During his first years in power he had demanded to know whom he was dealing with. League representatives had promised to pass on his “request,” but nothing ever came of it. He had even peppered Calrach of the Numrek with questions about them. His people came from that side of the world, but they offered him little that made sense. Calrach had referred to the Lothan Aklun as “unimportant.” They were no more than traders, he claimed.
Nine years in power and the Lothan Aklun were real to Hanish only because of their ravenous appetite for child slaves and because they produced the drug that had helped him soothe his tumultuous empire. Leaguemen assured him that was as it had to be, and he knew Sire Dagon would provide no new answers to his questions now. He chose not to raise the subject again.
“By the way,” Sire Dagon said, “the Lothan are pleased that you have made progress with the antoks. They presented them to you in the belief that you would find a way to harness their ravenous appetites. It pleases them that you have done so.”
Hanish nodded. He had actually had little to do with these antoks. They were strange beasts that he had laid eyes on only once. They were enormous creatures, like living versions of the giants whose bones were sometimes found in the ground. He could scarcely describe them. They were a mixture of the worst swinish and canine traits, unfeeling, brutal, ravenous. He eventually conceived of a practical way he might use them in battle, but he had left it to Maeander to handle the creatures in a remote compound in Senival. The less he heard about the beasts, the better.
Sire Dagon did not linger on them long. “I trust you will be pleased by the news I bring,” he said. “The Lothan Aklun are anxious to increase their trade with you. They have been patient these many years, as you know. The scant tribute you have sent them thus far…you understand that they consider it a kindness done to you that they have accepted it without complaint and that they have supplied the empire with mist on credit, as it were. It was a necessary period of adjustment, but now it is concluded.”
He paused, raised and lowered a single eyebrow. Hanish simply motioned with his fingers that he should continue.
“We have pledged that we will deliver a full shipment of Quota slaves to them before the winter. It will be double the amount the Akarans offered, but this is no more than what you agreed to before the war. From each province they request five thousand bodies, evenly distributed between the sexes, no more or less of any one race. The age range may need to be larger than before, but they have no issue with this. In return, they will increase the mist by a third. This may not seem much, but the drug has been refined. It is no longer as incapacitating as before, and it is more addictive. The body adjusts to it in a manner that means when deprived of it the user experiences significant distress-hallucinations, fever, pain. Most will do anything just to ensure their supply. This is all detailed in documents supporting the revised treaty. And that, Hanish Mein, is all there is to it. You’ll be glad to hear that they demand nothing more from you than this.”
Hanish glanced away, thinking that they demand nothing more than the world itself. Generous of them. His gaze settled on a golden monkey that had perched on the banister of the balcony, its yellow-orange hair aflame in the sunlight. Hanish did not like the creatures. Never had. They had about them a noisy, knowing air, as if this whole palace was actually theirs and he was just an interloper. Early in his stay on Acacia he had introduced another variety of primate, a stout thing with long snow-white hair and a brilliant blue face. But these had proved unruly and belligerent. They hunted down the goldens and left bloody, half-eaten corpses strewn around the grounds. They seemed to take pleasure in tossing severed limbs at groups of women. Hanish had eventually ordered them slaughtered; the goldens, however, won favor with the noblewomen. They remained.
“I have brought the revised treaty with me,” Sire Dagon said. “You and your people may peruse it at leisure. And that, largely, will be that. You can then get on with enjoying your hard-won empire. There is only one new aspect of the treaty for you to consider.” The leagueman seemed to remember the food all at once and stretched to study the trays. He let that last statement sit a moment, but Hanish waited. “As our commission for negotiating it, the league asks for…well, we request no change in our percentage, no monetary bonus-nothing like that. We would simply like to take a burden from your shoulders and place it on ours instead.”
Hanish touched the scar on his nose with his thumb, just a passing motion that he did not linger on. Wryly, he said, “I can barely contain my curiosity.”
“We would like to take the Outer Isles off your hands. We would like to own them outright.”
“Those islands are thronging with pirates.”
Sire Dagon smiled. “We have considered that. They are not a problem. We have examined every aspect of how they function, and we are confident we can pacify them.”
“They are hardly the type to accept passivity of any sort.”
“They have been a problem to you, haven’t they?” Sire Dagon asked. “So many problems you’ve taken on your shoulders. Perhaps you did not think that the peace would be more challenging than the war. This is a lesson only learned by error and trial. It is why the league chooses to always be at peace, even if our friends choose to make war on one another.”
Hanish could not dispute that there was wisdom in such an approach. Who would have thought that winning the military battles would prove to be easy compared to managing the empire? One and then another and then another crisis sprouted. Some of the trouble was of his own making. The fever was more virulent than he had imagined, for example. He had not fully reckoned with how far it would spread and how quickly it would outstrip his military objectives. It simply killed too many, leaving a weakened fragment of the former population to rebuild after the war.
Also, the Numrek outlived their usefulness, and their welcome. They had not returned across the Ice Fields as they had first promised they would, though Hanish had paid them lavishly for their services. In the turmoil after the war, as the fever still raged through the south, they entrenched themselves in Aushenia, claiming the entire region as their own, taking over the towns and villages and the royal estates, enslaving the humans unlucky enough to get captured. Even worse, they had started colonies along the western edge of the Talayan coast. Creatures of the frozen north, indeed! As it turned out they loved nothing better than baking beneath a furious sun and swimming in the limpid waters.
There were other problems he had no hand in creating. The people-perhaps because the war disrupted the flow of the mist-got all sorts of ideas in their heads. They became unruly, conniving, flaring into rebellion, staging acts of sabotage, as when they set fire to the grain stores on the Mainland, halving the supply there and causing a near famine year. They spun stories of holy prophecies, said that Hanish and his plague were the harbingers of the Giver’s return. They developed a liking for martyrs, recalcitrant bastards upon whom torture and execution were but a blessing. Talay had never been fully pacified; the Outer Isles were lousy with pirates; his troops were pestered by assassins in the guise of loyal subjects.
And the revolts at the mines were most frustrating. Just when Hanish was poised to restart the engine of the world’s commerce, the miners took it into their heads to grasp control of their own lives. They refused to work. Some fool among them rose to prominence by suggesting that the miners deserved a share of their profits from their labor. A silver-tongued, ranting prophet of a man, Barack the Lesser, had caused no end of trouble. He had even claimed to have seen the future return of Aliver Akaran. How very annoying. His efforts achieved nothing but misery for all involved. The strike had to be put down through a siege that Hanish could scarcely afford to prosecute. So many of them died. Such a waste of manpower; all for nothing.