The other lands

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Even though he lived every moment of it, Rialus managed to disbelieve the entire ordeal. How could he credit such madness? What in all his years of life would have prepared him for the shoving, blood-spattered, roaring chaos that erupted after Devoth beheaded Sire Neen? The Ishtat soldier beside him lost his arm at the shoulder. His scream was so horrific that Rialus felt like it came from his own mouth. The flailing man drenched Rialus in a spray of blood, which he slipped in as he tried to back away. There, on the floor, he was smeared across the stones, stepped on, and kicked. He swam through bodies and severed limbs and once found his fingers entangled in a leagueman's entrails. He had retched so hard and long he would happily have coughed up his internal organs to end it.

If all that was not bad enough, when he was yanked up off the floor it was an Auldek hand that gripped him; Auldek hands slapped sense into him; Auldek eyes probed his. As they dragged him from the chamber, he saw not one living Acacian. It was hard for him to remember what he saw, but he knew it had to have been a scene of hellish carnage.

When they left him alone, Rialus's thoughts flew away from the details of his present horror. He thought through the pain to recall Gurta. He recalled all the things that had been, that might have been, and that had slipped from his grasp. She had loved him. Really she had. She had said so time and again in her plain, lowborn Acacian. He had seen her love on her soft-featured face and felt it in her caresses and known the truth of it when her body welcomed him each evening-as well as during the morning, afternoon, sometimes in the wee hours of the night. He had planted a child in her. Imagine that! A part of him living within her. Rialus made immortal! A boy child to carry his name and build up his fortune, a child he alone could educate about the world and shape in his image. Better than that, he could shape him in the image of what Rialus dreamed he might have been.

Now that fatherly role was destroyed. It seemed so dim and distant a possibility that Rialus gave himself over to grief. He did not know what was to happen to him, but he knew nothing would ever be the same. He cried, sobbed. He writhed on the floor in physical and emotional anguish, spitting out the blood that pooled in his mouth.

He was in just such throes of self-pity when Calrach found him. The Numrek crouched beneath the low door frame and entered the room. His bulk immediately made the space seem tiny, uncomfortably cramped. He stood a moment, taking Rialus in, and then asked, "What's wrong with you?"

Rialus focused on him and, despite his misery, tried to find a way to answer the question. Nothing he could come up with seemed the right thing to say to the Numrek. Calrach righted a stool that Rialus had overturned and lowered himself onto it. He swept back his black hair with both hands, squeezed it into a tail, and wrapped a leather band around it.

After tying it, he set his big-knuckled hands on his knees and said, "You have a decision to make. In store for you, if you displease the Auldek"-the Numrek rolled back his eyes as he considered the possibilities-"oh, a poker shoved up your ass; that's likely. Also, I've seen times when they bend your shoulder back. Bend it hard, hard like, so you feel the bone is going to jump out of the socket. That's pain. Then they pull a knife red-hot from the fire. A thin, thin, thin sliver of a blade. With it, they just touch your flesh. Tiny touch, no more weight behind it than a feather. But the blade is so red-hot sharp and your skin so taut that that feather touch splits the surface and you'll want to avoid that, too, I think."

"I did nothing."

"You are big stuff now," Calrach said. "Only Acacian they got."

"Dariel?"

"Dead, I suppose. Haven't found his body yet, though. Messy in there, you know. They think you're a leagueman, but no matter. They have questions for you. Just answer them. You'll betray nobody who hasn't already betrayed you. Mein, Akarans, the league: piss on them all. Play it right, Neptos, and you may outlive them."

Rialus stared at him, hating him and completely mystified by him. Piss on them all? Did this imbecile really think Rialus would betray everything in the Known World? Not that he even could, but… "What have you done?" His voice was just barely more than a whimper. "And why? Why? Why did you… The queen gave you privileges. You lived just as you wanted, servants and cooks and-"

Calrach raised a hand and made a chattering motion with his fingers. "Blah, Blah. Neptos, stop blathering. Those things don't matter! To you maybe, but to us? No. That's no way to live. Not for us. But you won't understand. Why waste words? Enjoy your last days, yeah? Enjoy them, and know that you died for a good cause: the Numrek cause!" He guffawed, crouched forward, and smacked Rialus on the shoulder with a surfeit of force.

Rialus pulled his knees to his chest and lay like an infant on his side. "Vile," he said. "Vile, vile, vile. I hate you."

"Shame. We liked you, Neptos. Remember when we used to make you run and throw spears at you? Oh, you were quick when you needed to be." Again Calrach could barely contain his mirth.

"Vile."

"You think so? Why, because we don't speak like you? Don't eat what you eat? You think you know us, but deceiving you was like telling tales to children. Simple. Boring. Easy. And it was misery; that's what it was, but you never knew us true. Some land? Some servants? Working for that bitch queen? You think we wanted that? Took pride in that? You-who know us better than most Acacians-should have known better. Those years in Acacia: exile, disgrace. You don't care about disgrace, do you? To a Numrek honor is all. That and belonging. We need to belong, understand? Belong." He drew this last word out, making sure Rialus acknowledged it before he would move past it. "We didn't over there in your lands, not without our totem and our people."

Rialus, noting what sounded like melancholy in Calrach's voice-an unfathomably strange emotion for him-looked up. He had thought Numrek faces capable of only a few crude expressions of anger. But he realized he had been wrong. Perhaps he had never looked closely enough, never wanted to settle his eyes on their craggy features for longer than he had to. Right now, though, staring at Calrach, he saw shades of melancholy and regret and shame and ambition all betrayed in the lines of his eyes and forehead and lips and jagged teeth.

"What are you talking about?"

"We could not live as exiles forever. They stripped us of our totem. They made us beasts instead of men and kicked us to the north in shame."

"Who did?" Rialus asked.

"The Auldek, you fool! They are chief among the clans. They-and the others-drove us from Ushen Brae. They called us filth and took our slaves and burned our totem." Calrach seemed at the verge of one of his cursing tirades, but he blew it out of the side of his mouth and kept on. "Did we tell you these things? No. Why should we? The Mein didn't care about the truth when they bought our blades. The Akarans hate the truth, so we gave them lies instead. We let them all think they buy us and order us around. What does it matter what they think?" Tilting his head, Calrach exhaled a long breath. "We have lived wrong for years. Now we wish to live right again."

"What terrible thing did you do to be driven from here in the first place?"

Calrach shot him a dangerous glance. "I'll get the torturer now."

He began to rise, but Rialus blurted, "No, no, don't! Ahh-" He had spoken too forcefully. The pain of it reverberated through him for a few closed-eyed seconds. When he opened his eyes again, Calrach sat watching him. "Don't leave," he said. "You came to tell me things. Please do so."

"I will," Calrach said, after a moment. "Hear these things. I won't tell you twice. In Ushen Brae, no Auldek or Numrek or any other clan-none of us-had given birth to a child in hundreds of years. Not a single birth. No children. You hear? That's right. I am not the youthful man I look. I don't remember my birth year anymore, but believe me, I have lived long, long."

"But, you do have children. I've seen-"

"Don't rush it! Now, I will keep this simple for you. The Lothan Aklun arrived here in their boats. They looked weak. They wanted to lay claim to our barrier isles. They were not warriors, but they were powerful with magic. They trapped us with that magic. They showed us tricks, made flames erupt in the sky, made the ground shake. They even killed with nothing more than whispered words. They said they would pay for the isles with a great gift. They would give us eternal life. You hear me, Rialus? They promised to make us immortal. And they did."

Rialus said, "But you are not immortal. I've seen Numrek die in battle. You fear death like any man."

"More than any man, perhaps. Don't interrupt what I am telling you. They create immortality by taking souls out of one body and putting them inside another. We could contain two, three,… ten lives within us. This they had the magic to do."

The image of the Auldek leader with an arrow in his chest, twisting and shaking like a thing possessed, popped into Rialus's head. "Devoth-"

"Yeah, you saw that, yeah? You thought Devoth dead from that arrow. Good shot, true, but only one of his souls died because of it. That's why he rose again and-" With the blade of his hand, Calrach imitated a sword slicing through his neck. "No, he has many souls within him. I used to as well. You could call it sorcery. Lothan Aklun sorcery. It's kept us alive all these years, but it came at a price. At the same time as they made us immortal they took away our fertility. We could live forever, but, we learned, we could no longer have children. Quite a trick-giving one kind of immortality, taking another at the same time. They did this to the slaves as well. None of them grow to birth their own young in Ushen Brae. None of them. This is a childless land. All these years we've been childless, except for the souls inside us and for the quota.

"When the Lothan Aklun began to trade through the league we had all the souls we could want coming to us from your lands. But we wanted more. Yes, for their labor, to work for us and take care of our every need. But not just that. Also, they became our children. Slaves, but children too. And because none of us could bear young either, we always needed more. Understand?"

He asked but did not wait for an answer. "I'll tell fast. Listen. The Auldek have many laws. Too many. The Numrek broke one. We were punished. They took our souls from us, burned our totems, exiled us. Made us trek into the ice."

"Burned your totems?" Rialus asked. "Totems?"

Calrach waved his impatience. "Later about that. Stick to the points, Neptos. We marched north, nothing with us but our weapons, clothes. Those were bad times, when we first walked into the north. Many died of the shame of it. Many thought death was the best escape. I felt it myself. Numrek don't kill themselves, but we can wish for it. We can take risks, hunt snow lions, the white bears. You ever kill a walrus with an ax? It's no sure thing, I tell you. Anyway, truth is, I believed the Numrek were doomed to vanish in the ice. Then something happened. You know what?"

Rialus did not have a clue, and his face indicated as much.

"One of our women got a child in her. First in hundreds of years. First one, and then another." He laughed, low and obscene. "And then we screwed like rats. We were having children again, Neptos! You have no child, so you may not know what this means, but it was a wonderful thing. We thought to go back to Ushen Brae, show them the children. But we were exiled. We couldn't. And some said that the birthing only returned because we had passed out of Ushen Brae and had escaped some curse. We did not want to go back and lose the gift again. And then we met the Mein, and got better ideas. You know the rest. Or some of it you know. Is it making more sense now?"

It was starting to, but Rialus still shook his head, which was pounding. He put much effort into speaking clearly. "What of the Numrek back in Acacia, in the palace? And in Teh?"

"They will have it hard, but they are ready for that. As soon as they know we've made it here, they will rise. Kill the bitch. Kill others, you know." He gestured with his fingers that surely Rialus could imagine the possible scenes. "Kill, kill. That sort of thing. And then they'll hole up and wait."

Why did it seem the more he knew, the less it made sense? Wait for what? They were worlds away. They had no ships. The Numrek back in the Known World could cause much bloodshed, but they would eventually be defeated. The league would not tolerate any of this. The Lothan Aklun were no more. And surely their sorcery went with them. The Numrek may not have planned or intended that, but what Calrach described was a confusion, not a situation that should please him so. "I still don't understand."

"Okay," Calrach said, leaning close. "Last thing. I had an idea, yeah? What if I got back to Ushen Brae? Came home and told what we found. Told all the Auldek that a new world awaited them, a world full of humans to hunt, to enslave. A rich world in which all the Auldek could again have children. What if I promised them that and showed them the proof of it? My son. You think, maybe, they would lift the exile? Maybe they would give us our totem back, yeah? Maybe they would march with us across the ice and down into glorious battle, toward the conquest of your Known World?" His grin could not have gotten any wider. "Pretty good idea, huh? I thought so. The league made it even easier by taking me across the Gray Slopes. Hated that, but good news. Devoth and the others like the idea, too. Not my fault the league killed the Lothan Aklun. No blame on me. No, instead, I bring them hope. I bring them a new world."

And that's it, Rialus thought. That's the truth of it. The things that were happening were not just about him and Dariel and Sire Neen. Not even about Corinn. Oh, how she would rage if she knew. But it wasn't about her either. It was about everything. This is about the entire Known World and everyone in it.

"Anyway. There it is. You know. I'll get somebody to torture you now. Fun for you. Fun for him. Everyone's happy."

"No!" Rialus shouted. "No, that won't be necessary."

Crossing his arms, Calrach grimaced, a show of mock confusion that clearly meant he was not confused at all. "No? Why not?"

"What does Devoth want from me?"

Calrach smiled. "I know you, Neptos. I knew I was right! I told them as much. Said, 'Always a weasel, he is. He'll turn.' Is that right? It pleases me that you're so true to your nature. Devoth wants everything you can tell him. Everything he'll need to plan his attack"-the Numrek shook his head at the irony of it-"on your nation. You, Neptos, are an important man. Play it right, and it might be very good for you."

In answer, Rialus curled back into his ball, lying on his side with his knees tight to his chest. He-Rialus Neptos, so often maligned, laughed at, joked with-was in a singular position to affect events. He would find a way to do so, he swore. He would talk with Devoth. He told himself that he would not help destroy his people. He also told himself that he would aim at getting back to Gurta and seeing his child. He did not acknowledge which of these was his greater priority.