The War with the Mein Read online

  He spun on his knee and yelled for the ranks to form up. He ran back to them, shouting for the column to draw tight, shields up and facing outward, weapons to hand. He instructed the archers to quiver their arrows and unsheathe blades not victim to the wind and better suited to close quarters. He told the sled drivers to circle them within the troops and huddle the dogs. The same officer who had called to him before asked him what he had discovered. He met the young man’s eyes and gave a simple answer. “There is a war drum beating.”

  Once the army had been formed into one defensive wedge and five hundred pairs of eyes stared out into the increasing fury of the north, then, finally, they all heard it. For a long hour that was all they did. The sound throbbed constant behind the wind, which was heavier now with large flakes of snow that stuck fast to their clothes and shields and fur-lined fringes and even, eventually, to the chill skin on their faces, rendering their still forms like some elaborate snow sculptures. At some point the reverberation mingled with the general’s heartbeat. That was why he was struck breathless at the shock of it when the noise stopped. It simply ceased. In the moments afterward Leeka knew he had made a mistake. Whatever drum beat was out there had been doing so not for hours but for days. It had been there for weeks perhaps before he was able to distinguish it. How could something like that have eluded him?

  He was not to contemplate this question for long, however. A creature hurtled through the screen of blown snow. It rampaged forward, a horned thing, woolly and huge, some sort of man astride it, a figure clothed in skins and furs, a spear raised in one hand, a yell emanating from his unseen mouth. The beast smashed into the ranks of men just to one side of the general’s guard. It tore through them as if the soldiers were of no consequence. It squashed some and knocked others aside without diminishing its speed or altering its course. It vanished through the far side of the troops as quickly as it appeared. In the few seconds the general had to contemplate the scene he counted ten dead and twice as many more writhing on the blood-splashed snow.

  A hand on his shoulder spun him around and he observed—as he had already known he would—that the rider had not been alone. The rest of them materialized all at once, as if the snow had thinned to better his view. There were so many of them, an alien multitude like nothing he had seen before. He suspected that the horror of it would be the last thing he took in with living eyes, and he knew that even if his message got through, he had failed to adequately warn the king and the people of the empire of the hideous threat massed against them.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Late in the evening Leodan Akaran heard someone enter his private chamber. He did not look up, but he knew who it was. The chancellor’s clipped footfalls had a unique rhythm to them, something that the king had once pinpointed as a stiffness in the right leg. A servant had just lit his mist pipe and withdrawn. The pungent scent of the drug was, at that moment, the only thing that mattered. A phantom had clung to the back of his head throughout the day, a hunger he envisioned as a batlike creature that huddled around the contours of his skull, its claws sharp and thin as curved needles where they pierced his flesh and found purchase by anchoring into the bone. It had gripped him during his morning meetings; left him for a time during an hour spent with Corinn; but returned with sharpened, malicious claws throughout the evening. It prodded him as he dined and gnawed at him as he put Dariel down to sleep.

  When Dariel had asked him for a story, Leodan had grimaced. It was just for a moment, a second of creviced physical expression that he regretted instantly. The boy had not even seen it, but it remained a nagging shame that he could long for his own vices while still in the company of his children. Where would he be without his children? Without Mena who still—for precious months more perhaps—wanted him to spin tales for her? And Dariel, who hung on his words with a trusting certainty the father knew time would shatter? He would be an empty shell without them. Shame on him for letting a moment with them pass in distraction. He told Dariel the story he asked for, and then he stood a few extra moments beside the boy’s door, listening to his slumbering breath and regretting his own weaknesses.

  All this was earlier; his feeble penance was complete. Now the pipe sat on the low table before him. It was an intricate confusion of glass tubes and water-filled chambers and leather hoses, one of which the king held between the fingertips of both hands. He placed the narrow bit of it between his teeth, touching it with his tongue. He inhaled gently at first. Then—as he tasted the bitter, putrid sweetness of the mist—his cheeks caved against his jawbones. The pipe bubbled and sputtered. He stayed huddled forward, eyes closed, aware that his chancellor stood near him but not caring. This was nothing Thaddeus had not seen before.

  When he fell back against the cushions of his couch, he exhaled a slow plume of green vapor. The creature on his head plucked out its talons one by one. It faded into nothingness, taking with it the gray weight that he had carried with him like a granite cloak throughout the day. The opiate numbed the edges of the world. He felt no barbs. Instead he was filled with blurred tranquillity, a warm feeling of connection with the millions of people throughout his empire tied to the same drug. Peasant farmers and blacksmiths, municipal guards and rubbish collectors, miners, slavers: in this one thing he was the same as them all. It was—to the reasoning of his muted mind—a secret offering made for their forgiveness.

  He opened his eyes, clouded now and veined reddish brown. “What news has the chancellor to share?”

  Thaddeus had seated himself on a nearby divan. He sat with his legs crossed at the knee and a glass of port pinned between his right thumb and forefinger. The king eyed the small vessel, transfixed by something about the movement of the liquid against the glass, the stain it left as Thaddeus swirled it. He listened as the chancellor apprised him of the preparations for the Aushenian delegation. They were prepared, he said, to impress upon the foreigners both their strength and wealth and to extend a cautious hand of welcome. If the Aushenians confirmed that they acknowledged Acacian hegemony, everything would be in place to respond positively to them, if such was the king’s wish.

  Leodan nodded. It was his wish, but he knew that several times before Aushenia had nearly formed an alliance with Acacia, only to have it scuttled by some minor dispute. Everything he had thus far heard about the young prince Igguldan was promising, but still there were aspects of such an alliance that he did not wish to think about. He changed the subject, although his thoughts did not stray far from the things that troubled him. “The other day Mena asked about the Retribution.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing. Why should she learn that she has the blood of mass murderers in her veins? It was long ago, and we are no longer like that.”

  “You are right that it was long ago,” Thaddeus said. “Twenty-two generations…What child can comprehend that?”

  The king recalled that when Mena had asked the question, he had glimpsed something less than faith in his daughter’s eyes, less than complete acceptance of his claims. And was not that astute of her? He had, after all, uttered yet another barefaced lie. The Retribution has no bearing on our lives? A blatant untruth spoken with a silvered tongue. How much longer could he get away with such things? It was not just Mena, of course, who had begun to question. Aliver had for some time carried an uncertainty and distrust behind his eyes that seemed ever ready to burst forth.

  The chancellor said, “I should mention that the convener called for the governors to intercede in the case the Prios miners have filed against the—”

  “Must I deal with that? I hate anything to do with the mines.”

  “Fine. We can let the governors handle it. There is something that they cannot handle, though.” Thaddeus pursed his lips, waited for the king to meet his gaze. “The league representatives want to verify that you are truly going to reject the Lothan Aklun demand to increase the Quota.”

  The statement was nearly enough to clear the king’s head of th
e drug’s dulling effects. The Lothan Aklun…the agreement known as the Quota…These two things were the great, disguised sin of the Akaran Empire. Leodan sucked on his pipe. He had a momentary wish that this matter be handled by the governors. In truth, these representatives from the provinces, based in the thronging city of Alecia, handled most of the practical matters of the empire. But Tinhadin, the early king who was in many ways the chief architect of the Akaran Empire, had written the Quota guidelines with explicit simplicity. Control, authority, responsibility—all rested on the monarch’s shoulders, a secret known by many but owned by him alone. For that reason, the management of it was handled by the palace. It was paid for through a separate budget and accounted separately from any other arm of the government. It was not spoken of except in closed circles, and the actual machinations of it happened far away, unseen by the king, although often imagined. No matter how he studied the ancient texts, the exact details of how the arrangement had been reached seemed jumbled to Leodan. The substance, however, could be understood.

  Tinhadin, having inherited his father’s newly won throne and outliving his brothers, found himself prosecuting wars on several fronts. The Wars of Distribution, as they were called, marked a strained and tumultuous time. His former ally, Hauchmeinish of the Mein, was now an enemy. He no longer trusted his faithful sorcerers, the Santoth. Provincial rebellions flared up like wildfires on the Acacian hills during the summer. His own understanding of the world was warped and horrific, and he struggled with a belief that any word uttered from his mouth might change the fabric of existence. He was a Santoth as well, the greatest of them, but the burden of the magic on his tongue had become a torture to control.

  Into this came a new threat from across the Gray Slopes. There was a power, Tinhadin learned, greater than his own. They were called the Lothan Aklun. They were of the Other Lands, outside the Known World, separated from them by a great ocean. They were a complete mystery to the early king. Their power was nothing really but a claim, but Tinhadin did not want another enemy at that time. He made overtures of peace with them, suggesting trade and mutual gain instead of conflict. The Lothan Aklun not only jumped at the offer, they proposed specifics Tinhadin could not have imagined on his own.

  The agreement must have seemed a bargain at the time. The Lothan Aklun promised not to attack the war-ravaged land and agreed to only ever trade with Akarans. All they needed to assure this beneficence was a yearly shipment of child slaves, with no questions asked, no conditions imposed on what they did with them, and with no possibility that the children would ever see Acacia again. In return for this they offered Tinhadin the mist, a tool that, they promised, he would find most helpful in sedating his fractious wards. It was fine-tuned later, but on these basic terms the deal was agreed. Since then, thousands upon thousands of the Known World’s children had been shipped into bondage, and millions under Akaran rule had given over their lives and labors and dreams to the fleeting visions brought on by the mist. The same drug Leodan Akaran inhaled nightly. Such was the truth of Acacia.

  “Demand?” Leodan finally asked. “You call it a demand?”

  “In tone, yes, my lord, it does have the ring of belligerent certainty to it.” “Lothan belligerence is nothing new,” Leodan said. “It’s nothing new…. They already have my people’s souls. What more do they want? The Lothan Aklun are no better than any of the riffraff surrounding us: the miners, the merchants, the league themselves. None of them is content from one moment to the next. I may have never set eyes on a Lothan, but I know them well. Tell the league to take this message to them: the Quota stays as it always has been. The agreement was binding into perpetuity, made before my time to stretch beyond it; I do not accept any change, now or ever.”

  He said this with finality, but he did not seem to like the silence Thaddeus responded with. “There is something else we should speak about,” Leodan said. “I received a letter this morning from Leeka Alain of the Northern Guard. He had it sent to a merchant in the lower town, who got it to me through the house servants. All very unusual.”

  “Yes, quite odd.” Thaddeus cleared his throat, first softly and then through several louder coughs. “What has the soldier to say?”

  “It was a strange letter, full of import but vague on details. He wanted to know if I had received a messenger he sent earlier. A Lieutenant Szara. By the sound of it, this messenger was dispatched with some grave message.”

  Thaddeus watched the king. “Have you received such a message?”

  “You know the answer to that. It would have come to me through you.”

  “Of course, but I have heard nothing of this. Did Leeka reveal the details of the message in the letter?”

  “No. He does not trust the written word.”

  “He should not. Once written, anyone could read it.”

  The king’s eyes moved slowly, heavily. They swung around on the chancellor and studied him, clouded by the drug but still able to focus. The man’s face was calm, although tense across the forehead. “Yes, perhaps…I do wonder why he chose to correspond with me instead of through the governor. I know he has no fondness for Rialus Neptos; I do not either, for that matter. Do you know that Rialus used to write me at least twice yearly, extolling his virtues and hinting that he should be recalled from the Mein and given some higher appointment here in Acacia? As if I want him sulking around the palace. He points out that he is of pure Acacian ancestry, says the climate of the Mein damages his health. I cannot argue with that, really; it is a miserable place…. Anyway, Leeka wished to communicate directly tome, and that makes me curious. Where is this Szara?”

  Thaddeus lifted his shoulders to his ears, then dropped them. “I know nothing, but even in these peaceful times ill things happen. It is the dead of winter. That means little here, but in the highlands of the Mein the weather would be most foul. How was she meant to travel? On horseback or down the River Ask?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Let me take care of this,” Thaddeus said. “Put it out of your mind until I have looked into it. I will send an armed envoy north to meet with Leeka. By your leave I will give them the king’s rights, so that they may travel swiftly and always have fresh horses. We will hear from them within a month, maybe less if they sail to Aushenia and take the short land route. Twenty-five days at most. And then you will know everything.” Thaddeus paused and waited for the king’s response. It was little more than a grunt of affirmation, but it seemed to satisfy the chancellor. He sipped from his glass. “And then you will see that it was nothing serious at all. Leeka has always prickled with suspicions about the Mein, but when has it yet amounted to anything?”

  “Things are different now,” the king said. “Heberen Mein was a reasonable man, but he is dead. His three sons are a different matter. Hanish is ambitious; I saw that in his eyes even as a boy, when he visited the city. Maeander is pure spite, and Thasren is a mystery. My father was sure that we would never be able to trust them. He made me swear I would not fall to that weakness—trust. You also used to tell me I did not worry enough. Together you and I conceived plans for all manner of tragic events, remember?”

  Thaddeus smiled. “Of course I do. It is my job to. In youth I saw danger everywhere. But Acacia has never been stronger. I mean that, my friend.”

  “I know you do, Thaddeus.” The king turned his gaze up toward the ceiling. “Soon I will rouse all the children and take them on a voyage. We will visit each province of the empire. I will try to convince them that I am their beneficent king; and they will try to convince me that they are my loyal subjects. And perhaps the illusion will go on for some time yet. What say you to that?”

  “That sounds like a fine thing,” Thaddeus said. “That would make your children very happy.”

  “Of course, their ‘uncle’ would accompany us as well. They love you as much as they do me, Thaddeus.”

  The other man took a moment to respond. “You honor me unduly.”

  The king sat repea
ting this statement in his head for some time, finding comfort in it even as he drifted away from its original context. He had said something similar once to Aleera. What had it been? You…love me unduly. That was what he had said. Why had he said that? Because it was true, of course. He had explained as much to her one evening a few days before their wedding. He had drunk too much wine and listened to too many speeches praising him. He could not take it anymore, so he had pulled his bride-to-be to the side and told her she should know things about him before they were married. He confessed to her all that he knew about the crimes of the empire, the old ones and the ones still done in his father’s name, the ones that would likely continue in his name. He poured it all out, tearful and pathetic and even belligerent, sure that she would shrink from him, almost hoping that she would turn away and reject him. Surely a good woman would. And he had no doubt of her goodness.

  How surprised he was by her response, then. She drew close to him and tilted her lovely, large-eyed face up toward his. There was no surprise on her features, no remorse, or judgment. She said, A king is the best and worst of men. Of course. Of course. She pushed her lips against his, so soft and full of hungry pressure that they took his breath away. That, perhaps, was the moment they were actually married, the moment the agreement between them was sealed. It was hard for him to decipher now which aspect of her love he was most drawn to. Was it the fact that she could forgive him all of it and love him because she understood his ultimate goodness? Or was it that she betrayed that she was just as capable of overlooking the truth and living a lie as he? Either way, having confessed to her and received her blessing, he loved her completely. He would never have been able to fulfill his role as monarch without her approval. This might or might not have been a good thing for the world, but to a man as unsure of rule as he had been, her devotion had been a great gift.