Kartholome’s systematic rummaging through the captain’s library paid off, at least in bits and pieces of knowledge that they put to use. Their vessel had clearly not been assigned to the Other Lands, but there was still information about the place to be found. They studied a chart detailing the barrier islands, at length, determining the best route to the mainland, which the map called Ushen Brae. Melio had never heard the name before, but he liked the feel of it on his tongue. Of course, he thought, the lands would have their own name. They weren’t “the other” to themselves, were they?
To avoid the Angerwall-which Kartholome was not sure how to navigate-they decided to sail north around the islands, then come down along the coast. The islands up that way appeared to be less developed than the ones to the south. They would put ashore north of Avina and travel toward the city on foot. The plan was simple, if incomplete. While avoiding the league and Ishtat patrols, they would search for the quota slaves. With their help they would learn what they could about Dariel’s fate.
Before they had seen any trace of the quota slaves, however, they came upon a bounty of league vessels. The galleys appeared behind them as they cut between a large island that the map named Eigg and the small skerries that trickled away to the north. First three ships, and then two more in the distance. They stretched many stories tall but had a sleek appearance different from the bulky brigs, with more sails than Melio could count. From their viewpoint on the Slipfin, the league ships looked carnivorous sawing through the waves behind them.
“What are they up to?” Kartholome said. There was a tenor of dread in his voice similar to when he called them out to see the sea wolves. “I know those ships. Never set eyes on them, but I’d heard talk they were building them. Five war galleys. That’s them, all right. They can each carry eight hundred soldiers, not counting the ship’s crew. There’s tons of storage capacity in them, but they’re fast, with keels that barracudas would envy. Steel reinforced, with turrets, baskets for crossbowmen.” He looked at Melio. “If the league sent these here, it’s because they mean to take over the place.”
Clytus kept the Slipfin moving north at a steady clip, and the others did their best to stay visible on deck and up in the rigging. If anyone on the galleys studied them through a spyglass, it would be obvious the boat was under-crewed. Kartholome ran up a flag that he said was a greeting to the other boats, acknowledging them but also indicating that they were on a mission they could not interrupt.
The ruse may not even have been necessary. Once the first galleys rounded a long isthmus at the tip of Eigg, they looped around and lowered some sails. They were, apparently, going to anchor there. “Yeah, they’re all pulling in,” Kartholome confirmed some time later, one eye stuck to a spyglass as the Slipfin sailed away from them. “Should we-I don’t know-spy on them? Circle back after dark and get a better look?”
“No,” Clytus said. “We didn’t come to get caught by the league. Let’s get out of here.”
They caught sight of Avina at dusk. The city’s stone walls pressed right up against the sea, the sky behind them scalloped with crimson-highlighted clouds. They sailed northwest along the coast, not daring to get too close to the city in the Slipfin. The land changed to stretches of agricultural fields. By dark they were past those, skimming cautiously along a maze of wooded coves and inlets. Pulling in to one of these, they spent the night at anchor. The next morning they left the Slipfin in as secluded a cove as they could, disembarked, and set out toward Avina on foot.
I t was Kartholome who first realized what the plants were. They had walked through them from late in the afternoon through the better part of the night. Rows and rows of low shrubs, with long green leaves that silvered in the moonlight. They stretched on for miles. Though the fields were deserted as far as they could tell, it had not been long since they had been tended. They were uniform in height, recently pruned, and the ground between them weeded. The plants bore no fruit, but they did have fuzzy clusters of flowers that gathered around a long, somewhat phallic protuberance. Melio acknowledged that it might have been his imagination, but they seemed to grow longer after nightfall, as if they were growing aroused at the sight of the moon’s round glow.
Kartholome, walking at the front of their line, paused when Geena called for a break to relieve herself. As she went off, he stood, fingering one of the plant’s erections. Melio felt inclined to make a joke, but he could not think of one fast enough.
“These are thread fields,” Kartholome said. He pulled his hand away, stared at it a moment, and then wiped his palm on his trouser legs. He looked at the others. “Mist. This is where they grow the mist. Can’t you smell it?”
The moment he said it, Melio knew he was right. He could smell it. A pungent scent, musky and almost animal. It had been there when they entered the fields, but it grew thicker in the air as he breathed. The realization somehow made the ranks upon ranks of shrubs look suddenly ominous. He could almost see the scent, the flowers’ pollen released to their lover the night, wafting on the air, searching for victims.
Clytus called, “Geena! Let’s get out of these fields before we all see visions.”
She did not answer. They all cast around. She was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing around them but miles of the plants.
“Geena? You squatting in the bushes? Mind you don’t touch them too much.”
The silence was solid around them.
“Geena, what are you up to, girl?”
When the first figure rose, there was no possibility that it was Geena. He appeared a few feet past Kartholome. A tall, tusked being lit by the moon, wide shouldered and, for a horrible second, not even human. He looked gray skinned, but that may have been a trick of the light. Before the shout of alarm was all the way out of Melio’s mouth, the thing dashed toward Kartholome. It struck him hard on the head with some sort of club, shoved his limp body into the bushes, and came on toward Melio.
Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw other figures emerging from the plants, converging on them in a sudden, savage attack. Clytus cried out in pain. Melio did not get to turn around to see. The tusked thing was before him, his bent arm raised to strike again. Melio dodged under it. He brushed past the man, under his arm, slamming a fist into a rock-hard abdomen as he did. He spun fast, drawing his dagger. He hoped to kick his attacker’s knee from the back and send him sprawling, but the man was already facing him. Melio went for him, knife flashing as he struck. The man slipped beneath his attack, kicked one of his legs from under him, and swept back around on him. He accomplished exactly the move Melio had intended. Melio had just enough time to acknowledge that the horned man was fast for someone so bulky and to appreciate that he had misjudged him. Then the man’s weight fell on him. Hard. The impact blew all the air out of him. Melio dropped his knife as his face smashed into the dirt. He might even have lost consciousness for a second. The next thing he knew, a fist yanked his head back by the hair and his own blade pricked his throat.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Not for the first time, Aliver broke away from the council’s ongoing session-with its various arms and offshoots, crowded with dignitaries and senators and military personal. All of them baffled and accusatory, fearful and more angry for their fear, self-righteous because of it, speaking in sureties because they were unsure of anything. And mourning. Some of them were in mourning. So much noise. Reports had come in about the Santoth raging their way across Prios, across to Danos on the mainland, and inland toward Calfa Ven. Panic spread throughout the empire faster than messenger birds could fly. Aliver needed to get away, just for a while, to clear his head and, of course, to check on his sister.
He stopped before he reached her quarters. He stood in the open air, in the courtyard between Corinn’s wing and Aaden’s. He knew what he would find if he entered. Her inner doors would still be shut, her guards and maids still huddled nervously outside. She had pushed them all out herself, locked herself in. She even beat back her own guards, with a masked
fury, they said, that blackened one Marah’s eye and scratched channels in another’s chin. As much as Aliver wanted to believe she would be there, welcoming him, he knew nothing would have changed. Not yet. If it had, he would have known already.
The night was noisy with muted life, with whispers and coughs and the hushed conversations of servants without work to turn to and nobles without the promised festivities. No one slept. Every torch and lamp burned. The very stones of the palace seemed uneasy, confused, shifting. These were meant to be days of rejoicing, of pipes and drums and fiddles through to the dawn, of food and wine, hope and pride. There was none of that.
Aliver stood, his head tilted and his eyes drifting over a mud-brown sky. There was not a star to be seen behind the oppressive murk. That seemed as clear a sign as any that what he remembered of the day had really happened. No stars. Mud in the sky. Misery in a stadium filled for rejoicing. And Corinn…
Aliver had a vision of what he had seen as Corinn’s head snapped back, but he could not credit it. It was a mistake of his eyes in a blurred moment of confusion. Something had happened to her, but surely not what he thought he had seen. Corinn had hidden her face. She fell down among her guards and twisted away, clawing at her mouth. Aliver had seen her from the back. It looked, in one instant, as if she had pulled her hands away from her face and screamed. Her neck and shoulders shuddered with the effort, but there was no sound. Such a scream as her body appeared to be issuing would have been vast, rending. But there was nothing, so it could not have been a scream.
He had been jostled away from her as the Marah pressed them to flee. Next time he saw Corinn she was on her feet, with the shawl that had been over her shoulders wrapped tightly around her face, clamped in place with a white-knuckled hand. Her eyes caught his a moment. In them he saw the scream he could not hear. It was more terrible for the utter silence of it.
All this because the Santoth had appeared from nowhere. They had stepped out of a void, out of memories that he had within him but that he had not explored since his return to life. Why had he not asked about them? He had never said a word about them. For that matter, he had not questioned Corinn’s use of sorcery. Again, he knew that he had always known-really known-that so much was wrong about what she was doing. Yet he had never said a word against her. Because of it, these sorcerers were free in the world, bent on things he could not yet imagine.
“Why didn’t I know?” Aliver asked himself. “Why didn’t I know it before?”
A passing maid started at his voice. She stood stock-still with bed linens pinned to her chest. Aliver turned away, waving that he had not meant to address her. He walked down the shallow stairs to the upper courtyard, across it to one of the railings. It was the same one at which he had stood beside Aaden the previous morning. To the east the indication of the coming sun just barely lightened the horizon, faint, only nibbling at the dark, slug-thick sky. The sea of boats still surrounded the island, alight with torches and small fires. It looked like a living thing, something breathing but pocked with flaming fumaroles. Would it have looked any different if the events of the day had not turned so foul? Or was it just the eyes of the watcher that gave character to the world?
Aliver realized he had not asked a question like that in some time. It felt familiar, though. The melancholia of it. The leaning toward doubt. Yes, his mind felt more his own than it had since he had awoken to life again. There was a burden in this, but truth as well. For the first time a thought rose in him. He could not grasp it yet. He just knew it was there. He could smell it. Could hunt it.
His thoughts turned to the Santoth again. The others had wanted to know why he had never warned them of their evil. He had lived with them, hadn’t he? Didn’t he know them better than anyone living? There was accusation in the questions, an edge that grew as the night’s hours curled toward dawn. He could not answer them. What they said was true. Deep in the desert south, he had shared a strange half-stone existence with them. Thoughts had flown silently between them, messages floated on a spectral tide that ebbed and flowed with a rhythm outside the world’s turning time. He had been so sure that the Santoth were what they said they were. That they held themselves in exile for the good of the world. They had helped so much, in so many ways, during his war with Hanish Mein. They had destroyed Maeander’s forces in one afternoon. Could that all really have been in service to a goal of greater evil?
Of course it was. He understood it now. The thinness of the lies they had told were so transparent now. He had always felt it but just not known he felt it. He had wanted to believe them, so he had. Their language may have been corrupted by time, but that was not what made it foul. It had always been foul. Time had just eaten away at it further.
He grew up believing Tinhadin was a noble man. Tinhadin, he who built a mighty empire and then banished the sorcerers who would, in their greed, have destroyed it. He who gave up sorcery himself, because he knew it was too chaotic a tool for humans to wield. That, in Aliver’s youth, had been the truth of the past.
And then it wasn’t. The Santoth said the truth was something else. Tinhadin had banished them not as an act of good for the world, but because he wanted the world all to himself. He was like an eagle chick, the strongest of the brood, that kicked his siblings out of the nest so that only he could live and thrive and grow. The Santoth, faithful servants, had been betrayed. That’s what they told him, speaking right into his mind, making the thought his. If brought back into the world, they would again be his faithful servants. How badly Aliver had wanted to believe that.
How clever of them to discover that he wanted to believe it. For that’s what they had done. In his communion with them they had explored every memory of his life, every desire and ambition and fear. He knew that at the time but thought it a good thing. He wanted them to know him. How good it felt to be completely understood, without judgment, he had thought. Now, he was certain that they had used what they learned to shape the lies they told him.
Something else troubled him, though as yet he only nibbled the edges of it. In defeating Maeander on the plains of Teh, the Santoth had saved the Acacian Empire. They had kept the Akaran line in power. What if the true reason they did that was so that they might have still other chances of a future generation of Akarans freeing them? That’s what they had said: a child of his freed them, and freed them into a world still ruled by Akarans, a world in which The Song of Elenet had not been entirely forgotten. A child of his? A child of his… Somehow, he knew that to be right. There was a child of his, but where in the world was this child?
“Your Majesty?” A Marah guard approached nervously. He snapped to attention as soon as Aliver turned to look at him.
“What is it?”
“We received a message from Sire Dagon. His messenger said a Marah should bring it to you and that you had to read it without delay.”
“Is that what he said?” It was more a statement than a question. Aliver raised a hand and the soldier slipped the folded square of paper into it. He unfolded the paper beneath the light of one of the oil torches set atop a pillar. The note was written in brown ink, the letters a little tremulous, like those shaped by the hand of an elderly person.
Prince Aliver,
This is quite awkward to write. I hope you’ll forgive my lack of grace. I have to inform you that you and the people of the empire have been killed.
He stopped, exhaled through his nose, and then read over the lines again to make sure he had not misread.
I have to inform you that you and the people of the empire have been killed. Poisoned. I need not explain to you how I know this, but it is a certainty. I am, in part, responsible for it. Both you and the queen are quite dead. It’s only a matter of weeks until your bodies realize it.
As for the people of empire, they have been addicted once again to a distillation of the mist that will kill them when they are denied it. It’s in the wine, you see. The very vintage they have been toasting you with. This was the queen’s doing,
though she did not know the deadliness of it. If ever you hated and despised the league and thought us treacherous villains, well, then let that ire rise in you again now. Accept that what I say is the truth.
Why do I tell you this? I thought it important that you know, and I’ve come to believe that your death is unfortunately timed. I believe that you are a decent man, and that you and the queen want, in your peculiar way, what is best for the empire. I acknowledge that it may only be the queen who can save the Known World from destruction. That is why I’ve made this admission.
Aliver, please encourage Corinn to be quick in finding a way to defeat the Santoth. Neither of you have much time. If you love your nation, be quick. If you are, it’s possible the league will continue to supply the vintage, thereby keeping the empire alive.
Yours fondly,
Sire Dagon of the League of Vessels
A liver still sat there on the balcony some time later. The coming day was clearly visible in the east now. The oil in the torch beside him had burned low. The flame wavered now, sending up more black smoke than before. He had been watching the changing appearance of the ships in the harbor. As the light increased, the patchwork of vessels looked more and more like a ragged scab on the skin of the ocean. It was smaller than it had been the day before, fraying around the edges.
People are leaving, he thought. I cannot blame them for that.
He opened the note again. Thinking he had it backward, he flipped the page over. There was nothing there. He held it to the uncertain light of the torch. He could just make out the tracing of the words that had once been there. Even as he watched, they faded further. Right before his eyes, they vanished completely.
For a long moment Aliver entertained the possibility that the paper had always been blank. He had imagined the words he read. Wouldn’t that make more sense than that they were true? As soon as he raised his eyes and saw the sun had just broken from the horizon, he let that idea go. Fading ink. That’s all it was. The words may have disappeared, but they had been chiseled in his consciousness and remained with him.
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