The War With The Mein (63 page)

Mena came up behind Dariel, grasped him by the shoulder, and whispered. “Didn’t Aliver slay the antok? Hasn’t he communed with the Santoth? Before that he hunted a laryx. Perhaps sorcery has been at work in his life all along. Have faith in him, Dariel.”

And then it was time. Aliver stood before the other man shirtless, wearing just the knee-length skirt of a Talayan runner, his knife like a sliver of ice in his hand. Maeander wore a thalba so thin the contours of his muscular chest and abdomen showed through. His knife was shorter than Aliver’s, with a slight curve to the tip, a dark tint to the blade. Aliver said something. Maeander looked puzzled a moment and then seemed to understand and respond.

Dariel did not hear the exchange. He watched what followed from a strange, muted place, not aware of his body at all, hearing nothing and taking in only what the harsh glare of the sun highlighted. He watched the two men circle each other. They measured each other’s strengths and weaknesses with cursory thrusts and parries. He saw Maeander’s thin lips smiling and joking, keeping up a steady stream of commentary that Dariel could not hear a word of. He watched Maeander dive into an attack, so fast he was like a hooded snake. Aliver flew up from the strike, a leap that took him over Maeander’s head, slashing as he did. Maeander, still snakelike, leaned backward. He flattened himself to the ground, his shoulders touching the dirt even as his legs moved him under Aliver and away.

At any other time that series of moves would have dumbfounded Dariel, but the two did not so much as pause to acknowledge what had passed between. They circled more, jabbed more. Their knives clashed. As they pulled apart, Aliver cut the skin of one of Maeander’s knuckles. The tempo increased. The two men became blurs of motion, slipping around each other, attacking and retreating, spinning so quickly it was hard to keep track of who was who. Somebody drew blood from the other’s shoulder. One of them fell and had to scramble sideways on all fours. Dariel thought it was Aliver, but the next moment Aliver was in the air above the cloud of dust, spinning around like a deadly acrobat, his blade at the tip of his orbit, slicing the air.

Watching him, Dariel felt the first inklings of hope. Aliver was blessed. How else could he dance ahead of every assault Maeander made, faster than him, more perfect in execution, deadly artistry in motion, pressing his own attacks with flourishes that made Dariel imagine the Form that this would one day become. Yes, that’s what this was! He was watching a Form being created…. Mena was right; sorcery had to be at work here. And Aliver was right; he would win this in his father’s name. He would conclude the duel begun years before.

And then Dariel saw it happen. For a few seconds all his mind registered were the physical details, the scene itself in vivid colors, one second passing into the next without understanding the significance of what he saw. Aliver, having ducked beneath Maeander’s punching dagger thrust, pulled on his chest and shoulder muscles to create the slicing arc that would tear through Maeander’s abdomen, just as he had disemboweled the antok. This, at least, was what should have happened. What did happen was different.

Maeander jumped, a quick concussion of power shot from his thighs, through his balled calf muscles, and down to his toes. He floated up into the air. Aliver straightened as his blade skimmed across Maeander’s abdomen, so close Dariel believed the point split the fabric of his thalba. Aliver lifted as the other man did, wanting this motion to end the contest, wanting it so badly that he focused his everything on carving into flesh. What he forgot was the knife still in his opponent’s outstretched hand, behind his head as Maeander’s arm came to rest on his shoulder. He was still focused on his attack as Maeander drew the point of the blade into the back of his neck.

The shock of realization showed then, but it was too late. Maeander carved a crescent from the back of Aliver’s neck, around the side of it, through the artery there, and all the way beneath his chin. He caught Aliver’s spinning form almost gently, lowering the bloody mess of him down to the ground. A second later he spun upright and away, Aliver’s knife in his hand, upraised, triumphant, oblivious to the nature of frantic tumult he had just created. It was as if Maeander had orchestrated the entire thing.

Dariel dashed in with the swarm of people rushing toward Aliver. He had to shove and yank others out of the way, yelling, although he could not hear anything, not even himself. He got his arms under his brother, felt the warm wetness of him, the dreadful limpness of his weight. Fearful lest he cause some further injury, he tried to be gentle, to soothe, to reassure. He spoke close to Aliver’s temple. He hated the way his head flopped about. He cursed himself for being so clumsy. He thought perhaps he should lower him down so that he did not make anything worse, but then he realized Mena was across from him, holding Aliver just as he was, her face as white as death, contorted with grief. With grief, not with fear. Not with worry or anxiousness…with grief.

Looking down again, Dariel saw what was right there before him. He understood the enormity of what had just happened. He would never again be able to look at another man’s neck without seeing the injury that had killed Aliver Akaran. It was too much. Too much. Whatever emotion was in him was full beyond his capacity to contain.

He stood. His eyes shot out in the direction Maeander’s group had departed in. It took him a moment, but he spotted them, a small cluster progressing through the throng that cleared the way for them reluctantly. He felt thousands of eyes beating on him. He knew what they were waiting for, and he wanted what they wanted. He felt the emotion they did, and with their gazes fixed on him he became the center of it. An uncontainable rage, a pure abhorrence that poured from his eyes as if a star were exploding inside his head. He wanted to commit a crime of honor. Wanted to right here and now, before thousands of witnesses. He knew he would be ashamed of it eventually and that he would have to reckon, not with the act itself but with knowing ever after that Aliver would not have approved. But there was no stopping it. When he opened his mouth he did the worst possible thing. He asked for a thousand accomplices. Eyes still fixed on the receding backs of the Meins, he bit down on the virtues that his brother would have demanded of him. He whispered, “Kill him.”

When nobody responded, he raised his voice and shouted the command as loudly as he could. This time, they—and he himself—heard his voice clearly.

Hanish used transport vessels from his personal fleet and others lent to him by Meinish nobles eager to take part in carrying the Tunishnevre the final waterborne leg to Acacia. They made the journey from the Mainland without incident. On arriving, they took over the docks. They swarmed the area, occupying every mooring, driving away the fishermen and merchants, bullying the populace back into the lower town. They would have cleared the place no matter what, but the work was made easier because the port was not as busy as it normally was. League ships, in particular, were conspicuously absent. Hanish noted this and considered having it explained before he proceeded any farther, but the area appeared to be secure. Also, his Punisari were armed to the teeth and ready to repel any treachery. He ordered his ships to begin disgorging their cargo.

Within an hour rows of sarcophagi were threading through the docks and ascending toward the palace via the sloping system of ramps. Before leaving the seaside, Hanish watched the first of the ancestors enter a gate in the palace walls. The shadowed mouth swallowed them one by one, each a relief, each finally safe and sliding home into the special chamber constructed to house them. Their long journey was finally at an end; a new one scheduled to commence soon, the next day, if possible.

Even as he made his way up toward the palace, with Haleeven beside him, Hanish’s secretaries and assistants rushed down to meet him. They bombarded him with news, with dispatches, reports, with a host of matters that had been waiting for his attention. The docks were not crowded, they explained, because league ships normally stationed there had departed. Some that had been scheduled to arrive had not. Sire Dagon had evacuated his compound without explanation the day previous, taking all his staff with him. There was something amiss with them, though nobody knew what. They were not even sure if the league still provided Maeander naval support.

This prompted him to ask what news they had of Maeander and the battle. The latest letter from his brother appeared in his hands a moment later. It had also arrived that morning. As he began to read it, he was reminded of his annoyance at not being able to communicate with Maeander through dream travel. He had long suspected Maeander of intentionally blocking him out, unwilling to allow him the access to his consciousness that such communicating made possible. Thus, striding up across the cobbled stones, he first got word of the antoks’ failure, via a message that had traveled strapped to a bird’s leg and was at least a day old.

The antoks had inflicted damage, Maeander claimed, but they had not decided the matter. They were not the invincible beings he had hoped they would prove to be, and Aliver seemed to have some form of sorcery aiding his side. But this was all right, Maeander wrote, because he had something else planned. He said no more than that. Hanish would not know what he planned or how it turned out until another of these birds flew across the sea.

“He is too cryptic,” Hanish said, showing the note to his uncle.

Haleeven read it without comment, setting his chin in such a way as to remind his nephew to focus only on the details at hand, the things ahead of them, waiting in the palace.

Though he thought of her constantly, Hanish had no plan to see Corinn until that evening. He did not tell her this; she would know it already. Anytime he returned there were a million things to see to, now more than ever. He spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in his office, dealing with everything piled upon his desk during his absence. Military advisers gave him event-by-event details of the war in Talay and of the outbreaks of troubles all around the empire. They had concentrated so many of their forces with Maeander that the provinces were thinly controlled. Too many of the troops holding them were of foreign blood, their loyalties suspect. They warned that should Maeander suffer a real defeat, Aushenia and Candovia and Senival would all likely burst into outright rebellion. And the Numreks had not joined Maeander. They were simply absent from the proceedings and had not responded to any of the orders dispatched to them. This might be an ill thing, Hanish thought, but he could not imagine what the Numrek were up to and still imagined they would appear belatedly, once they had made some point or another.

What he found more troubling than anything was Aliver’s emergence as a skilled leader and as a figure around whom myth could be spun, one who might walk with magic. The fact that he personally killed the first antok was a great nuisance. Minstrels would be telling grandiose tales of Aliver’s victory over them for years to come, no matter what Maeander managed to accomplish against him. It would be best, he thought, if they could capture all of the Akarans alive. Parade them through the streets of every city in the empire. Let the populace see them in chains. That, perhaps, would kill the myths. The truth usually could, if one faced it honestly.

The one comfort Hanish had was that he did not believe he was yet in danger. The Acacians might think they were gaining ground, but their small victories meant little. Nothing would stand up against Meinish power after the ceremony. Aliver might have some meager sorcery working on his behalf, but Hanish would soon tap the accumulated rage of generations. This fact, likely, was why the league had withdrawn. They had reason to fear the power they knew was going to be awakened. Good, Hanish thought. Let them tremble for a while. Perhaps the ancestors would take the reins of the world in their newly animated hands. He wished they would. Let them rage through the provinces, winning them back; let Sire Dagon stand before them and try to flex his muscles. Hanish would happily rest and attempt to forget the things he would need to forget.

As the day began to fade, his thoughts more and more returned to Corinn. Enough so that he eventually pushed himself upright and dismissed the advisers and his staff, saying he would continue with them in the morning. He asked Haleeven to join him in inspecting the ceremonial site. After that, he knew, he could finally go to Corinn and spend a last night with her.

The chamber had been under construction since the end of his first year in control of Acacia. It was a monumental project, conducted in semi-secrecy. It was one long, slow exercise in excavation. Diggers went at the bedrock beneath the eastern base of the island, just below the palace. It was never too obvious a project, never worked by more than a modest stream of laborers. All the stone quarried inside exited through one access point. They used it to extend the docks and create an artificial island out at sea, making it easier for the league’s large ships to moor there. There were many uses for the material and nothing was officially said about why it was being mined.

Hanish knew the lower town was alive with rumors about what he was constructing deep in the earth. An unassailable keep. Torture chambers. Cages in which he would raise unnatural beasts. A chamber like the Calathrock for conducting games and military drills. It did not matter what they speculated; they would never quite get at the truth.

Inside the cavern, looking about as workers positioned the last of the sarcophagi in place, priests overseeing all with the stern visages rendered stark by the white light of clean-burning oil lamps, Hanish marveled at the structure. It had been carved to the specifications conveyed to him by the undead themselves. In many ways it resembled the chamber back at Tahalian, with ancestors stacked row upon row. It had needed to be built here, of course, on Acacia. It was here that the curse against them had been created and here was the only place from which it could be reversed. The slots that housed each sarcophagi had been carved directly into the granite itself, smoothed and polished, like an enormous beehive cut from stone. When his ancestors breathed again and reached out and touched their corporeal fingers to the world for the first time in years or decades or centuries, they would be able to caress the very stone that the early Akarans had stood upon when they set out to bind the world.

At the center point of all this was the Scatevith stone, the single great block of it so dark and dense it seemed to suck life into its murky depths. It was the very piece that had been carved from the basalt at the base of the Black Mountains, high up on the Mein Plateau. His ancestors had been forced to offer it as a gift to help the Akarans build the great wall outside Alecia. After his victory, Hanish had it cut out of that wall and brought here to serve as the platform on which an Akaran would die. Everything was in place.

He tried to remind himself of this, to say it like a prayer that would clear away all else. But he could not help but imagine Corinn as she would be tomorrow. She would walk in halfway through the ceremony, when Hanish had already invoked the ancient words as whispered to him by the ancestors. She would come toward him in all her grace, believing she was to offer healing drops of blood. He would look her in the face, assuring her, moving her as close as he could to the moment of death without her seeing it coming. At some point she would figure out what was happening. He might have gotten her into position upon the stone and stood her over the bowl waiting to gather her blood. He might be holding the knife in his hand, might even be preparing her to receive its cut. But…

At some point she would realize that he was not just there for her blood but for her life as well. She would likely see it in his eyes or his gestures or hear it in the quavering of his voice if he did not control himself perfectly. She would not, he was sure, go quietly to her death. He imagined her fighting against him as he dragged her up onto the stone. She’d be cursing him, tearing at his face with her fingers, bucking against him, gouging at his eyes. What would she say to him? He could think of a thousand insults, and they’d all be true.

Haleeven, standing beside him, intuited his thoughts. “I wish there was another way,” he said. “But there isn’t. Things have come to this in just this way. I, at least, know how hard you tried to find the others and how much you give up for the Tunishnevre. It is for this that you were chosen. Because you have the strength to do it.”

Hanish felt a pressure surge up from his gut and threaten to pour out of him. He knew his uncle was trying to help, but he could not listen to such things now. “Leave me,” he said. He raised his voice and ordered the workers to depart the chamber for a few moments. He wished to be alone.

He sat until they drained out, ignoring the dour looks on the priests’ faces. When the place fell silent, when he could just faintly sense the satisfied pulse that was the Tunishnevre’s heartbeat, his eyes clouded. His face reddened. He blinked and blinked rapidly, embarrassed by the flood of tears he could not stop from streaking down his cheeks. He wiped them away with the hard edge of his hand, anxious lest somebody—one of the priests perhaps—stick his head in and see him. But the tears came with their own strength. The emotion began with thoughts of Corinn, but it was not just about her. His grief at knowing what he had planned for her intertwined with dread of the forces he was about to unleash. The Tunishnevre. A spiteful pantheon of his hallowed ancestors. How he feared them. How he loathed them. He had lived, bowing to their animus, all his life, and now he would soon meet them all face-to-face, flesh and blood, as men before him, animated by a warped version of the Giver’s tongue.

When he was a boy his father had often taken him into the chamber at Tahalian. Heberen would press Hanish’s forehead to the cold floor and make him remain prostrate like that for hours. He left him alone, saying that he must learn to hear the voices of his ancestors. Only if he heard them would he be able to serve them. And serving them was all his life was really about. How frightened he’d been! Alone in the dark, the angry cries of spirits in the air, hundreds of corpses surrounding him, living and dead at the same time. He had barely allowed himself to breathe, so aware was he that he sucked them in with each inhalation. He had heard them all right. Every day of his life he’d heard them in some way or another.

He had wanted to ask, even as a boy, why the ancestors so craved life again. If living was only a prelude to death—and if the living were but servants of the deceased—why then did the old ones want so very badly to walk the earth again? He had the question formed and solid in his mind since his eighth or ninth year. But he never asked it. He feared that to ask it was to reveal a lie that would shame his ancestors and embarrass him in some irreversible way. Now, decades later, what choice did he have other than to carry the lie through? It was what he had worked for all along. If he failed at the awakening, he failed at the main thing he had striven for throughout his life. So he reaffirmed that he would not fail. Haleeven was right. In choosing him, the Tunishnevre had chosen correctly.

By the time he left the chamber he had drained the well of his tears, though, as he discovered, he would soon need to replenish them. His secretary collided with him in the hallway just outside. He had been progressing at a dead run. The moment he had recovered himself he thrust a curled piece of paper at him. It had just come by a messenger bird from Bocoum, he said.

“From my brother?”

“No,” the man said, his blue eyes round and nervous. “It’s not from him, but it’s about him. It tells of two deaths.” He stretched out his hand, trembling, to offer the note. “Please, lord, you will want to read it yourself.”

Some time later, when he stepped into his quarters and saw Corinn look up at him, watched her stand and begin to walk toward him, beautiful as ever, her gown kind to her contours, the train of it trailing the stones, tiny bells tinkling to mark her progress, Hanish knew himself to be every bit the impostor, the coward, the villain that Corinn would name him if she knew him truly. He knew it, but he rushed toward her embrace. He heard himself utter the news to her, and he luxuriated in the solace of the moments to come. They would each comfort the other. They would both share their losses. She wouldn’t hate him just yet, because only the two of them in all the world split equal measures of exactly the same kind of suffering at that moment.