Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

It took all of Corinn’s concentration to keep her gaze elevated above the gore that littered the palace. She tried to keep her eyes vacant, uninterested, letting the bodies on the floor; the blood-splattered walls; and the strewn, shattered debris remain vague, only defined enough so that she could navigate through them. She focused on mundane objects in the distance, murals at the ends of hallways, doorframes, particular bricks singled out on the walls. Soon she planned to lock herself in her room until the cleanup was complete, until every sign and sight of the carnage she had orchestrated was scrubbed from the floors and walls and washed out of fabrics. She would send Rialus to the lower town to conscript the Acacian peasants huddled there for the task. She would pay them with freedom, with privilege, with her love and thanks. She would infuse them with pride in the Acacian Empire again. There would be a great deal to do, but these things would all come later. First, she had to walk these halls and complete one more task.

She found Rialus waiting for her. Earlier, when a Numrek soldier returned to inform her that the palace was controlled, Rialus had gone before her to assess the situation. Now he looked queasy. His tongue was quick enough, though, and he began talking before she had even reached him, expressing his amazement at how easily the palace had fallen. Her plan had worked perfectly. The palace was under her power already. The lower town was shut tight and trembling. There might be a few Meins hiding in the servants’ areas and in the town, but the Numrek were hunting them down door to door. The priests protecting the Tunishnevre had proven quite stubborn. They had clung to the sarcophagi until they were ripped from them and killed on the spot. Several noble families were caught trying to sail from the ports, their yachts piled high with all they could carry. A few boats had managed to get away. The Numrek, not being a seafaring people, did not-

Corinn cut him off. “Where is he?”

Rialus did not need to ask whom she meant. “In the ceremonial chamber, as you ordered.”

As the two walked, Rialus rattled on, detailing what he had learned about the battle. Much of it had gone just as the Numreks imagined. Their surprise appearance had created instant chaos. The first killed had been two Meinish women whose heads had twirled in the air before they had so much as voiced their alarm. Most of what had followed was pure butchery. Meinish guards fought bravely enough, he supposed, but they were cut down in ones and twos. Few of them had managed to organize a cohesive response. There had been a large skirmish in the main upper courtyard, where the palace battalion had focused their efforts. The Numrek had welcomed the sport of it.

Hanish had been in the ceremonial chamber when the attack began, but he had rushed out to respond. He and a band of Punisari held the lower courtyard right to the last, trying to block the entrance to the chamber. The Numrek had surrounded them, pushed in on them with their greater numbers, working at them like so many butchers slaughtering ornery beasts. The Punisari had not made it easy. They were Hanish’s best men, lean and muscled, capable of lopping free even a Numrek’s meaty arm. Each of them had blocked and struck at peak speed, blurs of motion that betrayed no fatigue, many wielding two swords. They had fought in a circle formation, drawing closer together as they fell. None of them had made even the slightest overture of surrender. Hanish himself spoke to his men the entire time. Few Numrek, however, know any but their own language. None could tell Rialus what the chieftain had said to his men as they, and everything they had ever fought for, died.

“Pity,” Rialus said. “I’d have liked to have heard what he made of the situation. Bit of a surprise, I imagine. Not what he had planned when he woke up…”

The last two remaining with Hanish had been the hardest to get rid of. They had reached a pitch of fighting that made it almost impossible to land a strike. One was eventually taken down after his leg was sliced off at the knee. He fell and, trying to right himself with the use of his blood-spurting stump, he became easy prey. The other got stabbed through the back of the head with a Numrek lance, an injury that, by the look of it, cut his spine and rendered his body instantly immobile.

Hanish, after this, had done his best to fight to the death. At some point he had realized that the Numrek were not trying to kill him. He had stopped fighting, let his blade droop and rotated it in slow circles, waiting. When none attacked, he pulled his Ilhach dagger and would have slit his belly, had the Numrek not grappled with him first. This also must have been a strange sight, a horde of the burly-armed soldiers dropping their weapons and struggling to pummel into submission a man who was intent on ending his own life-this when they were covered in gore from a few hours of blood work themselves. Rialus admitted that the Numrek had ill treated Hanish, but he left them little choice. He still lived. He was bound as she ordered and awaited her in the chamber.

When Rialus seemed to have exhausted his knowledge of the day, he turned and studied Corinn’s profile. “Princess, this is a work of genius, of simplicity. Once it is cleaned up, the world will bow to you and your beauty. They’ll forget the bloodshed here.” He hesitated a moment, his tongue flicking out to moisten his lips. “Of all the surprises you’ve devised, none is more of a revelation than you yourself are. I pray you never find reason to disfavor me.”

Something about this praise touched her. She felt a flush around her eyes, an itch that suggested tears were not far behind. She spoke quickly. “Thank you, Rialus. You have been a great help to me. I will not forget.”

Corinn left the ambassador standing in the open air outside the passageway into the chamber that now housed the Tunishnevre. She steadied herself a moment and drew out the one weapon she now carried. She walked past the Numrek, milling about the entrance, and into the dark corridor with a crisp step unconsciously modeled on Maeander’s stone-chipping gait. As the chamber opened up around her, she felt the seething incorporeal life in the air. She tried to ignore it, moving through the huge space of the place with no outward sign of discomfort. It took great effort. If air could scratch like claws, the air in this room would have shredded her. If silent screams could consume flesh, she would have been eaten alive. All her instincts told her to turn and run. She did not. She cut her progress with the point of her chin. Pride, even in the face of the undead, now seemed of greatest importance to her.

Hanish hung suspended over the Scatevith stone. His arms were bound above him, secured at the wrists, and his head slumped forward as limp as a corpse’s. He was naked from the waist up, his chest ribboned with bruises and abrasions. A gash under his armpit dripped a stain of blood, like rust, stretching all the way down into his trousers. He was bound at the ankles also, in such a way that if he tried to move he would be able only to writhe in the air but not kick out. One of his feet jutted out at a strange angle, broken. Perhaps most horrible, though, was his hair. It had been hacked away by Numrek swords, leaving his pate uneven, mangy, his scalp exposed in some places.

Part of Corinn wanted to fly to him, to grasp him around the torso and lift his weight and find some way to get him down and to beg forgiveness. She wanted to search about on the ground for clumps of his straw-colored locks and stick them back in place. It seemed unfathomable that Hanish, the chieftain of the Known World, could be reduced to this state within the space of a few hours. Is this the way the world worked? The way she had the power to affect it?

As she approached, she tried not to let any of these questions or emotions show. This man would have killed her. Pride, she thought, despises uncertainty. She began speaking as soon as his head lifted and his eyes found her. “I had thought to enter here with a bow and a quiver of arrows,” she said. “I thought I might have you nailed to the wall, splayed out as a target. You recall how good a shot I am, don’t you? I would have had you name the spots you wished me to place each arrow in.”

Blinking, Hanish seemed to have trouble seeing her. Drops of blood from his wrists speckled his forehead. He looked dazed, as if he might not be entirely conscious. But then he said, “One in my heart would have been enough.”

Corinn crooked her mouth, making it a knot that kept her emotions hidden.

“I never thought it before,” Hanish continued, “but I see now why you were so apt at archery. You kill best from a distance. You can shoot an arrow from hiding, from a safe place. I can see now why that sport suited you.”

A safe place? Corinn had never in her life found a safe place. She planned to, though. She planned to. She lifted the dagger and held it high enough for him to see. “And yet here I am with your blade. You are going to die on it.”

Hanish smiled, his teeth brown with blood. “So this is all your personal revenge? You were scorned, and because of it you ordered thousands killed. Do you know what that makes you? It makes you just like me, or perhaps worse than me.”

I am not like you, Corinn wanted to say. But she feared her voice might quaver around the words, suggesting things she did not wish suggested. She stayed to her planned script. “Before you die you should know all the ways in which you’ve failed. For one, you have lost everything to me, your concubine. Everything. I’ve cut out the heart of your empire. Even if your dead brother’s army defeats my dead brother’s army, they cannot change what I’ve done here.”

She felt herself warming to her words. Saying them to him made her feel better than she had in many years. She climbed the granite steps up onto the Scatevith stone, feeling the ceremonial import of the platform, the honeycombed ranks of the Tunishnevre all around her, their energy as palpable in the air as electricity. It was hard not to feel that the sarcophagi were going to begin opening one by one, the dried corpses in them animated by their own hatred.

As she spoke she studied the bowl carved in the stone that Hanish had planned to drench with her blood. “Already there are boats sailing the sea in all directions, each of them a herald of the change. Messengers will fly from here within the hour. They will tell the entire Known World that Hanish Mein is dead and that Acacia is once again in Akaran hands. Also, your Tunishnevre will never walk the earth again. If that was what you lived your life for, know now that you failed at it.”

Hanish sucked his teeth and then spat, a halfhearted gesture that left a stain of saliva on his chin. “I should have chained you the moment I heard what your sister did to Larken. I should have realized Akaran women were deadlier than the men.”

She moved closer, the dagger held high enough, near enough, that it was a threat to his bruised skin, no more than a quick slash away from his ribs and muscles stretched taut by his bondage. “Is that why you Meins don’t let your women fight?” she asked. “Are you afraid of them?”

“I should have chained you,” Hanish repeated, fixing his gray eyes on hers. “But I loved you too much. That thing-love-is what I should have feared. Now we both see why.”

“You cannot win me over now,” Corinn said, though the words did not come out with the clipped tone she wished for. Her hands were sweating. The dagger grip was slick against her palm. She wanted to put it down, just for a second, so that she could wipe the moisture from her skin. She thought, How can I even now feel something for this man?

The life seemed to be draining out of Hanish with each breath. He let his head drop forward again, a low, ruminative moan reverberating in his throat. He asked slowly, with pauses so that he could inhale or exhale, “Would you kill me now? Do that for me. My ancestors have things they wish to say to me…directly. Never let the past enslave you, Corinn. The dead seek to burden us…to twist our lives as badly as they twisted theirs. Don’t let them.” With that he fell silent. His breathing came regular but labored, his lungs struggling against the pressure his hanging body put on them. It was not clear if he was conscious anymore.

The knife, held high, shone with the light from the few unbroken oil lamps. She raised it and looked beyond it at her former lover’s chest, at his neck, at his muscled abdomen. Where does one stick a knife? No place seemed right. Each and every portion of him was too familiar. She had held that chest close to her too often, brushed her lips over that skin, and listened to that heart beating within that cage of ribs. In a way, she knew, a piece of that heart beat inside her, small, quiet, growing. There was no place on him into which she could thrust this blade. Instead, she did something else, something she had not been aware she’d even considered an option.

She pressed the honed edge of the dagger into the palm of her other hand. It cut the flesh easily down to the bone, without any real pain. Removing the blade, she clenched the wounded hand into a fist, held it up for a moment. Crimson oozed between her fingertips, inching tentatively over her hand. “Do you know what?” she whispered. She wanted Hanish to hear her, but hoped he would not look up, hoped that the words would enter his unconscious mind, unsure that she could say them into his eyes. “I am carrying your baby. Can you believe that? You’ve fathered the future of Acacia.” She bent and pressed her bloody palm into the receiving basin, leaving a blurred handprint that the stone sucked up like a sponge. “I will raise this one well, as an Acacian. Whether that is a joy or a punishment is up to you. But neither you, nor your ancestors, will have any say in this child’s fate.”

She could not be sure if she heard Hanish call to her as she turned and descended from the stone. She might have, but the air was too filled with other sounds. Who knew if she was supposed to have intoned certain words in a certain way? Perhaps she should have spoken the language written in The Song of Elenet, the hidden volume that she would begin to study soon. Surely, she did not do it quite right. But she did the thing that mattered. She offered her blood, willingly, in forgiveness. In the first moments afterward, the air filled with a thousand cries that she might or might not have heard, protests from those ancient undead at being denied their second chance at life. But it did not last long. In their coffins, she sensed, those ancient bodies of Hanish’s ancestors finally gave up their long purgatory. They became dust, and the spirits within them rejoined the natural order of the world. They joined the mystery, no longer trapped outside it, no longer a threat to the living in any way.

When she stepped back into the sunlight, she found Rialus staring toward the south, transfixed enough that he did not note her approach. She followed his gaze. As her eyes adjusted to the glare of the late afternoon, she made out the seething clouds that fascinated him. There was a storm of some sort on the horizon. The heavens shuddered with the power of it, alive with color, flashing with what must have been bolts of lightning, though they were like nothing she had ever seen. It might have been an ominous sight, but the longer she stared, the more she resolved that whatever was happening out there was at a great, great distance. It was not going to affect them.

Reassured of this, she reached out and touched Rialus on the shoulder. He turned toward her, his face letting go of one set of questions and adopting another. Seeing the blood dripping from her hand, he asked, “Are you hurt?”

She said that she was not.

“It is done, Princess?”

“No,” she answered. “How could I kill the father of my child? If I do that, he will have brought me down to his level. He’ll have debased me. I just looked at him and knew that if I drew this blade through his flesh, I’d relive the moment over and over again for the rest of my life. I’d never be free of it. I’d see him in my child’s face. Do you understand? He would rule me, even in his death. So I could not do it.” She turned her eyes away from the small man’s, not liking the familiarity taking shape in them, surprised at how readily that confession had poured out of her. Enough of weakness. She said, “So instead, Rialus, you will do it. Here, use his own blade against him. I give this as a gift to you.”

Rialus took the weapon and stared at it, incredulous, the sliver of metal curved like a lean moon. He looked from it to her and then back to the blade again. He could have been a dealer in Meinish artifacts, so intently did his gaze drift over the lettering engraved in the collar and across the twisted metalwork of the guard and down the ridged contours of the handle. But Corinn, studying the slow evolution of thought behind his features, knew that his mind was not on the details of the weapon at all. He was rushing back through his long list of grievances against Hanish. He was recalling the ways he had been belittled, mocked, shunned over the years. He was thinking how powerless he had been and how much he yearned for revenge.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“Is he…secured?” Rialus asked.

Corinn said that he would give him no trouble. He was secured. He was waiting. Nodding, Rialus turned and moved toward the passageway. “Yes,” he said, just barely audible, “this I can do, Princess, if it is what you wish.” He walked with short, hesitant steps, a man dazed by an act of fortune so complete he had never imagined it and doubted it yet.

Once he was swallowed by the shadows, Corinn turned back to the churning chaos at play in the southern heavens. She had never seen anything like it. There was fury in it, but it was muted by distance. Of more note was the beauty of it: the way the high reaches seemed aflame with liquid fire, dancing with colors she could not even recall the names of. With colors that she was not sure she had ever seen before. She could not help feeling the display was meant for her, that it somehow marked the change in the world that she had just arranged. She wished that she felt more joy than she did, more relief, more solace, but something about the sight touched her with melancholy. She could not put her finger on it. She did make sure to refute what Hanish had said, though. He was wrong. She was not like him at all.

“I am better than you.” Corinn said this aloud, although there was nobody around her, nobody but herself to convince.

End of Book Three