CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
B arad had thought that the presence of a ghost made physical was to be the most disturbing thing he would witness that day. From his box below the dais he watched the figure appear at Corinn’s shoulder. He nearly called out, but the fact that nobody else did stopped him. Or, not just that. Whatever sorcery Corinn had bound him with stopped him. He feared the man was an assassin, and then wondered why he feared that. Let the queen die. That would be a fine thing. Let his inability to warn her be the death of her. As ever in his life since the queen had captured him, his mind rocked like a boat atop choppy waters, first leaning one way and then the next, all the time making him sick to the stomach.
Because he could only watch, he did. Through watching, he saw. The queen could hear the words the dead man whispered in her ears. She fought not to show any sign that she acknowledged the phantom’s sudden appearance, but to Barad’s eyes it was obvious. Her jaw clenched when the man’s lips moved. She shifted away from the touch he gave her elbow. Her eyes darted around, checking to see if others saw the man at whom she would not herself look. Not an assassin, then. Barad stared harder.
The man’s hair was long and golden, with a few thin strips of colored leather woven into its braids. Meinish. His face looked odd beside Corinn’s. His features did not show the contrast of light and dark that hers did. No touch of the sun on them. He seemed to stand in the dull light of another place entirely. He did stand in another place, Barad realized. He was dead. As soon as he had the thought, he knew it to be true. A ghost was whispering in the queen’s ear. Why could he see the dead man when nobody else seemed to? His stone eyes, surely. They were works of sorcery, after all, and they were Corinn’s doing. Through them, he watched as the man moved around the dais unseen, talking much of the time. More than that, Barad knew every word the man spoke. Intimate. Playful. Teasing. Even his whispers reached him. He did not follow the intricacies of the ceremony at all, just watched the queen and the ghost, hearing his one-sided conversation, wondering what was going to happen.
He had no better understanding of it when the gates to the Carmelia crashed open. He rolled his stone eyes away from the dais and watched the figures march through the tunnel and into the crowded stadium. They were not ghosts, these ones. For a moment Barad thought them monsters with elongated heads like eaters of ants, but that image faded as the light touched them. They were men, larger than normal, but men. They cast shadows and had about them a solidity that was even more tangible than the crowd who drew back in horror from them. They must have been heavier than normal men, for their feet split the stones across which they trod. Even the tattered robes they wore swung with a martial weight, as if the fabric were woven of metal and as likely to cut as a blade. They drove a wedge through the people standing on the entry causeway. The crowd cringed away from them, some pressing back so hard that those along the inner railing went toppling over onto the lower benches.
The intruders took no notice of the people at all until the guards remembered their duty. With a lieutenant shouting them into motion, they snapped into ranks and began marching toward the intruders. The front rank thrust before them a treacherous bristle of halberds. The foremost of the intruders raised their arms in unison and roared out something. The soldiers’ flesh went liquid. Their clothes and armor dropped to the stones, sodden with blood. Their weapons clattered down among the filth, all of which was trodden over by the intruders’ feet a second later.
Sorcerers, Barad named them. They are sorcerers.
The sorcerers turned and ascended the stairs toward the dais. General Andeson barked a command. Archers-Barad had not even known there were archers-on the ledge up beyond the dais let loose a volley of arrows. They should have fallen a hundred or so right on top of the intruders, but the sorcerers tilted their heads and blew at them. The motion was like shooing away a bothersome fly. The arrows skidded away from them. They careened through the stadium, looking suddenly like sleek, black birds, erratic fliers that impacted randomly among the crowd, puncturing chests and throats and embedding in skulls. People sprang away from the injured, sending waves of panic through the tightly packed audience.
Andeson did not repeat the order to shoot. He stood with his mouth hanging open. Aliver asked something and in answer the Marah shifted around the dais. They bunched tightly together on the stairs below the royal party, swords drawn.
The intruders climbed one flight of stairs before slowing. They paused and looked around, taking in the view from the landing. The action was so casual that the Marah held their positions. No new orders came for them. The sorcerers’ gazes roamed over the assembled crowd, both the ranks above and below them, both the motion of those trying to flee and the awed stillness of most of the crowd.
Just like that, by stopping their raging forward progress, the men looked almost normal. Their faces, though mature and weatherworn, were not animal or massive or even particularly fierce. They contained two expressions at war with each other. On the surface they conveyed disdain, as if they owned all the people they surveyed and found them lacking. Beneath their condescension a terrible eagerness squirmed. That was the main thing Barad saw. Behind their features, and in their eyes, were passions at odds with the aged facades they occupied. There were twenty-two of them. Barad did the math on his lips. Twenty-two, the same number of generations as the prophecies had predicted would pass before a time of great change.
One by one they completed their survey, began slowly up the next set of stairs, and set their gazes on Corinn and Aliver.
Barad did the same. He had forgotten about her for those few moments of chaos. Corinn was there at the same spot on the dais. Prince Aaden was nowhere to be seen, but Marah were all around the queen and Aliver like living armor. Even the priestess had been bustled away as the guards closed in. She was pressed uncomfortably between a soldier and the stone pedestal behind her.
The ghost was still at Corinn’s elbow, even then whispering in her ear. “Friends of your brother’s or friends of yours? Late arrivals. I’m hoping it’s one or the other…”
Hanish. Of course it was Hanish Mein! Barad had never met him, but what other Meinish ghost would haunt the queen? Who else would say the things he was saying? Seeing that, knowing it, Barad knew as well that the number twenty-two was not random. They were still living within the same generation. Hanish had not been the change at all. This was. Whatever these had come for. That was what he was whispering in the queen’s ear. By the pallor of her face, she believed him.
The priestess of Vada, aghast at the interruption, began a babbling reprimand. Several officers and a senator added their ire. Sigh Saden’s wife screeched something about the ghastliness of it. Compared to them, the intruders seemed tranquil.
“Where is The Song of Elenet?” The voice that said this was almost too genteel to be believed. It carried to every corner of the Carmelia with a soft-spoken lilt, tinged with an accent Barad could not place. The crowd near and far fell silent. “Tell us where it is. Our time to have it is now.”
“More courtly than the Tunishnevre, that’s clear,” Hanish said. His eyes just happened to touch Barad’s. He paused, surprised to see the man staring at him. He nodded and, looking straight at him, he said, “Still, I don’t like their tone.”
Barad did not return his greeting, but even that was a form of communication between them. It was all he had time for.
“How does one speak to madmen?” Corinn asked. No one hearing it would have known she had just watched these men slaughter soldiers with a gesture of their arms or had turned falling arrows to flying dart birds. “I wish I knew, for surely you are madmen. You seem not to know that you are speaking to the queen of the Acacian Empire. You seem to not know that you’ve interrupted-”
“We know,” another of the sorcerers said. He stood at the second landing now, again having paused there. His voice dripped sickly sweetness, as if he were answering the question of a toddling child. “Give us The Song and we will bless your reign with wizardry you have not yet even imagined.”
Corinn’s mouth hardened. “Madman, what name do you claim?”
“I am Nualo,” the first man said. He gestured to the others. “We are the Santoth. We are Tinhadin’s chosen warriors. We are the exiled returned. We who have been imprisoned are free.” And then, proudly, “You both know us. We called to you, but you would not listen.”
“You can’t be. The Santoth are exiled.” Corinn snapped a quick glance at Aliver. “Do you know these
