The War With The Mein (23 page)

Mena asked the servant who changed the bed linen if she had noticed it. The girl did not seem at all happy with being spoken to. She almost backed out of the room. “Princess, what you see is dust rising from the mines. It just comes from the work, is all.”

Mena asked if the mines were near, and the young woman nodded. Just beyond the hills above the compound, she explained. Where were all the workers, then? Mena asked. Why had she not seen any signs that the mines even existed?

“You have seen a sign. You read it in the air. But for you it need not be any more real than that. The workers? I don’t know, lady. Perhaps there are no workers. It’s not for me to say.”

The young woman used the pause as Mena considered this to slip out of the room. Annoying behavior. A servant should not leave once she had been engaged in conversation. On the other hand, the woman’s boldness in sneaking away might have been the thing that inspired Mena’s own actions a few hours later.

She left the compound well after dark, cloaked in an overcoat she had found in her closet. She avoided the guard posted outside her door by squeezing out her window, dropping down onto the patio there, and then opening the gate to freedom. She took no light, but the moon was high and, though nervous and alive to even the slightest sound, she had little difficulty following the bone-white paths away from the compound.

There was a second guard to get past just up the pathway a little. He was a dense form in the darkness. She sensed the details of his body, the position of his head, and probable direction of his gaze. There was even a musty scent on a gust of air blowing toward her—his odor. She slipped off the path when she dared proceed on it no farther. She walked, crouched low through grasses, feeling with her hands and feet and finding a crease in the landscape that took her past the soldier.

She kept hearing sounds that set her heart beating faster: the rasp of her coat; the bonelike snap of the shoots of grass beneath her feet; the way the press of her weight caused grains of sand to shift and protest; the explosion of sound as a rodent, startled by her proximity, fled. She never stopped expecting the man to call out to her. She had heard before that it was difficult to travel silently at night and that Marah guards were trained to hear any concealed irregularity in night sounds. Now she wondered who had said it. For all of her rapid breathing, despite the violence the tiniest of sounds did to her ears, even though her calves ached from the effort of the strange squatting posture of her stealth—in truth her escape did not really feel that difficult. She kept moving and was soon beyond him and rising back up toward the main path. Her feet and hands and fingers and muscles seemed to know what to do of their own accord. She was half inclined to sit down and ponder on this, but she had yet to reach the goal she had set out for.

A series of staircases climbed away from the compound. It had been sunk into the hillside so that in her crouched position she could proceed without fear of being spotted. The stairs ended at a junction with a stone road. She cut straight across it and climbed up the steep bank on the other side, clawing handfuls of the long grass.

All told, the climb took only a few minutes, but still, what relief to feel the angle of the slope lessen and to see that there was nothing above her. She breathed heavily the last few steps, taking them slowly, as one does when a goal is reached. She stretched to full height, which helped her see over the rise to the landscape beyond. She knew what was supposed to be there, the very thing that she had been curious about, the reason—if there was one—for this night journey. And yet she was not ready for what she saw.

Gone was the quiet night on the other side of the ridge behind her. The moon was nowhere to be seen, nor the clear sky she had just traveled under. Instead the earth seemed contained beneath a flowing, dust-laden billowing, a cloudlike seething of motion. Beneath this sprawled a great pit, many mouthed and enormous. It took up the entirety of the view before her, a crater of caved desolation like nothing she had seen or imagined before, alive with a throbbing, cacophonous, angry clamor.

She was looking over the northern rim of the mines of Kidnaban. The sight of them struck her with a type of horror that she had forgotten existed, the same fear she had felt when a silly maid had told her tales of a demon race of people who lived inside a steaming mountain, feeding the fires within it with naughty children snatched from their beds. As in her imaginings, hundreds of different fires illumed the place. Sheets of curved glass set around cauldrons of flaming oil shot beams up into the sky. By the light of these she again made out the confusion of crisscrossing diagonal lines that she had seen at the Cape of Fallon. But she was so much nearer now. The lines shifted as she stared, blurred by a barely perceptible form of movement. She thought this was an effect of the light. It took her a moment to understand it was something more than that.

The lines were stairways and ledges, wide tracks for machinery, ramps and ladder systems stories upon stories tall. The objects in motion were not tricks of the light. They were people. Hundreds of them. So small that they could not be perceived as individuals but took form only because of their collective movement, as a line of ants from a distance is one being. Maybe they numbered more than hundreds. Thousands was more likely. Tens of thousands. And even this might only be a small portion of the number. She had no idea how extensive the mines were, how much was hidden from view.

She inched over the lip and then slid down the other side to a solid ridge of rock. She had to climb forward on her belly to look over this. As her head pushed out beyond the edge she froze, surprised to find that just below her, some twenty or thirty feet, ran an avenue cut from the stone. It thronged with workers. They carried objects on their shoulders, sacks on their backs, their skin and clothing all the same gray-black of the mine, tainted by the reddish light and etched in shadow.

Off to the south stood a tower, beyond it some distance another. It sat squat and thick, hooded with a roof that looked somewhat like a mushroom, emblazoned with the gilded insignia of the Akaran bloodline. It was her family’s symbol, the Tree of Akaran, the silhouette of an acacia against a yellow sunburst. It was her symbol. It was a shape she had doodled a thousand times onto tabletops and napkins.

Beneath the roof were balconies peopled by moving figures. Looking to the south along the lip of the mine she saw another watchtower and beyond, all around the rim of the pit—many more watchtowers. The figures were lookouts, guards. Many of them were archers. She could just make out the way they stood with their bows hanging easy in their grip, each with an arrow ready to be drawn. It should not have been a surprise. Criminals must be guarded. But there were so many. Towers were everywhere in the distance, the far ones just bulbous shapes on the horizon. The tiny workers beneath them had no chance of escape, no option but to bend to what promised to be unending labor.

Her eyes, losing the will to scan the largeness of it, drifted of their own accord and settled on the lines of moving forms just below her. There was something unsettling about the sight of them. They looked exhausted. They walked with heads down turned. Not one talked to another. Not one lifted his or her eyes to the sky. The longer she stared, the more she believed she could see individual features and attributes, the shapes of faces and the lay of collarbones thinly draped with flesh. It was because of this growing intimacy that she realized the most ghastly thing was not the staggering numbers of them nor their dejected façades nor their smallness compared to the project that bound them. There was another reason the line looked so irregular to her eyes. There were children among the laborers. Every third or fourth person she saw was a child no older than herself, some no taller than Dariel. This was too much to bear.

Back in the fresh night air, Mena took a few steps down toward the compound. She lowered herself to her backside. She could not go back to the compound with any sign of what she had just witnessed written on her face. She was not supposed to have seen it. None of them were. Clearly, the world was not as she had been led to believe. She thought of her father in his melancholy moments. Was this why? This was an Acacian mine. It was her father’s mine. It was her family’s. Those people, those children…they worked for her. There were beings who snatched the young from their beds and sent them to fuel the world’s fires. They worked in her name. She wondered if that errant nurse years before had known this. Was that why she felt the right to frighten her, to tease her, and to corrupt her dreams?

She returned to the compound just in time. She had barely stepped into her room and thrown off her overcoat before a hard knock broke the predawn silence. They were to be moved, a voice she did not recognize said, speaking through the door. It was most urgent that she be moved. “Princess, your safety depends on it.”

Why did she not recognize the voice? It was not any of the Marah that had escorted them nor a servant nor anyone she recalled from Crenshal’s staff. And yet she was quite certain that it spoke honestly. Her safety did depend on it. She scooped up her overcoat and glanced around the room, wondering if she needed to make arrangements to bring her things. She thought she would ask whomever it was that summoned her, but when she opened the door she felt strangely prepared to step through it as she was, still flushed from having been outside, coat over her arm, ready. Simply ready.

She did not know that by stepping through that door she was placing one portion of her life behind her forever. She did not know that for years to come she would not lay eyes on her brothers or sister or anybody she had known up until that point. She could not have imagined that crossing that threshold was akin to stepping into obscurity, vanishing from the map, moving out of her skin, away from her home and country and name, into another life entirely.

End of Book One

Exiles

Few people who had known him in his prime would have recognized the man climbing the dirt path up from the mountain village of Pelos. He walked bearing the scent of goats with him, a horse-sweat smell heavy on his robes, with chicken filth encrusted under his fingernails and stray feathers ensnared in his mane of hair and beard. His breath was rank with wine stink. He cared for the animals in the town’s tavern. It was a beggar’s or a child’s job, one that he could stumble about to attend to, taking breaks to suck from a skin of wine that lent each day claret-blurred edges. There was little in his appearance to betray the man he had once been. He did not even go by his given name anymore. He did, at some point each day, mutter it out loud. He needed to hear it float on the air as a feeble act of defiance, but this was meant for no other human ears to hear.

This evening he stopped at a rock outcropping just off the trail. Before him the mountainous terrain etched ridges and dips, lit by the risen moon. Here and there patches of mist slid through the valleys like ghostly slugs across a damp forest floor. A yellow point of light moved across a far hillside. It must have been a trader with his lamp lit as protection against the spirits. These mountain people were superstitious, frightened of the night and the creatures who patrolled it. The man had no such fears. Part of him desired death at the claws of a belrann or to be carried into bondage by a wood ghoul. Either of these was a fate, he thought, of greater substance than his daily existence. He no longer lived for his conscious hours at all. Should a wolverbear sniff him out and bite his head from his shoulders, he would regret only the loss of his dream existence.

He was just about to turn and stumble up the path toward his hovel of a home, pulled by the dull hunger that had lately come to define him. Before leaving he whispered, “Leeka Alain. I am Leeka Alain. I am not dead. I have not been killed.”

Leeka Alain, once a general in Acacia’s most fractious province. Now what was he? He had had no purpose in life for several years now. All his travails in the frozen north, his sole survival of that first Numrek ambush, his ordeal with the fever and the lonely trek he undertook in pursuit of the enemy host: all these things were behind him. They had amounted to nothing. His notion that he might have a crucial task to fulfill had been mistaken. He had tumbled down off the Methalian Rim nine years previous, riding that woolly, horned mount, believing himself to be the bearer of apocalyptic news.

He found a land already at war, already suffering from a variety of attacks: his king dead, Aushenia smashed by the Numrek, the Candovians roused to rebellion by Maeander, and Acacia’s military might crippled by a disease that made them easy targets for slaughter. In many ways Hanish assured his victory on the Alecian Fields. Leeka had not been there on the day, but he arrived shortly after to behold a carpet of rotting corpses, peppered with flies and vultures and all manner of scavengers.

The weeks after the Fields saw an ongoing butchery that stalked off the battlefield and into every lane and courtyard, into temples and monuments and homes. It seemed the evil fury of the Mein would not abate until every last Acacian was split upon their steel. Other nations, fearing such a fate, allied themselves more and more faithfully with the Mein: the clans of Candovia had never been so united; Senival put up a gallant, short-lived fight before laying down their axes; and the Vumu Archipelago petitioned for peace before even a single blow was struck against them. In Aushenia little resistance of any sort remained. That an empire so long held together could crumble so quickly baffled Leeka. It seemed that all the years of obedience meant nothing. All the praise and tribute lavished on Acacia vanished in an instant, replaced by the fire of long-harbored animus.

Only Talay, with its vast resources, stood against the Mein even after the Mainland and Acacia were overrun. Whether they did this for the Acacian cause or because they wished to forge their own independence was unclear. They might have given up on Acacia—as most of the rest of the world had—while still choosing to fight for themselves. Leeka had not asked and had not cared. They were fighting Hanish Mein and the Numrek horde. That was what mattered. He had rushed to join them. In particular, he had relished the opportunity to fight the Numrek.

Many had surmised that the Numrek would not be able to fight outside the northern regions. They had seemed ill suited to even the mild warmth of Aushenia. But on arriving in sun-baked Talay they stripped off their furs and cloaks and stepped out as grotesquely white creatures. They were more fearsome for the length of their limbs and the striations of their muscles and the unconcealed girth in their hands and feet. From their first day exposed to the undiluted sun, their skin blistered and peeled as meat does above coals. During the first battles they looked like they had walked through flames. Chunks of their skin sloughed off. Clumps of hair pulled free from their scalps.

Surely, Leeka had thought, they could not go about so red and oozing and live. But they did. They fought like crazed madmen. They stood among the carnage looking worse than the corpses around them, but they never fell except from the gravest of injuries. Within a few weeks they began to recover. Their skin grew back shades darker, taut against their muscles. It peeled again—not so savagely this time—but with the next healing they ripened even more. Before long they walked the land proudly, naked save for a skirt that male and female wore alike. To the dismay of the retreating Talayans, the Numrek had never looked healthier and stronger than in coppered nudity. On the summer solstice they danced a tribute to the length of the day and the strength of the sun. A new conjecture spread. The Numrek were not the creatures of the north everyone thought them to be. They must have once been a tropical race. Perhaps they had been driven to exile in the north and had only now returned to their preferred climate. In the face of their onslaught, Talay surrendered piece by tribal piece.

People said that Hanish Mein sought the utter destruction of all things Acacian. They said the spite of the Tunishnevre was such that Hanish would destroy all sign of the race he had conquered. But once the peace was established, Hanish set about securing his hold on the empire in ways surprising in their reasonableness. He did not damage Acacian architecture. He left Alecia and Manil and Aos accoutred in their splendor. He touched not a stone or statue on Acacia itself, except those of Tinhadin, which he tore down and had splintered into shards. He had the black stone of Scatevith cut out of Alecia’s outer wall, moved it to the palace on Acacia, and set it as a monument in the place that tributes to Edifus and Tinhadin had once sat. Mostly, though, he just filled Acacian places with his own people, adding his relics to those already there. He layered things Meinish atop the Acacian and seemed to welcome taking on aspects of the defeated empire’s mantle. Instead of dismantling the Acacian system of government and commerce, he grasped them and adopted them to his own purposes.

None of this cooled the heat of Leeka’s hatred, but eventually he could fight no more. All his allies had died, put down their arms, or slunk away into hiding. His enemy turned from conquest to tasks of rebuilding and entrenching and managing their newfound wealth. If Leeka had known with surety on any particular day what his life would become, he would have leaned upon his sword and cut his bowels out. But he did not know. One day slipped with its veiled import into the next, so that his defeat clung to him in tiny increments, accrued day by day.

He wandered the empire. He lost or abandoned the trappings of his rank: his vest traded for food, his dagger for wine, his helmet lost one hazy evening, his shoulder pack stolen by a youth much faster than he. Before long he looked like any other war-weary veteran. He was unkempt, lost, perhaps mind addled, obviously harmless to the Meinish military that now policed most of the Known World. He had always been a man who liked a drink. After the war, he no longer enjoyed drinking—there was none of the mirth in his inebriation that there had once been—but he drank alcohol like it was sustaining water. He might have died a drunkard’s death and been content with it. He was saved, ironically, by the introduction of a new addiction.

The mist was more plentiful throughout the Meinish Empire than it had been during the Akaran reign. It was everywhere, constant as bread or water, cheaper than Candovian wine. He inhaled a pipefull one evening when there was nothing else to be had. What revelations! With mist in him, he understood he had been mistaken. He was not a failure. The war was not concluded. No, in truth he was a lone apostle of bloody retribution. He had killed Numreks before and he would do so again. He lay back and saw the images right there above him, cast on the screen that was the night sky. He strode through Aushenia with a sword in each hand. The earth had not seen the likes of him in ages. At some point the vision was not just an imagined thing. He lived within it. He felt ground beneath his feet and air pumping in his lungs. He traveled a thousand miles and fought until his face was red and dripping with Numrek blood, his fists so welded to his swords that the steel was an extension of his being. Such damage he did! Such holy, retributive carnage he unleashed…

The first morning he awoke from such dreams anguished to find himself in his enfeebled body, no hero at all. He might have spurned the drug and cursed it, except that he could not help but hear the low heartbeat of the mist lingering thereafter, with it the promised possibility that there was truth in his vision. The mist dream was so very real. It was intimate in every detail, vivid as life. No, it was more tactile and real than the life he now led.

There were prohibitions on using the drug during the daylight, working hours. Being found in mist haze by a soldier of the Mein could get one locked up and deprived of the stuff—which was punishment all devotees dreaded. Before long Leeka had contracted himself to his present arrangement—he would labor drunken among the animals through day to earn the few coins needed to dream the mist through the night. In this, he became one of millions in the Known World. He never even noticed that it was happening to him, never questioned this order of life. He could not truly have said at what moment he gave himself to it completely. The mist commands full devotion; Leeka, believing in no other god anymore, learned to worship at a new altar.

It was this that he was thinking of as he approached the darkened shell in which he passed the evenings. Sometime earlier he had taken the packet of mist threads from his breast pocket and walked, caressing the fibers with his fingers. Once inside it would only take a few minutes’ preparation, and then he would inhale and inhale and inhale….

Leeka stopped in his tracks and stilled himself. He sensed something, another breathing thing, close but hidden. He thought of the predators of the mountain night and knew that if this be one of those, he was likely dead on his feet.

“Forgive me,” a voice said. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” A hooded figure peeled away from the shadows beside his hut and stepped into the moonlight, arms raised in a gesture of innocence. “In fact, you surprised me, coming so quietly.”

The man’s tone was kindly, but Leeka had a particular dislike for speaking to people wearing hoods, especially ones who stepped out of the shadows of his hovel late at night and blocked his path. He sought to convey as much with the full intensity of his glare.

“Are you Leeka Alain?” the hooded man asked.

The question caught Leeka off guard. His first thought was that the man must have heard him speaking on the outcropping, but that was scarcely possible. He tucked his mist threads back into his pocket.

“Are you Leeka Alain, he who commanded Leodan’s army in the Mein? Leeka Alain that some call Beast Rider?”

The man’s Acacian was fluid and spoken like a native of the island itself. Leeka had not heard the language uttered so perfectly in some time. Who would ask such a thing in such a tongue? Probably only a man who wished to hear his identity confirmed before killing him.

“Are you he that claims to have been the first to kill a Numrek?”

“No,” Leeka said, speaking the mountain dialect of the area, “I am not that man.”

The hooded figure did not move. He was a statue that almost blended into the features of the night. For a moment Leeka wondered if he was hallucinating. Perhaps this statue had always stood just there, but he had forgotten it. Or perhaps it was no statue at all but just a trick his mist-hungry mind played with the light.

The stranger spoke again, still in Acacian. “This news pains me. I had need of Leeka Alain’s services. It is true that you do not look much like him. Perhaps I was mistaken. I am sorry to have disturbed you. Let me offer you something to pay for my mistake. Here…”

The figure’s hand came up, from it stretched the flickering, tumbling progress of a tossed coin, flaring each time its face caught the moonlight. Leeka’s eyes could not help but follow it. A thief’s trick, and he fell for it. Because of this he would not afterward be able to say that he really saw the man move. But he did feel the impact of something driving up into his abdomen with force enough to have run him through. A pinprick sensation at his neck released a flash of pain that scorched all the way through him like a fire across dry brush. Ignited, and then extinguished in the next moment. As it went, so did his hold of consciousness.

He opened his eyes knowing that time had passed and his placement on the world had changed. He remembered the figure in the shadows, his voice, the airborne coin, the impact that lifted him. He lay with all this in his mind a moment, watching as his eyes gained clarity, focusing on the rough-hewn beams of a wooden ceiling. They were lit by the flickering glow of the fireplace. He knew the ceiling well, every irregularity in it, the knot that disfigured one beam, the lacework of ancient cobwebs hanging from another. He was on his cot, in his hovel, looking up at his ceiling. How very strange…

A man’s form leaned over him. “You lied to me, Leeka Alain. I do not claim to be surprised by it. This is not an easy time to speak forthrightly to strangers, but I might have thought you would be more convincing.”