How surprised he was by her response, then. She drew close to him and tilted her lovely, large-eyed face up toward his. There was no surprise on her features, no remorse, or judgment. She said, A king is the best and worst of men. Of course. Of course. She pushed her lips against his, so soft and full of hungry pressure that they took his breath away. That, perhaps, was the moment they were actually married, the moment the agreement between them was sealed. It was hard for him to decipher now which aspect of her love he was most drawn to. Was it the fact that she could forgive him all of it and love him because she understood his ultimate goodness? Or was it that she betrayed that she was just as capable of overlooking the truth and living a lie as he? Either way, having confessed to her and received her blessing, he loved her completely. He would never have been able to fulfill his role as monarch without her approval. This might or might not have been a good thing for the world, but to a man as unsure of rule as he had been, her devotion had been a great gift.
“Perhaps I do, Thaddeus,” Leodan said, responding belatedly to his statement. “Perhaps I honor you unduly. We all make that mistake at times. But what harm does it do?”
He did not hear the chancellor’s response, if, indeed, he offered any. He closed his eyes and felt the sensation of being pressed against an invisible wall. This mist had built in him, filled him. Now the moment of letting go of the physical world was finally his. This moment always came to him as pressure, as if his chest lay flat against a stone and a great force behind him gradually ground him into it. Just when he felt he could take the weight no more, he started to slip through the stone, to merge with it and pass through as if it were porous and he in liquid form. On the other side Aleera waited for him, the temporary delusion he craved almost more than true life. He went to her in reverence.
CHAPTER
Rialus Neptos believed he had found a method whereby he could keep track of everyone who came into and went out of the northern fortress of Cathgergen. He believed such surveillance was essential for a governor, especially one with such a tentative grip on power as he. He had ordered a single sheet of glass cast in the furnaces at the base of the fortress. He knocked out a portion of the granite wall in his office and set the pane to form one enormous window. The glass was taller than a man and as wide as he could stretch his narrow arms out to either side. The workmanship was imperfect. It was uneven in thickness, milky in some places and dotted throughout with air bubbles. But there were a few patches of true clarity; Rialus had located each through long hours of inspection.
Alone in his chambers he would press his forehead to the pane. More often than not the touch of the glass would bring a chill on and fuel his cough, a torment that had racked his bird-frail chest all his life. For a time he even took to stretching out on the floor. A ribbon of glass along the lower edge of the pane distorted the world in such a way that he could study the entrance to the military headquarters at his leisure and thus keep track of just who came and went in Leeka Alain’s world. The best vantage came when he stood on a footstool and gazed down with a one-eyed squint that provided a view of the full reach of the western wall and the gate at its center. From this spot he had watched General Alain’s troops march out in defiance of his direct orders. From the same spot he observed the arrival of the second of the Mein brothers, Maeander, some weeks later.
Rialus pulled back from the glass. He was chilled again. The fortress was heated by steaming pools of hot water that bubbled up from the earth. An intricate network of pipes and air ducts channeled the warmth throughout the labyrinthine structure. The Cathgergen engineers claimed it was a wonder of complicated craftsmanship, but in truth the place was never warm enough. He sometimes suspected that his chambers were intentionally denied a full measure of heat, but he had no way of proving this.
He circled his desk one and a quarter times, then walked to the bookshelved wall and trailed a finger over the spines of the volumes there, dusty tomes full of records, accounting documents, and gubernatorial journals kept since the first installment of Acacian hegemony in the satrapy. His father had treated these records with sober reverence. He tried to instill the same in his only son, to no avail. Rialus was only the second generation of his family to oversee the Mein-not a long tenure in office, by Acacian standards. On the demise of the previous governing family, his father had been sent north in punishment for some malfeasance Rialus could not even recall anymore. As the years passed the other governors came to take the Neptos family for granted. The Akarans all but ignored them. It galled him that he was expected to pay indefinitely for a crime no one could even name. It tormented him that the outside world had no understanding of his razor-sharp mind, somehow held captive inside his stunted form, betrayed on every occasion by his jaw’s tendency to freeze up at just the wrong moments. If others would just see beyond these outward defects, they would realize that he was wasted on this posting.
Rialus was fond of saying that the Giver rewards her worthies, but he had yet to see any evidence that the divine forces in the world had even noted his existence. After ten years of being overlooked Rialus became a fertile ground for intrigue. The elder Mein brother had been quick to take advantage of this. Hanish was an eloquent speaker, a handsome man who spoke with such composure behind his gray eyes that one could not help but trust in him. Coming from his mouth, the strange belief system of the Mein seemed no thing of fancy at all. The world of the living was transient, Hanish had explained, but the force that was the Tunishnevre was constant. The Tunishnevre was composed of all the worthy men of his race who had once lived and breathed but did so no longer. It was their life force lingering outside their mortal vessels. It was the palpable energy of their rage, proof that the dead mattered more than the living. Life was the curse inflicted upon a soul before it rose to a higher plane. Like the body that is separate from the spirit within it and yet causes that spirit all manner of pain, so the fate of the living caused the ancestral core no end of suffering. The living kept the dead chained to them and in ignorance of it made the afterlife a burden, when it should have been the sweet fulfillment of life’s journey. The ancestors, Hanish had claimed, implored him to ease their torture.
When the governor had asked just what it was that the Tunishnevre wanted and exactly how were they to be freed of this suffering, Hanish had squeezed his shoulder as if they were close companions. He had a way of switching from a most serious tone to a casual one at a moment’s notice. “I do know that there are changes to be made to the order of the living world. That is the work I was born for. And you, Rialus Neptos, are an agent of my enemy.”
This also had been said lightly, but the list of crimes perpetuated by Acacia’s hegemony seemed long and foul when Hanish had detailed it. What nation did not suffer beneath their rule? From the pale men of the north to the black ones of the south, from east to west, so many different peoples, scores of races of men-all suffered grave injustices. Generations had lived and died under the yoke of Acacian “peace,” but the Mein had never forgotten who their enemy was. Now, finally, Acacia had a king grown lax enough that they could strike. Hanish believed that Leodan was the weakest heir in the long chain of his family’s history. A new age could begin, with a new calendar to mark the day, with new concepts of justice, with a redistribution of wealth, with privileges finally in the hands of those who had so long labored for other men’s gain. There was little in this that Rialus could refute. He was, after all, in a prime position to know just how deeply Acacia taxed its allies.