The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  Pausing in the entranceway to Aliver’s tent one evening, Thaddeus could not keep himself from eavesdropping on the two. He had not meant to do so, and he certainly had no ill intent. But hearing Aliver’s low voice on the other side of the flap stopped him in his tracks. It was not the same voice the prince usually spoke with. There was an open frankness to it, an undisguised sincerity. It was the voice of a man speaking to his brother, to one of the few people in the world from whom he did not need to hide anything.

  Aliver was talking about how hard it had been for him to be thrust into Talayan culture. It was overwhelming. Early on, he had hated his pale skin and straight hair and thin lips. For a time he had shaved his head and spent too many hours in the sun and even pouted his lips to make them seem fuller when talking with young women. Fortunately, this was years ago. He had grown more comfortable in his skin the last few years. He knew who he was now, knew what he had to do, and, finally, he could look at Dariel and see his family reflected back at him. That was a wonderful gift. Speaking through a laugh, he said, “So I thank you for living this long. Please, continue to do so.”

  Dariel shared just as much with Aliver, detailing how strangely lonely he had felt growing up among the raiders. There had been people around him all the time, coming and going in the swirl of adventure and camaraderie, and yet he had been lonely. He loved them all, he said, especially Val. The giant of a man had been all the father he could. He had given his life for Dariel, in more ways than one. Things like that could not be repaid. Such gifts could not even be earned, he said. “I’ve no idea what I ever did to deserve it.”

  “Val had a life to live, too, right?” Aliver asked. “Maybe doing what he did was his way of living with honor, his way of finding meaning. Often, I think, the men who do the most with their lives are the most afraid of…not being worthy of the faith of those that love them. Of course, it makes our lives harder as well. You and I, we have to be better than we might have been otherwise. We are links in a chain, aren’t we?”

  Hearing this, Thaddeus felt sure that to some extent the prince was talking about him. It embarrassed him, and furthermore he knew that no matter what he did for them he could never be as close to these Akaran children as they were to each other. He loved them absurdly, with an intensity that had increased over the years. It felt like he had taken Leodan’s feelings for his children and added them to his own and mixed them within the great hollowness left by the death of his wife and son. He was father and uncle, mourner and penitent for past crimes all at once; the combination was almost too much to bear. A fitting punishment, he thought.

  As the younger Akaran heir needed to be brought into the fold, to know everything, to have a hand in all that was happening, Thaddeus took over from Leeka Alain and carried on the young man’s education. One evening, while encamped about a hundred miles from Bocoum and the Talayan coastline, he shared a tent with Dariel and Aliver and Kelis, who in many ways seemed a third brother now. Dariel asked about the Numrek, beings that he had not yet laid eyes on. He asked if the tales told about them were true.

  “Depends which tales you mean,” Thaddeus said. “Some are decidedly true. Others are decidedly not.”

  “Is it true that they were forced out of their land?” Dariel asked. “I’ve heard that was why they came across the Ice Fields and joined with Hanish.”

  Thaddeus nodded. “Those whom the Acacians never defeated on the field of battle came to this land as a vanquished people, fleeing forces they feared enough to trudge into the unknown.” He let the significance of this sit for a moment. “This world is larger than we know, with more in it to fear than we have yet imagined. Don’t let this cloud your thoughts, though. For the moment Hanish Mein is the enemy. If we don’t defeat him first, we’ll never have to worry about what might come after.”

  “Well,” Dariel said, “if they were never defeated during the first war, how do we plan to defeat them now?”

  He had asked Thaddeus the question, but the chancellor deferred to Aliver for the answer. The prince sat on a three-legged stool, his legs planted widely, leaning forward, an elbow propped on one of his knees as his fingers massaged his forehead. He indicated that he heard the question only by balling his hand into a fist and pressing his knuckles flat against his skull. Studying him, Thaddeus realized something was weighing on him more heavily than usual.

  “I’m not sure,” Aliver finally said. “I hate that answer, but it’s the truth. I wish I could have all the pieces in place before putting any lives in danger….”

  “But you cannot,” Kelis said, speaking Acacian for the others’ benefit. “If you waited to have everything in place, you’d be forever waiting. There are many things we have only partial knowledge of. Some speak of creatures the Meins received as presents from the Lothan Aklun. Antoks, they call them. But nobody can tell us what these are. We cannot know, but neither can we wait forever.”

  Aliver let the interruption sit for a moment, showing neither agreement nor disagreement with it. “There are the Santoth. They are why I’ve not fought against how rapidly things are moving. I know their power. I believe they will help us. I don’t know exactly how, but if anybody can defeat the Numrek, they can. If they join us on the battlefield, they will find a way.”

  Again, Dariel found something to question. “You said if the Santoth join the battle. Is it possible they won’t?”

  “They promised they would, but there’s a condition attached. I told them that I’d give them The Song of Elenet. They need it, they say, in order to get the impurities out of their magic. They won’t leave the south until I tell them I have the book.”

  “But we move farther north each day,” Dariel said.

  “The distance doesn’t matter. I’m never out of contact with them. My bond with them is stretched by the miles, but it’s not broken. Believe me—they can hear my thoughts when I send them, and I can receive theirs when they wish. If the book dropped in my lap tomorrow I could summon them immediately. The problem is that the book isn’t going to drop into my lap. I’ve no idea where it is, and nobody has stepped forward to tell me. I’ve been too lax about this. I did not let everyone know how unequivocal they were…. I used to think I would simply summon them whether I found the book or not. Once they joined us, they’d have no choice but to help. Afterward—once we won—I’d find The Song of Elenet and give it to them. I’d honor the promise, just change the order of the events to get there. But I’m not sure of this anymore.”

  “What is different now?” Thaddeus asked, feeling this might be the core of what troubled him, wishing that he himself had given all of this more thought. When he was younger, and his mind sharper, he would have probed everything. Waiting for the prince’s answer, he knew he had not done so as completely as he should.

  Aliver looked up, straightened, and seemed to take in the room anew. He wiped under his eyes with his fingertips. “The way people have been coming off the mist…it’s because the Santoth are aiding them. I told them that I could not fight with an army drugged and groggy every night. In answer they whispered out a spell. I heard it inside my head and felt the way it slipped out across the sleeping land each night. It moved like a thousand serpents, each seeking a user.”

  “That’s incredible,” Dariel murmured. “I heard how people were breaking free of the mist, but…”

  “Yes, it is incredible,” Aliver said. Having agreed, though, he struggled a moment with how to express the further things he had to say. He illustrated his thoughts with his fingers a moment, but then gave up on the effort and let his hands rest on his knees. “I could sense that there was corruption in the spell. It’s what they always told me. I don’t know how to explain it. I could not actually understand the language. It barely even seemed a language at all. It’s a sort of music, as if voices plucked tunes from millions of different notes. The notes were like words. And they weren’t like words….”

  He glanced around from face to face, searching them, hoping that they understo
od him better than his capacity to put it into words. He seemed disappointed by the incomprehension he saw looking back at him. Thaddeus felt he should say something, but he had already understood Aliver’s point. Instead of refuting it, he sat, feeling its import grow on him.

  “I cannot explain it,” Aliver continued, “but the Santoth were right, of course. The spell was garbled at the edges. They didn’t intend to make the mist dream into a horror, but that’s what happened. They made the mist state a living nightmare that preyed on each person’s greatest fears and weaknesses. They made it such a torment that the users feared the drug more than the torture of withdrawal, more than losing forever the dreams that they always sought the mist for. Understand me? It may have worked, but that was not the song they wanted to sing. They would have gentled them off with a loving pressure. Instead, by the time the spell took hold, it had twisted into something malevolent. If that’s what happens when they’re reaching out to our allies to help them, what might they unleash when they strike out to slay our enemies, when the song they intend is one of death and destruction?”

  What a question, Thaddeus thought. Exactly as he would have put it himself. He had no answer to it, and sat in silence with the others.

  “You know,” Dariel eventually said, a tinge of humor in his voice, “if this all ends well for us, we’ll have a most amazing story to tell. A most amazing story. One to sit on the shelf beside The Tale of Bashar and Cashen, as father used to say. Remember how he said that? ‘The most amazing tale is yet to be written,’ he said. ‘But it will be, and it will deserve the space beside Bashar and Cashen.’”

  Aliver said that he understood that tale differently now. He began to explain what the Santoth had taught him, but Thaddeus could not listen to him. He knew the instant the words were out of Dariel’s mouth that something crucial had been said. It sent a shiver up from his lower back that fanned out across his musculature. He’d heard Leodan use just those words, but in a different context.

  Somebody approached the tent door. The guard posted there gruffly asked the person’s business. A woman’s voice piped up in answer. Thaddeus could not hear her words, but there was a confident tone to them. Thaddeus assumed he understood the situation. The princes were young men, handsome and powerful. There were certainly women who vied for their attention. It surprised him neither brother had paid much attention to—

  The woman shouted something. Thaddeus did not catch it, but Aliver and Dariel both shot to their feet and rushed toward the tent flap. They were out past it before Thaddeus could make sense of it. He sat forward in his seat, listening to the excited sounds that followed, but it wasn’t until Dariel called for him that he actually rose. Pushing through the tent flap into the torch- and star-lit night, he saw the two princes sharing a multi-limbed embrace with a young woman. She was as sun-burnished as they, as lithe and strong. She wore the dual swords of the Punisari at her waist. The fact that she went thus armed drew so much of his attention that he failed to realize a far more important thing.

  “Thaddeus,” Aliver said on noticing him, “look, it’s Mena.”

  By the Giver—when had he become so dim-witted? So slow? When had his eyes lost their ability to see what mattered? Mena. It was Mena. She disentangled herself from her brothers and walked toward him. Her strides were so determined and the swords so prominent at her side that he half believed she was about to cut him down. Mena, who had always been so smart. Who’d always understood people intuitively, even as a child. Mena, whom he’d feared he’d lost, whom he’d spoken to sometimes in his dreams, who’d named his crimes in those nightmares by counting them off one by one on her small fingers…For that Mena he would stand still and accept whatever havoc she would wreak upon him.

  But if this young woman remembered all the ways that Thaddeus had betrayed her, she gave no sign of it. She closed on him with open arms. She smashed against his chest, arms thrown around him, her head nestled beneath his chin. Thaddeus’s eyes moistened immediately. It took a great deal of effort to balance his head in such a way that the tears did not break over the rims of his eyes. She could have squeezed the air out of him and he’d not have moved until he lost consciousness and crumpled to the ground.

  Drawing back from him, Mena slipped her hands up his neck and clamped them around his head. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She tilted his head forward, spilling the tears onto his cheeks. “You are exactly the same,” she said. Her voice had a foreign accent to it, a bit of the thickness of Vumu that she somehow transformed to music. “Not a new wrinkle on your face. Not a blemish or freckle I don’t remember.”

  Thaddeus gave up all pretense at controlling his emotion. He let it flow, more completely even than he had on reuniting with Aliver or on embracing Dariel. Three of Leodan’s children were together now; all of them—all of them—were alive! It was simply too much joy, too much relief and sorrow to contain. He let it flow.

  What he did later that night was not the rash action it might have seemed. Or so he told himself. At some level he had known for a while that he had done all he could to help Aliver onto the path of his destiny. That job was complete. Aliver would either fail or succeed, but he would not turn away from either result. He had everything he needed to win this war except for one thing. He needed the book that would help his sorcerers sing his cause to victory. Though others had been asked to hunt for the book, there was nobody more likely to actually find it than he himself.

  In the early hours of the next morning, before the sun had risen, Thaddeus Clegg set out to find this book, marching north ahead of the army, toward Acacia and the palace in which he hoped the volume might still lie hidden.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Hanish had not enjoyed his last parting with Corinn. He’d looked her square in the face as he took his leave, unsure of how she would respond, prepared for a petulant show of emotion. Perhaps he even craved some such outpouring. Instead, she had been strangely reserved. She had not protested his leaving to meet Haleeven and the caravan transporting the Tunishnevre. Nor had she asked to come with him, which he’d anticipated. Though she wished him success and speed, her lips had no vigor during their final kisses. She had not pressed her body to his as she usually did. She gave him nothing but polite indifference. He half wondered if she’d started to tire of him already, but it was a silly thought that he brushed aside. The truth, he thought, was simply that she’d grown more adept at hiding her feelings, more like a Meinish woman.

  As he sailed from the island toward Aos he convinced himself of this. She had been full of emotion she wished to hide, he decided: a trembling at the edges of her lips, an intensity in her eyes, something betrayed by the annoyed way she flicked at a lock of hair that fell over her forehead. Yes, it was all there. He could not pin it down in exact terms, but she was not so different from the fragile girl who’d experienced the loss of her family. She’d been abandoned and the shadow of it hung over her still. She did not like parting, though she’d tried stoically not to betray this. Ironic, he thought, considering that it was his return she needed to fear.

  He also suspected she had heard about Aliver’s emergence in Talay. Perhaps she’d even heard rumors that Mena and Dariel were alive as well. He wasn’t sure how that would affect her. In truth, he struggled with the news himself. How was it possible that all the search parties over the years had not found them? Why had nobody betrayed them for the riches he would have gladly paid them? It had been a lasting frustration, and now it was an untimely annoyance. At least he had Maeander to rely upon. He and his love of mayhem, with his weapons of war and those warped creatures he was so enthusiastic about: he would take care of the Akarans.

  Having ordered this in his mind, he did his best to box away any emotions he had for Corinn. He had ordered the Punisari to shadow her closely. He drew out clear boundaries beyond which she was not allowed to pass. The guards were not to make this obvious to her, of course. Let her feel as free as she pleased, but keep her caged with
in the safety of the palace. That was all she needed to do to be in place to fulfill her role. If none of the other Akarans could be made to stand in her place, Corinn would have to die upon the altar to release his ancestors. This would grieve him, yes, but he would reckon with that later. He was strong enough, full enough of purpose, that he could and would do what was necessary.

  That was the purpose of this trip, after all. He was going to help Haleeven bear the Tunishnevre on the last leg of their journey to Acacia, to the chamber he had built especially for them. There was no greater responsibility now. There never had been and never would be after this work was complete. Even the pending war with Aliver and his growing hordes did not compare. Maeander was more than capable of handling that. He trusted his brother’s martial skills completely. Success in defeating Aliver was of crucial importance, certainly. That was why he had given Maeander leave to use all the resources he needed, including unveiling the antoks, creatures never used in battle in the Known World. But still, a poor outcome on the fields of Talay would not decide this contest. Releasing the Tunishnevre would.

  He disembarked at Aos and walked up from the docks without pausing to take in the resplendent grandeur of the place. Under Acacian rule, the port town had been developed as a prosperous settlement. But that was before the war. Now a handful of Meinish nobles and quite a few elite Punisari resided here, ensconced in wealth and beauty unimagined back when they had huddled against the cold in Tahalian. Perhaps the memory of that was what kept Hanish moving without raising his eyes. His people had come so far, but they’d yet to transform themselves into a true imperial nation. They were still, in many ways, occupiers parading in the skins of those they’d conquered, adorned with their trappings. He hoped to change that soon with the aid of his liberated ancestors.

  Fresh horses awaited him and his contingent of Punisari. They mounted and rode away from the city without pause, ignoring the magistrates waiting to greet them. For two days they rode through the patchwork of farmland that provided the empire so much of its food resources. They camped simply each night, not even erecting tents, as the summer weather was so fair, the skies so very blue and cloudless. On the third and fourth days they cut through the rolling grass country, riding past flocks of sheep and cattle tended by young men and women who stared at the Meins as if they were wolves in disguise.