He said, “I don’t plan to leave you today, Mena, but if I do-and if our cause seems on the verge of failure-call the Santoth. Speak to Nualo. He is one of the Santoth, a very good man, Mena.”
“What about The Song of Elenet?” she had asked.
Aliver had looked at her sadly. “I don’t know. You think I know how to do all of this, Mena? I don’t. I wish we had that book, but call them even if you don’t have it. And then…see what happens.”
After that he had walked to the arena of his death.
Had he really said that? See what happens? It did not seem possible that such massive challenges could be overcome with vague, hopeful sentiments like that. Aliver had spoken of communicating with them but never clearly enough that Mena had imagined trying it herself. It required opening the mind. It involved reaching a quiet, meditative state, his consciousness empty of everything except thoughts of those he wanted to communicate with. He let his call uncoil from his body, he had said, and find direction on its own accord. It might take a long time, but eventually he would hear them within him, answering. Then he would speak to them directly from his being. They had read his mind to some extent, but he could also focus particular thoughts and transmit them. It required patience, faith…
Yes, he had said that, too. It required faith, the same word she had whispered into Dariel’s ear. But Aliver’s death seemed to refute faith as powerless. Maybe it was, or maybe it counted only when it went in the face of adversity so great nothing else could be called upon. That was what she faced. By all reason she knew that in the morning the Meins would slaughter everyone gathered to face them. It would be but the mopping up of a victory already achieved. Knowing this, she resolved to try faith one more time. She had promised to, so she would.
She looked about as if she might find some tools to aid her or should rearrange the objects in the tent or pull her ankle from Melio’s grasp. But there were no tools for something like this. Her surroundings were what they were, and she did not want to break the connection with Melio. She settled herself, pressed her thumbs against the spine of the eel pendant, and closed her eyes.
She tried to still her thoughts. For some time she fought a barrage of violent images from the day’s fighting and of Aliver in death and in the duel moments just before, when anything was still possible… Distractions like these seemed to have lain in wait to ambush her. Get past these things, she thought. Clear the mind. Think only of the Santoth. She could not visualize them since she had never seen them. Instead, she tried to locate the energy of them. She thought of it as a point of light in the empty heavens, and then as a hint of warmth in surrounding cold, and then as the beating of life in a silent eternity: all of these things she searched for inside her mind. It felt like no more than a mental exercise, all within her instead of out in the world. But she kept at it.
At some point, she realized, she found that point of warm, beating light. No, she did not find it; she created it. She focused on it and brought it closer and closer and closer, until it was the palpable center of her. It was right there within her. She tried to formulate a thought to push into this, but there were too many different things to say. She could not narrow it down to one thing. Instead, she took in all of it: all her fears, hopes, and desires, wishes and dreams; all the horrors of the recent days, the scenes of bloodshed, the antoks, the duel; all the death and all the suffering promised on the morn. She spun them like a ball before her and pushed them into that light. If the Santoth were to understand anything, they might as well understand all of it.
Once she was sure she had done the best she could with sending the message, she listened. Waited. Searched the answering silence. It seemed to have no end, but she waited, not knowing what else to do. She simply waited for a response.
It did not come.
She awoke as dawn’s light suffused her tent. Surprised that she had slept, she drew up from her crumpled position. Melio stirred beside her. Outside she heard the sounds of the camp awaking. Somebody walked by, feet crunching the dry earth. She realized that Melio was not gripping her ankle anymore, and this saddened her.
With that, yesterday poured into her, memories of all of it, including what she had attempted to do. She had tried to summon the Santoth, just as Aliver had asked her to. But there had been no response. She had listened so hard and long that the act had finally lulled her into sleep. That was all that had happened. She was not even sure that the whole exercise had ever left the confines of her own skull. That light was just something she had imagined, that she had fantasized in her tent, sitting beside Melio in the early hours of what would be a terrible day. That, she thought, was the best she had managed to do. It would not be enough. Aliver had made two mistakes, then, not just the one of dueling Maeander.
The reality of what the day offered crept back upon her. The coming day was completely unavoidable, already upon her. The only thing good about it was that at last this would all be concluded. At least she knew how she would die. Maeander had known how he would. That was where his calm had come from, his assurance. He had nodded to her, indicating as much, though she only now realized that was what he had been saying. He had been predicting his future. She should have cut his head from his shoulders right then. She should not have let him control their world as he had. That was where she had made her first mistake.
Or was it? She had made mistakes earlier than that. And it wasn’t just her mistakes that mattered. There were so, so many things that should have been different, going back years. No, not years-decades and centuries. Back to the early ages, to when the Giver still walked the newly created earth. Somebody back then should have cut down Elenet before he stole that which he should never have stolen. But if that was true, then wasn’t the Giver truly to blame? This was all his creation. He was the one she wanted one day to stand before and take to task. Why did he let it all go foul so quickly? Barely was the dew of creation dry before he let his children betray him. And why didn’t he care that some now strived for right in the world, that some fought so that there could be a greater peace afterward? She feared the question. He might turn it all around on her and assault her claim at righteousness-she being the killer that she was, so easily enraged, so skilled at murder. Perhaps Hanish was no more a villain than she was. Perhaps there was no difference between good and bad…
A hand yanked the flap open, a shaft of light blinding her for a second. And then she heard the voice of Leeka Alain, awed in a way unusual to it. “Princess, come. You should see this. Something is happening.”
CHAPTER
Rialus Neptos was a pathetic runt of a man. Never was this more obvious than when he stood flanked by Numrek warriors, tall men, shoulders wide, with balled knots of muscle at the joints, like grapefruits beneath their burgundy-tinted skin. He was a weasel in the company of wolves. Stooped to fit beneath the low ceiling of the palace’s hidden passageways, any of the Numreks could have grabbed the ambassador by the neck and shaken the life out of him with one of their hard-knuckled fists. Had Corinn not needed him to translate the instructions she was about to give, she might well have asked them to do just that. Strange, she thought, that her fortunes relied on such dubious allies.