Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Rialus Neptos fled Cathgergen after what he would claim to have been a siege of several days. In a final action before departing, he tossed all manner of hard and heavy objects-his chair, a vase of copper flowers, a paperweight in the shape of an Ice Fields bear, an aged ax once bestowed on his father by the Aushenians-at the glass window that had so sorely embarrassed and betrayed his ego. It would not shatter into the cascade of shards he desired, but it cracked and chipped enough that he felt he had made his point. Whether the message was meant for the glass itself, for someone who would later view it, or for himself he did not consider. He took with him the meager entourage of officials, courtiers, and family members he had been able to maintain in the satrapy-only those so indebted to him that their silence was guaranteed. The Numrek whom he put behind him filled him with as much actual dread as he had feigned. As far as he could tell, few of his colleagues were even composed enough of mind to suspect that the governor himself had any hand in the misfortune befalling them. Indeed, as he ran through the Gradthic Gap he almost felt himself a fugitive in fear for his life.

Because of this Rialus arrived in Aushenia with all aspects of his deception in place. In hasty council with the realm’s king, Guldan, he told how the foreign invaders marched out of a squall of snow. He had been concerned for some time, Rialus claimed, by vague reports of movement as far north as the Ice Fields. This was why he had sent General Alain out to examine the territory and question the Mein brothers. He had not heard from him and therefore feared some mishap, but the actual attack had come as a complete surprise.

The Numrek, he said, had arrived in a massive horde, hulking creatures, hidden beneath furs and skins, armed with pikes twice a man’s height and with swords curved and weighted toward the tip. Many of them rode horned beasts, naturally armored creatures covered with hairy coats. They poured through Cathgergen’s gates before the alarm had even been sounded. They did not explain or announce themselves at all; they just commenced the killing, a merciless slaughter they went at with relish and ravenous glee, bellowing as they fought and dancing to the beat of an unseen drum.

None of this was far from the truth. The Numrek-his guests, as Maeander had called them-did arrive in a ravenous mob. Even though there was little military resistance to meet them, they still managed to find people to kill and did so with the glee Rialus described. He did not, of course, mention to Guldan that the entire Northern Guard had met their deaths in one monstrous trap. Instead, he claimed that the outnumbered troops of the guard fought in a frantic retreat, relinquishing one portion of the fortress and then another until all the remaining population stood cornered with their backs against the last granite wall of the place. It was only then, Rialus said, that he consented to parlay with whatever vile being led them.

“You looked their leader in the face?” Guldan asked. He had been a tall man in his youth. Even now, seated in his royal council chambers, stooped somewhat by stiffness in his back, he still had about him an air of natural nobility. His features were steady, although his voice trembled with a measure of trepidation. “What name does he go by?”

“Calrach,” Rialus said. “There have never been stranger creatures. There has been nothing like them in the Known World since the Ancients cast back the gods of Ithem-”

“You say they are gods?” one of Guldan’s aides interjected.

Rialus was taken aback for a moment. “Well, no. I just mean they are dreadful to look upon. Most alarming.”

As with so much in this strange charade, Rialus could speak for some time on this matter with complete honesty. Standing before the Numrek party he felt as if he were gazing through the warped glass of some window and into another age entirely, at beings whose clay had been fired in a different oven than terrestrial men, meant to inhabit another world, an older epoch. They were tall beings, at least three or four heads higher than normal, long of limb, shoulders wide and flat as if they wore some sort of square-edged yoke beneath the skin. They were black haired and bushy browed. For a time Rialus thought their skin had been powdered or painted, so pale was it. On stepping uncomfortably close to them, he saw that this was just their natural hue, a color like the ceremonial mixture of milk splattered with goat’s blood that the Vadayan drank at the new year. It was a thin membrane beneath which pulsed an intricate pattern of veins, all as clear to the eye as if they were drawn on paper and held up before a lamplight.

Calrach, their leader, showed his strength in the striated cords of muscle supporting his neck. Even his features had about them a fierce, tensile quality. His eyes were of a brown so dense as to appear solid black. His brows followed contours similar to those of regular men, but they protruded more prominently, crested high like sea waves just starting to spill over. They were pierced through by several thick silver rings, metal set deeply enough it must have punctured right through the bone. Rialus found it nearly impossible to keep his gaze on the man’s face. But as soon as his eyes moved on he could not resist turning them back, aghast each time that the creature continued to stare at him from behind the same frightening mask. He was a man, and yet he was not.

Rialus said that for a translator they used a Meinish scribe, a revelation greeted by shocked murmurs and gasps from his Aushenian audience. “Hanish Mein knows of this race?” Guldan asked.

Rialus guessed that he must, and then he continued. “Calrach offered no apology. No explanation or vindication. He simply said we had to leave. Cathgergen was ours no longer. The Numrek had been promised the city. He set me free so that others might learn of the enemy coming against them and be better prepared to offer sport.”

“Cathgergen was promised by whom?” an Aushenian aide asked.

Rialus shrugged his thin shoulders to his ears. “I do not know, but we were in no position to argue. He said that I should run to my people and tell them the end had come. They would hunt us for their amusement and roast us over spits.”

“You are not serious!” the king said. “Rialus Neptos, have you gone mad? The things you are saying are beyond belief.” The monarch seemed to lose his train of thought but found voice again by returning to his earlier question. “Have you gone mad?”

The governor could well imagine that he had. He could never have concocted such a thing in the normal course of his lying. Calrach had said just that. He had sat there, laughing with his generals, saying the vilest things as if Rialus had not been standing before him, as if a translator had not been whispering each word into the trembling man’s ear. He had to press his knees together to keep from spilling his bladder. Remembering the moment, Rialus felt a flush of envy toward those who had not yet seen what he had.

The Aushenians had more than a few questions for him. They knew they were the next obvious target, and they probed the exiled governor for further details, for his opinions and conjecture. Rialus warmed to the role of trusted adviser-such was all he ever really wished for. But behind this temptation to remain and be of genuine aid he could see both Maeander’s and Calrach’s countenances. These helped him to remain resolute. So Rialus explained to the Aushenians that his duty required that he travel to Alecia. Guldan released him, sending him with the grandiose message that whatever evil intent this horde brought would be met first by the soldiers of Aushenia. Such high notions! Rialus thought. But like so many high notions they were of no more weight than the expelled air that carried them. Rialus was in no doubt that Aushenia would fall within a fortnight, a month at most. This assessment, of course, he kept to himself.

Rialus left the kingdom aboard a vessel from the monarch’s fleet, watching the bustle of military preparations on the receding shoreline. He was pleased with himself, an emotion that filled him almost to bursting on landing at the capital. He had pined for a villa on the western hills of Alecia since he first saw the spot on a brief visit fifteen years before. Alecia: to him it was the real center of the Acacian empire, the beating heart from which everything of worth in the world radiated. He loved the very idea of the place, the wealth it controlled, the pleasures it offered, the power it wielded, the limitless maze of intrigue, the clandestine couplings. He could barely grasp the dense complexity of the city’s quadrants. No matter. Rialus had long believed that he would thrive inside the central city’s shimmering pale walls, heated by the sun, draped in hanging vines, and fragrant with only sweet smells.

It was a pity, then, that he arrived within Alecia’s gates a traitor to the people he so adored. He tried not to dwell on this, and he was largely successful at fixing his thoughts only on the bounty finally within his grasp. He had, as he earlier professed to Maeander, allies within the capital who shared his desire to see the wealth of the city redistributed. Some were members of the Neptos family, but many others had been nurtured by his agents at clandestine meetings, people who met in small groups and who scarcely knew of the other pockets of people likewise being groomed. He had a promise to keep. He did not shrink from the blood others would spill on his behalf, just as long as he might finally receive some portion of the rewards he had long deserved. In the first few days in Alecia Rialus was a man with two faces. His public face cried tears of grief at the coming war. Privately his eyes scanned the villas above the city for a suitable new home. True to his long-held belief, it appeared the Giver would indeed reward her worthies.