The governor entered preoccupied, mumbling something under his breath, his elbows tucked close to his body and shoulders hunched against the chill in the room. Seeing Maeander, he stopped so abruptly that he tilted free a splash of the steaming drink he had been carrying in a careful, two-handed grip. “Maeander? What brings you here so early?”
Maeander pulled a face of exaggerated insult. “What sort of greeting is that? One would think you take no joy in starting the day with me.”
Rialus was immediately caught off balance. He explained that he meant no slight at all. He was just surprised. Actually, he was on his way to the baths. He had just stopped in for a moment. He might not even have come to his office, in which case he would have left Maeander waiting. He rattled on without any sign that he was likely to abate soon.
“Enough!” Maeander dropped the sole of one black-booted foot to the floor with an audible impact. “I have a number of things to tell you. You may want to sit down.”
Rialus did not initially seem inclined to do so, but Maeander waited, eyes hard on him, until he changed his mind.
“Leodan Akaran,” Maeander said, “has been removed from his throne. Don’t interrupt me. I will tell you everything you need to know. My brother Thasren has sacrificed himself to end the king’s rule. I have received word that all but confirms he has achieved this. I expect in a day or two you will learn the Akaran has passed from this world. Have care for your coffee.”
Rialus, so stunned by Maeander’s words, had let his saucer tip to one side. “By his action Thasren has announced that the people no longer honor the Akaran line. He has declared war, and it is my intention to fully rally behind the cause he died for. I leave with a small contingent of my men in a few hours’ time. Do not look relieved; I am not finished yet. Now, Rialus, what I am about to spell out for you may send you into a fit of sputtering confusion, but do try to keep a hold of yourself. You have several important responsibilities today. The first has to do with the baths.”
“The-the baths?”
“Just so. The second company of the guard will have use of them this morning, yes? Well, what you are going to do is order the first company and the third also to join them in the steaming waters. It will be a great crowd of men and women, but I am sure they will not object. All that warm flesh rubbing and touching…Who doesn’t love the warm, moist heat of a crowded bath? But you would be better off not joining them. You will explain-if you must explain to anyone-that the baths will undergo their cleaning and maintenance this afternoon, so anyone who wants use of them must do so this morning. That sort of thing.” With a motion of his finger he indicated that these details he happily left in the governor’s capable hands. “And then…you will order all vents not linked to the baths closed. Once they are, you will have the tampers loosed on the main valves. You will release the full force of the stored energy in the wells.”
“I don’t understand,” Rialus began. “The heat inside the baths-”
“Will be considerable. I know. It will bring the pools to a boil. The soldiers will flush red as lobsters in the pot. They will claw over one another trying to get out of the water, but there will be too many of them. The air will fill with steam, and the heat will fill their lungs and they will suffocate. I know very well what will happen, Rialus.”
“But they will try to flee out into the halls, naked and…” The governor was too perplexed to continue. “Is this a joke?”
“Does it strike you as funny? You are a strange one, Rialus. Anyway, the lobsters will not escape the baths. I am leaving behind enough soldiers to bar the doors until the steaming is complete. After which they will dispatch any other soldiers they find. Then they will leave you to prepare for what is to follow. Is any portion of this unclear so far?”
Rialus answered this with a stammering description of just what would happen to the troops, as if the actual reality of what he proposed had possibly escaped Maeander. That would mean nearly three thousand soldiers, men and women-almost all the Northern Guard since Alain’s company had disappeared-would be steamed or boiled to death. They would swell and burst and leak all manner of fluids and die horrifically. He had never heard of such an idea. It was mass murder on a grand scale. An infamy and deception of epic proportions.
“It will be a horrible mess,” Rialus said, concluding with bewildered, indignant finality. “I could not possibly-”
Rising to his feet, Maeander clamped a hand down on the smaller man’s shoulder and made him stand. He slipped his arm more around his neck and turned Rialus toward his precious glass window. “It will indeed make for a horrible mess, but you need not worry about that. All you have to do is gaze out your window here. Watch that horizon. Remember that you have guests coming. They are nearly here. Actually, you will start hosting them this evening. They will be hungry and wanting for comforts. You will be glad then, my friend, to have so much freshly cooked meat to offer them.”
Maeander left without awaiting a further response. He was so pleased with himself he feared he could no longer keep the self-satisfied expression off his face. His heels slammed hard on the floor with each footstep. It was an almost painful way to stride, but he enjoyed that the earth beneath him accepted the punishment of his footfalls. He knew that Rialus watched him recede with open-mouthed awe. Such a little man, Maeander thought. A shrew. But he was useful and so easily manipulated; one could not deny that.
Maeander was in a fine enough mood to forgive the rodent his shortcomings. He had never been more pleased. Thasren was immortal now. Soon Hanish would be leading an army toward Alecia via the River Ask. For his part, Maeander would push another force through the mountains into Candovia. And his new allies, these Numrek, would rampage through Aushenia, a horror like nothing the Known World had seen in centuries. Then there would be a great meeting in which the bulk of the Acacian army would find themselves gasping for life before the battle even began…
The present, Maeander thought, was a blessed time to be alive.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Leeka Alain’s meeting with the Numrek warrior began as a surprisingly muted affair. He had walked for so long through the soiled detritus that marked the horde’s passing that he had grown lax. Fatigue clung heavily to him. He no longer placed his feet with the grim determination he had on the first few days. Isolation and barrenness played tricks with his mind. He stopped, pausing to study the lay of the land and to examine the shapes against the snow from a distance. He had seen mirages out on the curve of the horizon several times already and none of the wavering shapes had come to anything. For greater and greater stretches of the day he occupied an imaginary world built out of the past. He almost forgot the purpose of his solitary arctic trek, forgot that he trailed a very real enemy, and forgot the recent massacre of his army. It already felt like a nightmare from a distant time, hard to credit as reality.
He trudged off the flats and onto the western edge of the Barrens without giving it much thought. The land before him was just as treeless as it had been before, but now it undulated like folds of wrinkled skin. Frozen riverbeds crisscrossed here and there, as yet unstirred by the coming spring. He lost sight of the horizon each time he dropped into a hollow. The horde’s path was easy enough to follow, however. It carried on right through the area, as unerringly straight as ever. Leeka trudged on, head down.
Thus he was when he crested a rise and started down into what would be a river in a few months. He saw the dark shapes against the white but was slow to lift his gaze to them. Not until something grunted. It was the first creature-made noise he had heard in some time. It was an exclamation of alarm, and it kicked Leeka’s senses alive. He froze. The sled behind him, propelled by the slant of the slope, slid forward and nudged his heels.
Before him were two living things and one dead. The noise had been made by one of the hairy rhinos. It stood about forty yards away, absurdly close, near enough that Leeka could imagine the feel of its coarse fur. He could make out the gr
owth striations that ringed its horns and note etchings in the buckles of its saddle. The creature found Leeka’s sudden proximity unnerving. It shuffled backward, head whipping from side to side. A short distance behind him, one of the invaders crouched near a makeshift hearth. He looked up, first at the rhino as it looped around behind him and then at Leeka. Why he was there-whether in some official capacity, as a straggler for some unclear reason, or as a deserter-Leeka would never know. There was no chance of the two of them conversing. What his eyes showed him, however, turned his stomach like no carnage of war ever had.
The Numrek sat attending a banquet of human flesh. A young man’s body had been set atop a cauldron heated from below by the pitch Leeka had found traces of earlier. The body was splayed on its back. Its arms and legs stretched away so that the feet and hands rested on the ice while the midsection roasted, steamed, and stewed all at once. The Numrek had just reached up to scrape a portion of flesh and internal organs into the bubbling broth below when he spotted Leeka. He set the knife down and rose to his feet, stretching his arms to either side, like an aged worker rising to carry on some interminable task. He bent and fumbled about for a moment, then straightened, a spear in one hand, a curving sword in the other.
Leeka shuffled off the straps that bound him to the sled. He had stopped wearing his sword a few days before and had lashed it to the sled. He now slid it free of its sheath. He had a crossbow and bolts as well, but the Numrek closed on him far too quickly. He hurled the spear, which struck deep into the pack of supplies and tilted the sled over. Leeka jumped back and circled away, yanking off his gloves, testing the weight of his blade against the frigid air. The Numrek had not even tried to hit him with the spear. He had thrown it as an amusement and struck his chosen target, as was obvious by the apparent glee that now animated his gestures. He came forward with springing steps, almost skipping-if so childish a word could be ascribed to a creature of such size and murderous intent. He tossed his sword from hand to hand, demonstrating that he was equally skilled with either. His fur cloaks hung about his body, swaying with his motions and hiding the exact bulk of the body beneath. His features were still hard to make out behind the screen of his hair and the cap that sat well down on his brow, but his mouth was visibly split by a grin.
How do you kill a thing like this? The question reeled out in the back of Leeka’s mind. With the fore portion he concentrated on the fight of his life. The Numrek swung at him in great crescents of motion that audibly sliced through the air. Leeka ducked a blow aimed at his head, and the steel snagged some locks of his hair and snipped them clean. The first time he blocked a blow, the impact of their two blades caused a crushing pain at his hilt hand, wrenching his wrist savagely and coming near to snapping it. He kept hold of his sword only by slapping his other hand over the pain and fighting with a dual grip. If fighting it could be called. In truth, he backed up and shifted, stumbled and caught himself, never attacking. He did not meet blade to blade again except with glancing blocks. Otherwise he was a puppet dancing through contortions demanded by the other.
In no time at all Leeka was breathless and sweating, his eyes watering. It seemed he had already lived impossibly long against this foe. The enemy spoke as he fought. He uttered a barrage of guttural sounds just ordered enough to resemble words. Leeka searched for a way to attack, but his foe was too massive, too quick with each strike, too much a storm of motion. The smell off him was pungent and almost painful to inhale, like vinegar and urine and onions. When he stepped into the glare of the low sun he blocked it entirely and became a shadow warrior. Had a man ever killed a thing like this, such a giant as this?
And then Leeka remembered. The Eighth Form. Gerimus against the guards of Tulluck’s Hold. Those guards were supposed to have been giants. That was what the old lore said. Larger than humans in every way. Stronger. Inhuman in their disrespect for life. Warriors who lived to kill. They had terrorized the First Kingdom of Candeva, the predecessor to the Second Kingdom of Candovia. It was not until the hero Gerimus beat them back to the Hold and took on the two guards himself that a way to beat them was arrived at. They were too confident, Gerimus realized. Too strong and too eager. He used their impatience against them, taunting them by fighting purely defensively until they made errors caused by eagerness. It had worked once, perhaps it would do so again.
So into his defensive ballet Leeka tried to weave bits and pieces of the Form. At first he barely managed it without losing his head, until he found a merging between what he needed to do to live and Gerimus’s ancient maneuvers. It was complicated by the fact that in the Form he had fended off two opponents, but Leeka modified most of the moves related to the second giant. The enemy did not really seem to notice this at first. It was not until Leeka spun away in a mad, hacking attack on the air that the puzzled giant paused. He turned his massive head and studied the area Leeka slashed so viciously. He watched as Leeka sank home his blade into the foot of his imaginary foe and as he pulled the point out of the ice, flipped it skyward, and slammed it into the soft spot beneath an invisible chin. This done, Leeka faced him.
The invader, whatever he might have thought of the display, stepped forward and resumed his attack. As they fought, Leeka grew more into the skin of the Form. It felt good. If he was to die, at least he would have some dignity in his last moments. In this slight hint of confidence was an inkling of control. Leeka began to feel that at times he did not just anticipate his adversary’s actions, he caused them. Yes, he thought, Step toward me. The other did. Thrust and then slip right. Again, the other did. Swing as if to take off my legs. He jumped, and not a moment too soon. It was no perfect dance, but Leeka managed to fold the variations in with greater and greater ease. His foe showed no sign of recognizing a design in this, but he did grow wilder. Some of his joy faded. He fell silent except for the groans of his exertion. He even spit at Leeka several times, his saliva like a weapon and an insult at once.
When the moment came, it surprised Leeka. The enemy, struck by his greatest burst of rage yet, tossed his blade from his left to his right hand. He rushed forward, swinging his sword in a circle, his shoulder joint stressed by the move, bearing down onto the swinging blade the full force of his arm and shoulder and abdomen; the entire weight of his body, and the full measure of pure, impatient spite. The force was incredible, but Leeka slipped to the side. Such was the pressure of the blade passing through the air that he felt the tug of its wake almost pull him off balance. The blade smashed into the ice in a spray of crystals.
And there it was: just as the last of the Tulluck giants had cut the granite stone of the floor of the Hold. Leeka stepped upon the giant’s sword, one foot on the back of the blade, the next on the hilt. His third stride found purchase on the giant’s forearm. From this platform Leeka leaped into a twisting flourish of a strike. His blade hummed around him, a spinning blur so quick that he would never afterward remember the actual instant it sliced clean through his foe’s neck. But he always remembered the moment after, when he realized that that was just what he did. The foreigner’s head stayed perched on his shoulders for the duration of his fall. When the body finally crashed down, the head shot forward, propelled, it seemed, by a spurt of brilliantly crimson blood. Leeka’s practice of the Form had never quite been like that.
Watching the fluid seep, steaming, into the ice, he said, “Well then…that worked.”
Though he could barely manage it without retching, he pulled what was left of the human corpse away from the fire. He kicked the pot over with his foot. He used the shaft of the enemy’s spear to nudge the coals and the burning pitch into a stronger fire. He tossed flammable items from his own supplies onto it, and then tended to the slow, unpleasant work of turning human flesh to ash. This man was, after all, one of his soldiers. He could not recognize his frostbitten face or find any identifying papers, but he said what words he could over him. He thought what things he could to mourn him. His sadness was real enough. It came from the heart more clearly tha
n ever before, his tears no less embarrassing to him for his solitude. He had not remembered the young man as he fought, but he was glad, now that he thought of it, to have avenged him.
Late in the day all that could be done for the soldier had been. Leeka turned to contemplate the rhinoceros, which had stayed a short distance away, watching. He walked toward it carrying the spear, trying to disguise the injury he now felt in his ankle. He must have twisted it at some point during the duel. The pain was sharp with each step, the joint stiff and swollen. He did not want to show the creature weakness, but each time he neared, it sidestepped, shuffled, rotated, backed up. It responded in kind to any move Leeka made, keeping him always at a distance, watching with either eye. Leeka looked around for something like food to offer it, but nothing obvious offered itself.
“Listen,” Leeka said, “I don’t have time for this. In case you haven’t noticed, your master’s lost his head. You and I, though, we could aid each other. I want to get somewhere fast, which would be hard on this ankle. And you…you look like you need somewhere to go.”
There was something like intelligence in the consideration the beast gave all this, but it was nothing like full understanding either. In answer the animal stamped the ice. Leeka was aware of his weakness, his feeble lightness compared to the creature’s girth and bulk, natural weapons, and the thickness of his defenses. He stared at the beast with all the annoyed exasperation he could muster. Better that it did not remember it could impale Leeka on that horn of his and walk about with a new ornament. Or that it could bowl him over and trample him to mush at will. There could be no violent contest between them. The winner was obvious enough that Leeka prayed the rhino did not consider it. Then he thought of something.
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