The War With The Mein (32 page)

Kelis pressed the pace. They did not stop at midday. Instead, they ran on through the rippling heat. Though laryx had the capacity to run for hours they only did so when truly provoked. They lost the laryx pack when easier prey—warthogs—came to the beasts’ attention. The two men ran on with little rest and did not pause until several hours after dark.

On the fifth day they traversed a salt flat and came across a mass migration of pink birds. Thousands and thousands of them marched across the land, an enormous flock shimmering in the sun’s glare, each of them long necked and graceful, with black legs that stepped high and formal. Why they did not fly, Aliver could not guess. They just parted as the two runners passed through them, watching them sidelong and without comment.

Late the sixth morning they came to the great river that drained the western hills of water. It was a wide, shallow trench more than a mile across. In the rainy season it was a formidable barrier. Even now it served as the southern boundary of inhabited Talay. The river itself was but a trickle now, a narrow vein of moisture a few strides wide, ankle deep. The two men stood in the water. Aliver enjoyed the feel of the smooth stones beneath his feet, slick against his skin. Had the horizon around them not been an endless stretch of pale, coarse soil, sparsely vegetated and crisped by the long tenure of the sun, Aliver might have closed his eyes and let the feel of the stones and the water conjure memories of times and places very far from here.

“Brother,” Kelis said, “I go no farther than this.”

Aliver turned toward him and watched him as he scooped another gourd of water and lifted it to his lips. “What?”

“My people do not venture south of this river. The Giver will run with you from here. He is a better companion than I.”

Aliver stared at him.

“I’ll wait for you,” Kelis said. “Believe me, Aliver, when you return to this point I will be here to meet you.”

Aliver was stunned enough by this that he did not dispute it. Kelis left him with the list of things to do and not do, reminders of how to conserve water and where to search for roots that held moisture and which animals might likewise offer him a drink of blood. Aliver already knew everything the man recited, but he stood as if listening, lingering in each moment that delayed his departure.

“Sangae gave me a message for you,” Kelis said, as he lifted Aliver’s sack and helped him string it over his back. “He said you are a son to him. And you are a son to Leodan Akaran. And you are a prince to the world. He said he knows you will meet the challenges facing you with bravery. He said that when you lift the crown of Acacia to your head he hopes you will allow him to be among the first to bow before you.”

“Sangae does not need to bow before me.”

“Perhaps you don’t need him to bow before you. But he might—for himself. Respect flows two ways and can mean as much to the giver as to the one receiving. Go now. You have far to travel before the sun sets. You should find hills to shelter in at night, rock outcroppings. The laryx fear such places at night.”

“How do I find the Santoth? Nobody has told me.”

Kelis smiled. “Nobody could tell, Aliver. Nobody knows.”

His first few days alone Aliver experienced even longer periods of trance than previously. It was not so much thoughts of his mission or memories from the past that stirred him as it was glimpses of the chaotic grandeur trapped in the silent flesh of the world, in the air breathing and creatures moving across the land. Once, in a landscape pocked with massive craters, Aliver watched the sky as contained in the bowl through which he progressed. Above him clouds gathered, seethed. They did not move on as clouds usually did. They seemed trapped in this particular spot in the world, ever changing but never escaping.

Moments like this one struck him with import. He did not regard it as a sign to read for prophecy. The meaning was simply there in the viewing, in his watching moments of life with eyes so very opened, so appreciative. In his youth he had never been one to study sunsets or vistas, or to pay much attention to the changing colors of leaves on the Mainland. In this regard he was a very different person from the one he had been.

In the middle of his fourth night alone Aliver awoke, having realized something while asleep that drove him up into consciousness. When Kelis told the story of that dreamer denied his path by his father…he had been talking about himself. Kelis was the dreamer denied his destiny. Perhaps this should have been obvious from his tone, but Kelis had never revealed things about himself before. He had never asked for another person’s pity. He had not been doing so by telling that story either, Aliver knew. Why hadn’t Aliver realized this at the time and said something?

Later that night he had a dream of his own, and he spent the entirety of the next day recalling the actual conversations that had sparked it. During the week or so that he had met each afternoon with Thaddeus, they had talked of more than just Aliver’s challenges. The old man had unburdened himself of his deceit. He explained the tale Hanish Mein had detailed for him of how Aliver’s grandfather might have killed Thaddeus’s wife and child. Yes, he said, despite the source that brought him the news, he did believe that Gridulan had had his family murdered. Because of it, Thaddeus had wanted revenge. He had, for a brief moment, betrayed the Akarans.

Aliver had barely been able to respond, either with renewed anger or with the forgiveness the man obviously craved. He was not sure if he should hate the man for conspiring with Hanish Mein or if he should apologize for his own treacherous family or if he should thank Thaddeus for being the instrument of his and his siblings’ rescue.

In the course of these conversations Thaddeus had revealed the complex web of crimes that truly held the world together. This, painful as it was, Aliver was thankful to finally hear. He had always feared the unspoken, the unexplained. He had heard words like Quota and whispers about the Lothan Aklun without ever succeeding in pinning them to concrete facts. Now, however, he heard everything that Thaddeus could tell him. Acacia was a slaving empire. They traded in flesh and thrived on forced labor. They peddled drugs to suppress the masses. The Akarans were not the benevolent leaders he had always been taught to believe they were. What, he wondered, did all of this mean for him? Could he be sure that a new Akaran rule would be better than that of Hanish Mein?

Eventually the landscape took on a different character. It grew even drier, and he moved, weaving through a region of broken ground. The sparse grass was bleached almost silver and contrasted sharply with the mounds of rocks that dotted the land, blackened, volcanic stone that looked like the droppings of some ancient creatures from the previous world. Aliver was not sure if he thought of that comparison himself or if he had heard such a tale told before. He seemed to have some memory of this and even a vague notion of watching the creatures turn from this place and walk, great legged, over the horizon in search of a better land. Between the rocks, solitary acacia trees grew, short versions of the species, stunted and terribly gnarled. They were aged grandfathers of the race, abandoned here some time ago and standing still, their arms upraised in unanswered supplication.

Nowhere among any of this did he see signs of humans. There were no villages here, no traces of agriculture or discarded tools. There were not even animals. It was a terribly lonely landscape, each day more so. The Santoth had been men, humans just like Edifus, a man whose blood flowed in Aliver’s veins. If they lived anywhere near here, there would have been some sign of them. But there was nothing.

One morning a week into his solitary journey Aliver realized that he would not survive this search. Part of him had never expected to find these Santoth, but it had not occurred to him until he sorted through his meager supplies—a palm-sized portion of sedi grain, a few mouthfuls of warm water, a small packet of dried herbs for making soup—that he did not have enough to live more than another day or two. He had not seen a trace of a water source in three days. There had been no sign of knuckle root or of any of the plants that trapped even small sips of water. He had never been in a drier place. Just sitting there he felt the air pulling moisture from his skin. He could try to retrace his steps back to the boundary river, but how many days was he from it? Try as he might he could not say, except that it was farther away than he was capable of walking.

He stood on his aching legs and surveyed the land. The world stretched out before him in uniform desolation, to the horizon and beyond. Nothing. Nothing in it but sand and rock and the sky above it all. He took a step. And then another. He did not try to run. He just felt he had to move, walking slowly, stumbling. He left his supplies where they lay. They would not help him for long, and without them he would get past this ordeal quicker. He noted the position of the sun and gauged the time of the day, and then decided that none of it mattered. The Santoth—as he had suspected all along—were nothing but vapors from the past kept alive by superstitious minds. And he was just a walking dead man. The surprising thing was he did not really mind that much. He felt vindicated in a way. He had been right all along. He was not destined for some mythic greatness. Maybe that mantle would fall upon Corinn or Mena or even Dariel, or maybe the Akaran line did not deserve the power they had wielded.

This all made perfect sense to him, and accepting it granted him a calm he had never felt before. He thought fondly of his sisters and brother. He wished he had seen them grow to adulthood. He hoped they would succeed at whatever they attempted. He, Aliver, had always been the weak link, no matter how hard he tried to be otherwise. His father had put too much faith in him.

Around midday he stumbled and fell. He pushed himself up to his knees, around him a flat expanse of sand, dotted here and there with oblong rocks the same tan color as everything else, standing or on their sides or leaning against each other. He half wondered at the geological oddities they were, but his throat was so very dry and that seemed more of note. His skin had stopped sweating some time ago. His head pounded with his heartbeat, and at times the pulse of it dimmed and brightened his vision.

He lay down. None of this would be so bad if he did not have to feel it from inside his body anymore. He lay like this for some time, content not to have a purpose any longer. That was why from the first sign of movement, of change, he felt an emotion wash through him, a coloring of the world that he experienced as…not as fear, as he might have expected. Not as awe or disbelief. The emotion was harder to define. It was something like regret. What caused it was the fact that the stones all around him awoke. They awoke and began walking slowly toward him.

The hunting lodge of Calfa Ven clung to a south-facing granite buttress, looking down upon the sharp, wild valleys of the King’s Preserve. Half carved into the rock and half perched atop it, the lodge had been a pleasure retreat for Acacian nobility for over two hundred years. The name meant “nest of the mountain condor” in the Senivalian tongue. The preserve was a densely forested land rich in game, protected by a small staff that maintained the lodge and patrolled the broad-leaved woodlands for poachers. Corinn had not visited it since girlhood, but it remained a place she remembered well.

It had taken the Meins several years to come to grips with the empire enough to be able to take holidays. The very idea was somewhat strange to a people who had hunted for sustenance, but they had recently warmed to the custom. When Corinn learned that Hanish requested her presence with him at the lodge, she had little choice but to accept. Not that she would have refused if she could. She made sure that her resentment showed in her demeanor and speech, but she never felt more nervously alive than she did in his company.

She was riding a little distance behind Hanish, along with several Meinish noblewomen, when they arrived at the lodge. From this side it was a gray granite structure, composed of large blocks in a simple style meant to hark back to humbler times. The contingent of staff awaited them on the steps. Corinn recognized one of them, the head house servant, Peter. She had thought him handsome when she was a girl, and it stunned her how old he seemed now. He was the first thing about the lodge that truly showed the passage of time.

Peter was effusive in his greeting. He approached Hanish with a half-stooped posture, his body trembling like an old hound trying to wag its arthritic tail. “We are most pleased by your visit, lord. Most pleased…” He barely gave Hanish the space to respond, his flow of words testifying to how long they had waited to meet him, how carefully they had prepared for his visit, how lush he would find the forest, how the hunting would be beyond his expectations. “The preserve is teeming with all manner of beasts. You will have no trouble—”

The servant paused mid-sentence. His eyes, which had just begun to move across the company, had found Corinn. He stared at her for a moment, wide-eyed, the full circle of his irises visible within the surrounding whites. He bowed his head and welcomed her by name, stammering. Then he turned away and gave his attention to Hanish once more.

His look unnerved Corinn. Why did he seem frightened? He feared Hanish, that was obvious, but the look he had briefly set on the princess was a different sort of alarm. She could not entirely get his expression out of her mind, although the experience of touring the lodge largely pressed it to the side. It was strange listening to Peter lead the entourage through rooms that she already knew. He spoke as if all of it had been created especially for Hanish’s pleasure, as if the memory of former inhabitants was a distant thing indeed.

The interior rooms were cramped and somewhat dark, lit by lamps hung on the walls and by fires in the fireplaces. Some of the old trappings were in view: a wall hanging of a hunt that ran the length of the dining room, a candelabra into whose ornate silverwork the tale of Elenet was carved, the bubbling glasswork pots of fragrant herbs and spices. How she had loved that scent. Inhaling it threatened to flood her with emotion. She tried to breathe shallowly and note the things that had been added or changed to suit the new masters. Fur rugs and furniture coverings in the Meinish style; a few low, stout-legged tables; the Mein crest stained on the stones of the floor before the dining hall fireplace: there were plenty of new touches, superficial as they were.

Larken, the Acacian Marah who had betrayed her years before, walked beside Hanish, puffed up by his status and talking almost as much as Peter. With Maeander gone, Larken was nearly always at the chieftain’s side. Corinn still hated him, though she tried not to let it show.

She heard the other women talking, commenting on the things they saw, finding this or that object quaint, charming. Rhrenna kept running her fingers across the tabletops, checking them for dust. They wore their new gentility so garishly it annoyed Corinn, though she did not let this emotion show either. The main weapon she had against these people was an inward defiance. Disdain nourished her, and she tended it like a gardener cares for the prickled beauty of a rosebush.

The greatest feature of the lodge was the view that its placement afforded. Each room overlooking the King’s Preserve had an open-air balcony from which to stare at a lush canopy of broad-leaved trees that stretched into the northern distance, disturbed here and there by other granite outcroppings. Wind brushed through the treetops in places, much as storm breezes ruffle the seething sea. The rough beauty of it stunned her. This part of it seemed nothing at all like her childhood memories. She recalled only the ominous fear of the greenness of the place, the shadows beneath the trees that seemed to everywhere hide ogres, wood ghouls and wolver-bears. True enough, she could still sense the threat of all of these things, but she found it invigorating. It reminded her of the images she had conjured of Igguldan’s northern forests.

That evening she dined at Hanish’s table in the main room. All told, the company numbered about thirty, with about the same number of servants busy behind the tables, rushing in and out of the hallway leading to the kitchens. The food was somewhat too gamy for Corinn’s tastes, all venison and boar, blood cakes and fattened livers. She did little more than move it around on her plate. One of the things she hated about such occasions was the ever-present possibility that she would be called into conversation as some sort of representative of things Acacian. Early on she had risen to the bait and worked herself up, recounting the accomplishments of her people, but this had never achieved what she wished. Either she felt a fool because her knowledge did not match the verifiable facts others answered her with, or she ended painfully aware that she had only made the Mein triumph over her people seem that much greater. Tonight she found herself again and again the focus of conversation. Larken could have answered any of the questions directed at her better than she, but no one seemed to remember that he had ever been an Acacian.

“Corinn, that mural in the hallway, what story does it tell?”

“Which one?”

“The one that’s like—that’s like the entire world, so large and detailed. But it all centers around one boy-looking person. You know the one I mean.”

Corinn did. She answered that it was a depiction of the world in the days of Elenet. She gave no more willingly, but after being probed she said that it dramatized the moment just after the Giver had turned away from the world. That, she said, was all she knew about it.

“Such a strange belief system,” a young woman named Halren said. “It’s built into your faith that your god abandoned you, right? He loathes you. He spurns your devotion, and for centuries your people went on halfheartedly worshipping him. On one hand you say, ‘God exists and he hates me,’ and the next instant you shrug and carry on your life, without even trying to win back his favor. Do you not see the folly in this?”

Corinn shifted, glanced at Larken, shifted again, and mumbled that she had not thought much about it.

“Why even ask her?” one of Rhrenna’s maidens said. “She’s not a scholar—are you, Corinn?”

The princess was not sure if this was meant as a friendly gesture or as a slight. Either way she felt her blood rise to her face.

“If I’d lost the favor of the Tunishnevre, I’d do anything to win it back,” Halren said, looking furtively at Hanish. “Fortunately, though, I feel they’re quite content with me. With all of us, really, thanks to our chieftain.”

This did nothing to lower the red from Corinn’s cheeks. She turned her gaze to Halren, to the silvery sparkles on her forehead and her pale features. “You’ve been ‘blessed’ for what? Nine years? That’s a sneeze compared to the Akaran reign.” Corinn might have said something even sharper—something she would have regretted afterward—except that Hanish chose that moment to become the center of attention.

“The princess makes an indisputable point,” he said. He seemed to consider this for a moment, his gray eyes thoughtful. “Corinn, have you heard the tale of Little Kilish? Little Kilish was a giant of a man, named ironically, you see. He was a farmer who made for himself a scythe so massive only he could wield it. He loved to swing it in great swathes, cutting free grains of wheat by the millions. He crafted a second scythe and danced through the wheat fields slicing circles and patterns, each stroke like the work of ten men. He became famous all around the countryside. He had a contest against others to test who could cut the most wheat, but he always triumphed without question. Soon nobody would even contest him.”

Hanish paused as a servant replaced his used plate with a clean one. He went on, explaining that one day a stranger arrived, a small man with dusky skin and mischievous eyes. He was a soul harvester. He had built some sort of machine that had already felled the greater part of the world. It was a great frame that stretched across an entire field from edge to edge, attached to wheels to move it about. At a hundred different points all across it he positioned mannequin figures, hinged and intricate like true humans but made of oak. Each of them gripped a sickle. When the people saw this they laughed. What sort of massive toy was that? What use are people made of wood? But this soul harvester knew some of the god’s talk. He whispered spells that stole souls out of those who were laughing at him. He placed one soul in each of the wooden figures. This brought them to life. They began to swing their tools just as real people would. The soul harvester slapped his mule and the beast pulled the contraption down the field. All the wooden people worked for him, and in just a few moments he had cut down more than Little Kilish could have managed in an entire day.

Another servant tried to refill the chieftain’s glass, but Hanish brushed him away, impatient, it seemed, with the constant attention. “The people were amazed,” he said. “They praised the stranger. All agreed that he had won the contest and to him went the honor. Little Kilish, however, hated that machine, hated the man who’d built it. All the fuss annoyed him greatly. Why were people applauding so vile a thing?”

“For a moment they forgot their own souls,” Halren said.

“Didn’t they notice the soulless zombies that now stood among them? Before he had thought through what he was doing Little Kilish swung his scythe and sliced the soul harvester’s head clean from his shoulders. It fell to the ground and chattered on for some minutes yet before the tongue inside the thing realized all was lost. Little Kilish looked around him, afraid lest he be called a murderer and criminal and find himself banished. But the people did not banish him. They rejoiced. They said, ‘Let Kilish harvest our wheat, for he is strong and has no need to steal our souls!’ And so it was.”

Hanish motioned with his hand that there was no more to tell. Several voices praised his telling of the tale. Halren beamed as she looked about, as if Hanish had told the story particularly to her. But the chieftain kept his attention on Corinn. “We’ve told this tale for many, many years. You understand its significance, don’t you?”

“You say that Little Kilish was a giant of a man, but I suspect at least one feature of his body was not so large,” Corinn said. “That, surely, is how he got his name. One shouldn’t trust a man called Little. No man wants to think any part of himself small. It makes him bitter, unjust, and petty—”

Rhrenna said, “Corinn, you’ve such a way of—”

“Little Kilish,” Hanish said, interrupting both women, “was of the Meinish race; the soul harvester was Acacian born. That’s the significance. We may be new to power, Princess, but we did not sell our souls to get it. It just took us a bit longer to achieve by honest means what your people won through treachery.”

“You’ve just now invented that tale,” Corinn said. “And, ‘honest means’! Are you—”

Hanish threw back his head and laughed. “I’ve angered the princess. I doubt she’ll admit that what surprises her is how accurately an ancient tale unveils the current truth of our two people’s history. It’s almost like a prophecy, isn’t it? My joy is in having had a hand in making it come true.”

This received murmurs of approval around the table, but Corinn said, “That may be your joy, but it’s my sorrow.”

“I don’t believe that,” Hanish said. He stared at her. “I think you say such things simply because you feel you are supposed to. But in truth, Princess, we have done you little harm. Yes, there’s your father. I won’t ask you to forgive me for that, but I will ask you to remember that in the same few moments you lost your father I lost a beloved brother. They were each instruments of a cause, of conflicting causes. This is just the way of men and there’s no crime in it.” Hanish drew back, picked up his glass, and sipped. “Beyond that we’ve done you no harm.”

“No harm—” Corinn began but was cut off.

“Exactly so. We never touched a hair on one of your siblings. Never. And we never would, not to harm them, at least. We’ve only ever wanted to bring them home, to the palace where they belong. They could live beside us, just like you do. Look at yourself, Corinn. Look at the life you have. You are the center of a court of women and men who adore you, despite the barbs you throw at us. You have all the luxuries of royalty; none of the responsibilities. I only wish you would warm to your position more. I would, truly, like to see you…content.”

Corinn snapped her head up to face him directly. She had felt as if he was about to stick his tongue in her ear. That was how his last spoken word had reached her, like a wet caress that could reach across the table and touch her in front of everyone’s eyes. But he was sitting back, at ease, his glass near his nose as he scented the wine. No one except Maeander had ever made her feel more uncomfortable for no obvious reason. She said, “Then die—you and all your people—and give me back my family.”

Halren began a shocked response, but Hanish looked only amused. “My dear emotional girl,” he said to Corinn, “you really are quite beautiful. Isn’t she, Larken?”