Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

For Leeka Alain it was no easy thing to come off the mist. There were days of visions. Nights of horrific dreams. Pains shot through his body with such electric force that he went rigid and trembling on his cot. At times he had glimpses of the world as he had seen it during the raging fever he had endured in the Mein. But beyond all of this he would remember the delirium as one of consumption, a nightmare during which he was simultaneously being consumed and consuming himself. At times it felt like his body writhed with thousands of sharp-jawed worms, serrating their way through every portion of his flesh. What was worse, though, was that the worms were part of him. Leeka himself was both the devourer and the devoured. He ate himself, and he was eaten.

Throughout all of this the former chancellor stayed at his side. From the first night when Thaddeus came upon him in the dark, he had been there to aid him, a strict doctor, nurse, jailer, and confidant all at once. Thaddeus all but sealed him in his hovel of a cabin in the hills above that backwater town. He bound his wrists and feet to the bed, wrapped a wide strip of cloth around his midsection, and sat beside him, explaining that he had a great need for Leeka’s services. He could not even begin to discuss it with him, however, until Leeka’s mind and body were free of addiction. Leeka railed at him, confused as he was and frightened by the turmoil building in his body.

At one point when his vision had cleared enough for him to see his caretaker looking down upon him, he said with complete certainty that he was dying. This was not an ordeal he could live through.

“Do you see this?” Thaddeus asked, stretching out his fingers to reveal a barb fastened to the tip of his little finger. “This pin has been dipped in a poison so potent it kills almost before its victim can feel the prick of it. Similar to that which I used on you in its quickness, save that this one is deadly. I will leave this here beside you. If it is true that you cannot live without your mist and wine, then use it to take your own life. Or, if you are too selfish for that, come upon me in sleep and kill me. Rob me of what coins I have in my bags and run away. Let the fate of the world rest in Hanish Mein’s hands. Stake no claim to greatness. All of this is within your power if you choose. If you kill me, it will not even be a crime; it would be a gift. You see, I have many demons to face as well. We could be cowards together.”

The man tugged the weapon from his finger and placed it on the stool he had sat on. He untied his patient’s arms and legs, loosened the sash across his torso, and then moved away. Leeka was quite sure that Thaddeus, no matter his wisdom, would never really know how close he had come to picking up that pin and sinking it into his neck. He wanted to so very badly. He fantasized each action, each motion of gathering the man’s coins, each stride down to the village, all the transactions he would need to go through before he got his lips once more around a pipe and inhaled. For the life of him he was not sure what stopped him.

The next morning he awoke crying. He knew without doubt that he was alone in the world. He blamed no one but himself for it. The fate of nations may have pushed and shoved his life, but it was his own fault that he had never properly loved a woman, never fathered children, never looked at the world with fear and hope for his grandchildren. If he had done any of these things he might have made better sense out of living. He could not fathom how he had lived for so many years without realizing the sums of his existence were destined to add up to naught. Perhaps he should use the release of that poisoned pin after all-on himself.

“I can see you are not entirely done feeling sorry for yourself,” Thaddeus said, interrupting his thoughts.

Leeka rolled over to see the man sitting once more on that stool, studying him, a hand outstretched with a cloth dangling from it. Leeka took it up and wiped his face, aware that he should be embarrassed but not quite feeling it. Thaddeus asked him if he was hungry enough to eat; Leeka heard himself say that he was.

“Good,” the other man said. “That is the right answer. I have made some soup. Just vegetables and herbs I found in the hills, some mushrooms. But I think you will like it. Share it with me, and then we can talk properly about the work I have for you to do.”

He would think many times later how strange a thing it is that one moment a person can wish for death, only to be distracted into life by a few kind words, by a kerchief extended, by simple food to fill an empty stomach. These things, as much as anything else, brought Leeka through. After that morning it was never really so hard to refuse the mist. He did have pangs of his old hunger, certainly. He had them daily, hourly almost. He had to decide again and again not to succumb. But he found he had the power to refuse. The fact that Thaddeus gave him a mission lent him the strength.

He left his hillside hovel with a mind full of instructions, with his hopes renewed in the most unexpected of ways. He bore an Acacian sword at his hip, a parting gift from the chancellor. In earlier years a former soldier of the empire would have drawn attention walking about armed, but the world had changed somewhat from the first years of Hanish’s rule. The resistance had been vanquished. The thinly spread Meinish troops paid little attention to individuals, reserving their energies to protecting the security of Hanish’s rule and the commerce that sustained it.

Leeka walked, loving the pumping of air in his lungs, the ache of his legs. By the end of his first week of trekking, he had found his old discipline again. He intentionally chose routes up and over the harder passes, trudging up scree or talus slopes, each forward stride halved by the loose matter sliding beneath his feet. One afternoon while resting in the saddle between two peaks, his legs cramped. His hamstrings clenched and heaved, the pain of them all enveloping. Leeka tilted his face to the sky, crying with joy. He was getting his body back.

He would never forget the exhilaration he felt on top of a peak near the western crest of the Senivalian Mountains, around him nothing but the clouds above, below thousands of pinnacles rising all around, each sharp as wolverbear’s teeth, each like a rebellious finger pointed toward the heavens in accusation. He danced himself through the Tenth Form, that of Telamathon as he fought the Five Disciples of the god Reelos. He had felt no purer moment in his life. It was a choreographed tribute, an act of connection with everything that he ever had been and everything he hoped he might be again. He may have been mistaken, perhaps delusional, light-headed from the altitude, vainglorious; he was not sure, but he had believed, as he slashed and swirled, leaped and spun, that for a moment all those mountainous protrusions paused to watch him.

And then, all too soon, he stumbled out of the mountains and rolled down to the shore of the Gray Slopes. He shouldered his way into the bustle of trade, commerce, and human treachery in the seaside towns there. Few faces looked upon him with kindness. All measured him for risk or opportunity. There was, he felt, a menace hanging in the fabric of the air, different from anything he had felt during Leodan’s reign. He was accosted again and again by peddlers of mist, all assuring him of the quality of their product, its purity, its direct origin from source, uncut, clean. Leeka was not sure if something in his face or demeanor made him a target for such people, or whether such was just the traffic of the world now. A few times he clamped his fist down on the hands of pickpockets exploring his garments. He was twice accosted in bars for insults he had not been aware of giving. Once he brandished his sword when cornered by three youths in a back alley. He sliced the air with the few quick strokes it had taken Aliss to dispatch the Madman of Careven. They had sense enough to back away, and he was grateful for it.

Thaddeus had given him the name of a man to seek out in a particular coastal town. He found the man and convinced him Thaddeus had sent him. The man passed him into the care of another, who fed him and told him what he could, who helped him fight back the mist hunger and sent him forward with a message to another person. Thus he came to understand that there was a hidden resistance at work in the world. The old chancellor was part of something larger than himself. Thanks to him, so was Leeka.

Throughout all of this he interviewed anyone he could as casually as he could. He knew of the person he searched for by a single name. He uttered it sparingly. He framed his queries differently depending on whom he spoke to. He passed one full month and much of a second in this manner, getting no closer to his goal, hearing little that helped him but much that fired his desire to push on. Still, when a break came he at first did not recognize it for what it was or welcome it.

A woman approached him in a tavern in a fishing port whose name he had not even asked. She carried a drink in one hand. She smiled at him and was young and attractive in a jaded enough way that he took her to be a prostitute. When she spoke, however, she struck with surprising directness. “Why are you asking after a raider?”

Leeka answered with one of his prepared responses. He was intentionally vague. He alluded to a business proposal, to inside information that he possessed, to the prospect that he and this raider might benefit each other in a variety of ways, all of them too delicate to reveal to anybody but the young raider himself.

“Hmm,” she said. She nodded her head as if this satisfied her. She took a sip of her drink and then, without any sort of warning, she pursed her lips and spat at him, spraying his face and eyes with a burning liquid. He was blinded. Hands fell upon him, more than just the woman’s. Suddenly it seemed every person in the tavern had lain in wait for him. He was battered by fists and blunt objects; his weapons stripped from him; his head beaten, beaten, beaten against a wall until he lost consciousness.

When he awoke he knew he was at sea. He felt the spray against his face. His body was wet. Drenched, actually. Intermittently dunked beneath the surface of the sea. He was, he realized, strapped rigid against a board that had been nailed to the prow of a ship. His arms and legs and torso were bound tight, and at times his body cut the ship’s course through a seething green sea. He was a living prow figure.

And it was as such that he arrived at Palishdock, in a less than desirable condition, with a great deal less secrecy than he wished, very little of his stature obvious to the motley throng of brigands that gathered to gape at him. The crew that lowered him to the pier was not over-careful about it. They left him facedown againt the sun-bleached beams for some time. When they finally carried him to shore they simply lifted the entire plank and walked with him, the ground rising and falling beneath him with their strides. They dropped him in the hot sand but only for a moment. He felt the entire board tilted upward and leaned back against a building of some sort. Thus he waited, bound, bruised, sand dusted.

The young woman he had taken for a prostitute was there, along with the host of thugs that had so easily beaten and bound him. They leaned about, as casual and lackadaisical as any street vagrants, until two others stepped out from one of the makeshift structures of the place: a young man and a large man. The young man did not look pleased. He conferred with the ones who had brought Leeka, and then studied him from a distance, seemingly considering whether to address him or turn away. The large man leaned heavily on a cane. His skin was pallid and his frame, though massive, sagged like a sack half full. He watched Leeka without speaking, just stared at him fixedly.

Eventually, the young man walked forward through the sand. He plucked the dagger from the sheath on his thigh and held it between himself and Leeka, not exactly a threat but not far from it. “Who are you, and why were you asking about me?”

Looking into the young man’s handsome face, nearly breathless at the prospect of the answer, Leeka asked, “You are the one they call Spratling?”

“I answer to that name. What of it?”

Leeka wished his lips were not so swollen and stiff, crusted with dried blood and salt. He wished his puffy eye was not obscuring his gaze and that he had a drink of water to loosen the words in his throat. But none of these things was about to change, so he said what he had planned to.

“Prince Dariel Akaran,” he began, “I rejoice to set eyes-”

“Why do you call me by that name?” the young man cut in, flaring with confused anger.

To Leeka’s relief, another answered for him. The large man hobbled his great bulk forward. “Calm yourself, lad. It’s my doing. It’s my doing.”