Two pups. Big-eyed and cautious, staring at him. Innocence in rounded features and floppy ears and slightly trembling jaws.
“Oh … look at you,” Dariel said. He sheathed his knife and reached in cautiously. “Look at you.” He stroked one of the pups on the head. It tried to back away. “Shhh. No, no, it’s fine.” His touch was gentle. His fingers sank into the soft fur, over the ears, and then down under the chin. The other pup inched forward. Its eyes were the same color as its fur, a slightly auburn tint now that he was up close. Just like the hound outside. Dariel offered his hand for it to scent. After doing so, the pup slapped its pink tongue wetly against his knuckles. Before Dariel could smile with the joy this gave him, a realization stopped him.
“That was your mother, wasn’t it?” Dariel moved to the doorway and scanned the scene. It lay as it had before, dark and glowing at the same time, still and crackling with unseen motion, silent and filled with a cacophony of sounds. Exactly the same, yet different now.
Looking back at the pups, Dariel asked, “What am I going to do with you two?”
Rialus Neptos went to bed each evening swearing to himself that he was not betraying his entire race. To really be doing what the Auldek asked of him would make him the greatest villain in the history of the Known World. He could think of nobody else who had sunk so low. Not even during the unfortunate years he served Hanish Mein had he been such a traitor. He had just been biding his time then, pretending to serve Hanish and the Numrek. He had proven as much by bringing the Numrek into Corinn’s service and saving the empire! He would find a way to do so again. He would lie and fabricate, confuse and obfuscate, trick and deceive and somehow emerge from it a hero for the ages. He had to. He had a wife, Gurta. He had a child who might already be born and living in the world. Didn’t that matter more than anything?
Going to sleep thus convinced made waking in the morn all the more peculiar. He found himself surrounded by the enemy. He watched himself go through motions that looked, smelled, and felt like the very treason he so despised. The situation was complicated enough to challenge his capacity for knotted excuses. The Numrek had never, in fact, been true to the Akarans. The “allies” he had brought Corinn had been planning the conquest of the entire Known World all along. The Auldek horde progressing around the curve of the world were every bit the threat they considered themselves to be, and they were daily educating themselves on all things Acacian—with Rialus as their instructor. At what point, exactly, would he transform himself into the agent of Acacian defense that he believed himself to be?
“Hey, Rialus leagueman!”
Rialus heard the shout from outside his room. He recognized the voice—Allek’s. He sat cross-legged with a writing cushion before him, pen poised above it. Just leave me, Rialus thought. Go on. He had begun yet another journal attempt at outlining his actions, justifying and explaining how he was handling himself while with the Auldek. He thought such documents would prove useful should he ever be called before Queen Corinn. For some reason, he found it quite hard to organize his arguments coherently.
Fingel uncurled herself from the corner of the room and moved for the door. Rialus waved her to stillness. Don’t play dumb, girl! he thought, as he had many times before. The Meinish young woman, his slave since Avina, showed a dogged unwillingness to ever anticipate his desires. It should be dead obvious that he would not want to be disturbed.
“There is someone at the door,” she said, staring at him with her gray eyes.
As if on cue, the circular portal was yanked open, letting in a howling beast of a wind that surged through the chamber, making it instantly frigid. A furred figure stepped across the threshold. He was bundled from head to foot, hooded, and wore black goggles. He cast about a moment, no doubt letting his eyes adjust to the dim lamplight.
“Rialus,” Allek said, “get dressed. Stop all that scribbling. Sabeer wants to massage your feet. Or … she wants you to massage her feet. I forget which. Either way, she asked for you. What charm have you put on her?” he asked.
“No charm but my wit and the pleasure of my company,” Rialus said.
The hooded figure guffawed. “Right. Your charm. Come, Rialus! Show me your charm at work. She’s in the steamship.”
“Please tell her I’m busy. I’m—”
“I’ll drag you by your locks if you don’t start dressing now. I’ll enjoy it, too. Just like last time.”
Still an ogre, Rialus thought. “Fine,” he muttered, setting his pen aside and tidying his supplies. “I’m coming. Keep your nose on.”
Rialus carefully pulled on his fur-lined leggings and boots. He shrugged himself into his sealskin jacket. The garment draped bulkily about him. He had learned the hard way that if it hung loose, wicked fingers of cold found their way to his skin, so he cinched down the buckles. He even strapped on the visor to protect his eyes, and then tugged his hood in place. All this for a walk that would only take a few minutes. Damn this place. So thinking, he followed Allek out.
The wind smacked him as if it had clung just above the door, waiting to pounce on him. He stood on a platform running along one side of what the Auldek called stations, rocking, taking in a scene he still barely believed. His room was but one chamber of several in the large wooden and steel structure, a rolling tower that churned across the frozen earth with unrelenting steadiness. All around him other stations rolled, pulled by long lines of harnessed rhinoceroses, the same woolly breed that the Numrek had ridden down into the Known World. The structures creaked and groaned. The creatures bellowed and snorted. The blown snow obscured further stations, making it feel like they went on forever, out beyond the reach of his vision.
The vessels were relics of ancient Auldek travel, quickly outfitted for this journey. Indeed, much of the preparation was made easier because of the great stores of old equipment and devices the Auldek had but to dust off and haul into use. The stations. Cargo wagons. The sleds. Stores of arms and supplies, tons of grain and other foodstuffs in crates and barrels. All of it slid into motion more rapidly than Rialus would have thought possible. Slaves had tended herds of the beasts outside Avina. Rhinoceroses. Antoks. Kwedeir. Not to mention the fréketes. Rialus had not seen much of the monsters since the cold weather had set in, but he understood them to be housed in stations outfitted for them.
Beneath and between the structures figures moved, driving animals, hauling supplies, doing the million things needed to feed and care for an army in constant, rolling motion. Rialus had doubted it would be possible, but the Auldek—or their slaves—were more efficient than he thought. They unpacked food stores in an organized manner that meant they could abandon the vehicles that had carried them. They ate the animals freed up from this, or any that got injured or sick. Rialus even suspected that the slaves themselves became food for the animals or worse. He tried not to think about it.
A man rode by atop an antok, swaying with the beast’s strides, as at ease as a horseman on a trusted mount. The swine blew plumes of white vapor from beneath the heavy patchwork of throws that covered it. Rialus felt the vapor billow around him, fogging his visor. He smelled the rank scent of the creature’s breath. But that did not make sense. It was not that close. Rialus scrubbed at his visor a moment, smearing the scene before him. He pulled back his hood and yanked the visor from his head.
The antok had moved away, but still the steaming breath blew past him. A noise at his back turned Rialus around to meet the clear blue eyes of a snow lioness. The cat crouched just a little distance away on a ledge of the station, tensed as if it might pounce. It thrust its chin forward, and then cocked its head, then righted it. Rialus had no idea what that was meant to convey, but the female of the species worried him as much as the massive males. In the wild, he had been told, it was the females that did most of the hunting. The males just used their brawn to fight one another and win wives. Miserable beasts! Rialus thought. He fumbled for the ladder poles, dropped over the edge, and descended.
Dropping from the ladder onto the frozen earth, Rialus pitched over, as he always did when jumping from the ever-moving structure. He scrambled to his feet, wary of the vehicle’s massive wheels, and had to shuffle run to catch up with Allek. They cut a zigzagging path through the rumbling, roaring, groaning flow of men and machines and furred and horned and tusked beasts, all the while buffeted by the wind.
They entered the steamstation through a trapdoor that lowered for them to leap up to. A moment later, after climbing a winding staircase, Rialus was shrugging out of his garments, the air warm around him. At least the steamship had that going for it. It was a specially constructed station, one that featured an elaborate heating system fueled by the flammable pitch the Auldek had brought with them in great quantities. A fire burning somewhere inside pumped in enough hot air that the Auldek lounged about half naked, slaves fanning them and serving them chilled drinks and giving them massages. It never failed to remind Rialus of the baths at Cathgergen, a memory which he ran from, remembering just how that had turned out.
“Ah, Allek, you’ve found my leagueman,” Sabeer said. “You never disappoint.”
“I try not to, dearest one,” Allek said, bowing his head.
Dearest one? Rialus sneered inside. As if you have a chance with her.
“Come, Rialus, sit with us.”
Sabeer lounged on a low divan, propped up on one elbow, sipping something from a tiny blue glass. She was tall and long limbed, with a tensile muscularity that hummed like a coiled spring, making even languid movements seem somehow dangerous. She wore a thin linen garment, perfectly designed to hug her contours and yet hang loose. Another woman, Jàfith, lay in a similar posture. A man named Howlk sat with her feet in his lap, an absurdly submissive posture for a warrior who, Rialus knew, enjoyed wrestling naked in death matches—or as close to such as an immortal could suffer.
Two humans stood just outside the group, one beating out a rhythm on a waist-high drum while the other smacked a rattle on his palm. If not for the sloshing liquid in the glasses one might have forgotten the entire station was rolling across an icescape.
Rialus sat on the cushion to which Sabeer directed him. He had been petrified when he learned she was Devoth’s wife, but what that distinction meant Rialus could not figure out. He rarely saw them together, and when he did they treated each other more like siblings than anything else—deeply familiar, enough so that they were also deeply dismissive. They kept separate quarters, and Sabeer spent her time with whomever she chose. For some reason, Rialus was one of those.
“Howlk was reciting a song to Sumerled,” Sabeer said, squeezing Rialus’s thigh. “Continue, sir. Let Rialus hear the end.”
The Auldek warrior cleared his throat. He closed his eyes, his fingers kneading the ball of Jàfith’s foot and his upper body swaying with the effort, as if he were putting all of himself into the pressure of his fingers. He tilted his stern features up, long hair flowing over his shoulders, and told a tale of epic love and tragedy that would have brought the entire Acacian senate to tears. Two lovers suffered the wrath of the Lvin for some crime Rialus could not quite pinpoint. Rialus had heard poems performed like this before, but Howlk had a particularly good voice for it. Despite himself, he was transfixed.
Rialus had ceased being surprised by the complex collage that was Auldek culture. At times they seemed as barbaric and prone to violence as the Numrek. But those moments did not define them entirely. Devoth with his dancing hummingbirds. The time Rialus watched them draw garden tapestries with colored pebbles, complex works of art that would blur and disintegrate under the first rain. They achieved a balance in their lives, but it was a balance of extremes. Here was a race who would howl for blood in the morning, and then tend beetle farms on their terraces in the afternoon. Here was a people who would abandon their land to march to war, but then bring with them strange artifacts of gentility.
He would never forget the makeshift banquet held on a black stone beach, waves crashing in the distance. The Auldek delicately plucked the violet leaves of some flowerlike vegetable. They dunked each leathery leaf in fragrant oils and scraped off the softer tissue with their upper teeth. The thing tasted fine, when you got used to it, but it was the spectacle of such rough creatures all silently attending leaf dipping that ranked as one of the strangest sights he had ever witnessed.
When Howlk finished his song and had shaken off the praise offered him, Rialus asked, “How old is that tale?”
“A couple hundred years,” Howlk said. “It’s a newer poem, really.”
“So as new as that? Then … did you know these ill-fated lovers? Personally, I mean.”
Howlk looked away without answering, opening an awkward silence.
Something over Rialus’s shoulder caught Sabeer’s attention. Several Lvin women climbed the circular staircase. Though they were human, Rialus knew them instantly. Their every movement shouted their status, not just with their clan affiliation but as simple sublime motion. Their bodies were lithe and sculpted, honed through torturous training that made them fighters almost on par with the Auldek themselves. They went about wearing only short skirts. They were bare breasted, with chiseled arms and long muscles taut in their legs as they climbed. Like their totem animal, they moved with feline grace, circling and climbing up toward the next level without pausing.
Behind the women came the white dreadlocks and the pale, leonine visage of Menteus Nemré. Like the women before him, he was nearly naked. The slave’s muscles bulged absurdly on his chest and arms, cut fine divisions on his abdomen, and stood out in thick bands running down his legs. He paused halfway up the stairs, taking in the room. For a moment, he seemed to stare so intently at him that Rialus wanted to squirm. Actually, he did squirm. Nothing about the attention of Menteus’s gaze changed, though.