Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Thasren Mein stood for some time in the street, feeling snowflakes light upon his skin and melt. How fine it was to feel snow kissing his upturned face. It was beautiful, righteous, and-in this land-remarkably strange to behold. The night air was just barely cold enough to snow, so very still, sounds muffled, footfalls of passersby pressing flat the moist layer of ice crystals; in all of these things this was a very different experience from a storm on the Mein Plateau. Still, the message and significance of it was easy to read: it was a blessing from home, encouragement sent by the Tunishnevre to remind him that the thing he did now he did for many. Snow fell on Acacia; so the coming change was marked by the heavens.

By the time he mounted the last staircase and approached the banquet hall across a stone courtyard, the other guests were already entering. He touched the wig with his fingers, noting the placement of the pins that fastened it in place. His garments were in order, his cloak one of the ambassador’s finest. There was a time, he knew, early in the Acacians’ rule when no one got nearer the king than a hundred paces, when the royals looked down upon social gatherings from a distance, like spectators at a play. They stayed safe behind a barricade of Marah guards, soldiers with swords drawn, each of them on one bent knee, dressed and dusted with bronze to take on the appearance of statues, ready to spring to life should a threat appear. They, he had been told, were trained as much in observation of body motions and demeanor as they were in martial arts. But that was long ago. Luxury cannot help but make a people soft, forgetful. It was a very different banquet he entered on this occasion, one that those first kings would hardly have recognized.

He nodded to the guards at the door. They greeted him by the ambassador’s name, no hint of suspicion behind their smiles. As Gurnal had told him, he had to walk through a long reception chamber to reach his goal. Both walls were hung with paintings of the early Acacians. Closer still stood statues of men he presumed to be kings. Behind the shoulders of these, soldiers shadowed them in similarly formal postures, arms tight to their bodies, hands crossed over the hilts of their swords. The soldiers were as still as the inanimate personages they protected. At the far entrance to the hall a few men congregated-the official host and his guards. Thasren walked, knowing that each stride was observed, each motion of his hands, his demeanor, his features. He had cut a slit inside his vest, a passageway to the weapon fastened there. He had to say a calming prayer to keep his fingers from twitching, so keen were they to find the hilt and puncture the first throat that voiced a complaint to him.

At the opening to the hall the chief Marah guard smiled in greeting, blocking entry in a gracious manner with two soldiers at either wing, these not inclined to smile. Beyond them, Thasren saw a room lit by hundreds of lamps, crowded with people; the air a clamor of voices and the music of stringed instruments, fragrant with the evening’s rich fare. The Marah touched him in two places, one hand on his shoulder and another on his opposite hip. He greeted Thasren by Gurnal’s name, asked him if the weather suited him, but as he did this he looked past him to the guards of the outer chamber. He spoke with his eyes, with a thrust of his chin, telling them that with the last guest inside they could seal the outside doors. He turned his attention back to the man within his embrace, who-despite what passed for calm-was coiled and ready to spring, to cut a path of chaos from this point forward if it were necessary.

Before the guard began the probing hug that would have cost him his life, a horn blast sounded at the far side of the hall. It was a loud note, followed by a milder tune, which the strings picked up on. The officer said something merrily, patted him, a cursory dance of his fingers that didn’t touch upon his weapon. He motioned Thasren inside.

With this, the greatest hurdle blocking his success was already behind him. Now he had just to sit through the opening moments of the banquet. He watched the king emerge, his entourage all around him, his son and daughter, the Aushenian prince, the chancellor Thaddeus Clegg, the guards that flanked them all. Though the party was called intimate there were perhaps a hundred people in the room, many of them between him and the monarch. For the first few moments he did not move at all. He felt his pores blooming with moisture, but he tried to think himself calm, to breathe slow breaths. He stilled his mind and focused, as he had been taught to do. He had to create the moment of his prey’s death, had to bring together myriad moving forces in the world and pierce through them all like an arrow shot through rings thrown in the air. He registered the various players in the room: how they carried themselves, what they looked at, in what proximity they were to the king and behind what boundaries.

When he moved he did so as part of an inhalation in the crowd, others being drawn with him toward the royal person. He sidestepped twice, jostled his way to open territory, and from there saw the moment he needed. Leodan answered a greeting thrown from the crowd. He sought out the man in question with his eyes, and then strode forward, the smile on his face suggesting recognition of an old friend. The king slipped between two tables and momentarily placed his guards single-file behind him. Leodan’s arms came up to embrace the other man, the birds on the wings of his garment rippling as he did so.

Thasren drew his dagger from hiding. He sliced it diagonally away from his body, a movement so fast it drew many eyes. The blade reflected shards of lamplight, a sharp thing in a hand that should bear no sharp thing. He dashed the last few steps forward. The king’s eyes turned toward him, puzzled, mouth puckered as if about to pronounce the ambassador’s name. Thasren tilted the curved blade of his dagger to puncture the man through the left eye socket. This he would have accomplished had not one of the guards bounded up onto the tabletop, his sword cutting upward aiming to slice off the attacker’s hand mid-wrist. Thasren snapped his arm at the elbow and the guard’s sword missed him. During the moment the man was off balance, Thasren swung around with his free hand and yanked him into the air by one ankle. He angled the falling man’s body in such a way that he flew back onto the other guard, knocking loose his drawn blade.

The king’s friend stood in front of the monarch, protective and gape mouthed in fear at the same time. Thasren high stepped and slammed his heel into the man’s knee at an angle. His body swiftly crumpled to the ground. Another guard came at him from the left, sword lifted. Thasren thrust his dagger in the air, a punching motion. When the guard raised his weapon to parry whatever odd attack this presaged, Thasren spun into a squat. He rotated one full time and slammed the butt of his dagger’s hilt into the soft spot below the man’s armpit, the barbed spike of it more than an inch inside his flesh. He yanked down and carved a jagged gash that pulled free only when it broke through his navel.

He heard a high-pitched voice yelling-the king’s son, he realized. Whatever command the young man gave went unacknowledged. Thasren still had not used the blade of his dagger, but he did so now. In the brief moment before anyone else could attack him he stepped the last few strides to the retreating king. Watching his stunned face, he stabbed him through the upper left chest, right through the eye of one of the embroidered Aushenian cranes. It looked little more than a fencing move. As such it drew a small spot of blood, covered over almost immediately by the king’s palm. And that was it, done. Easier, actually, than Thasren had imagined it would be.

He stopped all aggressive maneuvers. He pulled himself upright, out of his fighting posture. He stood still within the center of the ring of bodies surrounding him, the wounded and living both, a bristle of sword points aimed at him now. In a matter of seconds the Elite had surrounded him. They would have killed him that instant, but there was nothing like unexpected passivity to confuse overtrained soldiers. They paused when he did, and Thasren had time to glance around. He settled his gaze on the king, who was now pressed against the wall behind a barricade of guards. Looking directly at the monarch, he named himself in his language, speaking as if he were the character in a legend of old. He said that he was Thasren Mein, son of Heberen, younger brother to Hanish and Maeander. He said that he died with joy in his heart, for he had done a just deed. He had slain the despot of Acacia. This was a blameless act, long overdue. Because of that he wished nothing more for his own life.

“Many will praise me,” he said, speaking these words in heavily accented Acacian. “Many will praise and follow me.”

He pressed the curved tip of his dagger against his neck and yanked the blade clean through his main artery. A moment later he lay on the smooth stones, taking in a skewed view of a world in chaos. His body crumpled in such a way that the pumping of his heart shot gouts of blood into the air above him, coating his face and chest with a mist of red. Blinking, he peered through this curtain. The king was hurried from the room at the center of a mass of men, like workers around a queen bee. They ushered him out of the chamber, supported between them in a half-seated position, their hands all over him, some holding their palms against his bloody chest. For a few seconds when the sightline between them cleared, Thasren saw the oval of the king’s mouth. Pain shivered across his cheeks. His eyes were two bewildered questions, full of dread.

Watching this, Thasren thought of his eldest brother and wished he had beheld this deed, hoped that the tale he eventually heard of it would make him proud. He felt a voracious emptiness eating up his body, extinguishing him inch by inch. He whispered it through the blood in his mouth, a taste like liquid metal. He felt possessed by awe. He had accomplished at least one great act in his life. With it behind him, he felt no fear. He had unleashed a great deal of it, but he himself went to the afterdeath without fear, as a soldier of a righteous cause always should. Before fading from consciousness he began to recite the Prayer of Joining, the praise song of the Tunishnevre.