Haleeven answered his questions, though he made sure to edge his voice with a disapproving tone and to keep his eyes toward the ground when forced to describe the beauties he had seen in the outside world. He feared he might betray something-he was not sure what-if he met the young man’s eyes at such moments.
He followed Hayvar up onto the battlements of the fortress. They looked back upon the train of laborers trudging reluctantly into view. Feeling the rough grain of the pine beams beneath his palms, inhaling the resinous scent cut with decay, looking out over the patchwork landscape, copper grasslands emerging through the old snow, a mottled sky draped low over it alclass="underline" ah, this was home!
For a few moments he swam in nostalgia. How to explain why this view lacked nothing compared to the shimmering blue waters around Acacia? He did not love this place for its soft virtues and pleasures. Nor did he believe anymore that his people were the finest on earth. He had witnessed too much bravery in others and seen too much beauty in foreign things to hold to this narrow belief. He loved the Mein simply because…well, because it needed to be loved. Perhaps this was a foolish thought, but it was the best he could do to explain it. Even if he had the words to express himself, he doubted the young man beside him would take them to heart. Even their ancestors set their sights someplace else…
“Brother of Heberen,” a voice said, “the ancestors foretold your coming.”
Haleeven knew who spoke without even looking. He must have approached in his fur-lined slippers. Only a Tunishnevre priest would insult him by not using his given name, and only they would claim to have received word of him through the Tunishnevre, when everybody else took their news from the more earthly means of dispatches and messengers. His pleasant reveries vanished.
“First priest,” he said, managing a smile, “the ancestors not only foretold my coming, they commanded it.”
The priest’s lips crinkled, two thin lines of chapped, peeling skin. His complexion was the ghostly white preferred by men of his order. His hair was a straw blond, intentionally plucked thin so that his scalp showed through it. With the sunken quality of his features, he looked much like the preserved remains of the ancestors he served. He said, “Yes, but Hanish took his time in sending you. Nine years. An absurd delay…”
“There were so very many things to see to.”
“An absurd delay,” the priest said again, stretching out the last word as if Haleeven’s understanding of it was in question. “There can be no excuse for it. Hanish will know my displeasure, believe me.” He turned and stared out, cold-eyed, at the approaching horde. “These are our workers?”
“Fifty thousand of them,” Haleeven said, “give or take a few hundred.”
“You have brought southern foreigners?” the priest asked, squinting.
Haleeven had expected the query. “Yes, but only to carry baggage and supplies. To maintain the road and accomplish the myriad tasks ahead of us. They will not handle the ancestors or any sacred objects.” The first priest probed him with his eyes, unimpressed by the assurances. Haleeven added, “You will oversee all the arrangements personally, I hope, to assure that the foreigners profane nothing nor insult the ancestors. But it’s appropriate, don’t you think, that Acacians should break their backs on the Tunishnevre’s behalf?”
The priest did not say exactly what he thought about this, but he voiced no further objections.
Late that evening, Haleeven, alone in a torch-lit passageway, approached the underground hold that contained his ancestors. He had already met with the rest of the priests. He had handed over presents to the few nobles still in Tahalian and visited the Calathrock. There he had watched a feeble display put on by a corps of young soldiers. The enormous chamber was still a marvel of hardwood construction, but it was meant to house many more bodies, those of burly-armed, long-haired men-not thin-shouldered children who had only ever dreamed of battle. Haleeven could tell that the people welcomed him and longed to impress upon him their steadfast resilience and faith in the old ways. Something in their fervent intentions saddened him, as it did to walk nearly empty hallways, being struck time and again with memories of persons either dead or far from Tahalian now. He did not often think disapprovingly of Hanish. On the upkeep of his home fortress, however, the young chieftain may have become lax and forgetful.
Reaching the chamber door, Haleeven paused to steady himself. His heart beat with what seemed an irregular frequency. His legs were stiff and aching, something he had not noticed until just that moment. He was an aging man, and he was tired. At the same time he tingled with nervous energy. He had ridden hundreds of miles to get to this very spot. He had imagined this moment endless times. He leaned against the door and felt it shift. He stepped inside, knelt at the edge of the chamber, and pressed his forehead to the chill stones of the place. He held it there until the cold touch began to feel like heat instead. Only then did he straighten and let his gaze rise.
Dimly lit by a bluish glow from no obvious source, the scene made Haleeven’s skin crawl. Above him stretched a cylinder imbedded with stacked protuberances, row upon row, layer upon layer, each jutting out of the earthen wall, arranged in uniformity, like an enormous beehive with hundreds of chambers. The area directly above him rose into fading perspective, perhaps a hundred layers tall. But this was only one alcove. Before him opened another, and beyond that another and yet another. Each of the shadowy shapes was a preserved corpse, a dried shell that had once been a Mein, wrapped in gauze and preserved both by the priests’ efforts and by the power of the curse that bound the souls within those shells to death without release, to the physical plane but without the pulse and warmth of life. They were no different from Haleeven himself. They were men like he. Whether they had lived fifty years before or five hundred years before, they had spoken his language and roamed this high plateau. And they all had lived briefly beneath the threat of an eternal punishment. As did he.
Haleeven walked forward and began to intone the words that Hanish had sent him with. They would already know why he was there, but he went through the formality of announcing himself. He asked forgiveness for disturbing them and testified as to his oath to serve them. He promised them that tomorrow he would meet with the engineers, the architects, the drivers. There was a monumental undertaking awaiting them. He would waste no time starting the move. They were only a short time away from ultimate release and final revenge.
The Tunishnevre did not acknowledge him overtly, but there was a shift in the air that in his heightened awareness he could not help but note. They seemed to whisper, sounds that were like groans from deep in the earth. He sensed the sounds, but he could not say he actually heard them. Each time he paused to listen, there was naught but dead silence. Only when he formed words enough to fill his head did the chamber seem to echo with comments thrown at him, indecipherable though they were. Laced with malice. He felt himself threatened with extinction, with complete obliteration. But for all of this he could not pinpoint one true sound, one true motion as small as an exhalation of breath in the entire chamber.
So strange, the power of them. Haleeven could not say he understood it completely. He had never been blessed with that knowledge. They were dead. He was in a massive tomb, bodies stacked row upon row, as cold and lifeless as the earth around them, incapable of effecting change upon the world. In truth, they were a mystery to him. Had circumstance been different he might have communed with the Tunishnevre himself. He had only been one step away from the chieftaincy in his youth, one dance. But it was an enormous step, one that he could not manage. No one could say that Haleeven was a coward; yet he would never have been able to commit to taking the life of someone he loved. Because of that he never grasped for his rough people’s throne.