Hanish, after this, had done his best to fight to the death. At some point he had realized that the Numrek were not trying to kill him. He had stopped fighting, let his blade droop and rotated it in slow circles, waiting. When none attacked, he pulled his Ilhach dagger and would have slit his belly, had the Numrek not grappled with him first. This also must have been a strange sight, a horde of the burly-armed soldiers dropping their weapons and struggling to pummel into submission a man who was intent on ending his own life-this when they were covered in gore from a few hours of blood work themselves. Rialus admitted that the Numrek had ill treated Hanish, but he left them little choice. He still lived. He was bound as she ordered and awaited her in the chamber.
When Rialus seemed to have exhausted his knowledge of the day, he turned and studied Corinn’s profile. “Princess, this is a work of genius, of simplicity. Once it is cleaned up, the world will bow to you and your beauty. They’ll forget the bloodshed here.” He hesitated a moment, his tongue flicking out to moisten his lips. “Of all the surprises you’ve devised, none is more of a revelation than you yourself are. I pray you never find reason to disfavor me.”
Something about this praise touched her. She felt a flush around her eyes, an itch that suggested tears were not far behind. She spoke quickly. “Thank you, Rialus. You have been a great help to me. I will not forget.”
Corinn left the ambassador standing in the open air outside the passageway into the chamber that now housed the Tunishnevre. She steadied herself a moment and drew out the one weapon she now carried. She walked past the Numrek, milling about the entrance, and into the dark corridor with a crisp step unconsciously modeled on Maeander’s stone-chipping gait. As the chamber opened up around her, she felt the seething incorporeal life in the air. She tried to ignore it, moving through the huge space of the place with no outward sign of discomfort. It took great effort. If air could scratch like claws, the air in this room would have shredded her. If silent screams could consume flesh, she would have been eaten alive. All her instincts told her to turn and run. She did not. She cut her progress with the point of her chin. Pride, even in the face of the undead, now seemed of greatest importance to her.
Hanish hung suspended over the Scatevith stone. His arms were bound above him, secured at the wrists, and his head slumped forward as limp as a corpse’s. He was naked from the waist up, his chest ribboned with bruises and abrasions. A gash under his armpit dripped a stain of blood, like rust, stretching all the way down into his trousers. He was bound at the ankles also, in such a way that if he tried to move he would be able only to writhe in the air but not kick out. One of his feet jutted out at a strange angle, broken. Perhaps most horrible, though, was his hair. It had been hacked away by Numrek swords, leaving his pate uneven, mangy, his scalp exposed in some places.
Part of Corinn wanted to fly to him, to grasp him around the torso and lift his weight and find some way to get him down and to beg forgiveness. She wanted to search about on the ground for clumps of his straw-colored locks and stick them back in place. It seemed unfathomable that Hanish, the chieftain of the Known World, could be reduced to this state within the space of a few hours. Is this the way the world worked? The way she had the power to affect it?
As she approached, she tried not to let any of these questions or emotions show. This man would have killed her. Pride, she thought, despises uncertainty. She began speaking as soon as his head lifted and his eyes found her. “I had thought to enter here with a bow and a quiver of arrows,” she said. “I thought I might have you nailed to the wall, splayed out as a target. You recall how good a shot I am, don’t you? I would have had you name the spots you wished me to place each arrow in.”
Blinking, Hanish seemed to have trouble seeing her. Drops of blood from his wrists speckled his forehead. He looked dazed, as if he might not be entirely conscious. But then he said, “One in my heart would have been enough.”
Corinn crooked her mouth, making it a knot that kept her emotions hidden.
“I never thought it before,” Hanish continued, “but I see now why you were so apt at archery. You kill best from a distance. You can shoot an arrow from hiding, from a safe place. I can see now why that sport suited you.”
A safe place? Corinn had never in her life found a safe place. She planned to, though. She planned to. She lifted the dagger and held it high enough for him to see. “And yet here I am with your blade. You are going to die on it.”
Hanish smiled, his teeth brown with blood. “So this is all your personal revenge? You were scorned, and because of it you ordered thousands killed. Do you know what that makes you? It makes you just like me, or perhaps worse than me.”
I am not like you, Corinn wanted to say. But she feared her voice might quaver around the words, suggesting things she did not wish suggested. She stayed to her planned script. “Before you die you should know all the ways in which you’ve failed. For one, you have lost everything to me, your concubine. Everything. I’ve cut out the heart of your empire. Even if your dead brother’s army defeats my dead brother’s army, they cannot change what I’ve done here.”
She felt herself warming to her words. Saying them to him made her feel better than she had in many years. She climbed the granite steps up onto the Scatevith stone, feeling the ceremonial import of the platform, the honeycombed ranks of the Tunishnevre all around her, their energy as palpable in the air as electricity. It was hard not to feel that the sarcophagi were going to begin opening one by one, the dried corpses in them animated by their own hatred.
As she spoke she studied the bowl carved in the stone that Hanish had planned to drench with her blood. “Already there are boats sailing the sea in all directions, each of them a herald of the change. Messengers will fly from here within the hour. They will tell the entire Known World that Hanish Mein is dead and that Acacia is once again in Akaran hands. Also, your Tunishnevre will never walk the earth again. If that was what you lived your life for, know now that you failed at it.”
Hanish sucked his teeth and then spat, a halfhearted gesture that left a stain of saliva on his chin. “I should have chained you the moment I heard what your sister did to Larken. I should have realized Akaran women were deadlier than the men.”
She moved closer, the dagger held high enough, near enough, that it was a threat to his bruised skin, no more than a quick slash away from his ribs and muscles stretched taut by his bondage. “Is that why you Meins don’t let your women fight?” she asked. “Are you afraid of them?”
“I should have chained you,” Hanish repeated, fixing his gray eyes on hers. “But I loved you too much. That thing-love-is what I should have feared. Now we both see why.”
“You cannot win me over now,” Corinn said, though the words did not come out with the clipped tone she wished for. Her hands were sweating. The dagger grip was slick against her palm. She wanted to put it down, just for a second, so that she could wipe the moisture from her skin. She thought, How can I even now feel something for this man?
The life seemed to be draining out of Hanish with each breath. He let his head drop forward again, a low, ruminative moan reverberating in his throat. He asked slowly, with pauses so that he could inhale or exhale, “Would you kill me now? Do that for me. My ancestors have things they wish to say to me…directly. Never let the past enslave you, Corinn. The dead seek to burden us…to twist our lives as badly as they twisted theirs. Don’t let them.” With that he fell silent. His breathing came regular but labored, his lungs struggling against the pressure his hanging body put on them. It was not clear if he was conscious anymore.