The other lands a-2

by David Anthony Durham

  "Barbaric," Corinn said, still looking out at the setting sun, "and flawed. Cutting off fingers is no way to get at truth."

  Delivegu could not have disagreed with her more. He did not like the word barbaric, either, or that he was doubted. "I saw the girl myself," he said. It just came out. The lie leaped off his tongue before he had weighed its usage completely.

  Rhrenna asked, "You saw Wren?"

  "Yes. I wouldn't trust a whore without seeing for myself, of course. So I verified it with my own eyes. She did visit the midwife." To himself, he thought, If that girl lied, losing her fingers will be the least of her concerns.

  Corinn said, "Wren was a brigand; it's natural she would seek out lowborn assistance. But it may be that Wren suffers some other illness. Your source may be mistaken about the details."

  Rhrenna murmured agreement.

  "Or it may be that your brother's bedmate has a pup in her." The words came out harsher than he intended, frustration beginning to heat him. "That's what I'd bet on. You don't suppose they just sleep in that bed, do you? Like brother and sister?" He wondered if he had gone too far. For some reason, his normal assurance seemed a flimsy thing when speaking with the queen. It was there, yes, but he always felt as if a breeze could blow it away at any moment. "I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. I don't mean to be coarse-"

  "I don't care if you're coarse or not," Corinn said. "I care that you serve me well. That's yet to really be seen. You spoke to the whore, but what of her cousin? Or the midwife herself?"

  "I didn't want to stir suspicion before bringing it to you. Best they think you're ignorant of the deceit, for the time being."

  "The whore won't run to her cousin straightaway or warn Wren that some brute was asking after her?"

  Delivegu frowned. Did she think him a brute? Brutal actions don't make a brute. He'd have to teach her that. "No, I don't think she will," he answered. "Believe me, I know this sort. She cares most about herself and her other nine fingers and other bits after that, as well. You may doubt me all you like, Your Majesty, but it won't change the facts. I simply wanted you to know. I want to be of use to you. I hope you know that."

  The queen turned from the now red sun, exhaled, and leaned back against the railing. "You are as helpful to me in your way as Mena or Dariel or Rialus or any other adviser," she said.

  The frankness of the statement and the flat manner in which she delivered it caught Delivegu off guard. He tried to respond with some wry quip, but nothing came to him. He wanted other things from her, things not so noble, but he had spoken with unusual honesty when he said he wanted to be of use. Perhaps she was reciprocating that.

  "You know, Delivegu, rule is a burden. People believe it a privilege. A gift. A great luxury. None of them know a thing about it."

  "I'm sure, Your Majesty, that none is more capable of carrying the burden than you. Tinhadin would have liked you as daughter."

  That thought caused her to pause for a moment. She almost seemed amused by it, but whatever melancholy had hold of her now prevailed. "I get a grip on this over here," she continued, showing the area she meant with a tented hand, "only to learn that this over there has gone awry." She brought her other hand into play, and then wiped both away with a flick of her fingers. "I get a grip on that, and two new problems fall from the sky. I deal with those, and then five foul weeds sprout beneath my feet. Why will it never hold still for a moment?"

  "That time will come," Rhrenna said, her face tight with concern. She touched the queen on the arm in a manner that suggested it was time for them to go.

  She's not happy sharing the queen's confidence with me, Delivegu thought. Get used to it, girl. "It's peace you crave?" he asked.

  "We're at peace now, and still nothing is peaceful."

  "Your Majesty," Delivegu said, again surprised to find himself speaking honestly, "you set yourself too great a task if you wish to make the entire world peaceful. It has never been that way-or not since the Giver abandoned us. Perhaps chaos is the natural order, to be embraced. Tranquillity might not make you as happy as you imagine. It might seem a bit like death."

  "What about bringing peace to my own family, then? That should not be too much for a queen to manage. What, you think we are at peace? Why-because I smile and say I love my siblings and they do the same?"

  "Don't you?"

  "Of course I do. Only they know me-" She cut her line of thinking with a sharp tick of her head to one side. It must have pained her, for she touched a hand to her forehead as if suddenly struck with a headache. "I didn't ask to be the queen. All my girlhood it was Aliver who was going to rule. That was fine with me."

  "What troubles you, your highness?" Delivegu asked. "Tell me and I will find a way to fix it."

  "Delivegu, I have powers beyond what you can imagine. I don't boast when I say that. It's the truth. But that was true of Tinhadin, too-he whom you would have be my father. One day I'll explain to you why that's not the compliment you think it is." She fixed her eyes on him and for a moment seemed surprised at what she found. "Why am I talking to you like this? I'll tell you why: because I've just recently learned my sister has been snatched from the world by a dragon. She may live; she may be dead; she may fight the beast still. I don't know. Like anyone else I have to wait to learn of her fate. I want her here with me now. I want Dariel here with me instead of on the other side of the world. I want both those things, yet it's I who sent them away. And I would do it again the moment they returned. You see? I cannot be a sister first and then the queen. It's the other way around. So you tell me that I may be aunt to my brother's child, but I know that I cannot be an aunt-not if the queen forbids it. Not if the queen decides a bastard born to a brigand girl from Candovia will hurt the Akaran name, maybe even threaten the heir. Do you understand me?"

  He was not sure he understood all of it, but he believed he caught the relevant thrust. "If Wren's child will cause problems-"

  "I will deal with Wren, and you may well have a part in it."

  Delivegu nodded, most pious. "The very fact that you say it fills me with joy, with purpose. You tell me what to do and I will do it. Anything-"

  "Do nothing right now," Corinn said. She blinked slowly, fatigue on her. "Nothing right now. The queen needs to think it through."

  He watched her and Rhrenna as they ascended the staircase and moved out of view as the wall curved away. A short, sweet view it was. One day, he thought, I'll walk those steps beside you both. May that day come soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Even though he lived every moment of it, Rialus managed to disbelieve the entire ordeal. How could he credit such madness? What in all his years of life would have prepared him for the shoving, blood-spattered, roaring chaos that erupted after Devoth beheaded Sire Neen? The Ishtat soldier beside him lost his arm at the shoulder. His scream was so horrific that Rialus felt like it came from his own mouth. The flailing man drenched Rialus in a spray of blood, which he slipped in as he tried to back away. There, on the floor, he was smeared across the stones, stepped on, and kicked. He swam through bodies and severed limbs and once found his fingers entangled in a leagueman's entrails. He had retched so hard and long he would happily have coughed up his internal organs to end it.

  If all that was not bad enough, when he was yanked up off the floor it was an Auldek hand that gripped him; Auldek hands slapped sense into him; Auldek eyes probed his. As they dragged him from the chamber, he saw not one living Acacian. It was hard for him to remember what he saw, but he knew it had to have been a scene of hellish carnage.

  When they left him alone, Rialus's thoughts flew away from the details of his present horror. He thought through the pain to recall Gurta. He recalled all the things that had been, that might have been, and that had slipped from his grasp. She had loved him. Really she had. She had said so time and again in her plain, lowborn Acacian. He had seen her love on her soft-featured face and felt it in her caresses and known the truth of it when her body welcomed him each evening-
as well as during the morning, afternoon, sometimes in the wee hours of the night. He had planted a child in her. Imagine that! A part of him living within her. Rialus made immortal! A boy child to carry his name and build up his fortune, a child he alone could educate about the world and shape in his image. Better than that, he could shape him in the image of what Rialus dreamed he might have been.

  Now that fatherly role was destroyed. It seemed so dim and distant a possibility that Rialus gave himself over to grief. He did not know what was to happen to him, but he knew nothing would ever be the same. He cried, sobbed. He writhed on the floor in physical and emotional anguish, spitting out the blood that pooled in his mouth.

  He was in just such throes of self-pity when Calrach found him. The Numrek crouched beneath the low door frame and entered the room. His bulk immediately made the space seem tiny, uncomfortably cramped. He stood a moment, taking Rialus in, and then asked, "What's wrong with you?"

  Rialus focused on him and, despite his misery, tried to find a way to answer the question. Nothing he could come up with seemed the right thing to say to the Numrek. Calrach righted a stool that Rialus had overturned and lowered himself onto it. He swept back his black hair with both hands, squeezed it into a tail, and wrapped a leather band around it.

  After tying it, he set his big-knuckled hands on his knees and said, "You have a decision to make. In store for you, if you displease the Auldek"-the Numrek rolled back his eyes as he considered the possibilities-"oh, a poker shoved up your ass; that's likely. Also, I've seen times when they bend your shoulder back. Bend it hard, hard like, so you feel the bone is going to jump out of the socket. That's pain. Then they pull a knife red-hot from the fire. A thin, thin, thin sliver of a blade. With it, they just touch your flesh. Tiny touch, no more weight behind it than a feather. But the blade is so red-hot sharp and your skin so taut that that feather touch splits the surface and you'll want to avoid that, too, I think."

  "I did nothing."

  "You are big stuff now," Calrach said. "Only Acacian they got."

  "Dariel?"

  "Dead, I suppose. Haven't found his body yet, though. Messy in there, you know. They think you're a leagueman, but no matter. They have questions for you. Just answer them. You'll betray nobody who hasn't already betrayed you. Mein, Akarans, the league: piss on them all. Play it right, Neptos, and you may outlive them."

  Rialus stared at him, hating him and completely mystified by him. Piss on them all? Did this imbecile really think Rialus would betray everything in the Known World? Not that he even could, but… "What have you done?" His voice was just barely more than a whimper. "And why? Why? Why did you… The queen gave you privileges. You lived just as you wanted, servants and cooks and-"

  Calrach raised a hand and made a chattering motion with his fingers. "Blah, Blah. Neptos, stop blathering. Those things don't matter! To you maybe, but to us? No. That's no way to live. Not for us. But you won't understand. Why waste words? Enjoy your last days, yeah? Enjoy them, and know that you died for a good cause: the Numrek cause!" He guffawed, crouched forward, and smacked Rialus on the shoulder with a surfeit of force.

  Rialus pulled his knees to his chest and lay like an infant on his side. "Vile," he said. "Vile, vile, vile. I hate you."

  "Shame. We liked you, Neptos. Remember when we used to make you run and throw spears at you? Oh, you were quick when you needed to be." Again Calrach could barely contain his mirth.

  "Vile."

  "You think so? Why, because we don't speak like you? Don't eat what you eat? You think you know us, but deceiving you was like telling tales to children. Simple. Boring. Easy. And it was misery; that's what it was, but you never knew us true. Some land? Some servants? Working for that bitch queen? You think we wanted that? Took pride in that? You-who know us better than most Acacians-should have known better. Those years in Acacia: exile, disgrace. You don't care about disgrace, do you? To a Numrek honor is all. That and belonging. We need to belong, understand? Belong." He drew this last word out, making sure Rialus acknowledged it before he would move past it. "We didn't over there in your lands, not without our totem and our people."

  Rialus, noting what sounded like melancholy in Calrach's voice-an unfathomably strange emotion for him-looked up. He had thought Numrek faces capable of only a few crude expressions of anger. But he realized he had been wrong. Perhaps he had never looked closely enough, never wanted to settle his eyes on their craggy features for longer than he had to. Right now, though, staring at Calrach, he saw shades of melancholy and regret and shame and ambition all betrayed in the lines of his eyes and forehead and lips and jagged teeth.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "We could not live as exiles forever. They stripped us of our totem. They made us beasts instead of men and kicked us to the north in shame."

  "Who did?" Rialus asked.

  "The Auldek, you fool! They are chief among the clans. They-and the others-drove us from Ushen Brae. They called us filth and took our slaves and burned our totem." Calrach seemed at the verge of one of his cursing tirades, but he blew it out of the side of his mouth and kept on. "Did we tell you these things? No. Why should we? The Mein didn't care about the truth when they bought our blades. The Akarans hate the truth, so we gave them lies instead. We let them all think they buy us and order us around. What does it matter what they think?" Tilting his head, Calrach exhaled a long breath. "We have lived wrong for years. Now we wish to live right again."

  "What terrible thing did you do to be driven from here in the first place?"

  Calrach shot him a dangerous glance. "I'll get the torturer now."

  He began to rise, but Rialus blurted, "No, no, don't! Ahh-" He had spoken too forcefully. The pain of it reverberated through him for a few closed-eyed seconds. When he opened his eyes again, Calrach sat watching him. "Don't leave," he said. "You came to tell me things. Please do so."

  "I will," Calrach said, after a moment. "Hear these things. I won't tell you twice. In Ushen Brae, no Auldek or Numrek or any other clan-none of us-had given birth to a child in hundreds of years. Not a single birth. No children. You hear? That's right. I am not the youthful man I look. I don't remember my birth year anymore, but believe me, I have lived long, long."

  "But, you do have children. I've seen-"

  "Don't rush it! Now, I will keep this simple for you. The Lothan Aklun arrived here in their boats. They looked weak. They wanted to lay claim to our barrier isles. They were not warriors, but they were powerful with magic. They trapped us with that magic. They showed us tricks, made flames erupt in the sky, made the ground shake. They even killed with nothing more than whispered words. They said they would pay for the isles with a great gift. They would give us eternal life. You hear me, Rialus? They promised to make us immortal. And they did."

  Rialus said, "But you are not immortal. I've seen Numrek die in battle. You fear death like any man."

  "More than any man, perhaps. Don't interrupt what I am telling you. They create immortality by taking souls out of one body and putting them inside another. We could contain two, three,… ten lives within us. This they had the magic to do."

  The image of the Auldek leader with an arrow in his chest, twisting and shaking like a thing possessed, popped into Rialus's head. "Devoth-"

  "Yeah, you saw that, yeah? You thought Devoth dead from that arrow. Good shot, true, but only one of his souls died because of it. That's why he rose again and-" With the blade of his hand, Calrach imitated a sword slicing through his neck. "No, he has many souls within him. I used to as well. You could call it sorcery. Lothan Aklun sorcery. It's kept us alive all these years, but it came at a price. At the same time as they made us immortal they took away our fertility. We could live forever, but, we learned, we could no longer have children. Quite a trick-giving one kind of immortality, taking another at the same time. They did this to the slaves as well. None of them grow to birth their own young in Ushen Brae. None of them. This is a childless land. All these years we've bee
n childless, except for the souls inside us and for the quota.

  "When the Lothan Aklun began to trade through the league we had all the souls we could want coming to us from your lands. But we wanted more. Yes, for their labor, to work for us and take care of our every need. But not just that. Also, they became our children. Slaves, but children too. And because none of us could bear young either, we always needed more. Understand?"

  He asked but did not wait for an answer. "I'll tell fast. Listen. The Auldek have many laws. Too many. The Numrek broke one. We were punished. They took our souls from us, burned our totems, exiled us. Made us trek into the ice."

  "Burned your totems?" Rialus asked. "Totems?"

  Calrach waved his impatience. "Later about that. Stick to the points, Neptos. We marched north, nothing with us but our weapons, clothes. Those were bad times, when we first walked into the north. Many died of the shame of it. Many thought death was the best escape. I felt it myself. Numrek don't kill themselves, but we can wish for it. We can take risks, hunt snow lions, the white bears. You ever kill a walrus with an ax? It's no sure thing, I tell you. Anyway, truth is, I believed the Numrek were doomed to vanish in the ice. Then something happened. You know what?"

  Rialus did not have a clue, and his face indicated as much.

  "One of our women got a child in her. First in hundreds of years. First one, and then another." He laughed, low and obscene. "And then we screwed like rats. We were having children again, Neptos! You have no child, so you may not know what this means, but it was a wonderful thing. We thought to go back to Ushen Brae, show them the children. But we were exiled. We couldn't. And some said that the birthing only returned because we had passed out of Ushen Brae and had escaped some curse. We did not want to go back and lose the gift again. And then we met the Mein, and got better ideas. You know the rest. Or some of it you know. Is it making more sense now?"

  It was starting to, but Rialus still shook his head, which was pounding. He put much effort into speaking clearly. "What of the Numrek back in Acacia, in the palace? And in Teh?"