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.
He tried to remind himself of this, to say it like a prayer that would clear away all else. But he could not help but imagine Corinn as she would be tomorrow. She would walk in halfway through the ceremony, when Hanish had already invoked the ancient words as whispered to him by the ancestors. She would come toward him in all her grace, believing she was to offer healing drops of blood. He would look her in the face, assuring her, moving her as close as he could to the moment of death without her seeing it coming. At some point she would figure out what was happening. He might have gotten her into position upon the stone and stood her over the bowl waiting to gather her blood. He might be holding the knife in his hand, might even be preparing her to receive its cut. But…
At some point she would realize that he was not just there for her blood but for her life as well. She would likely see it in his eyes or his gestures or hear it in the quavering of his voice if he did not control himself perfectly. She would not, he was sure, go quietly to her death. He imagined her fighting against him as he dragged her up onto the stone. She’d be cursing him, tearing at his face with her fingers, bucking against him, gouging at his eyes. What would she say to him? He could think of a thousand insults, and they’d all be true.
Haleeven, standing beside him, intuited his thoughts. “I wish there was another way,” he said. “But there isn’t. Things have come to this in just this way. I, at least, know how hard you tried to find the others and how much you give up for the Tunishnevre. It is for this that you were chosen. Because you have the strength to do it.”
Hanish felt a pressure surge up from his gut and threaten to pour out of him. He knew his uncle was trying to help, but he could not listen to such things now. “Leave me,” he said. He raised his voice and ordered the workers to depart the chamber for a few moments. He wished to be alone.
He sat until they drained out, ignoring the dour looks on the priests’ faces. When the place fell silent, when he could just faintly sense the satisfied pulse that was the Tunishnevre’s heartbeat, his eyes clouded. His face reddened. He blinked and blinked rapidly, embarrassed by the flood of tears he could not stop from streaking down his cheeks. He wiped them away with the hard edge of his hand, anxious lest somebody-one of the priests perhaps-stick his head in and see him. But the tears came with their own strength. The emotion began with thoughts of Corinn, but it was not just about her. His grief at knowing what he had planned for her intertwined with dread of the forces he was about to unleash. The Tunishnevre. A spiteful pantheon of his hallowed ancestors. How he feared them. How he loathed them. He had lived, bowing to their animus, all his life, and now he would soon meet them all face-to-face, flesh and blood, as men before him, animated by a warped version of the Giver’s tongue.
When he was a boy his father had often taken him into the chamber at Tahalian. Heberen would press Hanish’s forehead to the cold floor and make him remain prostrate like that for hours. He left him alone, saying that he must learn to hear the voices of his ancestors. Only if he heard them would he be able to serve them. And serving them was all his life was really about. How frightened he’d been! Alone in the dark, the angry cries of spirits in the air, hundreds of corpses surrounding him, living and dead at the same time. He had barely allowed himself to breathe, so aware was he that he sucked them in with each inhalation. He had heard them all right. Every day of his life he’d heard them in some way or another.
He had wanted to ask, even as a boy, why the ancestors so craved life again. If living was only a prelude to death-and if the living were but servants of the deceased-why then did the old ones want so very badly to walk the earth again? He had the question formed and solid in his mind since his eighth or ninth year. But he never asked it. He feared that to ask it was to reveal a lie that would shame his ancestors and embarrass him in some irreversible way. Now, decades later, what choice did he have other than to carry the lie through? It was what he had worked for all along. If he failed at the awakening, he failed at the main thing he had striven for throughout his life. So he reaffirmed that he would not fail. Haleeven was right. In choosing him, the Tunishnevre had chosen correctly.
By the time he left the chamber he had drained the well of his tears, though, as he discovered, he would soon need to replenish them. His secretary collided with him in the hallway just outside. He had been progressing at a dead run. The moment he had recovered himself he thrust a curled piece of paper at him. It had just come by a messenger bird from Bocoum, he said.
“From my brother?”
“No,” the man said, his blue eyes round and nervous. “It’s not from him, but it’s about him. It tells of two deaths.” He stretched out his hand, trembling, to offer the note. “Please, lord, you will want to read it yourself.”
Some time later, when he stepped into his quarters and saw Corinn look up at him, watched her stand and begin to walk toward him, beautiful as ever, her gown kind to her contours, the train of it trailing the stones, tiny bells tinkling to mark her progress, Hanish knew himself to be every bit the impostor, the coward, the villain that Corinn would name him if she knew him truly. He knew it, but he rushed toward her embrace. He heard himself utter the news to her, and he luxuriated in the solace of the moments to come. They would each comfort the other. They would both share their losses. She wouldn’t hate him just yet, because only the two of them in all the world split equal measures of exactly the same kind of suffering at that moment.
So he thought of that, and he tried to forget that on the morrow he would kill her.
CHAPTER
“How can you be dead?” Mena asked for the hundredth time. She sat on her camp blanket late in the evening of the day after Aliver’s duel. Her tent stood limp around her, the night still, no breath in the warm air outside to blow against it. She clasped her eel pendant in one hand, tugging at the string around her neck, unsure whether to use the necklace as an amulet or to tear it free and toss it away. Beside her Melio slumbered restlessly. He lay facedown with one hand tight around her ankle, his grip firm and constant, as if his fingers and thumbs, at least, were still awake.
“How can you be dead?”
She spoke softly, not wanting to disturb Melio. They had been through it enough times already: she asking that same question, he whispering answers for her, finding new words of solace, pushing her away from the well of grief she wanted to fall into. The last two days had been a strange, chaotic courtship of sorts. They had not spoken of the letter she had written him. When would they have? But it was there between them, as was the fact that he had chased her across the sea with an army he managed to spin out of nothing. If ever they saw the calm of a peaceful world, she would look no farther than Melio for love; that love, however, hung on the other side of a yawning, unpredictable if.