One of them scooped up bodies from the ground and whirled them into the air. Another tore into a mound of discarded clothing and shredded the fabric. It spun inside a multicolored whirlwind of its own creation, stamping and fuming. And then it abruptly halted. Swatches of cloth floated down around it, draping its flanks and back and even falling around over its head and snout, snagging on its tusks. It panted, looked about, snuffed, and grunted. It was, Mena could see, confused. It was the lead antok and it bellowed to the others. Each of them answered in turn, a call that echoed the first’s frustration and unease. They did not draw any closer together, though. Each had become encircled by brownish, moving walls of humanity whose frailty they did not seem to recognize.
In the hush after the leader’s call, Mena realized how quiet the plain was. Thousands of soldiers stood all around the creatures, but nobody talked. Nobody shouted orders. No horns blew. There was a background noise of sorrow in the air, muffled sobs and occasional bursts of agony from the injured, but the silence was such that Mena could hear the antok’s footfalls and breathing. She even heard the closest one’s joints creak as it walked, slowly now, before the wall of people facing it. The humans were like children beside the huge beast. If it straightened its legs, it could have stepped over them and walked with ample clearance beneath its belly.
Watching it, Mena’s eyes found Aliver for the first time. He was not far away, just a way down in the wall of bodies facing her across the space left open for the creatures. He stood only a few strides away from the stiff-jointed antok. He was so like the Talayans in his carriage and musculature that her eyes must have passed over him several times before picking him out. He held the outer line, shoulder to shoulder with the Talayans around him. He was a shade lighter than they, but she could not deny that he, too, was brown. And she could not pretend that he was not in danger.
The beast was but a few of its strides from him. Its gaze focused on one man and then another and then another as it moved along the line, getting nearer to Aliver, searching for any excuse to kill. Its tusks were like the naked blades of so many curved swords. Mena placed a hand on her sword hilt and felt her pulse thrumming in her grip around the leather. She watched the antok step closer to her brother. She wanted to break free and dash toward him. Every muscle and fiber in her cried to leap the distance between them with her sword slicing the air before her. She was near enough that if she launched herself from the shoulders of the man in front of her she would land in the clear, pull her blade free and…
Aliver looked at her. His head did not move. His body did not change position in the slightest. But his eyes shifted and focused on her. He drilled his gaze into her, his look heavy with import, telling her something. But she did not know what. She shook her head just slightly. He rolled his eyes back to the antok, stared a moment, and then looked back at her. He repeated this three times. That was all the time he had.
The antok broke the visual contact between them as it moved past Aliver. Mena’s eyes bumped along the animal’s coarse-haired hide, over its plates and dried skin and wrinkled rump. When it cleared her brother and came into view again, Aliver’s attention was only on the beast. By the motion of his body, Mena knew a sound came from his throat. She did not hear it, but she saw his neck flex, his mouth in an oval, as if he had exhaled sharply. The swine swung its mighty head, causing the nearest group of soldiers to billow away, leaning back one on another on another. It doubled back. It closed the space between itself and its taunter, finding renewed interest in the prince. It studied him with a single, bulbous, veined eye, so close to Aliver’s face that it could have licked him. It looked up and down Aliver’s body.
Aliver gazed right back into the eye. He must have felt the creature’s breath on his face. Moisture-sweat and blood and foulness-sprayed him with each exhalation. Aliver stared at it, his visage stony, no emotion on it that she could read. It was just his face as it might look captured in stone. His lips moved again. Whatever he said registered on the faces of the Talayans around her. They all, in single motion, let their eyes drift upward.
What was he doing? Mena wondered. What did he want her to see? He must know something, she thought. How else could he look so calm? So perfectly in control, as if he owned the beast already. As much as she wanted to fly through the air propelled by Maeben’s rage, she also felt a lump at her center that housed her love for her brother and her pride and confidence in him, a faith that at that moment verged on hero worship. She knew he could prevail. Could, except that there was something he was trying to tell her that she did not understand. She looked all the harder to figure out what it was.
Aliver held the King’s Trust in his right hand and his dagger in the other. He must be planning to attack, Mena thought. And if he was planning to attack, he must have found a weakness. She looked at his face and gauged what his eyes were looking at on the far side of the antok. She searched out the same point on the side of the animal facing her. And then she saw it.
Between the plates on the creature’s shoulder, an area of hide rose and fell rhythmically. It throbbed. Throbbed. Throbbed. It bulged in a manner that could only mean an artery lay beneath the thick skin. She would never have noticed the spot if the animal had not been standing still. Without taking her eyes away, she leaned close to the nearest Bethuni and spoke into his ear. It took him only a moment to see it also.
She whispered, “Tell the others to watch and do as my brother does.”
A moment later she saw Leeka Alain’s head jut up above the crowd. He studied the antok for a long moment, then looked at her, nodded, and disappeared back into the crowd. Whispers fanned out from hushed mouth to hushed mouth.
She was not sure how much time passed between that and what happened next. It seemed no more than a few seconds. The animal, losing interest in the prince, began to turn away. Mena watched as Aliver dashed at the antok. He ran two strides and then leaped. He slammed the dagger to the hilt in the tissue of the foreleg and used it as an anchor to swing upward from. The next move was almost delicate, rendered in slowed motion. Aliver, straight armed above the planted dagger, touched the tip of the King’s Trust against the artery, and sank half its length home. He released the dagger, grasped the sword blade, and yanked downward. He dropped his full body weight onto the blade. It sliced through the flesh in a descending tear that severed the artery.
The antok snapped around in the direction of the wound, but Aliver kicked away from it, pulling the sword free as he did. He landed on his feet some distance away, out beyond the shower of blood. The pulsing fount sprayed out over the nearest soldiers. They shaded their eyes from the stuff, which looked black and thick as oil. It was a geyser that the beast spun and spun into, getting drenched, seemingly in search of its source.
Aliver stood away from the others, alone and nearest the monster, sword up and drawing circles in the air. The King’s Trust looked so very light in his hands, so slim that at times the blade all but disappeared. Aliver talked softly in words that Mena could not make out, waiting for the creature to remember him. Eventually the antok stopped its circular dance and spotted him. It squared off, staring, wobbling and drunken. It blinked rapidly, as if it were trying to clear its head. That was where it was hurt-in the decreased flow of blood to the brain. It blinked and blinked; it seemed to have trouble focusing. It shook its head and snuffed.
Aliver stooped down and peeled a piece of fabric away from the ground. He held it in one hand, snapped it until it flapped loose, spun it so that the unsoiled orange caught the sun. He said something else to the antok. He let the fabric drape over his chest.
This was an invitation the vile thing understood. It roared and ran forward, limping but intent now, looking as fierce as ever. Aliver waited until it was only strides away, and then he flung the fabric up into the air. The antok lifted its head to follow, jaws open, body rearing up. Aliver ducked beneath it. He jabbed his sword into the creature’s underbelly and sliced it open from chest to abdomen. He was out fr
om under it by the time it began to collapse, spilling its insides around it in a flood of viscera.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-THREE
It had not been particularly hard to get into the palace, although-as with the clue about The Song of Elenet that drove him here-Thaddeus had learned how only because of something Dariel had casually uttered. One evening shortly after he had joined Aliver in Talay, the younger prince had spoken about how he had come to meet Val of the Verspines, the raider who became his surrogate father. He had detailed what he could remember of the subterranean regions of the palace. Much of what he described was rendered in vague terms. Where he did have details, they sounded skewed by childish imaginative flourishes, filled with eccentric characters who inhabited labyrinthine tunnels that, by the sound of it, looped out through miles unimagined by the palace dwellers above.
But Dariel was both specific and credible about the time he had almost been swept out to sea. It was a memory not blurred by the passage of time. There was a platform just above the water level, he said, at the northern edge of the island near the Temple of Vada. It was a small flat area cut into the rock for some long-ago purpose. Just above it, set at an angle into the stone that probably made it hard to see from the water, was an entry point. The passageway it opened into led upward through hidden regions that wormed all the way into the palace, even as far as the nursery chambers.
Thaddeus committed the description of the entry point to memory. After departing without ceremony from Aliver’s camp he marched his old man’s body north a few days. Then he angled off to the west to avoid Maeander’s massing army. Arriving at a port town on the coast, he bought the smallest sloop he could imagine risking the seas in. He sailed at sunset that very same day. The wind was with him for most of the night journey, and the graying light of predawn found him bobbing in the waves near the temple, just out from the rocks that marked Acacia’s northern coastline.
He searched for as long as he dared in the coming light. Eventually, he committed himself to making landfall. Knowing he could not leave the boat to be discovered, he set its sail to angle out to sea, jumped overboard, and watched it slip away on the breeze. He swam for the rocks and clawed his way back, for the first time in many years, onto the island of Acacia.
It still took him longer than he wished to locate the entry point. By the time he did he was awash with sweat, breathing heavily, and fearful lest he be in the midst of yet another great folly. He thanked the Giver profusely when he found the slit in the stone. He slipped out of the light into environs that were, in fact, every bit as forlorn and eerie as Dariel had described.
For all the risky faith of the journey he was amazed at the ease with which he climbed up into the palace. He was slipping through the halls so suddenly that he was not actually prepared for it. It was hard not to step out into the center of the familiar corridors and walk as if he still belonged within them. He stopped himself. He had to be careful, especially now. He withdrew and kept to the shadows throughout the daylight hours. He could not always tell the abandoned corridors from the passageways still used by servants, but he placed himself at cracks in the walls through which he could see and hear the goings-on of the palace. It amazed him to think somebody could navigate unseen this way. He wondered if anybody had during his tenure here.
He knew the answer as soon as he formed the question. His skin crawled with the certainty of it; of course he had been spied on before. The leaguemen: if anybody used these corridors it would have been them. Weren’t they known for their nearly clairvoyant anticipation of coming events, decrees, opinions? Perhaps they still used these regions to observe Hanish as well. Thaddeus redoubled his efforts at secrecy, only moving at all so as to place himself where he could observe the pattern of Meinish palace life.
What struck him was that there was no pattern to it. The place hummed with disarray. There was a bustling energy in the staff and servants, an undercurrent of excited confusion that had a singular quality, as if it marked the approach of an unprecedented event. His command of the Meinish language was tolerable. From snatches of conversation, he pieced together that Hanish had been away from the island but was soon returning. As night settled down on the palace, he decided that this accounted for the level of excitement. It did not feel quite complete, but he wasn’t here as a spy.
His mission was a singular one. If what he had finally figured out from clues that had lived within him for nine years was correct, The Song of Elenet had resided in Leodan’s library all along. It had, in a way, never been lost. And if the room had not been disturbed, the volume would still be sitting in the same place it likely had for decades. All he had to do was get to the library unseen, find the book, and then extricate himself from the palace and the island, still unseen.
In the still hours of that night, Thaddeus crept toward the library, half focused on his stealth, half reliving the distant moments that had planted the clues that had led him here. It pained him now to recall that last exchange with Leodan. It had pained him every day and night since, but now he understood it differently from the way he had before. When he remembered Leodan’s face gazing at him, he was no longer sure that the dying man was recalling the life they had shared together. He was not even sure if Leodan had been looking at him with love or with mistrust or hatred. He wasn’t sure of any of this because Leodan had spoken to him in code. He had specifically not told him where the book was. He had not entrusted it entirely to him or to the children, who would have been too young to know what to do with it. Instead, he had placed the clues to its location between them. Clearly there for them to see once they were ready to see it, once they really needed to see it.
Leodan had written: Tell the children their story is only half written. Tell them to write the rest and place it beside the greatest story. Tell them. Their story stands beside the greatest tale ever told. It was as simple as that. He had told Thaddeus that the children’s story should be beside “the greatest story,” and he had told the children that the greatest story was that of the Two Brothers. Put them together and the answer was obvious. Their story was not just the story of their lives. It was not even just the history of the Akaran line. It was a longer narrative of human folly. It was the tale of how humans had learned to become gods, to control language, how they had angered the divine, enslaved the Giver’s creatures, and secured their dominion over the world. It was the story of Elenet’s betrayal.
The library door made far too much noise in opening. The hinges creaked from disuse. The smell was just as he remembered, dusty and heavy with mildew, oily with the scent of sandalwood. The moon cast its white light through the large windows, several of which were open enough to let in a breath of night air. Thaddeus navigated beneath the moonlight. He knew his way through the tall stacks of books by heart, and he found the book exactly where he thought he would. The ease of it amazed him. The book The Two Brothers was just where it was supposed to be, and beside it was the plain spine of an ancient volume. He knew the instant he cracked it open that it was the book he sought.
It was The Song of Elenet, the dictionary written in the first sorcerer’s own hand. His eyes, drifting over the cover, found nothing on it that named it explicitly. Its cover was plain worn leather. It had a utilitarian look to it, as if it might be a record book for a minor government official. Flipping it open, nothing in the appearance of the lettering or the opening headings suggested the import of the contents. It seemed crucial that he read enough to prove he was not mistaken. Just enough to confirm that he had the right book. He sat down with it in one of the window bays and leafed through it, feeling a breath of stale air brush his face with each passing leaf.
Each page prompted him to turn to the next, but not because of what he read. He turned pages because he could not, in any real sense, read it. He found his mind could not hold the words for any longer than the second his eyes took to pass over them. He was reading, and yet he wasn’t. There before him was a page full of script, and then another, and
another. Plain letters and words, written in an innocuous hand on paper that showed its age in its coarseness. It was a page like any other, filled with words he almost recognized. But try as he might he could not comprehend even a single sentence of what he read. He could not hold a phrase, a thought, an impression even, of what was right there before him. He lost himself in the effort of it, flipping page after page, always feeling he was on the verge of cracking its meaning. He lost himself in the attempt, without realizing how much time was passing.
Eventually, infuriated, he hissed, “What good is such a thing?”
The sound of his voice jolted him. He looked around the library, watched dust float in the air, listened to the silence, and searched for any sign that he might have been heard or seen. The chamber was still and empty, but he realized that it was not night anymore. It wasn’t even early morning. The full light of a clear day cascaded through the windows. Hours had passed while he sat with his head in the book. He had been so preoccupied someone could have walked in and tapped him on the shoulder. He could hear voices in the courtyard outside, the click of shoes passing in the hallway, a grinding sound as somebody moved a heavy piece of furniture in a nearby room.
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