As the two walked, Rialus rattled on, detailing what he had learned about the battle. Much of it had gone just as the Numreks imagined. Their surprise appearance had created instant chaos. The first killed had been two Meinish women whose heads had twirled in the air before they had so much as voiced their alarm. Most of what had followed was pure butchery. Meinish guards fought bravely enough, he supposed, but they were cut down in ones and twos. Few of them had managed to organize a cohesive response. There had been a large skirmish in the main upper courtyard, where the palace battalion had focused their efforts. The Numrek had welcomed the sport of it.
Hanish had been in the ceremonial chamber when the attack began, but he had rushed out to respond. He and a band of Punisari held the lower courtyard right to the last, trying to block the entrance to the chamber. The Numrek had surrounded them, pushed in on them with their greater numbers, working at them like so many butchers slaughtering ornery beasts. The Punisari had not made it easy. They were Hanish’s best men, lean and muscled, capable of lopping free even a Numrek’s meaty arm. Each of them had blocked and struck at peak speed, blurs of motion that betrayed no fatigue, many wielding two swords. They had fought in a circle formation, drawing closer together as they fell. None of them had made even the slightest overture of surrender. Hanish himself spoke to his men the entire time. Few Numrek, however, know any but their own language. None could tell Rialus what the chieftain had said to his men as they, and everything they had ever fought for, died.
“Pity,” Rialus said. “I’d have liked to have heard what he made of the situation. Bit of a surprise, I imagine. Not what he had planned when he woke up…”
The last two remaining with Hanish had been the hardest to get rid of. They had reached a pitch of fighting that made it almost impossible to land a strike. One was eventually taken down after his leg was sliced off at the knee. He fell and, trying to right himself with the use of his blood-spurting stump, he became easy prey. The other got stabbed through the back of the head with a Numrek lance, an injury that, by the look of it, cut his spine and rendered his body instantly immobile.
Hanish, after this, had done his best to fight to the death. At some point he had realized that the Numrek were not trying to kill him. He had stopped fighting, let his blade droop and rotated it in slow circles, waiting. When none attacked, he pulled his Ilhach dagger and would have slit his belly, had the Numrek not grappled with him first. This also must have been a strange sight, a horde of the burly-armed soldiers dropping their weapons and struggling to pummel into submission a man who was intent on ending his own life-this when they were covered in gore from a few hours of blood work themselves. Rialus admitted that the Numrek had ill treated Hanish, but he left them little choice. He still lived. He was bound as she ordered and awaited her in the chamber.
When Rialus seemed to have exhausted his knowledge of the day, he turned and studied Corinn’s profile. “Princess, this is a work of genius, of simplicity. Once it is cleaned up, the world will bow to you and your beauty. They’ll forget the bloodshed here.” He hesitated a moment, his tongue flicking out to moisten his lips. “Of all the surprises you’ve devised, none is more of a revelation than you yourself are. I pray you never find reason to disfavor me.”
Something about this praise touched her. She felt a flush around her eyes, an itch that suggested tears were not far behind. She spoke quickly. “Thank you, Rialus. You have been a great help to me. I will not forget.”
Corinn left the ambassador standing in the open air outside the passageway into the chamber that now housed the Tunishnevre. She steadied herself a moment and drew out the one weapon she now carried. She walked past the Numrek, milling about the entrance, and into the dark corridor with a crisp step unconsciously modeled on Maeander’s stone-chipping gait. As the chamber opened up around her, she felt the seething incorporeal life in the air. She tried to ignore it, moving through the huge space of the place with no outward sign of discomfort. It took great effort. If air could scratch like claws, the air in this room would have shredded her. If silent screams could consume flesh, she would have been eaten alive. All her instincts told her to turn and run. She did not. She cut her progress with the point of her chin. Pride, even in the face of the undead, now seemed of greatest importance to her.
Hanish hung suspended over the Scatevith stone. His arms were bound above him, secured at the wrists, and his head slumped forward as limp as a corpse’s. He was naked from the waist up, his chest ribboned with bruises and abrasions. A gash under his armpit dripped a stain of blood, like rust, stretching all the way down into his trousers. He was bound at the ankles also, in such a way that if he tried to move he would be able only to writhe in the air but not kick out. One of his feet jutted out at a strange angle, broken. Perhaps most horrible, though, was his hair. It had been hacked away by Numrek swords, leaving his pate uneven, mangy, his scalp exposed in some places.
Part of Corinn wanted to fly to him, to grasp him around the torso and lift his weight and find some way to get him down and to beg forgiveness. She wanted to search about on the ground for clumps of his straw-colored locks and stick them back in place. It seemed unfathomable that Hanish, the chieftain of the Known World, could be reduced to this state within the space of a few hours. Is this the way the world worked? The way she had the power to affect it?
As she approached, she tried not to let any of these questions or emotions show. This man would have killed her. Pride, she thought, despises uncertainty. She began speaking as soon as his head lifted and his eyes found her. “I had thought to enter here with a bow and a quiver of arrows,” she said. “I thought I might have you nailed to the wall, splayed out as a target. You recall how good a shot I am, don’t you? I would have had you name the spots you wished me to place each arrow in.”
Blinking, Hanish seemed to have trouble seeing her. Drops of blood from his wrists speckled his forehead. He looked dazed, as if he might not be entirely conscious. But then he said, “One in my heart would have been enough.”
Corinn crooked her mouth, making it a knot that kept her emotions hidden.
“I never thought it before,” Hanish continued, “but I see now why you were so apt at archery. You kill best from a distance. You can shoot an arrow from hiding, from a safe place. I can see now why that sport suited you.”
A safe place? Corinn had never in her life found a safe place. She planned to, though. She planned to. She lifted the dagger and held it high enough for him to see. “And yet here I am with your blade. You are going to die on it.”
Hanish smiled, his teeth brown with blood. “So this is all your personal revenge? You were scorned, and because of it you ordered thousands killed. Do you know what that makes you? It makes you just like me, or perhaps worse than me.”
I am not like you, Corinn wanted to say. But she feared her voice might quaver around the words, suggesting things she did not wish suggested. She stayed to her planned script. “Before you die you should know all the ways in which you’ve failed. For one, you have lost everything to me, your concubine. Everything. I’ve cut out the heart of your empire. Even if your dead brother’s army defeats my dead brother’s army, they cannot change what I’ve done here.”
She felt herself warming to her words. Saying them to him made her feel better than she had in many years. She climbed the granite steps up onto the Scatevith stone, feeling the ceremonial import of the platform, the honeycombed ranks of the Tunishnevre all around her, their energy as palpable in the air as electricity. It was hard not to feel that the sarcophagi were going to begin opening one by one, the dried corpses in them animated by their own hatred.