Rialus answered without translating the question. “Two hundred.”
“Two hundred?” Corinn asked. “When I wrote you, I told you to bring a force to take the entire palace, parts of the lower town, as well. You bring me two hundred?”
“Princess, this was as many as we could manage,” Rialus said. “It’s amazing we weren’t spotted as is. You know how hard it was to ferry two hundred of these men in a few small boats at night? Any more and we would have betrayed your plans. Although I don’t mind saying this passageway is incredible! To think that generations of enemies could have slipped inside the heart of Acacia, if only they’d known the way…” Noting Corinn’s thin-lipped look of impatience, Rialus clipped his digression. “Anyway, two hundred Numrek are more than enough to take the palace from the inside. They are hard to kill.”
“Hanish has an entire army here. Punisari among them: they’re hard to kill too.”
Calrach, annoyed at being kept out of the conversation, nudged Rialus. The small man spoke to him in the Numrek tongue, fluent and animated. Calrach found what he said amusing. Looking at Corinn, he spoke his discordant answer.
Rialus translated. “Punisari aren’t a problem. He says he’ll capture the palace for you within a few hours. The cleanup, he says, will take longer than the deed itself.”
Corinn stared at the Numrek’s wide-spaced eyes, the irises the color of amber. She had never noticed that before. They were almost attractive to gaze into. Strange to stand here quietly talking with Calrach about the things they were discussing. These Numrek did not have to hate to kill. It did not matter that they had no deep-seated grievance with Hanish and his people. They had gripes, yes, but they were not truly wedded to this generational struggle. She knew it did not really matter to them who won, so long as they benefited from it. This suited Corinn. There was no ideology to twist their motives or to cloud their thinking. There was a simple honesty to their avarice, an understandable reason to the things they asked from her in return for their aid. With such a people she would always know where they stood and where she stood.
“You can accomplish this attack?” she asked. “You are certain?”
Calrach said that in war nothing is certain. But then he grinned and said, “Nothing except Numrek victory.” He looked around to bring in his fellows, who began to grumble their affirmation. It took a few moments for them all to answer, even the dim shapes hulking far down the corridor wanting to make themselves heard.
“Don’t speak in contradictions,” Corinn said, once they had quieted enough. “It will foul everything if—”
The Numrek interrupted her. He spoke for a few moments, and then Rialus translated. “He says they’ll kill them all.”
“That’s all he said?”
Rialus smirked. “It’s the substance of it. He described their methods as well, but I didn’t think that would interest you.”
Turning back to Calrach, Corinn said, “Then do it. Kill everyone. Everyone, without hesitation. Show them no mercy, listen to no plea. Kill all of them except Hanish himself. Keep him alive for me.”
On hearing this last instruction, Calrach shrugged. That was fine with him, he said. Hanish was of no interest to him anymore. Before he left, though, he asked her to confirm the terms of their agreement. When she did, he grinned, his teeth prominent and glistening in the torchlight. “We will happily accept that. But how do I know you will keep this promise?”
“You can know it,” Corinn said, “because what you want is exactly what I want as well. I don’t promise it as a gift to you. It is in both our interests.”
Calrach studied her for a long time after hearing the translation of this. His gaze was appraising, invasive, and yet indifferent as well. Eventually, he pronounced, “I much prefer working with you to dealing with Hanish. Because of it, you will have your palace back. And, as you wish, we will tell nobody what you’ve promised us. It will be our secret, yes? Between Princess Corinn and the Numrek. Nobody else need know—until the day that we reveal it to the world.”
Corinn stood to the side as the procession of burly soldiers marched past her. They were absurdly large and loud. Their leather trousers squeaked as they trod. Their weapons and random bits of armor clanked and grated. Many of them talked in their discordant language. Behind their screens of wiry hair, some grinned as they passed her. A few even laughed at jokes she had no inkling of, as casual as if they were simply proceeding to an exercise. Two hundred had seemed a small number when Rialus pronounced it, but midway through the line of them they seemed innumerable.
And then they were gone. Quiet settled in, a living presence in its own right that occupied the space as if disgruntled by the previous intrusion. Rialus, who was to have no part in the fighting, stood near at hand, shifting, nervous, clearing his throat often as if about to speak. Corinn ignored him. Another seizure of doubt gripped her. It wrapped around her torso and squeezed the breath out of her and set her insides churning. The implausibility of what was happening and the fact that she, Corinn, was making it happen: it was almost too much to fathom. She felt the ceiling pressing down on her. She kept checking it with her eyes, suspecting, despite herself, that it was sliding downward. For the first time she noticed the bizarre carvings that lined the nearby space, forms half human and half animal. Was that what her people had once looked like? Were those her ancestors?
Rialus interrupted her thoughts. “May I ask, Princess, how you learned of these secret passageways?”
“Thaddeus Clegg,” she heard herself answer.
“Clegg?” Rialus asked, alarm in his voice. “Truly? That old traitor? He’s here, in the palace? He’s not to be trusted, you know. What is he—”
“He is dead, Rialus. Not a threat to you in any way.” He is gone, Corinn thought, but the gift he left me remains. One day, when she learned to use it, she would do many things. Good things. Benevolent things. She would not need to kill then. Would not need to make allies of—
“Well, may I ask how do you plan to proceed now? You’re not exactly working toward the same goal that your brother was. He is done for now, I’m sorry to say, but Mena and Dariel remain. What happens when—”
Corinn turned on the ambassador and stepped up close to him, enough so that he backed away a step, unnerved by the suddenness of her movement. Something about directing her agitation at him helped her get a grip on herself. “No, Rialus, you may not ask me anything. When we speak, it’s because I’ve asked you something. That’s all there is between us, understand? I need you, but I don’t have any delusions about the nature of your loyalty. It is the same as with the Numrek. Like them, you will be loyal for one reason—because only I will give you all the things you want. The Meins would flay you alive. My brother or sister would imprison you as the traitor you are. Only with me have you any chance of happiness. Do you doubt it?”
Rialus did not.
“Good. I will deal with my siblings when I have to. I love them, of course. They love me. Do not concern yourself with it.”
She stopped talking and motioned that Rialus should keep quiet as well. Faintly, she heard shouts of alarm and then the clash of weapons. They came to her muffled and warped by distance, almost ghostly. They were the type of sounds she might not have even noticed if she had not been listening for them. She had heard enough tales about how the Numrek fought so that she could envision the scenes now spreading through the palace. Right at that moment, she imagined, the Numrek were pouring through the halls. They were appearing at the very heart of the palace, completely without warning, igniting utter confusion. They were dashing from room to room, swinging those battle-axes, severing arms and splitting skulls, pinning breasts to the walls with their spears, driving the points of their swords into bellies, showing no mercy to anyone.
She pressed her palm against her abdomen, hit by a quick montage of the people she had sentenced to such deaths. Men like Haleeven, Hanish’s uncle, whom she had actually liked. Women like Rhrenna, who had been her friend and
Halren, who had laughed at her at dinner that night at Calfa Ven. Guards and soldiers, maids and servants, officials, noblewomen and their children. The quick barrage of faces and names struck her like so many punches in the gut. What a nightmare she had unleashed! She stepped back and reached for the wall for support. She had to remember that they were her enemies. They always had been. Every one of them. If they seemed genteel and harmless, it was only because men had killed effectively enough in their name to assure it.
The ambassador stepped toward her, inquiring if she were well.
Corinn spoke coldly. “You said earlier that you did not think I’d be interested in all that Calrach said. In future, Rialus, when you are translating for me, translate exactly. It is not for you to edit what I—or they—hear.”
Rialus nodded, meekly accepting the reproach. A moment later, looking askance at him, she watched a smile of satisfaction draw across his face. She almost snapped at him, asking why he smiled. But then she understood why. She had just promised him a future. Such things, it seemed, were now hers to bestow. Or to take away.
This would take some getting used to.
Chapter Seventy
When he stepped out of his tent in the predawn that morning, Leeka Alain had already decided that this day was to be his last. He had fought so much in his life, in so many varying terrains, from these arid fields to the mountains of Senival and the marshes of Candovia, right up to the high tundra of the Mein and through the woodlands of Aushenia. He had squabbled with Maeander Mein’s troops; fought outright against Hanish’s; clashed with Senivalian mountain tribesmen; and battled Numreks, a race he had discovered before anyone else in the Known World. He had even tamed one of those foreigners’ rhinoceros mounts. He had stood shouting into snow squalls and through storms of catapulted fireballs. He had triumphed a few times but also been defeated more than once. He’d even sunk to the level of a belly-crawling mist addict. Yet he’d been resurrected and given another chance.
That made him one of the luckiest men alive. Thanks to Thaddeus Clegg’s hard discipline, he had been given a second opportunity at life. With it he found the young prince Dariel. He had a hand in teaching him his name and in turning him from a raider into a man worthy of the nobility to which he was heir. He had seen Mena, lithe and small of stature, become an artist of martial craft the likes of which he’d never witnessed before. What she did the day before with her sword was incredible. It made no sense, looking at her slim frame and intelligent face, that she could be such a tornado of rage. And he’d seen King Leodan’s eldest become a prophet of change, a noble man who spoke of a better world and was willing to fight—and die—in the struggle to bring it into existence. What, he wondered, could ever best watching his prince in all his perfectly formed glory cutting down the antok, a beast right out of the caves of hell? That would stand as the high point of his life, just as Aliver’s death the next day was undeniably the lowest moment he’d ever known. What a shifting, chaotic tide their fortunes followed.
Leeka did not regret the life he had led. He certainly would not alter a moment of the years he put in laboring for his king and country. It was possible, though, that his journey through life was not going to end as he would have written it himself. This truth, he decided, he would face with as much composure as he could muster. At least he would lose with dignity and die in a manner befitting the code by which he had lived. That, he believed, was what the coming day’s last stand against the Meins was to be about. He walked into it with his armor on, sword at his side, his face as creviced and venerable as he could muster as an example to those under him.
Such, at least, was his intention when he split the flap of his tent and stepped through the portal. But what he saw on the southern horizon was so bizarre and unexpected that he lost his composure immediately. His jaw hung loose. His mouth formed an amazed oval. His eyes became two copper coins that widened more and more with each passing moment.
What he saw was this: a sky roiling with clouds of red and orange, combusting with plumes of yellow and purple, with great mountains of movement stretching up into the heavens. All of this was a background upon which a company of giants approached. The sight of them was bizarre and surreal, their shapes incorporeal enough that on occasion the last stars of the dawn sky, seen between gaps in the seething clouds, twinkled right through them as well. Their shapes were in black silhouette, enormous figures of elongated vastness, their bodies rocking with their strides. Their arms waved in the air to either side as if they were moving across shifting ground, searching for balance. Their legs must have spanned miles with each step. Behind the first giants he saw the indications of others and felt the pressure of still more beyond that, coming up from around the curve of the world. He scanned his memories for anything to explain such a sight. He recalled only one thing.
“Could these be God Talkers?” he asked Mena, once she had emerged to answer his gruff command. “When Tinhadin exiled them, did they not rampage down toward the south like enraged giants? That’s what I recall from my childhood studies.” From his childhood studies? The very idea sounded absurd enough that Leeka doubted his own sanity. He might be dreaming or hallucinating. Mena might look at him and name him a madman. He asked, without his usual command of voice, “You see them, too, I hope?”
Mena did not respond, but she stared in a way that was answer enough.
Dariel joined them a moment later, just as speechless. Within a few minutes what remained of the entire army stood gazing to the south at the scene playing out across the heavens. It was hard to gauge how far away the figures were. Each of their strides appeared massive. Their legs seemed to stretch out as if the foot would plant itself beyond the onlookers. But the next step after that was just the same, and again after that. For all the strangeness of this Leeka knew they were, in fact, getting closer. But the territory they traversed was beyond his ken.
Leeka sensed alarm building around him. Personally, it had not occurred to him to be fearful. Something was happening here, yes. Something unexpected. Even without knowing what it was, he welcomed it. But considering the things they had witnessed recently, it made sense that others would be afraid. They were not all old men, like him. They were not all resolved to die as he was. Of course, they would conclude that whatever was coming came against them.
Somebody began mumbling a prayer in Bethuni. Another uttered the word that named Meinish ancestors, saying that they were coming to avenge Maeander. Still another yelled that it was Maeander himself returning. He had been killed in contradiction to honor, and they were all to be punished for it.
“Calm! Let us be calm,” Leeka said.
Nobody seemed to hear him. People began to back away, tripping over things, their eyes dilated with growing fright.
“All of you stand!” Leeka bellowed. “Hear me! Whatever comes, be brave with us and welcome it. We still fight for Princess Mena and Prince Dariel. Our cause is just—”
Mena grabbed the general’s arm. “I know what they are,” she said. “You’re right. They’re God Talkers. I called them back.” She piped up, her voice sharper than Leeka’s, higher pitched. It got attention. They had nothing to fear, she yelled. The giants coming were Santoth sorcerers. She had called them. They came to answer her, and they were friends of her brother’s, friends to them all. “There is nothing to fear.”
The tone with which she pronounced this last statement did not really contain enough certainty to match her words, but just hearing her speak had a calming effect on the soldiers. Instead of fleeing, the troops drew closer together. They tightened up, flanking the royals and the general. Even those who had not been near them and who probably had not heard Mena’s words gravitated toward her, perhaps remembering her feats from the previous days and taking some comfort from them. Together in one mass, they waited.
Leeka, standing just behind the Akarans, saw Dariel turn his head and heard him whisper in his sister’s ear, “I hope you’re right about this, Mena.”
�
��Me, too,” she said, once more staring at the sky. “Me, too.”
When the shapes changed, they did so quickly, all of them going through it in the space of a few compressed seconds. One moment they were the towering figures they had been since Leeka first laid eyes on them. The next they were smaller. And then smaller again. Then smaller. It was so fast that Leeka’s eyes were still in the sky when there was no longer anything to see up there. The billowing clouds consumed themselves in a silent implosion. Behind it the morning sky emerged, its normal pale shade of Talayan blue.
Leeka wondered if that was the end of it. A light show in the heavens, without substance, hard to read or understand, finally disappointing. But that was not all of it. He heard inhaled breaths all around him, felt Mena’s arm brush his unintentionally. He lowered his gaze.
There on the earth, just yards away, walked a group of men. They were of normal stature, of flesh and blood, moving at an easy pace, about a hundred of them. They swayed slightly, as the giants had, but in most ways they were everything those shapes had not been: small, corporeal, tangible. They had the stooped postures and the thin limbs of old men, with gaunt, hungry faces. They should not have been frightening. Yet Leeka could not help but step back, pressing against the barricade of bodies just behind him.
The first of the men stopped just a few strides away. The others bunched up behind them. Leeka stared at their faces. They were not right. They were not normal. He saw them in concrete detail: the individual shapes of their noses, the jagged ridges of their hairlines, the shape of their eyes, and their slow manner of blinking. But he could sense stitches at the edges of their foreheads, or just under the chin, as if they had taken on the skins of others and wore them sewn onto their own skins. At times tremors rippled across their flesh, leaving them different from before. The longer he looked, the more he thought he saw bits and pieces of familiar persons in their features. He even saw himself in the scowl on one, in the eyebrows of another, the jawline of that one….
Acacia, The War with the Mein Page 68
