The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  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….

  Who called us?

  The question appeared in his mind. He heard it, even though it had not been spoken. The figures had not moved their mouths, but the words sounded within him with a choric timbre of blended voices. Glancing around, he knew he was not alone in having received the question.

  Who called us?

  “I did,” Mena said. Her voice sounded as brittle as a twig. She seemed to think so herself. She tried again. Without opening her mouth, she spoke, I did. Are you Santoth? Nualo? Is one of you Nualo?

  The figures drew in. They seemed to slide toward Mena on rollers. One of them stepped forward. He managed to convey that he was Nualo, without overtly affirming it. Leeka just knew, and he knew that everyone nearby knew also. They were all part of this.

  Why was it not the firstborn? Nualo asked.

  Mena glanced at her brother, at Leeka. She swallowed. Aliver—the firstborn of us—has died….

  Flushed, her lips trembling, Mena carried on. He was killed by our enemy. That’s why I called you. Before he died, he told me only you could—

  The Santoth did not let her finish. They asked for proof of the firstborn’s death. Mena told them that his body was nearby. Instantly, the sorcerers drifted toward it. They knew how to find Aliver’s corpse without needing to be directed.

  Unable to speak, not knowing how to begin, Leeka did not move. Nobody else did either, except to look into one another’s faces. Dariel eventually broke the silence, saying, with a strained hint of his usual humor, “I’ve asked this before, and I’ll try it again in this situation…Do we have a plan?”

  Mena did not have time to answer. The Santoth were already returning, sliding into the same positions they had been in previously. Leeka barely managed to follow the exchange Mena fell into with them. So much passed between them, not just words but other thoughts that did not take verbal form. While Leeka got tangled in it, Mena managed to sort through the weight of information floating between them. The Santoth admitted that they had felt Aliver’s death when it happened. They had known the moment the connection between them was cut, but they had hoped it was not so. They had believed him when he promised to free them. Only he could do so because he was the first of his generation and a direct descendant from Tinhadin. They wanted to know how he could have allowed himself to die with his promise to them unfulfilled.

  Mena could not answer that; it just was. She asked if he could not live again, though. Could they not bring him back to life? Did they not have the power to heal him? But Nualo, speaking now for the others, said no, no, no. They could not restore life. Elenet had never learned how to achieve that. The Giver had protected this knowledge above all else, and he had departed without ever having spoken the words. There may not even be words for restoring life, not to a person who was truly dead, with no sorcery involved.

  Then do what you can do, Mena said. Help us defeat the Meins. They come for us even now. Look, if you don’t believe. They come.

  Nualo and the others turned in the direction she pointed. It was true. The Meinish army approached, looking more numerous than the day before, marching in to finish what they had started. Looking at them, Leeka realized how completely they were defeated. He might have hoped the giant shapes in the sky would have unnerved them, but they marched forward as if they had not seen anything unusual. He felt the collective heart of the troops sink. The end trudged toward them. It was but minutes away.

  We cannot, Nualo said. We would only cause harm.

  “As if they are not planning on just that?” Dariel said, but there was no humor in it, especially as spoken words sounded so discordant in the company of the Santoth.

  In one shared capsule of thought, Nualo explained that the Giver’s tongue was ever deceiving. Men were not meant to possess it. They should never have studied it. The power they wielded was a dangerous thing even at the best of times, even when they had The Song of Elenet to read from. No matter what good they tried to do, it always became corrupted somehow. Tinhadin had not banished them without reason. No Santoth wished to tempt the dangers of using their knowledge for violence now. If they began it, they could not say where it would end.

  Nualo said, The prince knew that we could do nothing without first studying The Song of Elenet….

  Dariel cut in. “Why are we having this discussion?” He lifted his gaze and took in the northern view, thronging now with Meins, loud with their singing and their taunts. Snapping back to the Santoth, he held his words with a clamped mouth and communicated with them as Mena was. Aliver is dead! That army is coming to destroy us. You see them, don’t you? Explain to me how you have any hope of coming in from banishment if we die? You’ve no hope at all, and you know it.

  Nualo turned his complete attention on the younger Akaran. A crease formed on the Santoth’s forehead and slithered down across his eyeball and changed the shape of his nose and bent one corner of his lips before he swallowed it. Leeka knew that that crease was an expression of anger, of desperation, and a sign of how hard it was for these banished ones to inhabit this physical world. He heard Nualo say, You do not know what you are asking. Watching him, Leeka believed that to be a true statement.

  Exasperated, Dariel turned and set off toward the Meins, calling for others to do the same. He gathered up his things when he passed his tent. A few answered him, but Mena stayed focused on Nualo. Maybe he doesn’t, she said, but you do. I called and you came. You didn’t come here to do nothing, did you? Do what you can now. Later, when the world is at peace, we’ll find The Song of Elenet. You’ll be able to speak pure again. Then you can undo any wrong.

  Nualo and the others sat with this for some time. Their faces changing ever more quickly now—creasing, morphing, becoming pocked, peeling, and then healing, their features impermanent and shifting. They were agitated, angry, hungry. Yes, they were hungry, too. They spoke among themselves.

  Leeka heard the clash of the battle just beginning. He felt the pull toward it. He could not let Dariel die without him. He had turned and begun to move away when he heard Nualo say, Others have made the mistake of believing that good comes from evil. It is not so. Nothing today will be any different.

  Leeka kept walking. He put his hand on his sword and felt the contours of the grip in his hand. He knew there was more coming from the Santoth, though. He knew how to sense anger, knew how it drove people to action, and he felt it pulsing behind him with a growing intensity. They were going to do it. No matter their wisdom and wish for peace, beneath it all, they were human. They raged against their fate. They mourned their savior’s death. They wanted revenge. And they wanted to do the one thing that had been denied them for generations. They wanted to open their mouths and speak.

  Whatever happens, Nualo said, stay behind us. Do not follow and do not look. It will be better for you if you do not look.

  Leeka was still moving forward when the Santoth strode past him. One of them gestured with his hand in a way that pushed the old general back, almost knocking him from his feet. They did this to others also and to those in front of them. With motions of their fingers and hands they grabbed soldiers from right in the fray and yanked them back from the Meins. Leeka saw Dariel seemingly get pinched up by the head and moved across the ground, ending up dropped on his bottom beside where his sister st
ood. Mena helped him rise, and then she turned him away from the battle. She cried for others to do the same.

  “Nualo said not to look!” she said. “Do as he said. Whatever happens, do not look.”

  Leeka had to consider what he was about to do for only a few seconds. He did not truly weigh the decision. Nor did he intend even the slightest disrespect with his act of disobedience. But he had woken that morning intent on death, sure that he was stepping into the sunlight for the last time. Now, presented with what was to be a sight for the ages, he could not turn his back on it. Let it be the last thing he ever witnessed, if it had to be. He turned from Mena and Dariel and from the huddled back of the Acacian forces. He followed the sorcerers into battle.

  He was among them as they fanned out across the field, close enough to see that they worked with their eyes closed. Their lips moved. They spoke. No, they sang. They filled the air with a twisting, twining, melodious confusion of words and sounds. Their song had a physical density to it. Musical tones brushed past Leeka with an audible slither, with a texture like the spiny contours on a serpent’s back. Every now and then, one of the sorcerers moved a hand through the air, a slow gesture as if he wished to feel the substance of the ether with his fingertips.

  The Meins backed away, bewildered, hesitating. A few of their generals tried to restore order and press the assault, but they did not get a chance to. The Santoth all attacked at the same moment. They strode forward without breaking their composed gaits, but they covered distance in leaps and jerks hard to measure. They shouted out their strange, incomprehensible words as they went. They waved their arms and swatted the air like madmen plagued by invisible demons.

  Leeka ran to stay with them. He was behind a Santoth as he approached a group of blond-haired soldiers. They were ready to meet him, feet set wide, their swords in their two-handed grip, elbows cocked. But with one swipe of his arm the Santoth stripped the armor, the clothing, and even the skin from two soldiers. They dropped their swords and stood uncomprehending, the striations of their facial muscles and tendons and cartilage raw to the air, their abdomens so completely opened that their inner organs slipped out of them in a tangle. The Santoth was past them before they fell, and he did the same to others beyond.

  Another sorcerer punched at the air, a strange motion with no immediate opponent. A second later a whole cluster of soldiers a hundred yards before him liquefied. They each became thousands of pea-sized balls of fluid clustered in human form. The drops fell to the ground, each bursting on impact, leaving the earth pooled from a red-tainted rain. Another wizard blew his fury straight from the back of his throat with a force that warped the air in front of him and tore a bloody path as straight and limb-snapping as a rolling boulder’s.

  In the space of a few seconds everything had changed. The Meins fled in chaos. Many of them dropped their weapons and tore free their helmets. They clawed at their fellow soldiers. They trampled others in their hysteria. They pushed and shoved, fear in complete control of their actions. It was clear that they were utterly defeated. Whatever they saw in the faces of the sorcerers shot them through with terror. And the Santoth followed, pursuing. As they did so, their fury grew. They moved faster, made grander gestures, roared out more powerfully. They stamped their feet, making the ground buck and shift around them. Slabs of earth tilted up, as if the earth’s crust were made of cheap board and axes were smashing up from underneath it, throwing soldiers somersaulting in the air.

  Leeka muttered to himself that this was not possible. It could not be. He refuted it over and over again. It was not possible, even if it all felt intimately familiar to him. It was akin to his fever time, when he had burned with nightmares in that pile of dead bodies high up on the Mein Plateau. The images that had raged in his mind then were much like the ones around him now. But those dreams had not been real. They were delusions. He wanted to believe that these visions were also tricks of his mind. He should not accept them, could not trust them. If his eyes were to be believed, the world was a mural painted on a flimsy canvas. It could be ripped to shreds. According to his eyes, rents could tear through the sky and into the earth and sometimes shred through the flesh of those caught with it. These scars mended just as quickly as they began, but the sight and sound of them was an amazing horror. And, if his eyes did not lie, the sky poured down a deluge of serpentine horrors. Snakes, worms, centipedes the size of ancient pine trees, eel-like creatures pulled up from the black depths of some great ocean: all of these thudded down to the ground. They twisted and writhed, batting the Mein legions about, flattening men. The beasts rolled and came up with soldiers smashed paper thin against their sides. And he knew that his eyes were not seeing the worst of it. The real horrors, he was sure, were just at the edges of his vision, just outside his capacity to focus. No matter that he snapped his head from side to side, eyes darting, frantic. Still, he never saw the complete ghastliness he felt was there just beyond.

  He spotted one of the Santoth, standing still, his mouth opened in song. It was Nualo. Leeka moved toward him. He drew as near as he dared and stood panting, fatigued as he had never been in life before, exhausted by something more than just the exertion. It is hard on the living to be near magic, he thought. Such force is—

  Nualo turned around. It was not a sudden move, just a slow rotation that seemed initiated by his eyes, the head and the rest of his body following. He scanned the battlefield behind him. He had never imagined such fury. His eyes contained a raging intensity that trembled as if all this chaos was mirrored inside them. They roared without sound.

  Corrupted. Such force is corrupted. He heard these words in his head and knew that Nualo had placed them there to complete his unfinished thought. How do you live?

  Looking into Nualo’s eyes and knowing what writhed and ripped and screamed all around him, Leeka could not answer the question. It felt as if he had been tugged out of the normal order of the world and observed all this from a space within and without it at the same time. He was being allowed to witness this, to live through it, but he could not even begin to explain how and why this could be.

  He would later be unsure just what he had seen. So much of his memory of the day would be a shattered collage of the impossible. But there was one thing he knew with certainty. The power he observed was frightening not just for the destruction it caused but because it was so completely and utterly evil. Its intent may not have been conceived with wickedness. Nualo and the other Santoth were not themselves malignant. Even the rage that propelled them was rooted in a love of the world, in a longing to be able to rejoin it. But the power they unleashed had its own seething animus. If the language of the Giver all those years before had been one of creation, and if that act of creation had been a love hymn that sang the world into being on music that was the fabric of existence itself and that was, as the legends held, most wondrously good to behold…if that was so, then what the Santoth released was its opposite. Their song was a fire that consumed the world, a hunger that ate creation, not fed it.

  Corruption, Leeka thought, doesn’t even begin to explain it.

  Nualo must have heard this, but he did not respond. He turned away, disgusted and impatient. He again unleashed air-rending shouts from the cavern of his mouth. He moved forward, arms flailing the world before him into shredded ribbons.

  Leeka did what he now believed he was meant to do. He ran to keep up. He ran so that he could be a witness, so that somebody would know, so that if ever the time came, somebody would be able to testify as to why the created should never appropriate the powers of the creator.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-ONE

  It took all of Corinn’s concentration to keep her gaze elevated above the gore that littered the palace. She tried to keep her eyes vacant, uninterested, letting the bodies on the floor; the blood-splattered walls; and the strewn, shattered debris remain vague, only defined enough so that she could navigate through them. She focused on mundane objects in the distance, murals at the ends o
f hallways, doorframes, particular bricks singled out on the walls. Soon she planned to lock herself in her room until the cleanup was complete, until every sign and sight of the carnage she had orchestrated was scrubbed from the floors and walls and washed out of fabrics. She would send Rialus to the lower town to conscript the Acacian peasants huddled there for the task. She would pay them with freedom, with privilege, with her love and thanks. She would infuse them with pride in the Acacian Empire again. There would be a great deal to do, but these things would all come later. First, she had to walk these halls and complete one more task.

  She found Rialus waiting for her. Earlier, when a Numrek soldier returned to inform her that the palace was controlled, Rialus had gone before her to assess the situation. Now he looked queasy. His tongue was quick enough, though, and he began talking before she had even reached him, expressing his amazement at how easily the palace had fallen. Her plan had worked perfectly. The palace was under her power already. The lower town was shut tight and trembling. There might be a few Meins hiding in the servants’ areas and in the town, but the Numrek were hunting them down door to door. The priests protecting the Tunishnevre had proven quite stubborn. They had clung to the sarcophagi until they were ripped from them and killed on the spot. Several noble families were caught trying to sail from the ports, their yachts piled high with all they could carry. A few boats had managed to get away. The Numrek, not being a seafaring people, did not—

  Corinn cut him off. “Where is he?”

  Rialus did not need to ask whom she meant. “In the ceremonial chamber, as you ordered.”

  As the two walked, Rialus rattled on, detailing what he had learned about the battle. Much of it had gone just as the Numreks imagined. Their surprise appearance had created instant chaos. The first killed had been two Meinish women whose heads had twirled in the air before they had so much as voiced their alarm. Most of what had followed was pure butchery. Meinish guards fought bravely enough, he supposed, but they were cut down in ones and twos. Few of them had managed to organize a cohesive response. There had been a large skirmish in the main upper courtyard, where the palace battalion had focused their efforts. The Numrek had welcomed the sport of it.