That was all Dariel heard before he toppled to the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Have a drink, brother,” Sire Grau said, motioning toward the servant entering with a tray of tall, thin glasses. Another servant set down a display of cheese parcels wrapped in edible leaves. A third hovered nearby, an intricate mist pipe in his hands. “Or a pipe, if you wish it.”
“No, thank you.” Dagon waved the servant away. He lowered himself to the floor cushions in Grau’s plush quarters. Why a man as elderly as Grau would choose to sit on the floor baffled Dagon, but he sighed and patted the pillow beside him as if he liked nothing more than to lie about in the middle of the day.
“You really should have a drink,” Grau said. He selected a glass from the tray and handed it to Dagon.
“If you insist,” Dagon said.
“I do,” the older man said. His glossed lips smiled, though the expression was limited to the mouth. His cheeks and eyes and forehead did nothing in support. He waved the servant away, having not taken anything for himself.
Dagon held his frown hidden deep below the surface of his face. He sipped, smiled, and made an audible indication of pleasure. He was certain that Grau knew he did not like liqueurs, especially pungent ones redolent of fennel, as this one was. At least, he thought he knew. Perhaps there was nothing sinister in it. Grau was past his hundredth year. He could be forgiven for misplacing specific likes and dislikes of the myriad leaguemen he communed with.
Though the room was deeply shadowed, one wall featured a long balcony. From his reclined position, Dagon could see only a featureless swath of sky. If he stood on the balcony, he knew, he would take in one of the grander views of the teeming city of Alecia. To the right the Akaran palace sprouted from a hillock. A rambling estate with large gardens, it went unused by the royal family. To the left he would have seen the white stone estates of the richer nobles, with those of Agnate families flying their lineage’s crest. Just beyond them the green dome of the senate building itself. Straight out from the balcony the view stretched over the city proper. Business and trading districts, markets, residential quarters, areas rich and poor, all thronging with their own heartbeats.
Dagon had sometimes imagined stripping himself of his league regalia and wandering into the city’s alleys and lanes. What world would he discover there? How different from the existence he had always known and worked so hard to maintain? He even wondered, on occasion, if he might lose himself within the anonymity of the urban vastness and take on a new identity. The thought never lasted long. With the distinctive cone shape of his head everyone would know him for what he was. He was Sire Dagon of the league; why would he ever wish to be anyone else?
“I wanted to discuss a few things with you,” the senior leagueman said. “Did you find our council meeting as unsatisfactory as I did?”
Having no idea just how unsatisfactory Grau had found it, Dagon dipped his head, something that was balanced between a nod and a shake. Better not to offer anything more committing just yet.
“Most frustrating,” Grau went on. “We’re too spread apart. With Faleen and Lethel in the Other Lands and half the council on the Outer Isles… Seems that some of us believe the center of the world has shifted west. No longer Alecia. It’s those islands now. You and I, Dagon, are on the margins, it seems. Our so-called official council. Most unsatisfactory. Hardly a trust of mighty thinkers. Not enough of us to truly meld. Didn’t you find it so?”
He had very much found it so. The emergency council had been called at his urging. After witnessing the queen’s growing power he had needed to meld his mind with his fellow leaguemen. In so many ways that was the basis of their success over the generations. One of the first things they were taught as children was to blend their minds, to take solace in one another, to share fears and doubts and ambitions and lusts and everything else that ordinary people had to handle while locked inside the solitude of their skulls. As a child, Dagon had found the melding more soothing than anything else in life. The fact that it had always been augmented by copious quantities of highgrade mist helped, but there was something comforting about sharing with others.
That had not happened during this last council. They had gathered in the chamber in Alecia. It was the largest of their council halls, rank upon rank of reclining chairs rising from the center. It could hold a couple hundred leaguemen, but this time only twenty-six attended. Most of these were not even senior enough to sit within the first three circles. Their thoughts reached Dagon muffled by the distance between them. Never before had he noticed how often others held opposing thoughts on the same issue, and never before had he noticed the noise of minds trying to hide the very things they were there to share. Perhaps it was the particular individuals involved. He did not think so, though.
He had never noticed it before precisely because a chamber filled with minds made it easier to hide. To join. To share. To remain a single fish within a shoal of similar fish. Without the great collective motion and comfort it brought, Dagon had felt more dissonance than he wished to coming from his brothers. They were more separate individuals than he had acknowledged. The disquiet of the experience lingered with him. As, apparently, it lingered with Grau.
“As you say,” Dagon said, “there were not enough of us in attendance.”
“We grew no clearer on how to proceed. It’s the issues we face as well. Mustn’t forget that. Let us discuss it now, just you and me.”
Grau picked up a cheese parcel pinched between the curved talons that were his long, painted fingernails. “When last we met in a proper council, it had seemed likely the Auldek would inflict great damage on the Akarans. Either side might win; both would suffer. At this last attempt at a council you expressed doubts about this.”
“A few weeks ago I would have said the outcome was a toss of the bones, going either way as chance blesses. Now… I fear Corinn has made herself a new Tinhadin.”
“ That old bastard,” Grau said. “The worst of the lot.”
“And she is not alone,” Dagon continued. “Aliver is beside her. I do not think his mind is entirely his own, but if Corinn has shaped it-”
“He may be worse than the old idealist he had been.”
Dagon pressed the sour truth of this between his lips. “She’s powerful. Raising the dead and making dragons. Don’t forget that she did destroy the Numrek at… What was that place called in Teh? The Thumb. I find it unsettling that there are almost no rumors of discontent among the populace. What with Barad the Lesser singing her praises and the vintage putting a shiny new gleam on the entire world, there are no voices fomenting against her. None that I’ve heard of recently, at least.”
“That vintage was our own fault.”
Shrugging, Dagon said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time. She even gets credit for ending the quota trade, as if she had any choice in the matter.”
“You think she could defeat the Auldek.”
“I fear that’s a possibility.”
Grau seemed to have something else to say on this matter, but instead he swallowed it along with a cheese parcel. “Think about our situation. Without the Lothan Aklun for us to trade with… without an enemy they fear like the Auldek… how long before the queen aims her ire at us? Sire El may think his army will be a match for her, but do we really want to become just another petty power, settling matters with the sword and spear? I find that distasteful and far too uncertain. Our success has never come from martial prowess; it never truly will. I once thought we could float through any change. I am no longer sure of that.”
“Nor am I.”
“We could try to remove Corinn. We’ve done such things in the past. I myself helped shorten Gridulan’s life. That old bastard. I’ve come to feel we must kill her. And her brother as well.” Grau made an expression as if he had burped and found the taste unpleasant. For the first time since they had begun, Grau’s eyes fixed on Dagon’s. “We are in agreement on that?”
There was som
ething about the directness of Grau’s eyes that unnerved Dagon. “Yes,” he said, “we are in agreement.”
Grau held him pinned to his yellowish eyes for a little longer, then relaxed again. He puckered his lips and made a kissing sound. Dagon might have been unnerved yet again, had not the pipe-holding servant peeled away from the wall in answer. He brought the delicate instrument to his master. He lit it by snapping the flame strips glued to his thumb and forefinger. It took him several tries to get the resulting tiny burst of flame to catch the threads in the bowl. Once they did, the young man darted away. He returned a moment later and lit a second pipe for Dagon, who did not refuse this time.
Grau held the tubing of the mouthpiece and smelled the pungent scent a moment. The threads were potent, pure, as the rich aroma of them attested to. “Dagon, I wish to send you back to Acacia with a charge, one outside the unsatisfactory proceedings of the last council. Council Speaker Sire Faleen should be here, but he isn’t. Sire El should be here, but he isn’t. Many others should be here, but they aren’t. It falls to us to take action when the council cannot. Are you prepared to do that?” Before Dagon could answer, Grau added, “Soon I will step down from all council matters. I am ready for Rapture.”
Of course you are, Dagon thought. It made perfect sense, and it perplexed him that he had not anticipated it. Grau was old. His body no longer took the physical pleasure in living that it once had. Why wouldn’t he be ready to join his predecessors in perpetual bliss? That was what awaited every leagueman who lived long enough-and who earned enough for the league over that long life. Rapture. It was the Tunishnevre in reverse. Instead of undead, ageless suffering, Rapture offered continuous life, unending bliss through a process that drained one’s body of blood, replacing it, very gradually, with the purest distillation of mist. It was a process that took the better part of a long life to prepare, and then several years of slow transition. Dagon had been tithing toward his own Rapture for decades, but it was still a faraway goal. Such a gift was incredibly expensive. Grau must have finally paid his dues.
“You have served many years,” Dagon said, realizing he had not responded yet.
“When I am gone, I would like to believe Sire Faleen won’t hold the reins of power. He may be council speaker, but I’d be remiss if I left it up to him to appoint his successor. I want a bold man in the position, one who will keep the league powerful forever. What use is going to Rapture if it all comes crashing down in a few years?”
Dagon nodded.
“I see several prospects for this role. I’m sure you know those I mean.”
Of course he did. Bold-or at least ambitious-leaguemen were as numerous as pimples, and as hard to scrub away. Sire Nathos with his vintage. Sire El creating his Ishtat army. Even the upstart Sire Lethel had the scent of blood in his nose. Dagon had damned them all more than once in moments of ill temper, but he said, “There are none like you, but many worthy men who aspire to be.”
“Well… there are one or two individuals that I would rather not see ascend. Lethel, if you must know.”
Dagon almost spilled his drink. Had Grau just-just… spoken ill of another leagueman?
“I am going to take you into my confidence. The next council speaker could well be you, Dagon. Why not? You’ve served us right from within the wolves’ den all these years. You’ve done a great deal more than you’ve received credit for, haven’t you?”
Answering that in the affirmative felt like a trap. Dagon tried his diagonal head-shake/nod combination again.
“Now comes the time when you can truly earn it.” The old leagueman studied him a moment, lips squinched together in a contemplative pucker. “I have in mind a coronation of death.” He pointed with his jaw. “Take the pipe. Ease yourself and we will discuss it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
On the morning she was to depart for the coronation, Mena left Elya in the care of gentle handlers and went to say good-bye to her troops. She paused in the hallway just outside an open doorway in the Calathrock. The chamber was still musty, damp, stained with the mold and decay. It would take more than a few weeks to undo the years of neglect. But it had been a corpse before. Now, soldiers’ feet pounded its floor. The air clanged with the clash of weapons and shouts of orders, and it smelled of men and women training. Volleys of arrows flew like single-minded birds. Once a dead ruin of a defeated people, now the building lived and breathed.
She had worked as hard as anyone to bring about the transformation. She had lifted new timbers with her own hands, pulled on the rusty-toothed saw to cut them, and leaned her weight to push them up into place, shoulder to shoulder with her soldiers. She had filled buckets with snow and brought them inside to melt, and then scrubbed the floor clean like a servant. She had held the safety ropes as climbers scrabbled into the chamber’s higher reaches, shoring up the ancient beams and repairing broken panes of glass. And she was among the first on the scene when a blockage in the vents caused an explosion that killed three and steamed the skin half off several more.
It was hasty work, done mostly so the chamber could function once more for its most basic purpose: to train an army sheltered from the winter that raged above it. This, too, she did in among her troops. She walked the Calathrock as Perrin shouted the soldiers through drills. None of them had fought more recently against the Numrek than she. So she taught what she knew. She lectured as she sparred with the strongest, tallest, and most skilled of her warriors, hoping that things learned from fighting Numrek would apply to the Auldek as well.
She was there to correct missteps, adjust weapons. Her eyes on the young men and women pushed them harder than they would have worked otherwise. She knew she had this effect on them. She used it not for herself but so they would become stronger, faster, more skillful than they thought themselves capable of. Perhaps one or two of them would learn just the extra bit he or she would need to survive the Auldek.
“Much has changed, hasn’t it?” Perrin’s shoulder brushed hers as he came to stand beside her. “Just a few weeks, but you’d barely recognize the place. It’s you who did that.”
“They did it,” Mena corrected. “One person can do little. Only together-”
“I know. Only together is great work accomplished. But I don’t know where we’d be without you. You, Mena, kept us marching and working and training. I’ve never known anyone more suited to lead others. You’re…”
She glanced at him.
The easy confidence on his face fell away. He went suddenly shy, as if the touch of her eyes was a rebuke. “I was going to say that you’re an inspiration, but that doesn’t sound like something a soldier should say to the princess he serves.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I should probably quit while I’m ahead.”
“I think so, Captain.” Looking back into the Calathrock, Mena smiled. Despite the interest she had always seen in Perrin’s eyes, she thought Melio would like him. I’d love to see them spar together. Melio would win, but this young man would give him a good contest. She stepped through the portal and into the massive chamber.
A visiting dignitary or senator from Alecia would not have recognized her, dressed as she was in simple garments meant for function, mobility, and warmth. Her soldiers recognized her; they were what mattered. Their survival in the face of the coming onslaught mattered. That was the main thing she hated about command-that the one thing she wanted to spare them from was the exact thing she was sending them toward. Aliver had warned her that leadership was like this.
She rejoiced when new arrivals swelled their numbers, knowing at the same time that many of them would likely die. A unit of new troops arrived from Candovia, as well as a team of laborers and young recruits from the Eilavan Woodlands. The former had acted on Corinn’s orders; the latter on their own initiative. Barely enough to make up for those taken by the hazards of trekking and working in a Meinish winter. As yet they did not fill even half the chamber, but it heartened them all to know that some were will
ing to join their cause. The trickle of arriving Meins had especially lifted Mena’s spirits and had done wonders for Haleeven’s.
She could see as much when she passed where Haleeven was talking with several of his clansmen. The Meinish men wore rags. Their hair hung in matted, golden knots that were, somehow, attractive on them, despite the bits and pieces of debris that clung to them. They were fresh faced and sharp featured, and each of them was sprinkled with peeling curls of pink skin on his or her nose and cheeks. It still amazed Mena that they had answered Haleeven’s call. They had appeared out of the frigid nothingness surrounding Mein Tahalian as if they had been camped just over the horizon. She stopped among them long enough to learn their names and to welcome them.
Just the previous morning they had rolled out wagons meant to imitate the wheeled structures the Numrek had arrived with. “Too bad I won’t be here to see you get squashed by these things,” she said, patting a young woman on the back. She wanted to work through the problems posed by antoks and to see the other beasts the Auldek might arrive with and form strategies against them. “I’m sorry to miss you all fighting that as well.” She pointed to where someone had mounted the head of a woolly rhinoceros on a wheelbarrow. The efficacy of training against such a comical imitation was questionable at best. She welcomed the laughter it was already invoking, though. “I’ll miss the lot of you.”
Gandrel’s booming voice called for quiet in the chamber.
“You began this campaign with me a few months ago,” Mena began. “Most of you did not know me. I did not know you. We know one another now. We were called upon by the nation as the first line of defense against invaders none of us have even seen. My sister, Queen Corinn, asked for bravery. You arrived wearing it on your chests. Didn’t you?”
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