The other lands

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Corinn would have to reach all the way around the curve of the world and touch a mind that did not expect it, but this should be within her powers. Dream travel. She had witnessed it before. She knew it could be done. Lying in bed beside Hanish Mein, she had listened as he spoke across great distances-even through the barrier between life and death-with his ancestors. The Tunishnevre had been a spiteful coven of the undead, with their own source of power, one that came from the curse that had denied them true death. And that curse had come from Tinhadin. Santoth sorcery. As such, it should be within her power as well. After all, the Tunishnevre, when speaking to Hanish, had demanded he murder her. They had failed. They went to the real afterdeath instead, as did Hanish. Corinn still lived and ruled and had a son. Who, then, was more powerful?

This was but one of the myriad things that she held in her mind after the Numrek uprising and the League of Vessels declaration that a war was coming once more across the Ice Fields. She had, in a surprising way, found a sort of pitching, tumultuous equilibrium. Once she knew that Aaden was safe-and she did know that with enough certainty to put worry for him behind her-she rode the noise and confusion of unfolding events with a calm certainty.

Much of this came from her realization that she had known something like this was coming all along. She had known not to lower her guard. She might have been tempted to forget it briefly, lured by Mena's enthusiasm and Grae's attentions, drawn even to notions of higher nobility in her rule, thinking she might leave the people free of sedation and ways to bring some of Aliver's high ideals to life. As much as she had held power grasped in one hand, she had tried to loosen the clenched fist of her other hand. That had been a mistake. Even the flexion of her fingers in considering the possibilities became an invitation to disaster. That was why she had not been ready and had not seen the treachery standing right behind her for so long. That's why Aaden had nearly died.

Unforgivable.

When faced with violence right before her eyes she did nothing but watch. She was completely unprepared in that moment. While Mena fought, Corinn stood and stared. That could never happen again. She had been lax in her study. Spending time summoning furry creatures for Aaden? Casting euphoria spells at banquets and creating flying insects? Foolishness! Even the water she fed into northern Talay was done for the wrong reasons. It was needed, yes, but she had enjoyed the approbation of the masses too much. She had delighted in hearing herself called mother of the empire. And what was that but a title she had commanded her people to use? No, the truth was she had been wasting time, wasting power.

Such neglect was completely and utterly unforgivable. She swore that she would never be that weak again. It amazed her that she had let slip so much of the strength that had helped her grasp power and steer the Known World out of Aliver's war and back toward prosperity. She had now to remember the person who had climbed to the throne nine years ago. She had to be that person again, tempered by experience, mother to a child whom she would never, never let come to harm.

Part of this included determining the real extent of the threat coming toward them. Trust the league's version of events? Hardly. Sire Dagon could profess his complete and utter honesty until he went hoarse; she needed to hear from other sources before she could decide how to act. Dream travel seemed the only possible way. It was, at least, worth a try.

The first time she planned to attempt it, she dismissed her servants and prepared her room herself. She dimmed the lamps. She lit sticks of incense and set a mixture of soothing herbs bubbling in fragrant, citrus-infused oil. She put on a formal dinner dress of dark green velvet, with a high neckline and full sleeves. Lying on her back atop her bedspread, she smoothed the folds of her dress out around her, feeling unnervingly silly. Did one dream travel in one's garments, naked, or without a body at all? She did not know if any of her preparations were necessary, but she needed some sense of ritual, something to occupy her as she gradually drew nearer the moment.

And what to do in that moment was another riddle she had yet to solve. However Hanish had dream traveled, he managed it without true knowledge of the Giver's tongue. Perhaps he used some fragment of it. Or perhaps his success had a different explanation. Corinn had consulted The Song of Elenet with this question in mind. As ever, the words and music of the book had surged up to engulf her. As ever, she closed it, knowing she had learned from it but incapable of putting her finger on the knowledge and examining it.

She slept for a time, a fitful slumber in which she counted the passing hours. Eventually, awake again, she just lay, calming her heartbeat, letting her body go limp against the bedding. She allowed herself to drift toward sleep again. She focused her attention on her breathing. No, on the awareness that her thoughts were a thing different from her body. Housed in it, yes, but not contained. Not trapped. She imagined her true essence floating up from her body and-

Ah! That did not work. She lifted her fist and smashed it against the mattress in exasperation. She sat up. This was not the way. It felt like something a fortune reader would instruct her to do. Some nonsense, like when she pretended to be able to read symbols in her girlfriend's mind as a child.

Use the song, she thought. It all begins with the song.

She fell back against the bed, inhaled, called up the swirling music that was the Giver's tongue, and, very softly, sang. She did not entirely understand the notes and words and shapes of sound that came from her mouth, but she knew the intent was right. She wove them in with her hopes, with the preparations she had already made. Trying to shape them even as she felt shaped by the song escaping her, she lost herself in the effort.

At some point, she realized the song was not on her lips anymore. It was in her. It was her and would travel with her. She pushed her spirit up and out of her body, floating free above the bed and then through the ceiling and beyond. For a time she swam through air above the palace. Such a strange feeling. She had an awareness of her physical form, but she also knew how very incorporeal it was. Part of her lashed at the air with limbs that were not entirely there but that were not entirely absent. Ultimately, it was thought, not physical effort, that moved her through space. More than thought, it was thought propelled by force of will.

For some time she flew from point to point above the palace, slowly learning to feel the presence of souls, sleeping and awake. She found she could draw herself to some individuals simply by settling thoughts of them in her mind and then driving toward them. Thus, she felt Rhrenna's sleeping presence and Aaden's. She knew the bed in which Delivegu slumbered, not alone. Any of these she could have stirred awake, but they were not her objective. She aimed for a person much, much farther away: Dariel.

She conjured every memory she had of him. She held her thoughts of him until she had them within her, contained like the seething balls of creation from which she built the creatures she summoned for Aaden's amusement. The song helped her. It gave shape to what she wished to do. She took that swirling embodiment of memories and thoughts and images and emotions that to her were Dariel, and then she hurled them forward.

It was like tossing a great ball of energy, a thing that hungered to be released. She sped behind, hooked to it, shooting forward across the Inner Sea. Oh, it felt good! Such speed. She watched Acacia recede as she passed between Kidnaban and the Cape of Fallon. Before long, the mountains of Senival rumbled beneath her, as if they were a herd of stampeding creatures. Wonderful. Such power and freedom. She raced across the coast and farther until…

She forgot what she was doing. Her progress slowed. For a few moments she felt the force that had been pulling her casting about in one and then another direction. Then it simply stopped. In a spirit form, immune to the cold or fear, Corinn hung in the air high above the Gray Slopes. Below her, the ocean moved in unending undulation. Watching it, she knew the waves gave life to all the earth. She knew, looking down, that there could be no more horrible thing than a dead sea. It meant a dead earth.

By why am I thinking that? I'm here for a reason. I'm searching for-

Her eyes snapped open. She gasped a breath so loud she thought for a moment that she screamed it out. Sitting up on her bed, in her gown, the air heavy with incense smoke, she realized she had failed. Dariel! She had been flying toward Dariel, driven by her thoughts of him, scorching toward whatever place or fate in the world identified him… but then the energy that propelled her realized it did not know where to go. She should have been able to find him, but there was no scent, no trail, not even an intuitive feeling for where to head. At some point, there was nothing. That was why she had stopped somewhere out above the Slopes. If her brother was out there, she had no power to find him.

"Dariel," she said. In speaking his name she felt a strange, dread certainty that she would never see him again, neither in life nor through the song.

The following day passed much the same as the one that preceded it. One appointment after another. One function before another. Her last official meeting that afternoon was with Paddel, the head vintner of Prios. She kept it short, not wanting to look too long at his heavily jowled, red-cheeked face. He sat at the far end of the table from her, as unattractive as ever, squeezed into a black jacket that was so tight he could barely move his chubby arms. She did not sit through all of his fawning, praise-laden greeting.

"Since last we spoke, have the trials of the vintage continued to go well?"

"Yes, of course! Better than well. See here, the reports-" He fumbled with his papers, rising to bring them to her.

"Just tell me this," Corinn said. She signaled with disdainful fingers that he should stay seated. "It works as efficiently as you thought before? It lifts their spirits, gives them a feeling of bliss, and yet does not dull minds?"

"Quite so. One might almost say it sharpens-"

"And once they taste it, they will forever crave it?" The man nodded vigorously. "What happens if they are deprived of it?"

"There's no reason that they should be deprived of it. We have vast stockpiles of the raw ingredients. We have enough to last us until we win or lose the coming struggle."

"That's good. But, again, what happens when they are deprived of it? You said before that they will do anything to get it-but if they cannot get it, what happens to them? How long until they recover?"

The nodding stopped. Paddel's mouth puckered, a stupid expression that Corinn wanted to slap away. "I don't know. We didn't deprive any indefinitely. They were so"-he grinned and lifted his shoulders, a gesture meant to indicate that surely she understood this point-"insistent and so pleased when they had access to it again. Why deprive them?"

The scowl on Corinn's face stayed constant. That annoys me, Paddel, she said to herself. You should have researched this area instead of taking so much personal pleasure from it. It was too late now to conduct more tests. She had waited too long already. Let it be done.

"Send word to your people," she said. "Release the vintage."

"Yes?" he asked, excited, his mouth now like that of a dog panting in expectation. "Do you mean it?"

"I just said it, so obviously I mean it. How quickly can you distribute it?"

"Oh, quickly indeed. The main warehouse is in Prios, of course, but in preparation for your order we've shifted stock to Danos, Alecia, Bocoum. We even had a storage facility in Denben. We can send word by messenger bird and have crates riding south toward interior Talay by tomorrow evening. And across west to Tabith, which will give us the entire Slopes coastline!" The possibilities took his breath away. He stammered on for a time, and then, realizing something, looked at Corinn with new admiration. "You are so wise to have arranged this, Your Majesty."

She showed no pleasure in the compliment. Instead, she flicked her fingers to indicate that he should leave. Before he reached the door, she stopped him. "One final thing. Do conduct the test. When one is addicted and is deprived indefinitely, what happens? Find out."

Later, in her offices with Rhrenna, Corinn closed out the day's business. The Meinish woman read from the meticulous notes she kept, detailing a variety of points achieved and yet to be faced on the morrow. Listening to her voice soothed Corinn. Much of what she said, conversely, did not. "Wren has petitioned for an audience with you. I told her the timing was ill but said I would put the request to you."

"Wren…" Corinn exhaled. Dariel's concubine. Pregnant and growing plumper every day. Though Corinn avoided speaking to her, she caught glimpses of the girl often enough. Her narrow eyes always seemed to be waiting for Corinn, fixed on her before she had realized they were going to make eye contact. She was pretty, indeed. A northern Candovian. One of those slim, athletic women upon whom a baby is but a shapely bump that adds to her attractiveness, a moon to be caressed. "I can't see her now. She'd likely ask me to acknowledge her child as Dariel's."

"It is Dariel's."

"Yes, but I'm not at all sure that I want to declare that right now. Tell her I'm too busy. If she likes, she could retire to Calfa Ven. I'll send physicians. She could have the baby there, in peaceful seclusion."

"I already felt her out about that, Your Majesty. She would rather be here in the palace."

"Fine," Corinn said a little coldly, as she wanted to close the subject, "but she'll have to wait for an audience."

Rhrenna nodded and noted this on her documents. Watching her down-tilted face, Corinn remembered that she once thought Meinish women uniformly bland of appearance. Too pale, thin-skinned, with finely drawn features that had a coldness in keeping with their frigid nation. At the time she had thought it ironic considering that the men of the same race had been striking, especially Hanish… Looking at Rhrenna now, she realized that her feelings about Meinish women had never been accurate. Yes, their features were as described, but they had their own style of beauty. What had kept her from seeing it was jealousy. Fear that Hanish might one day choose one of his own over her.

Forgetting the annoyance of a moment before, Corinn acknowledged a very different emotion instead. "Rhrenna, I'm sorry."

The secretary looked up and studied her. "For what?"

Was this folly? To admit a crime and wish it otherwise? No, she did not think so. "For what I did to your people."

"Oh." Rhrenna cleared her throat, looked back at the documents. "We weren't innocents."

"I know. You knew all the time, didn't you? All the time that we rode together and I showed you the ways of court and we were young together-all through that time you knew that Hanish might one day sacrifice me to the Tunishnevre."

Rhrenna drew in on herself. She pulled her gaze in, head down as she stared at the papers on her lap. Her blond hair fell around her. "I never wanted that to happen."

"But you knew it might. I'm not chastising you. You are closer to me now than my sister is. Perhaps I love the blood you share with Hanish. Maybe that's why I feel so close to you. For some reason, I know that the fact that you would have betrayed me then means that you won't now. Or ever again. Am I right?"

The young woman's head bobbed. "You are right."

"I know it," Corinn said. She folded her hands in her lap and inhaled a long breath. Something about doing so made her feel she had sucked in Rhrenna's promise and owned it. "When this is over and we're at peace again, I will lift the ban on entering Mein Tahalian. There's no reason it shouldn't be opened again, lived in again. There's every reason it should, actually. If I did that, would it please you?"

Rhrenna sat as if she were still studying the pages before her, but her gaze had drifted off slightly, unfocused. "I don't think I could live there again. Maybe if I lived to old age I'd return, but I'm not sure. I think some others would, though. I know some want that very much. It wouldn't be the same, of course. There are too few of us left, but I know some Mein who would take their families back to Tahalian. Even their mixed families. They'd pry off the beams that seal it, open the steam valves, and heat the place. It could never be the same, but it would be good for life to fill the place again. I would like to believe that an entire culture can't just be forgotten."

This time it was Corinn who took a while to respond. Though she had begun the conversation, it surprised Corinn to realize that Rhrenna had truly thought about this before. She had even spoken to other Mein about it. A culture forgotten? What a strange idea. To Corinn it had always been the opposite. She had feared the world would remember the Mein too well, feared that they might yet have some power, some way to shape the world. Hanish so often haunted her thoughts. How could he not when he so clearly lived on in Aaden? The Mein-in her own mind, at least-were far from being forgotten. That had seemed a problem before. Now, however, she sometimes wished she had not ordered Hanish killed. Perhaps there could have been some way for them to live together. What a powerful pair they would have been! Rulers for the ages.

Outside, a bone whistle announced the advancing hour. Other flutists and pipers picked up the melody and spread it down from the palace toward the lower town. Corinn listened until the music faded into the distance, reminded by it just how tired she was. "Rhrenna," she said, "I am not going to destroy it all. You believe that, don't you?"

The answer came back to her with welcome speed. "Yes, Your Majesty, I believe that."

That night, after visiting Aaden and singing healing into his sleeping form, Corinn tried to dream travel again. She waited even later than the night previous, and she aimed for a different target this time. Dariel might not be reachable. Maybe dead, or perhaps the connection would never snap tight between them. She tried not to think too much about it. Think only until you know what to do. Then act. This time, when her spirit lifted and pulled free of the shell of her body and began the long flight through the dark night, it was another man's name she screamed out before her, racing behind it. This one, surprisingly easily, she found.

Her feet did not exactly touch the floor in the room, but she did reach stillness at the foot of a sleeping man's bed. His face was hidden beneath a cushion, his arms thrown wide. He looked like a man recently suffocated, but the nasal grinding of his breathing testified to his continued life.

"Wake," she said.

A form rolled in the sheets and then settled, still again. Nothing more.

"Wake!"

Corinn instilled all her will in the command, and this time a shape pulled away from the physical form hidden beneath the blankets. She could not have said whether the image was clothed or naked-no more than she could have detailed the same about herself. He simply was as he was. Many details of his form blurred, were unsteady, or translucent. At the same time, other identifying features showed clear. Thin shoulders. Bewildered. Muffled and ill at ease in a way that would have been expressed by disheveled hair on a physical body but was now a part of the impression of the spirit. His face, droopy and dull eyed, was just as she remembered, just as gape mouthed. How bizarre that she could reach around the world in spirit form and still find Rialus Neptos to be… well, Rialus Neptos.

"Queen Corinn?" he asked.

She did not answer. She looked around the room. She could not have said what she would have expected, but a grand bed was not part of it. Nor a chamber with finely constructed furniture, wall hangings, rugs so thick they must suck at the toes of one walking across them. Rialus had no finer quarters in Acacia!

Her eyes settled back on him. "This I find very strange," she said.

His head snapped around from side to side, taking in the same sights she just had at double the speed. "This is-ah-difficult to explain."

Corinn wanted to ask him to do so, but she knew her connection with him could not last long. She already felt the fatigue of being so far from her body. Felt the pull back toward it, and knew that it would grow stronger with each passing moment. And she knew somehow that she was in danger like this. If anything-or anybody-snipped the long thread that connected her to her corporeal self, she could be lost forever. Dead, even if her body lived for a time in a long sleep.

"Rialus Neptos," she said, cutting into his stammering explanation, wanting to be direct and calm so that he would be as well, "is Dariel alive?"

"Dariel? Ah-"

"Just answer each question I ask you. Do no more or less. Just answer. Is Dariel alive?"

"I don't know." Rialus thought for a moment. "I-don't think so. There was a terrible battle at-"

"You can tell me nothing of him?"

"No. I wish I could, but-"

Corinn flared with impatience. She realized from Rialus's expression and from how the room snapped into greater focus that the intensity of her emotions showed. She had his attention again, waiting. "Are the Auldek planning to attack the Known World?"

"How did you know that?"

"Answer!"

"Yes," Rialus said. "Yes. They're brutes, Your Majesty. Not like the Numrek. I mean, not really. They're more… dignified. Do you know they keep beasts like white lions in their palaces? Just let them walk around like they own-"

"Rialus, in the Giver's name, do no more than answer my questions!" She gave him a moment of staring intensity to come to terms with this, and then asked, "How great a threat are they?"

"Very, I'd say."

"They have a large army?"

"Yes, but it's not just size that matters. They have some terrible creatures. Antoks and things worse. And the Auldek cannot be killed."

"Cannot be killed?"

"Well, not exactly 'cannot.'" He fumbled for a way to explain it, and then seemed puzzled that he was even doing so. Looking at her anew, he asked, "Am I really talking to you? This is so odd."

Corinn flared brighter than ever. "Let me see their army."

"What do you mean?"

"Think it. Make a picture of the things you have seen and things you imagine you will see. Make all those things in your mind's eye and I will take them from you."

He did, and she did. The images were blurry, shadowed, overlapping, and without context or explanation. But she saw vast numbers of soldiers in animal guise. She saw beings similar to Numrek being chopped down and then rising again and again, as if impervious to mortal injury. She saw the ranks of an army of men and creatures, giants and winged things. She saw tramping feet and hulking forms unlike anything in the Known World. She heard the bellowing of angry beasts and rhythmic chants of war songs. So many of them that they faded into shadow in the distance, like a neverending parade of demons finally escaped from entrapment and hungry for plunder. It was all that she needed to see.

"One more thing, Rialus Neptos," she said, once she had drawn back and could speak again. "Have you betrayed us?"

The man could hardly have conveyed as much shocked indignation with his real body as he did with contortions of his spirit face. "No! Never!"

"You must prove the truth of that. If you have any honor, Rialus Neptos, you will find a way to serve me. If you wish to see your wife again, you will find a way to serve me. Understand?" Corinn asked the question, but she did not manage to stay long enough to hear his answer. She could no longer resist the call back to her body.

Early the next morning, Corinn summoned her secretary. She instructed her to have Rialus's wife, Gurta, sent to Calfa Ven for the duration of the coming conflict. "Put her under my royal protection."

"Ah, so she's a prisoner," Rhrenna said. "She is heavily pregnant, you know, but I'll arrange for her every comfort."

Corinn then called in a bevy of scribes and told them to prepare a dispatch for transport by bird. She spoke a message to be sent to the governors and chief officials of each province, to the Senate in Alecia, and to a host of other important figures who needed to hear the news first. She confirmed the truth of the league's claim. An enemy-the Auldek-did march against them, bringing with them horrible creatures and an army in the tens of thousands. Among them were many quota children-warriors now and with hearts hardened against Acacia. They were the greatest threat the Known World had ever faced. If they did not unite and defeat them, all would perish. Battle against the Numrek was, in comparison, just a diversion.

"Prepare your people." She paused, looking over the bent heads of the scribes, listening to the scratch of so many styluses against parchment.

A few of them completed writing and lifted their tools. Rhrenna asked, "Is that all of it?"

Corinn shook her head, waited until all the scribes were ready for more. "Tell your people," she said, "that the Law of Quota, which has been in effect since Tinhadin's time, is now revoked. As of today, no more children of the Known World will be sent to the Other Lands. Let the people know this. Invite them to drink the vintage of Prios in celebration. Hear me again. The quota is abolished."