Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Hanish lay a long time without moving, aware every second of the body pressed against his. He did not want to wake her, to have to talk and smile and begin the day with a lover’s platitudes. At least that was how he explained it to himself. Better to minimize how good it was to feel her naked contours in the places they touched. Better not to fully admit how right it felt to have the curls of her hair entwined in his fingers. He knew that traces of her would cling to him in many ways. This pleased him, but it was better not to acknowledge that at some level he held still so that he could absorb more and more of her into his skin. He would taste her all day on his tongue, in the corners of his mouth, as a scent off his own body that he would catch in the air as he turned his head. He would have liked not to have thought about all these things, but he could think of nothing else.

No woman before Corinn Akaran had thrust herself so deeply into every conscious moment of his existence. Since that night at Calfa Ven she was never truly out of his mind. He refused to put a word to the emotion he felt for her, but this did not mean he didn’t sense the word-vague and sentimental as it was-lurking in the air between them. She had been shy that first night, unsure of herself, coy with her body and all the more attractive for it. Her reticence was short-lived, though. It seemed that if she was going to give herself, she wanted to do so completely, with abandon. Her mouth in kissing him was driven by a hunger that stunned him, her lips and tongue and teeth all devouring him at once. It almost felt like she had conquered him, instead of the other way around. A disquieting thought.

It was remarkable how much it elated him to have her near. When she was not near, he either actively thought of her or moved around nagged by a feeling of unease. He was neglecting his companions. He knew that they felt slighted. Considering their fragile egos, he should not go long without finding ways to praise and acknowledge them, but the very thought of it seemed tiresome. Nobody else seemed as interesting as Corinn. No other face gave him such a feeling of well-being to look upon. No one listened to him as she did. With nobody else did such mundane pastimes as archery, which they spent hours at, become sure pleasures. She was so much better at it than he was. For some reason this fact tickled him like a joke of his own devising.

What had he been thinking when he began this? He’d said he would keep the princess close, to watch over her and make sure she was there if the Tunishnevre needed her. So when did that effort become this swirl of emotion? It was dangerous; he knew that. His thoughts were not focused and clear as they had always been before. Just the day previous, he had been stunned to realize he’d been asked a question that he had not heard at all. A circle of faces stared at him, concern and surprise on their features. He was not fully himself, right down to the fact that he would not and could not do away with the thing that weakened him. He should shove her back into her place. He should cut the affection between them with public, bladed wit. Corinn was, after all, easy to insult. She was quick to rile. A few comments poking fun at her now would send her into flaming anger, which would be a better thing than the situation he now found himself in.

But he simply could not. Why should he have to? Consider all the things he’d accomplished in his life. All the gains he’d won for his people. He’d conquered the Known World! Even now the Tunishnevre wound down from the Methalian Rim, only weeks away from their deliverance. It was his successes that made it possible for Maeander to push his search for the other Akaran girl out to Vumu. If he found her, they’d have the blood they needed from a second source. Corinn need not bleed, need not die. Considering all these things, why should he deny himself love?

Oh. There was that word! The very fact that he formed such a sentence in his head prompted him to rise. He peeled himself away from the princess, really not wanting to wake her now, not wishing to have to speak. It took ages to pull his arm, clammy with their mingled moisture, from under her neck.

Dressed a little later, straight backed in a thalba and looking perfectly at home within his icy composure, Hanish read the letters his secretaries brought him in his office. The first was from the log Haleeven kept. He was meticulous in his entries, detailed and rigorous and honest. Because he received such correspondence at least twice a week, Hanish had followed every step of the Tunishnevre transport. Not one of those steps had been easy. Just getting them out of their burial slots had been an ordeal. The chamber had been built to house them indefinitely. The original architects had not considered that the ancestors might someday be removed. They were crammed in close together, stacked high in honeycombed alcoves.

Haleeven had all manner of ramps and pulleys set up. It was an awkward business in the small space. It would not have been easy in the best of circumstances to wring from the workers the necessary level of care and precision, but it was especially hard with the lot of them nervous about the seething, incorporeal presence all around them. One night nearly fifty of the conscripted laborers fled from their makeshift camp outside the gates of Tahalian. Each and every one of them had to be hunted down. They were then punished in ways that served as considerable deterrents to any others with similar notions.

Keeping the workers in line; wrapping, housing, and transporting the ancestors; flattering the priests; maintaining roads softened to mush by the spring thaw; driving forward through swarms of ravenous insects; negotiating the steep descent from the Rim down to the Eilavan Woodlands: each task provided myriad challenges to Haleeven’s abilities. Now, at last, they were making their way through the woodlands and into the farmlands that would lead them to the coast. The hardest portion was behind them, although in his dispatch Haleeven cautioned that the going would be slow. They were on paved roads now, but they could hardly move any faster for fear of the jarring effects on the ancestors. Their frailty required gentle handling, as much so now as ever.

There were several other pieces of correspondence as well. One was from the warden who looked after the island land outside the palace and lower town. He claimed that the acacia trees, which he had faithfully sawed close to the roots, were managing to sprout anew. They were hardier trees than they’d thought. They’d never really died, apparently, and it would be an ongoing effort on his part if he was to keep the trees from returning.

Another missive was marked with Sire Dagon’s seal. He requested an audience. Request, was how it was written, and yet the leagueman named the time later that day with such an air of finality that it was more like a demand. Fine, Hanish thought. It was about time the League of Vessels reported to him. Whether that was Sire Dagon’s intention for the meeting or not, Hanish decided he would make it the focus.

Hanish was always surprised by the look of leaguemen. The fact that they were so thin and fragile looking sat uneasily beside their demeanor of complete calm, unchallengeable control. Sire Dagon wore a head cap ringed with bands of gold. His gaunt features were as pallid as ever. His neck seemed longer than it had been the last time they met, but Hanish assumed this was a trick of his own eyes.

They bowed to each other, and Sire Dagon took a seat. He collapsed his body into it and exhaled a fatigued breath. He slipped a hand inside his robe and drew it out, holding a short length of a mist pipe. It looked to be of blue glass, with a small bowl and the thinnest tendril of a mouthpiece. He flipped the lid from the bowl with one of his long fingernails and checked the packed material. It smoldered instantly, as if it had either been lit already or had sparked to life as the latch opened. He said, “I would offer you a smoke, but I doubt you could handle this purity.”

Hanish cocked his head and straightened it, mouth wrinkling enough to convey his respectful disdain for the drug. “I know too little of how the league is responding to the attack on the platforms. You must fill me in.”

The leagueman waited long enough before speaking to demonstrate that he did so at his leisure, not at Hanish’s command. He began by reiterating in vague terms that the losses on the platforms were manifold, creating problems both now and for well into the future. Those further problems the league would deal with as appropriate. For today there was the immediate issue that they had been made late in delivering a shipment of quota to the Lothan Aklun. It was not just time that was at issue, however. The blasts and subsequent fires on the platforms had burned the warehouses in which the quota was stored before transport. The area for this was quite a large complex of buildings, a miniature metropolis, really. During the resulting chaos, the product-as he referred to the slave children-rioted. They swarmed to other sections of the platforms. They began spreading the fires with them, running through the lanes with torches smeared in pitch. The Ishtat Inspectorate squelched the uprising, but not before the entire platform verged on destruction. In the end they had to cut loose the warehouse unit and drag it away to burn itself out. All the product was destroyed. An entire shipment.

“You should have told me this before,” Hanish said.

Sire Dagon drew on the pipe. He exhaled a cloud of powdery-blue smoke and said with a detached air, “We don’t consider league affairs to be your concern.”

“It’s all my concern. When have our interests not been aligned?”

The leagueman fixed a stare on Hanish that might have been angry, though it was hard to read emotion on the emaciated configuration of his features. “The league is a commercial venture. To us, everyone is an adversary, no one more so than our rich clients. I am surprised you haven’t realized this by now.”

Hanish had realized such things long ago. The league had weathered the war on calm waters and emerged at the far end of it in a better position than ever, with little apparent concern about the fate of the Akarans, with whom they had dealt for twenty-two generations. This had once seemed a clever boon for his own interests. Now their lack of loyalty troubled him. Better not to show it, though. Instead, he mused, “I don’t suppose the raiders intended such an outcome. The common lore is that they’re fighting against organized tyranny. They wish to free slaves, not incinerate them.”

“Such are the unconsidered consequences of violent action masked by ideology. The innocent take the brunt of it. It’s always been that way and always will be that way.” He scowled at the nuisance of such things. “We will deal with the raiders soon enough. No force is better suited to deal with this than the Ishtat Inspectorate. When we find the raiders, we’ll squash them for good.”

Hanish motioned with his finger that he wished to pose a question. “When you find them? I thought you had spies on every rock rising out of the Gray Slopes.”

“We do, but since their attack on the platforms the group led by Spratling has vanished.”

“Is that so?”

Sire Dagon glanced at Hanish, checking the tone of the question against his facial expression. He placed his thin lips on his pipe, inhaled, and held the vapors in his chest a moment. “What the league needs now is to immediately replenish what we’ve lost. To that end we have devised a plan to take the units from the coastal city of Luana, north of Candovia. We’ll recoup the loss in a single action.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ll take the units from Luana. We’ll arrive under cover of night, subdue the place, and leave with the product we need.”

“The children you need,” Hanish clarified. “Which is how many?”

Sire Dagon answered flatly, “Two thousand.” Before Hanish could respond, he continued, explaining that there was a festival in the region that brought the population together. Children, in particular, gathered in the city to celebrate the return of spring. It pulled them in from all the neighboring villages and towns. It would not be a perfect venture. It would be hard to find children up to their normal standards. Perhaps they would have to accept some out of the optimal age range. But they believed it was the preferred remedy to the problem.

When he was finished, Hanish sat staring at him. Two thousand? Among those people such a number would mean almost every child in the region. He felt like bridging the space between them and smacking Dagon’s bony face for such a number. Two thousand? It went against everything the established quota system guaranteed. It unmasked the barbarity of the whole thing in a way they might not recover from.

For a time he sat massaging his temples. He thought of Corinn. He would tell her all about this later. He would look in her face and listen to her response and gain some measure by which to weigh his own feelings. That would be good. It grew harder and harder to gauge the effect his decisions had on the world. She would help.

“You know,” he said, speaking through an exhaled breath, “some have argued that the league has outlived its usefulness. Some say you take too much and give too little.”

Sire Dagon sneered. “What learned adviser whispered that in your ear?”

Hanish ignored the question. “You expect me to allow you to take an entire generation from those people? I cannot. I will not. The provinces are tense enough already. What nation in the Known World won’t see such an action as a threat to them? They’d be outraged. It could be the spark that ignites all manner of unrest. No, you must find some other way. The world still needs to be repopulated, not harvested.”

Sire Dagon flipped his pipe closed and stuffed it away. After contemplating the chieftain for a moment, he said, “I’ve not been clear on something, Hanish. The orders have already been given. The raid, in all likelihood, occurred yesterday. I am here as a courtesy, so that you need not be surprised when the news reaches you. Scowl at me all you like, Hanish. Threaten me. Fume at me. Reach across the space between us and throttle my neck if you want to. Stab me with the blade at your waist. I’m entirely at your mercy. Just know that if you do so you’re like the ant that bites a man’s little toe. You bite one moment, the next you’re squashed. You rule the Known World at the pleasure of the League of Vessels. Haven’t you realized that yet? And the revolt you fear has already begun. It didn’t take our actions to start it. Look to the provinces, Hanish. Look to Talay and put your ear to the ground and hear the name those people are murmuring with more and more urgency. You’ll see you have enough problems to attend to. Leave us to our business. And know that whatever revolt is coming is nothing compared to the risk of angering the Other Lands.”

“So you do fear someone,” Hanish said. “You insult me, put me in the place you believe I should occupy, but the Lothan Aklun you fear.”

Sire Dagon had risen to his feet, ready to depart, but something in what Hanish said softened him. The look he fixed on the chieftain was almost kind. “You understand so little of the way the world works. It’s not the Lothan Aklun we fear. The Lothan Aklun are not so different from us of the league except that their wealth surpasses ours. The ones we have reason to fear live just beyond the Lothan Aklun. It’s they that the Lothan trade with, just as you trade with us.”

The last few moments had introduced too much information for Hanish to grasp at once. He was not sure which thing to question first, and he felt an almost adolescent need not to show his surprise. He cast his voice with a tone of disinterest, as if the question were not particularly important to him. “What are these people called?”

“The Auldek,” Sire Dagon said, after weighing for a moment whether he should answer. “You’ve never set eyes on one of them and you never need to. Knowing too much about them would only keep you awake at night. Yes, even you, Chieftain. But believe me, Hanish, on the day that they decide it’s worth their effort to set their sights on us-to punish, to reap the products themselves, even out of simple curiosity-on that day the world you love ends forever. Only the League of Vessels keeps the world in balance.”

Hanish stopped the leagueman from departing. “Don’t go,” he said. He bit down his pride. “I…thank you for telling me about Luana. I understand that the league must act decisively in these tumultuous times. I won’t fault you for it. It would be easier, though, if you sat with me a little longer and told me more about the things I don’t know. Better that you share with me than that I work against you. Don’t you agree?”

Sire Dagon considered this. He said nothing, but he did lower himself back into his seat and pat his pocket to locate his pipe.