Entering Sire Dagon’s office, she found him already shuffling through papers with his long fingers. He glanced at her with a distracted air, as yet giving her only half his attention. “My dear princess,” he said, “what can I do for you? Please be brief with me, as my time is regretfully short. You have some…communication from Hanish?”
The princess was not as nervous as she had imagined she would be at this moment. She knew that the grip of her dilemma should be enough to paralyze her with fear. At times she had found herself standing still, staring off into nothing. She often thought back to the past, to her father, to her mother, to her short-lived exile on Kidnaban. But she was not the same now as she had been as a child. She felt increasingly disconnected from her old way of being. She could affect the world, she believed. She could have a say in her fate. Perhaps the thought of Aliver still living and breathing gave her strength. If this were true, though, it was an irony. The agenda she worked for was only partially in line with what she imagined Aliver’s to be.
“You can tell me why you have returned,” Corinn said. “What news do you have?”
The leagueman’s eyes rolled up and fixed on her. “Am I to believe that Hanish requests this information?”
“If you wish. But you are not Hanish’s pawn. I know that, even if he doesn’t. If possible, let this be between you and me. You would not have stopped in here and requested a messenger bird without news of some import. I have reason to be curious.”
“That I can believe. You may not like what I have to tell, however. Why ask about things you cannot change?”
Corinn shrugged. She wanted to know, she said, for the sake of the knowledge itself.
Sire Dagon mimicked her shrug. He pressed his thin lips together derisively but relaxed them the next moment. “If you must…I returned to dispatch a message to the Inspectorate. It seems one of our patrols spotted a…well, a fleet, I guess you could say, of fishing and merchant and trading vessels sailing into the Inner Sea. They’re Vumuans. For a number of reasons, we’ve concluded that they are on a mission to rescue your sister.”
“My sister?”
“They’ve come to join the battle, which invariably means they are not on the Meinish side. It is my intent to send a messenger bird to the Inspectorate, who will then crush the fleet before they ever reach Talay. They’ll be like a child’s toy boats bobbing on a pond compared to our warships.”
Corinn heard him, but she had not yet fully swallowed the mention of…“Did you say that Mena is alive?”
Sire Dagon chuckled. “I thought that would interest you. Your sister is a goddess.” He said the last word with feigned reverence. “A goddess…Tribal peoples always amaze me. It may be that she’s not a goddess at all but is actually a goddess slayer. I’m not sure which it is, really. My information on this is vague as to the particulars. I can tell you, however, that she was captured by Maeander and Larken. She didn’t stay captured long, though. She stabbed Larken in the heart with his own sword. She killed two Punisari and injured several others, and then commandeered the vessel and convinced the crew to sail her to Talay. By the end of the voyage, it seems, she had convinced most of the sailors to join your brother’s cause. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Little Mena, a sword-wielding deity slayer, a match for one of the craftiest Marahs I have ever set eyes on.”
The leagueman had been shuffling through his papers as he relayed most of this. He paused, looked up, and studied Corinn a moment. “My dear, this does tug at your allegiances, doesn’t it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. I always heard you were of fragile temperament. It must be very strange to be Princess Corinn Akaran. It might surprise you, but I find these developments with your siblings quite interesting. Consider what they have become: one of them leads an army that is loyal to him; one is called a deity by people who are fanatically devoted to her; another is a raider, a sea captain who also has followers that would die for-or at least with-him. Not what your father would have planned, I’m sure, but at least they have made something interesting of their lives. Pity that you weren’t allowed to become anything but your conqueror’s mistress.”
Corinn had been about to express shock and confusion at the strange news of her sister. She had pursed her lips, about to ask for a chair to sit in. She might even have looked to Sire Dagon for guidance, for help. But all these possibilities vanished the moment he expressed pity for her. She did not want pity. She would not accept pity. Nor would she allow the suggestion that her life added up to nothing of interest or worth to stand.
“You are mistaken,” she said. She stepped around his desk and drew close to him. She felt the invisible barrier between them, the point that marked the perimeter of what Sire Dagon considered to be his private domain. She pressed against it and felt it resist, felt it bow back against her. The leagueman’s face showed no outward sign of consternation, and yet she could tell that he was fighting the desire to step back. Something about this pleased her, gave her confidence. “You, as a member of the league, know that appearances are one thing. The substance beneath is another. Isn’t that right?”
“You have already answered your own question.”
“So it may be that you don’t know yet what lies beneath this faзade. You think nothing does, but you should know better. The league, after all, claims to have no hidden interests. But that’s absurd. It’s not just wealth you want, is it?”
“We want only to continue as we have,” Sire Dagon said. “We serve the world’s powers. We bring nations together to nurture trade and mutual prosperity-”
“Please, Dagon,” Corinn said. “Don’t insult me. You have a different objective. I can feel it behind your mask.”
“I wear no mask, lady.”
“Of course you do.” She moved a half step closer, cocked her head as if she were searching for something minute along his hairline. “As a child they sewed it to your face with hair-thin thread. Perhaps you have gotten so used to it that even you don’t recognize your own deceit. But the stitch is still visible, Sire Dagon. It is right here…” She lifted a hand, fingers pinched as if to tweeze the thread in question.
The leagueman batted at her hand. He twirled away, the fabric of his gown brushing her hip, stiff, heavy fabric that felt almost like a plate of pliable armor. “Your arrogance knows no bounds.”
“I hope not, but I don’t as yet know. I have only just discovered arrogance and taken it to heart. You, however, thrive on it. You want to control the workings of the world. You want to know that you are godlike, that you pull the strings that make nations dance. Isn’t that what you want?”
“As I said, we want only to preserve what we already have.”
“And what is it that you have?”
Standing at a distance again, Sire Dagon regained his composure. He grinned. The question pleased him. “Now you ask something of substance. What do we have already? What do we want to preserve? Consider this…If we don’t transport water to the Kidnaban mines, the workers die of thirst. There is little water on the island, and they cannot get off because we control the seas. So if we say that they die by drought, they die by drought. Consider that only the league makes pitch now. Even the Numrek cannot be bothered to produce it. Why should they when we do the work and give it to them? So we-the league-hold the secret of how to toss down flaming meteors from the heavens. Only we do business with the Lothan Aklun. Only we know the full extent of the power they serve. We are the ones that keep the Other Lands at bay so that the Known World can continue to believe itself a complete world. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Add these things up and add more things than I can even begin to detail to you, and what is the result? I will tell you. We don’t want to become like gods. We already are gods. We don’t want to pull the strings attached to every soul in the Known World. We already do. Had you the eyes to see them, you would realize a million tiny threads stretch out from each of my fingers. This is the truth. The Giver left the world to us, and the Known World has felt the hand of no deity but us ever since. Not Akarans. Not Meins.”