Another sorcerer punched at the air, a strange motion with no immediate opponent. A second later a whole cluster of soldiers a hundred yards before him liquefied. They each became thousands of pea-sized balls of fluid clustered in human form. The drops fell to the ground, each bursting on impact, leaving the earth pooled from a red-tainted rain. Another wizard blew his fury straight from the back of his throat with a force that warped the air in front of him and tore a bloody path as straight and limb-snapping as a rolling boulder’s.
In the space of a few seconds everything had changed. The Meins fled in chaos. Many of them dropped their weapons and tore free their helmets. They clawed at their fellow soldiers. They trampled others in their hysteria. They pushed and shoved, fear in complete control of their actions. It was clear that they were utterly defeated. Whatever they saw in the faces of the sorcerers shot them through with terror. And the Santoth followed, pursuing. As they did so, their fury grew. They moved faster, made grander gestures, roared out more powerfully. They stamped their feet, making the ground buck and shift around them. Slabs of earth tilted up, as if the earth’s crust were made of cheap board and axes were smashing up from underneath it, throwing soldiers somersaulting in the air.
Leeka muttered to himself that this was not possible. It could not be. He refuted it over and over again. It was not possible, even if it all felt intimately familiar to him. It was akin to his fever time, when he had burned with nightmares in that pile of dead bodies high up on the Mein Plateau. The images that had raged in his mind then were much like the ones around him now. But those dreams had not been real. They were delusions. He wanted to believe that these visions were also tricks of his mind. He should not accept them, could not trust them. If his eyes were to be believed, the world was a mural painted on a flimsy canvas. It could be ripped to shreds. According to his eyes, rents could tear through the sky and into the earth and sometimes shred through the flesh of those caught with it. These scars mended just as quickly as they began, but the sight and sound of them was an amazing horror. And, if his eyes did not lie, the sky poured down a deluge of serpentine horrors. Snakes, worms, centipedes the size of ancient pine trees, eel-like creatures pulled up from the black depths of some great ocean: all of these thudded down to the ground. They twisted and writhed, batting the Mein legions about, flattening men. The beasts rolled and came up with soldiers smashed paper thin against their sides. And he knew that his eyes were not seeing the worst of it. The real horrors, he was sure, were just at the edges of his vision, just outside his capacity to focus. No matter that he snapped his head from side to side, eyes darting, frantic. Still, he never saw the complete ghastliness he felt was there just beyond.
He spotted one of the Santoth, standing still, his mouth opened in song. It was Nualo. Leeka moved toward him. He drew as near as he dared and stood panting, fatigued as he had never been in life before, exhausted by something more than just the exertion. It is hard on the living to be near magic, he thought. Such force is-
Nualo turned around. It was not a sudden move, just a slow rotation that seemed initiated by his eyes, the head and the rest of his body following. He scanned the battlefield behind him. He had never imagined such fury. His eyes contained a raging intensity that trembled as if all this chaos was mirrored inside them. They roared without sound.
Corrupted. Such force is corrupted. He heard these words in his head and knew that Nualo had placed them there to complete his unfinished thought. How do you live?
Looking into Nualo’s eyes and knowing what writhed and ripped and screamed all around him, Leeka could not answer the question. It felt as if he had been tugged out of the normal order of the world and observed all this from a space within and without it at the same time. He was being allowed to witness this, to live through it, but he could not even begin to explain how and why this could be.
He would later be unsure just what he had seen. So much of his memory of the day would be a shattered collage of the impossible. But there was one thing he knew with certainty. The power he observed was frightening not just for the destruction it caused but because it was so completely and utterly evil. Its intent may not have been conceived with wickedness. Nualo and the other Santoth were not themselves malignant. Even the rage that propelled them was rooted in a love of the world, in a longing to be able to rejoin it. But the power they unleashed had its own seething animus. If the language of the Giver all those years before had been one of creation, and if that act of creation had been a love hymn that sang the world into being on music that was the fabric of existence itself and that was, as the legends held, most wondrously good to behold…if that was so, then what the Santoth released was its opposite. Their song was a fire that consumed the world, a hunger that ate creation, not fed it.
Corruption, Leeka thought, doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Nualo must have heard this, but he did not respond. He turned away, disgusted and impatient. He again unleashed air-rending shouts from the cavern of his mouth. He moved forward, arms flailing the world before him into shredded ribbons.
Leeka did what he now believed he was meant to do. He ran to keep up. He ran so that he could be a witness, so that somebody would know, so that if ever the time came, somebody would be able to testify as to why the created should never appropriate the powers of the creator.
CHAPTER
It took all of Corinn’s concentration to keep her gaze elevated above the gore that littered the palace. She tried to keep her eyes vacant, uninterested, letting the bodies on the floor; the blood-splattered walls; and the strewn, shattered debris remain vague, only defined enough so that she could navigate through them. She focused on mundane objects in the distance, murals at the ends of hallways, doorframes, particular bricks singled out on the walls. Soon she planned to lock herself in her room until the cleanup was complete, until every sign and sight of the carnage she had orchestrated was scrubbed from the floors and walls and washed out of fabrics. She would send Rialus to the lower town to conscript the Acacian peasants huddled there for the task. She would pay them with freedom, with privilege, with her love and thanks. She would infuse them with pride in the Acacian Empire again. There would be a great deal to do, but these things would all come later. First, she had to walk these halls and complete one more task.
She found Rialus waiting for her. Earlier, when a Numrek soldier returned to inform her that the palace was controlled, Rialus had gone before her to assess the situation. Now he looked queasy. His tongue was quick enough, though, and he began talking before she had even reached him, expressing his amazement at how easily the palace had fallen. Her plan had worked perfectly. The palace was under her power already. The lower town was shut tight and trembling. There might be a few Meins hiding in the servants’ areas and in the town, but the Numrek were hunting them down door to door. The priests protecting the Tunishnevre had proven quite stubborn. They had clung to the sarcophagi until they were ripped from them and killed on the spot. Several noble families were caught trying to sail from the ports, their yachts piled high with all they could carry. A few boats had managed to get away. The Numrek, not being a seafaring people, did not-
Corinn cut him off. “Where is he?”
Rialus did not need to ask whom she meant. “In the ceremonial chamber, as you ordered.”