They have a large army?”

“Yes, but it’s not just size that matters. They have some terrible creatures. Antoks and things worse. And the Auldek cannot be killed.”

“Cannot be killed?”

“Well, not exactly ‘cannot.’” He fumbled for a way to explain it, and then seemed puzzled that he was even doing so. Looking at her anew, he asked, “Am I really talking to you? This is so odd.”

Corinn flared brighter than ever. “Let me see their army.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think it. Make a picture of the things you have seen and things you imagine you will see. Make all those things in your mind’s eye and I will take them from you.”

He did, and she did. The images were blurry, shadowed, overlapping, and without context or explanation. But she saw vast numbers of soldiers in animal guise. She saw beings similar to Numrek being chopped down and then rising again and again, as if impervious to mortal injury. She saw the ranks of an army of men and creatures, giants and winged things. She saw tramping feet and hulking forms unlike anything in the Known World. She heard the bellowing of angry beasts and rhythmic chants of war songs. So many of them that they faded into shadow in the distance, like a neverending parade of demons finally escaped from entrapment and hungry for plunder. It was all that she needed to see.

“One more thing, Rialus Neptos,” she said, once she had drawn back and could speak again. “Have you betrayed us?”

The man could hardly have conveyed as much shocked indignation with his real body as he did with contortions of his spirit face. “No! Never!”

“You must prove the truth of that. If you have any honor, Rialus Neptos, you will find a way to serve me. If you wish to see your wife again, you will find a way to serve me. Understand?” Corinn asked the question, but she did not manage to stay long enough to hear his answer. She could no longer resist the call back to her body.

E
arly the next morning, Corinn summoned her secretary. She instructed her to have Rialus’s wife, Gurta, sent to Calfa Ven for the duration of the coming conflict. “Put her under my royal protection.”

“Ah, so she’s a prisoner,” Rhrenna said. “She is heavily pregnant, you know, but I’ll arrange for her every comfort.”

Corinn then called in a bevy of scribes and told them to prepare a dispatch for transport by bird. She spoke a message to be sent to the governors and chief officials of each province, to the Senate in Alecia, and to a host of other important figures who needed to hear the news first. She confirmed the truth of the league’s claim. An enemy—the Auldek—did march against them, bringing with them horrible creatures and an army in the tens of thousands. Among them were many quota children—warriors now and with hearts hardened against Acacia. They were the greatest threat the Known World had ever faced. If they did not unite and defeat them, all would perish. Battle against the Numrek was, in comparison, just a diversion.

“Prepare your people.” She paused, looking over the bent heads of the scribes, listening to the scratch of so many styluses against parchment.

A few of them completed writing and lifted their tools. Rhrenna asked, “Is that all of it?”

Corinn shook her head, waited until all the scribes were ready for more. “Tell your people,” she said, “that the Law of Quota, which has been in effect since Tinhadin’s time, is now revoked. As of today, no more children of the Known World will be sent to the Other Lands. Let the people know this. Invite them to drink the vintage of Prios in celebration. Hear me again. The quota is abolished.”

K
elis kept thinking he should dig for knuckle root. His eyes scanned the dry land for the tiny shrubs that marked them. Surely, they needed to suck the moisture from knuckle root. How else could they survive? He stood in the mornings, sniffing the moving air for moisture, for any indication that water lay more in one direction than another. Nor could he help but tilt his head and listen to any animal sound, a call at night, a scurrying nearby. Several times, he caught mice with his hand net. Only as he looked into their trembling, frantic eyes, did he realize he had no desire, no need, to eat them. Once, he went so far as to skin a sand snake, dry the meat with the heat of the sun. And then he sat disgusted by it, knowing that neither he, Naamen, nor Benabe could stomach such fare.

This must be Santoth magic, he thought. Nothing else explains it.

Almost four weeks since Shen and Leeka had disappeared. He knew because he had counted the days. He had, right? He had scratched the growing number on the dry skin of the back of his hand. Twenty-eight days, but it felt much longer. It might have been an entire lifetime. He might be ancient now. Everything in the Known World might have changed, be unrecognizable. Or, for that matter, he and the two souls with him might be the only people left on the curve of creation. Everything else seemed so distant and clouded by time and blurred, unreal. Even events he knew himself to have been a part of struck him as mythic. Hunting foulthings with Princess Mena Akaran? Watching Aliver Akaran dance to his death with Maeander Mein? Standing in awe as sorcerers screamed rents into the land, dropped worms from the sky, and blasted men into vapor?

“Kelis?” A hand gripped his shoulder and shook him. Naamen leaning down before him, looking close into his face, his kindly eyes so tired now. “Are you with us?” He did not wait for an answer. “We should not let Benabe sit alone too long. She speaks to herself.”

“Ah …” She speaks to herself. He had heard those words before. Naamen had said them before this, and he had responded to them in a certain way. It was a game between them, a way to keep sane by joking about insanity. What had he said? “So do you.”

Naamen smiled. That was what he wanted to hear. “No, I speak to the winged goat and the boy with cat eyes and my long-dead mother. That’s different.”

“Of course,” Kelis said, rising to his feet. “My error.” He draped an arm around the other man’s shoulder and together they walked toward the woman who had become the center of their lives.