CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Not for the first time, Aliver broke away from the council’s ongoing session-with its various arms and offshoots, crowded with dignitaries and senators and military personal. All of them baffled and accusatory, fearful and more angry for their fear, self-righteous because of it, speaking in sureties because they were unsure of anything. And mourning. Some of them were in mourning. So much noise. Reports had come in about the Santoth raging their way across Prios, across to Danos on the mainland, and inland toward Calfa Ven. Panic spread throughout the empire faster than messenger birds could fly. Aliver needed to get away, just for a while, to clear his head and, of course, to check on his sister.
He stopped before he reached her quarters. He stood in the open air, in the courtyard between Corinn’s wing and Aaden’s. He knew what he would find if he entered. Her inner doors would still be shut, her guards and maids still huddled nervously outside. She had pushed them all out herself, locked herself in. She even beat back her own guards, with a masked fury, they said, that blackened one Marah’s eye and scratched channels in another’s chin. As much as Aliver wanted to believe she would be there, welcoming him, he knew nothing would have changed. Not yet. If it had, he would have known already.
The night was noisy with muted life, with whispers and coughs and the hushed conversations of servants without work to turn to and nobles without the promised festivities. No one slept. Every torch and lamp burned. The very stones of the palace seemed uneasy, confused, shifting. These were meant to be days of rejoicing, of pipes and drums and fiddles through to the dawn, of food and wine, hope and pride. There was none of that.
Aliver stood, his head tilted and his eyes drifting over a mud-brown sky. There was not a star to be seen behind the oppressive murk. That seemed as clear a sign as any that what he remembered of the day had really happened. No stars. Mud in the sky. Misery in a stadium filled for rejoicing. And Corinn…
Aliver had a vision of what he had seen as Corinn’s head snapped back, but he could not credit it. It was a mistake of his eyes in a blurred moment of confusion. Something had happened to her, but surely not what he thought he had seen. Corinn had hidden her face. She fell down among her guards and twisted away, clawing at her mouth. Aliver had seen her from the back. It looked, in one instant, as if she had pulled her hands away from her face and screamed. Her neck and shoulders shuddered with the effort, but there was no sound. Such a scream as her body appeared to be issuing would have been vast, rending. But there was nothing, so it could not have been a scream.
He had been jostled away from her as the Marah pressed them to flee. Next time he saw Corinn she was on her feet, with the shawl that had been over her shoulders wrapped tightly around her face, clamped in place with a white-knuckled hand. Her eyes caught his a moment. In them he saw the scream he could not hear. It was more terrible for the utter silence of it.
All this because the Santoth had appeared from nowhere. They had stepped out of a void, out of memories that he had within him but that he had not explored since his return to life. Why had he not asked about them? He had never said a word about them. For that matter, he had not questioned Corinn’s use of sorcery. Again, he knew that he had always known-really known-that so much was wrong about what she was doing. Yet he had never said a word against her. Because of it, these sorcerers were free in the world, bent on things he could not yet imagine.
“Why didn’t I know?” Aliver asked himself. “Why didn’t I know it before?”
A passing maid started at his voice. She stood stock-still with bed linens pinned to her chest. Aliver turned away, waving that he had not meant to address her. He walked down the shallow stairs to the upper courtyard, across it to one of the railings. It was the same one at which he had stood beside Aaden the previous morning. To the east the indication of the coming sun just barely lightened the horizon, faint, only nibbling at the dark, slug-thick sky. The sea of boats still surrounded the island, alight with torches and small fires. It looked like a living thing, something breathing but pocked with flaming fumaroles. Would it have looked any different if the events of the day had not turned so foul? Or was it just the eyes of the watcher that gave character to the world?
Aliver realized he had not asked a question like that in some time. It felt familiar, though. The melancholia of it. The leaning toward doubt. Yes, his mind felt more his own than it had since he had awoken to life again. There was a burden in this, but truth as well. For the first time a thought rose in him. He could not grasp it yet. He just knew it was there. He could smell it. Could hunt it.
His thoughts turned to the Santoth again. The others had wanted to know why he had never warned them of their evil. He had lived with them, hadn’t he? Didn’t he know them better than anyone living? There was accusation in the questions, an edge that grew as the night’s hours curled toward dawn. He could not answer them. What they said was true. Deep in the desert south, he had shared a strange half-stone existence with them. Thoughts had flown silently between them, messages floated on a spectral tide that ebbed and flowed with a rhythm outside the world’s turning time. He had been so sure that the Santoth were what they said they were. That they held themselves in exile for the good of the world. They had helped so much, in so many ways, during his war with Hanish Mein. They had destroyed Maeander’s forces in one afternoon. Could that all really have been in service to a goal of greater evil?
Of course it was. He understood it now. The thinness of the lies they had told were so transparent now. He had always felt it but just not known he felt it. He had wanted to believe them, so he had. Their language may have been corrupted by time, but that was not what made it foul. It had always been foul. Time had just eaten away at it further.
He grew up believing Tinhadin was a noble man. Tinhadin, he who built a mighty empire and then banished the sorcerers who would, in their greed, have destroyed it. He who gave up sorcery himself, because he knew it was too chaotic a tool for humans to wield. That, in Aliver’s youth, had been the truth of the past.
And then it wasn’t. The Santoth said the truth was something else. Tinhadin had banished them not as an act of good for the world, but because he wanted the world all to himself. He was like an eagle chick, the strongest of the brood, that kicked his siblings out of the nest so that only he could live and thrive and grow. The Santoth, faithful servants, had been betrayed. That’s what they told him, speaking right into his mind, making the thought his. If brought back into the world, they would again be his faithful servants. How badly Aliver had wanted to believe that.
How clever of them to discover that he wanted to believe it. For that’s what they had done. In his communion with them they had explored every memory of his life, every desire and ambition and fear. He knew that at the time but thought it a good thing. He wanted them to know him. How good it felt to be completely understood, without judgment, he had thought. Now, he was certain that they had used what they learned to shape the lies they told him.
Something else troubled him, though as yet he only nibbled the edges of it. In defeating Maeander on the plains of Teh, the Santoth had saved the Acacian Empire. They had kept the Akaran line in power. What if the true reason they did that was so that they might have still other chances of a future generation of Akarans freeing them? That’s what they had said: a child of his freed them, and freed them into a world still ruled by Akarans, a world in which The Song of Elenet had not been entirely forgotten. A child of his? A child of his… Somehow, he knew that to be right. There was a child of his, but where in the world was this child?
“Your Majesty?” A Marah guard approached nervously. He snapped to attention as soon as Aliver turned to look at him.
“What is it?”
“We received a message from Sire Dagon. His messenger said a Marah should bring it to you and that you had to read it without delay.”
“Is that what he said?” It was more a statement than a question. Aliver raised a hand and the soldier slipped the folded square of paper into it. He unfolded the paper beneath the light of one of the oil torches set atop a pillar. The note was written in brown ink, the letters a little tremulous, like those shaped by the hand of an elderly person.
Prince Aliver,
This is quite awkward to write. I hope you’ll forgive my lack of grace. I have to inform you that you and the people of the empire have been killed.
He stopped, exhaled through his nose, and then read over the lines again to make sure he had not misread.
I have to inform you that you and the people of the empire have been killed. Poisoned. I need not explain to
