Within an hour rows of sarcophagi were threading through the docks and ascending toward the palace via the sloping system of ramps. Before leaving the seaside, Hanish watched the first of the ancestors enter a gate in the palace walls. The shadowed mouth swallowed them one by one, each a relief, each finally safe and sliding home into the special chamber constructed to house them. Their long journey was finally at an end; a new one scheduled to commence soon, the next day, if possible.
Even as he made his way up toward the palace, with Haleeven beside him, Hanish’s secretaries and assistants rushed down to meet him. They bombarded him with news, with dispatches, reports, with a host of matters that had been waiting for his attention. The docks were not crowded, they explained, because league ships normally stationed there had departed. Some that had been scheduled to arrive had not. Sire Dagon had evacuated his compound without explanation the day previous, taking all his staff with him. There was something amiss with them, though nobody knew what. They were not even sure if the league still provided Maeander naval support.
This prompted him to ask what news they had of Maeander and the battle. The latest letter from his brother appeared in his hands a moment later. It had also arrived that morning. As he began to read it, he was reminded of his annoyance at not being able to communicate with Maeander through dream travel. He had long suspected Maeander of intentionally blocking him out, unwilling to allow him the access to his consciousness that such communicating made possible. Thus, striding up across the cobbled stones, he first got word of the antoks’ failure, via a message that had traveled strapped to a bird’s leg and was at least a day old.
The antoks had inflicted damage, Maeander claimed, but they had not decided the matter. They were not the invincible beings he had hoped they would prove to be, and Aliver seemed to have some form of sorcery aiding his side. But this was all right, Maeander wrote, because he had something else planned. He said no more than that. Hanish would not know what he planned or how it turned out until another of these birds flew across the sea.
“He is too cryptic,” Hanish said, showing the note to his uncle.
Haleeven read it without comment, setting his chin in such a way as to remind his nephew to focus only on the details at hand, the things ahead of them, waiting in the palace.
Though he thought of her constantly, Hanish had no plan to see Corinn until that evening. He did not tell her this; she would know it already. Anytime he returned there were a million things to see to, now more than ever. He spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in his office, dealing with everything piled upon his desk during his absence. Military advisers gave him event-by-event details of the war in Talay and of the outbreaks of troubles all around the empire. They had concentrated so many of their forces with Maeander that the provinces were thinly controlled. Too many of the troops holding them were of foreign blood, their loyalties suspect. They warned that should Maeander suffer a real defeat, Aushenia and Candovia and Senival would all likely burst into outright rebellion. And the Numreks had not joined Maeander. They were simply absent from the proceedings and had not responded to any of the orders dispatched to them. This might be an ill thing, Hanish thought, but he could not imagine what the Numrek were up to and still imagined they would appear belatedly, once they had made some point or another.
What he found more troubling than anything was Aliver’s emergence as a skilled leader and as a figure around whom myth could be spun, one who might walk with magic. The fact that he personally killed the first antok was a great nuisance. Minstrels would be telling grandiose tales of Aliver’s victory over them for years to come, no matter what Maeander managed to accomplish against him. It would be best, he thought, if they could capture all of the Akarans alive. Parade them through the streets of every city in the empire. Let the populace see them in chains. That, perhaps, would kill the myths. The truth usually could, if one faced it honestly.
The one comfort Hanish had was that he did not believe he was yet in danger. The Acacians might think they were gaining ground, but their small victories meant little. Nothing would stand up against Meinish power after the ceremony. Aliver might have some meager sorcery working on his behalf, but Hanish would soon tap the accumulated rage of generations. This fact, likely, was why the league had withdrawn. They had reason to fear the power they knew was going to be awakened. Good, Hanish thought. Let them tremble for a while. Perhaps the ancestors would take the reins of the world in their newly animated hands. He wished they would. Let them rage through the provinces, winning them back; let Sire Dagon stand before them and try to flex his muscles. Hanish would happily rest and attempt to forget the things he would need to forget.
As the day began to fade, his thoughts more and more returned to Corinn. Enough so that he eventually pushed himself upright and dismissed the advisers and his staff, saying he would continue with them in the morning. He asked Haleeven to join him in inspecting the ceremonial site. After that, he knew, he could finally go to Corinn and spend a last night with her.
The chamber had been under construction since the end of his first year in control of Acacia. It was a monumental project, conducted in semi-secrecy. It was one long, slow exercise in excavation. Diggers went at the bedrock beneath the eastern base of the island, just below the palace. It was never too obvious a project, never worked by more than a modest stream of laborers. All the stone quarried inside exited through one access point. They used it to extend the docks and create an artificial island out at sea, making it easier for the league’s large ships to moor there. There were many uses for the material and nothing was officially said about why it was being mined.
Hanish knew the lower town was alive with rumors about what he was constructing deep in the earth. An unassailable keep. Torture chambers. Cages in which he would raise unnatural beasts. A chamber like the Calathrock for conducting games and military drills. It did not matter what they speculated; they would never quite get at the truth.
Inside the cavern, looking about as workers positioned the last of the sarcophagi in place, priests overseeing all with the stern visages rendered stark by the white light of clean-burning oil lamps, Hanish marveled at the structure. It had been carved to the specifications conveyed to him by the undead themselves. In many ways it resembled the chamber back at Tahalian, with ancestors stacked row upon row. It had needed to be built here, of course, on Acacia. It was here that the curse against them had been created and here was the only place from which it could be reversed. The slots that housed each sarcophagi had been carved directly into the granite itself, smoothed and polished, like an enormous beehive cut from stone. When his ancestors breathed again and reached out and touched their corporeal fingers to the world for the first time in years or decades or centuries, they would be able to caress the very stone that the early Akarans had stood upon when they set out to bind the world.
At the center point of all this was the Scatevith stone, the single great block of it so dark and dense it seemed to suck life into its murky depths. It was the very piece that had been carved from the basalt at the base of the Black Mountains, high up on the Mein Plateau. His ancestors had been forced to offer it as a gift to help the Akarans build the great wall outside Alecia. After his victory, Hanish had it cut out of that wall and brought here to serve as the platform on which an Akaran would die. Everything was in place.