The other lands

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A young league apprentice, Noval, sat waiting for Sire Neen among the plush chairs reserved for leaguemen in their council chambers. Several other officials and naval officers stood or sat nearby. With the exception of a few of Neen's assistants, all of them had newly arrived from the sailless clipper.

"It all went as planned?" Sire Neen asked as he stepped into the room.

"You saw the bodies," Noval said. He motioned toward a porthole with a lazy finger. "Up and down the archipelago it's the same thing."

Noval had not yet joined the higher ranks of the league and earned the title sire, but after this he likely would. Noval grinned, leaning back against his chair's cushions as if he might fall blissfully asleep. You'll need to learn to hide emotion like that, Sire Neen thought. He did not really begrudge him his happiness, though. In truth, he could barely contain his own enthusiasm.

"Every Lothan Aklun is a corpse now," said a captain, presumably the one who had piloted the clipper. "A feast for the crabs and sea worms."

Noval nodded and concluded, "Yes, it all went as planned. You, Uncle, are a genius."

Sire Neen pressed his lips together. As much as he wanted a share of the young man's satisfaction, he could not accept it all without a measure of doubt. "Nothing ever goes entirely as planned," he said. "Tell me it all and I'll judge."

Noval proceeded to describe what had transpired on the barrier isles over the last few days. Listening to the report, Sire Neen had to inhale deep breaths. His heart raced as if he were joyously running. Perhaps in the years to come it would be this feeling he relived during mist trances. Certainly, triumph was a sweeter pleasure than anything else he had yet experienced. The Lothan Aklun food for sea worms? Absolutely amazing. Could he truly believe it?

The Lothan Aklun had seemed invulnerable, proud, greedy. They were aloof in a manner most marked by their… well, by their simple denial of aloofness. He had met their agents on several occasions. Each time they dressed in loose wraps of white cloth that hung on their leanly muscled frames, always bare of foot. They were slight men and women, healthy looking and tanned. Sire Neen had always felt a knot in his abdomen when meeting them. His head tingled in a manner that made him want to flee. Why, it was hard to say.

They smiled and nodded and conducted their business with courteous efficiency. They never invited leaguemen beyond the docks at which they traded their goods, but nothing in their outward appearance indicated threat. They did not even seem to have guards watching over them. This fact alone made Neen's skin crawl as if with a thousand spiders. Who other than people so secure in their power-with unseen weapons ready to unleash-would act as if they gave no thought to it? That the Lothan Aklun had such an effect on him while outwardly feigning harmlessness had planted in him the first seed of personal animus toward them. This seed had found ready watering in the years since.

And now they were dead. Not so invulnerable after all, it seemed. Now everything that had been theirs belonged to the league. Sire Neen did not know exactly what that meant, but he longed to find out.

"You saw the clipper?" Noval asked. "The captain here has made a quick study of it. He can't explain it in the slightest, but I believe he's rather taken with the vessel. You should see him at the helm."

The captain did not deny it. "There is power in that ship like I've never felt before. It's inside the vessel itself, Sire. Truly amazing."

Inside the vessel itself, Sire Neen repeated to himself. So it's true. They had long known that the Lothan Aklun stole the life force from chosen quota children with a soul-catching device and then transferred the force into other bodies. But they had heard only rumors that the Lothan also managed to harness the life force to power inanimate objects like their ships. Now they had proof. And if this rumor was true, perhaps the others were as well, but these things could be explored in time. They had other business to see to.

"And have you made contact with the Auldek?" Sire Neen asked.

"Yeesss." Noval dragged the word out. "We have. I can't say that we've communicated all that effectively with them, though. They were somewhat agitated by our arrival. I'll leave it up to you to explain things to them fully. In any event, we've arranged for you to meet their clan leadership tomorrow. We should have the Numrek with us from the start. We mentioned them to the Auldek, but they didn't grasp what we were telling them. Are the Numrek well?"

"The brutes." Sire Neen blew a dismissive burst of air through his lips. "Who knows? I mean, yes, yes, I'm sure they're well. They've been bound in their cabins the entire voyage. They're alive and will likely be overjoyed to set foot on dry land again." He considered taking a seat, but his body tingled with too much energy to sit still. Instead, he paced, amazed at the situation he found himself in. It was all too perfect. He had been too modest in his aspirations; by the end of this he would be chief elder in his later years. The league would own everything that passed across the Gray Slopes, both what went out and what came in. He himself would be a deity while still in the prime of life.

This thought did, in fact, cause him to sit down. "So tomorrow I will broker a new trade agreement with the Auldek. Are they like the Numrek?"

Noval raised his shoulders. Dropped them. "Yes and no. I really can't tell you much about them. They are quite like the Numrek and also not that much like them at all. You should just see for yourself."

A bit casual in his mastery of details, Sire Neen thought. Youth. "Are they rich?"

Smiling, Noval said, "Rich enough. Rich and strange, which together bodes well for us."

"What more do we know about what becomes of the quota?"

"About what they do with them? Nothing. I saw Known Worlders in among the Lothan Aklun. We interrogated the few we captured. Peculiar creatures; they fought like trapped wildcats, though they were body servants, not warriors. Strangely loyal to their masters, they seemed. Quite a few of them died along with the Lothan Aklun, for no reason but blind loyalty. And the ones I saw among the Auldek…" He began to illustrate something, his fingers dancing before his face, but he dropped the effort. "Really, Uncle, you should see them for yourself. Don't let me spoil the amusement."

Sire Neen found all this too vague. He was about to say as much, but a commotion at the far door announced new arrivals. Several Ishtat guards jostled their way into the room, all of them focused on a single figure at their center: Prince Dariel. But not Prince Dariel as he had been a few moments ago on deck. The small interval of time between then and now had worked a transformation on him. His lips were swollen and raw. His nose puffy and leaking blood, which smeared across his face. Eyes teary with shock and pain and emotion. And anger. There was plenty of anger, too. He wrenched his body and head about, fighting the Ishtat. But they held him firmly. His hands were bound behind his back. One guard grasped him by a fistful of hair and steadied him. The most ignominious feature was a bit that had been shoved inside the royal mouth and fastened by straps that pressed against his cheeks and wrapped around the back of his head. He could breathe but not talk.

Sire Neen had forgotten the pleasure of running his tongue over his rounded teeth. Seeing Dariel reminded him of it and he indulged. "Oh, that looks most uncomfortable, Prince," he said, grimacing in a show of commiseration. "It looks as though you put up a fight. Commendable, I guess, but futile." He gestured with his fingers. The guards dragged the prince closer. "Look here, Noval, this is Prince Dariel Akaran."

Bowing his head, Noval said, "Honored to meet you, Your Highness."

"I left word for the Ishtat to bring him to us, but it seems he did not come willingly. Perhaps he thought he could fight his way through our entire Ishtat force. He might have thought his Marah would aid him. Alas. They won't." He dropped his voice and added, "We've… had to kill them."

Dariel's eyes bulged. He worked his lips and tongue, clearly wanting to speak, but the apparatus let nothing more than grunts and frustrated exhalations escape his mouth-that and the drool that slipped from the corners of his stretched lips. He began thrashing about again. The sight of him was almost too much for Sire Neen to bear with composure. To keep from showing his mirth, he fumbled in his breast pocket for his mist pipe.

He did not look up again until he had lit it and sucked a quick puff of the green smoke. Dariel hung panting, his gaze positively blazing with hatred. "I can see your thoughts," Sire Neen said. Despite the meaning of his words, his voice was syrupy sweet, playful. "They're right there in your eyes. You're thinking, How can he think he can offend an Akaran prince and not regret it later? You never were the brightest of your brood, were you? Aliver would not have trusted me for a moment. Corinn would have figured everything out by now and already be working to undo the damage. Mena, even bound as you are now, would likely have found some way to cut my head from my shoulders. Not you, though. You had a skill at treachery and murder-I'll grant you that-but I've always found you rather dull. You let your sister be master of the world you could have claimed. That lack of ambition mystifies me."

Sire Neen reached out as if to smooth a lock of the prince's hair back into place, but he was not really near enough and did not complete the gesture. For a moment he forgot how much he hated the prince. He felt something like warmth for him. "Should we explain things to you? There's no reason you shouldn't face your future with clear eyes." He gestured for one of his secretaries to vacate his seat. "Let the prince sit."

A kind offer, but one that took the guards a moment to convince the prince to accept. Once he was seated, held in place against the chair's cushions, Sire Neen began a casual discourse, one he punctuated with pauses to sip from his pipe. "As you can imagine," he said, "the league has attempted to gain intelligence about the Lothan Aklun for generations. They were annoyingly secretive, giving nothing, wanting nothing other than to trade mist for quota. That's all they wished of us. No more or less. We sent spies among them, but rarely heard back. Usually, they were lone individuals disguised as child slaves. They had orders-and the means-to kill themselves if discovered."

Neen pursed his lips. "Why did we spy on them? For the same reason that Edifus broke the jaw of any man who raised his voice to him. For the same reason that Tinhadin betrayed Hauchmeinish and exiled the Santoth. Because of the very same impulse that drove your sister Corinn to see Hanish bleed to death upon his ancestral Scatevith stone. Because they were competition, Prince. Because the world, not even the entire stretch of the Gray Slopes, was wide enough to contain our ambition. Why share trade with them when we could own it all ourselves?"

Noval said, "As an Akaran you should understand such thinking well."

Sire Neen slitted his eyes at the young man, not exactly a reprimand but nearly so. He did not yet feel like sharing his discourse. "Yes, well, the league is patient, and because of our patience we learned some time ago that the Lothan Aklun were a ceremonial people. Among their many customs was a yearly ritual, a cleansing ceremony in which every Lothan took part. Each and every one, Prince: you can see how that would interest us. It was some years later, but eventually we gained a sample of the ceremonial purgative that was part of this cleansing from one of the few spies to make it back to us alive. Again, remember that every Lothan Aklun takes this purgative on the same day of the year, during the same hour. They, but only they. This gave my grandfather-he was the first architect of this venture-an idea. What, he asked, if we could find a way to poison that purgative in a way that would wipe out the Lothan entirely on a single day?"

He stared at Dariel for a moment. "I see by the way your cheeks are twitching that you acknowledge what a fine idea he had. It proved difficult to orchestrate, though. We simply did not have the agents in place to spread a poison evenly among them. Never would, it seemed. So we tried to find another way. All the time, of course, we kept up the trade. Prospered from it, really. Some of the older leaguemen would have been content to continue like that, but most of us wanted more. What man doesn't really, at some fundamental level, want more? More of everything! More riches. More lovers. More power. More revenge.

"Because he remained persistent, my father-who had taken up my grandfather's mission-worked with his physicians until they found a component of the purgative they could separate out. This they made into a poison, a vastly potent one." Here Neen paused and shared a knowing glance around the room, finally returning to Dariel. "Do you see where this is heading yet? Earlier this year-at great expense and risk-we managed to contaminate the purgative. A single agent did it, with a single vial of our poison mixed in with their purgative. It was all manufactured and stored in one place, you see. Security around it was surprisingly lax. A weak spot, indeed."

Dariel had stopped struggling some time ago. His eyes, still red with emotion but calmer than before, remained fixed on Sire Neen. More bewildered now than angry.

"Somebody wipe the boy's chin," Sire Neen said. "It's disturbing to see a grown man drool so." One of the Ishtat actually tried to carry out the order, but Dariel yanked his chin away. Lovely to see the fight in him, Sire Neen thought. I wonder how long he'll manage to keep it up? Out loud he said, "Noval, tell him what you witnessed. Exactly the same as you told me before."

The younger man happily obliged. Sire Neen listened to each detail almost as if he had seen the events and not just heard them reported a short time before. Thus, he envisioned the panorama that was the main harbor of Melith An, the trading port of the Lothan Aklun. He watched as the league schooner, the Hooktooth, nosed its way into the harbor. Normally, the harbor was thriving, bustling, alive with boat traffic and commerce. This time, chaos ruled. Neen watched as white-robed Lothans ran shouting along the harbor, chased by their own servants, who were trying to hold them back. But again and again Lothans managed to break free and throw themselves in the water. Some of them even carried others down to the same fate. The waters of the harbor were blocked with corpses and with the dying and with slaves trying either to save their masters or to die beside them.

Once docked and disembarked, Sire Neen imagined himself running through the streets behind an Ishtat vanguard, trying to find any living Lothan, or capture one of the fool slaves who seemed intent on fighting to the death out of allegiance to them. It was only by piecing together information and by interrogating the few slaves they actually captured that they came to understand the rest. The fever had erupted within hours after the Lothan Aklun had imbibed their ceremonial drinks. They dove in the water because the fever inside made their bodies burn. Those who could not make it to the harbor fell into convulsions on the ground.

"Most of it was over by the time we arrived," Noval concluded, "but still, what we did witness was a sight to see. As far as I can tell, the Lothan Aklun are no more."

Sire Neen let his pleasure curve his lips. "A work of fine planning. Complexity woven in such a way that it made victory terribly simple. And just like that, the balance of the world shifts." He said that directly to Noval, but then he turned and contemplated Dariel.

"Prince, I see the many questions in your eyes. You want to know what's to become of you, don't you? And there's anger there, too. I see it. I see it in the way you tremble and blink rapidly. You want to shout at me with all your Akaran outrage, don't you? How dare we do these things without consulting you! 'Just wait until my sister hears about this!' That's what you'd say, isn't it?"

Sire Neen chuckled. He leaned forward, taking a pull from his pipe before he continued. "The thing is, Prince, more is about to change than just the extermination of the Lothan Aklun. We don't need them, nor do we need Akarans. I had to argue among my own people to make this point clear, but argue it I did. It was time, I said, that the league not simply ride upon the tides of fortune. It was time for us to shape them. The destruction of the Lothan is part of that. Your people will soon wake to the other part. You see, there are traitors at the heart of Acacia, right in the palace, Prince, right in among the royal family. They need only hear confirmation that we have succeeded, and then… your family will finally, after all these years, get the type of deaths they deserve."