The Aushenians had more than a few questions for him. They knew they were the next obvious target, and they probed the exiled governor for further details, for his opinions and conjecture. Rialus warmed to the role of trusted adviser-such was all he ever really wished for. But behind this temptation to remain and be of genuine aid he could see both Maeander’s and Calrach’s countenances. These helped him to remain resolute. So Rialus explained to the Aushenians that his duty required that he travel to Alecia. Guldan released him, sending him with the grandiose message that whatever evil intent this horde brought would be met first by the soldiers of Aushenia. Such high notions! Rialus thought. But like so many high notions they were of no more weight than the expelled air that carried them. Rialus was in no doubt that Aushenia would fall within a fortnight, a month at most. This assessment, of course, he kept to himself.
Rialus left the kingdom aboard a vessel from the monarch’s fleet, watching the bustle of military preparations on the receding shoreline. He was pleased with himself, an emotion that filled him almost to bursting on landing at the capital. He had pined for a villa on the western hills of Alecia since he first saw the spot on a brief visit fifteen years before. Alecia: to him it was the real center of the Acacian empire, the beating heart from which everything of worth in the world radiated. He loved the very idea of the place, the wealth it controlled, the pleasures it offered, the power it wielded, the limitless maze of intrigue, the clandestine couplings. He could barely grasp the dense complexity of the city’s quadrants. No matter. Rialus had long believed that he would thrive inside the central city’s shimmering pale walls, heated by the sun, draped in hanging vines, and fragrant with only sweet smells.
It was a pity, then, that he arrived within Alecia’s gates a traitor to the people he so adored. He tried not to dwell on this, and he was largely successful at fixing his thoughts only on the bounty finally within his grasp. He had, as he earlier professed to Maeander, allies within the capital who shared his desire to see the wealth of the city redistributed. Some were members of the Neptos family, but many others had been nurtured by his agents at clandestine meetings, people who met in small groups and who scarcely knew of the other pockets of people likewise being groomed. He had a promise to keep. He did not shrink from the blood others would spill on his behalf, just as long as he might finally receive some portion of the rewards he had long deserved. In the first few days in Alecia Rialus was a man with two faces. His public face cried tears of grief at the coming war. Privately his eyes scanned the villas above the city for a suitable new home. True to his long-held belief, it appeared the Giver would indeed reward her worthies.
CHAPTER
The commotion was like nothing ever heard in this frozen expanse of barren solitude: the grunts of beasts shackled to labor; the constant barrage of shouts; the jingle of numberless bells; the crunch of boot after boot after marching boot; and the grinding, grinding, grinding of large objects propelled across a surface that could not decide whether its nature was to aid or resist. It was the scrape of metal and wood over ice, the sound of a fleet of ninety warships traversing a frozen sea. They were tugged to motion by hundreds of woolly oxen, driven by an army of fifteen thousand men who walked with bells fastened to their boots. The old ones had instructed Hanish that each man should bear a chime upon his body that would sing to them no matter how great the distance they traveled. They should announce themselves to the world with voices that spoke for the many silent generations that had struggled to make them possible. The Tunishnevre must have heard them and known in their still chamber just how their children honored them.
With the passing miles Hanish felt the old ones’ hold on him slipping somewhat, but he had never felt surer that he was worthy of their trust and would achieve the things they wished of him. Because of him the rumors discussed in the mild climes of Acacia were true, true on a scale beyond even the most extravagant speculation. The few vessels that the fishermen had spotted weeks before were only a scouting force sent to verify the feasibility of what Hanish envisioned. Hanish had instructed the party to allow themselves to be seen. He believed that no matter what people heard about movements in the north they would never believe it until they stood face-to-face with the future he was bringing to them. So why not let them cogitate and worry over phantoms they could neither entirely believe in nor dismiss?
“Nature had always been to the Mein like the goading of a whip to an ox,” Haleeven shouted in his ear over the keening wind. “It changes nothing. It slows us little and keeps us bent to work. As it should.” His uncle always had such wisdom to dispense at the right moments, and Hanish was glad of his presence. Though he never showed it outwardly, it was often hard being a pillar of unflappable confidence. This older man, so like his father, was a living source of strength.
On a morning at the end of the first week heading south the weather cleared so suddenly that it set the animals on edge. It changed the very sound and feel and substance of the world and left men squinting into the distance, more than one head cocked to better hear the strangeness of it. The whole shell of sky shone pale blue. The sun could barely be seen, but it lit the entirety of the firmament evenly. Hanish climbed high up into the rigging of the ship he traveled in. The gnarled ropes bit into his palms, and his feet slipped on the ice-crusted rungs. He was no sailor. Who born in the Mein was? Still he felt joy take him when he leaned back against the mainmast in the lookout perch, his face red from the climb, the breeze tugging at him in gusts and carrying away the plumes of his breath.
Before him stretched a white world painful to look upon. He shaded his eyes with a visor of smoked glass. Looking through this artificial twilight he saw for the first time the entirety of his venture in motion. Surrounding him went a navy traversing a solid white sea. Ninety boats that did not rock and bob with the undulations of currents, that did not rise and fall with the swell of waves. Their sails were furled tight and their rigging sparkled like moist spiderwebs. The ships moved on runners of wood shod with iron, pulled by long lines of oxen, creatures hidden beneath coats so thick they rendered them shapeless. Fifty or so of the animals in double rows tugged each warship, whipped on by fur-garbed men who themselves resembled humans only in the way they moved and in the work they performed.
Behind them the army walked and sledged, outfitted against the cold and struggling to keep alive. It was not an enormous force, but it was the most they could field. Among them went more than one gray-haired man, more than a few smooth-cheeked youths of thirteen and fourteen. They would fight proudly, though, and they were but one of three points of his attack. Another army of five thousand threaded the northern pass into the Candovian lakelands. They would wreak the most useful damage under his brother’s command. Then there were the Numrek, who surely had taken Aushenia by now. And then there were a whole host of other schemes conceived over the years in Tahalian. Amazing, just amazing that it was in motion!
Hanish stayed in the crow’s nest well past the point at which his face and hands went numb, climbing down only when the sun, wherever it had hidden in the sky, sunk behind the ice and the world went dark and the storm returned, a wall as of shattered glass hurled by the angry wind.