That which came before-the palace of Acacia, his role as prince, his father’s empire, and three others born of him and his mother, Aleera Akaran-well, it seemed to be clearer in Val’s mind than in Dariel’s. Why try to hold on to people he would never see again? He had been so young that his memories had not stuck in his head with an ordered clarity. Yes, there were images. There were moments of emotion that seemed to take him by the neck and close off the air to his lungs. There were times when he awoke from dreams fearing that something was horribly wrong, but he grew to tolerate this as the years passed. Maybe such was just what it meant to be alive.
Spratling-yes, that was his name now and there was no reason to slip back to that scared child persona any more than he had to-flipped open the small latch of the chest and tipped the contents onto Dovian’s bed, a slithering tumble of gold coins. The man stared at them, ran his fingers over them, tested their feel on his palm. He whispered that this was it. This was just what they had needed. This would fund everything…
He plucked up an object between his fingers and held it up to a ribbon of sunlight. It was gold-gold colored at least, though the workmanship was almost too fine and sharp edged for such a soft metal. The shape of it was unusual. It was the thickness of a large coin, slightly square, ridged along one end, inscribed with markings that might have been writing but which bore no similarity to any language either of them had seen. There was a single hole at its center, just slightly oblong.
Spratling had not noticed it before. “What is it?”
Dovian thought on this for some time. Spratling could almost see him sorting through his memories, a lifetime’s catalog of labeled and priced treasures. “I’ve no idea,” he finally said. “It’s a fine thing, though.” He pressed it to the young man’s chest. “Here. Keep it there around your neck. If you ever get in trouble and need a fast fortune you can melt it down and make coins. It’s yours. The rest of this is more than we need for what we have planned. Bring me those charts and look them over.”
Spratling did so, spreading the familiar images across the cot and sitting on the edge of the bed. He loved moments like this, when Val seemed to forget his ailments and the two of them got lost in contemplation, like a father and a son, scheming, planning, dreaming a swashbuckling world into existence. In many ways Spratling was still the boy Dariel had been. He had no inkling yet of how much that was soon to change.
CHAPTER
There was one particular Talayan acacia tree that was to haunt Thaddeus’s dreams afterward. It rose solitary out of the plain. It stood like an old, black-skinned man, leaning to one side as if gentling an infirmity. It was precariously thin, its limbs crooked and decrepit, its leaves so sparsely dispersed that Thaddeus was not sure until he stood under it that the thing still lived. It did. Acacia trees were hardy, slow growing, thorned against enemies, and stoic against the vagaries of weather. Perhaps there should have been something comforting in this, but, if so, Thaddeus could not find it. Nothing in this country comforted him. Never had the mute grandiosity of a landscape so pressed upon him as it did when he stood in the sparse shade beneath that tree. The curve of the earth seemed more gradual than elsewhere, distances greater, shapes of hills out there more massive. The vault of the sky seemed higher in Talay than it did anyplace else. It stretched up and up, shoved aloft by seething white clouds, stacked like pillars supporting some massive temple. Everywhere he looked-below and above him, at each point of the compass, near and far-creatures moved into and out of view. He could not number or name or categorize all of them, but he suspected each to be a spy intent on studying him.
Of the six provinces of the former Akaran Empire none was more complex, nor more important, than Talay. In breadth it was as wide a land mass as Candovia, Senival, the Mainland, and Aushenia combined. It stretched away to the south in sun-baked folds of land, unmapped regions vast enough that the Acacians never charted all of it in their twenty-two generations of rule. Much of it was so arid that no rain fell to the earth at all. While the name of one particular tribe was assumed by the entire territory, in truth Talayans were just the favored nation among many others. Some have argued that Edifus was an ethnic Talayan, but Edifus himself never claimed such ancestry.
What was indisputable is that the Talayans were the first people on the continent to align themselves with Edifus. In return, he granted them dominion over their neighbors and the responsibility of policing them. No small thing. The province was home to thirty-five other chiefdoms, with nearly the same number of languages and featuring four racial groups so distinct from one another that no generalities could apply to the people of the province as a whole. It was true that they all were dark skinned, but within this was considerable variety, not to mention greater physiological diversity than anywhere else in the Known World. Many of these nations were numerous enough to be military powers in their own right. The Halaly, the Balbara, the Bethuni: in the late Akaran age, each of these could field armies of ten thousand men. The Talayans themselves could call up nearly twenty-five thousand of their own, and, of course, they had the right to levy troops from the others. If their authority had held, the war with Hanish Mein might have taken a different course. It did not, however, for reasons rooted in the soil of antique history.
Old animus does not die, Thaddeus thought. It just awaits opportunity.
Such thoughts came to him unbidden, adding to his unease. Perhaps he had been too many years in hiding. Too long wormed into the cave systems of Candovia, in places dark and moist, with the earth close around him, hearing low grumbles like those deep in a fat man’s belly. But he had not felt so ill at ease when he first emerged and set about his work. He had felt confident enough in his abilities as he gathered information, as he pulled in his spies and learned all they could tell him. He had had no doubts about himself when he sought out the old general and set him on a new path. So why the dread clinging to him now?
Perhaps, he tried to believe, it was just that he was so very far from home, getting farther each day from the latitudes in which he had spent his life. These lands were quite different even from the lush country he had already passed through in northern Talay. Rolling farmland had stretched off as far as his fading eyes could see, dotted by tree lines dividing the fields, with occasional villages. It was nature manicured, hemmed in, and tamed by generations of human effort. And it was more abundantly populated. Their numbers, Thaddeus knew, had been thinned by the contagion. They had been ravished by it and by the war, as had most of the provinces. There were markedly few men of middle age, but the women seemed to have fared better. And there were many children. The place had thronged with them, which must have pleased Hanish Mein. He had made it law that all women who could bear children had to bear them. The Known World needed to be repopulated. They required numbers to thrive, new loved ones to replace those lost, new citizens to help the world turn. Thaddeus understood better than anyone exactly why this mattered so much to Hanish.
The former chancellor’s destination was farther south than he had ever been, well into the parched plains and rolling hills at the heart of Talay. It was a distance of several hundred miles, a long way for a man his age to trek. He chose to walk, however. Lone, rambling, and mind-addled madmen were no rarity in the world. He could have roamed indefinitely without drawing the slightest notice from the thinly spread soldiers of the Mein. Perhaps also there was an overture of penance in his march, though he did not define this even to himself.