Rialus could not even remember just when the Mein brothers had brought him into their confidence, but he did recall his incredulity at the claims that Hanish made. He had said his league allies were more powerful than the Akarans. They had grown frustrated with the Akarans and angry with Leodan. They believed the king wanted to break the Quota and abolish the mist trade. Because of this they had decided his fate. He would be removed and replaced by another willing to more faithfully meet their needs. Hanish claimed that this had happened twice before in the twenty-two generations since Tinhadin, but this was different. The king was not merely being removed so that his son-younger, more easily molded and controlled-could take his place. This time the Lothan Aklun wanted the entire line extinguished and a new dynasty established, with the Mein upon the throne.
That was why Hanish had at his disposal a strange race of people willing to march across the Ice Fields and make war on the Mein’s behalf. That was why he possessed new weapons that hurled flaming balls of pitch like the sun, or that tossed boulders. Add to this a hidden Meinish army that had been hard at training in the mountains to the north of Tahalian, unknown to the outside world. With these tools and several other surprises, Hanish promised to sweep down upon an unsuspecting world and take it apart piece by piece.
The brothers had alluded to various positions of stature Rialus might occupy in the reshaped world they envisioned, but as yet he had seen no rewards. He had hoped to prove himself useful. Unfortunately, this business with Leeka had not gone as he wished. He knew that the general’s army had been mysteriously massacred, but he was not at all sure if this would bring Maeander the pleasure it should. After all, Rialus’s charge had been to keep the general caged and to do what he could to hide the foreigners’ arrival. He had failed on both accounts.
Maeander entered the governor’s chambers with a visible disdain for the formalities due an Acacian official. He walked past the secretary who was preparing to announce him and strode into the room with clipped steps that seemed both casual and sharp enough to split the stones beneath his boots. Maeander was several inches taller than his host. He was broad in the shoulders, with strength that showed in movements of his muscled thighs and in the sinewy bulges of his forearms and in the contours of his neck. He wore his hair long, below the shoulders, the straw-gold strands of it washed daily in icy water and combed out-an unusual thing, for most Meinish men let their hair knot and walked with a nest of snakes cascading down their shoulders. He was, in all outward forms, a model figure for the rough-hewn, virile men of his race, strapped into garments of tanned leather, legs covered by fitted trousers.
Maeander pulled off his fur-lined gloves and tossed them down on a table, making a loud thwack as they hit. He did a quick survey of the room, pausing on the window. “So this is your window,” he said, inspecting the sheet of glass. He spoke Acacian with the guttural tones of his native language, sounds that had always offended Rialus’s ear. “The guards joked with me on the way in. When I instructed them to send you word of my arrival, one of them said that you already knew, since you always had one eye pressed against this glass. Another said that you seemed not to realize that one can see both into and out of glass. Such impertinence, Governor, should not be allowed.”
Rialus flushed. The basic fact that he would be visible to people outside had never occurred to him. He imagined the absurdity of his image viewed from outside, twisted into different contortions, those below watching him from the corners of their eyes, hiding smirks, laughing at him… And just like that, with a few casual words, he was made to feel a complete fool. He recalled a time when the Mein brothers spoke to him as befit his office, but all that had changed. He had no idea how to regain his former stature. In fact, he increasingly suspected that he had never held any.
Maeander turned from the window. The man’s eyes were strikingly gray. He did not so much look at someone as aim at them. Never, the governor thought, had he known a person to stare so fixedly, with such undisguised ill will. His gaze was that of a child upon a beetle he was about to squash beneath his heel. “Do you know what happened to Alain’s army?”
Rialus was not generally a fluent speaker. Before Maeander he became a sputtering mess, which he was sure gave the wrong impression. Fortunately, Maeander was more interested in talking himself than in giving a true interrogation. As he related it, Numrek scouts sent out to clear the way before the bulk of their nation had spotted the general’s column. Unseen, they shadowed them for several days, until they were positioned for ambush. They swept in on them upon the tail wind of a clearing storm and slaughtered them down to the last man and woman.
“You will be glad to hear that the Numrek are as skilled at killing as they claimed,” Maeander said. “They welcomed the test Alain’s army gave them. It warmed them, they said.” He turned and strolled around the room, directionless. He had three thin plaits of hair that stretched from the crown of his head down to the left side. Into two, ribbons of blue were woven, into the third a leather strap studded with silver beads. Rialus knew that these were some primitive accounting system: the blue standing for ten men killed, the leather strap for twenty. Or was it the other way around? The governor could not remember. “I have never seen anything quite like this Numrek army. They absorb and spit out everything they come up against. Their women and children take as much joy in slaughter as the men. I doubt very much that the combined forces of Acacia could match them on an open field.”
“Then it was all for the best,” Rialus said. “The Giver provides for all worthies. A great success!”
Maeander did not like being led. “Do not get ahead of yourself. You failed to keep your general shackled. You sat at your window here as he marched out to threaten everything my brother has been planning for years now. The outcome was not that bad, true, but you have forced us to speed up our plans. And is it true that your general sent out messengers-several of them?”
“He did, but not to worry. I had them all hunted and slain.”
“Not true. One of them got through. One of them met with the king’s chancellor, Thaddeus Clegg.”
“Oh,” Rialus said.
“Yes. ‘Oh.’ Again, however, you have been saved by a piece of fortune.” He paused to let Rialus squirm a moment, and then said, “Thaddeus is…conflicted, enough so that he may not see his interests as aligned with Leodan’s.”
Rialus’s mouth formed an oval. “Conflicted?”
“Just so,” Maeander said. He reached down and pushed the tips of his fingers through olives set in a bowl on Rialus’s desk, imported delicacies not easy to come by in the Mein. He popped a few in his mouth and watched the governor. “Actually, Rialus, the reasons for his conflicted state of mind intersect with your own situation. Would you like me to explain?”
Rialus nodded, hesitant but too curious to refuse. Maeander spoke as he chewed. He asked Rialus to step back in time with him and to imagine Leodan and Thaddeus as they were in their youth. Imagine the young prince: dreamy, idealistic, indecisive in his acceptance of the power he was being groomed to wield, smitten by a young beauty-Aleera-who seemed of more import to him than his throne. Beside him his chancellor: resolute, confident, disciplined, a gifted swordsman, ambitious in the ways that Leodan was not.