Free The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham Page A

occurred to him. He imagined the absurdity of his image viewed from outside, twisted into different contortions, those below watching him from the corners of their eyes, hiding smirks, laughing at him…. And just like that, with a few casual words, he was made to feel a complete fool. He recalled a time when the Mein brothers spoke to him as befit his office, but all that had changed. He had no idea how to regain his former stature. In fact, he increasingly suspected that he had never held any.
    Maeander turned from the window. The man’s eyes were strikingly gray. He did not so much look at someone as aim at them. Never, the governor thought, had he known a person to stare so fixedly, with such undisguised ill will. His gaze was that of a child upon a beetle he was about to squash beneath his heel. “Do you know what happened to Alain’s army?”
    Rialus was not generally a fluent speaker. Before Maeander he became a sputtering mess, which he was sure gave the wrong impression. Fortunately, Maeander was more interested in talking himself than in giving a true interrogation. As he related it, Numrek scouts sent out to clear the way before the bulk of their nation had spotted the general’s column. Unseen, they shadowed them for several days, until they were positioned for ambush. They swept in on them upon the tail wind of a clearing storm and slaughtered them down to the last man and woman.
    “You will be glad to hear that the Numrek are as skilled at killing as they claimed,” Maeander said. “They welcomed the test Alain’s army gave them. It warmed them, they said.” He turned and strolled around the room, directionless. He had three thin plaits of hair that stretched from the crown of his head down to the left side. Into two, ribbons of blue were woven, into the third a leather strap studded with silver beads. Rialus knew that these were some primitive accounting system: the blue standing for ten men killed, the leather strap for twenty. Or was it the other way around? The governor could not remember. “I have never seen anything quite like this Numrek army. They absorb and spit out everything they come up against. Their women and children take as much joy in slaughter as the men. I doubt very much that the combined forces of Acacia could match them on an open field.”
    “Then it was all for the best,” Rialus said. “The Giver provides for all worthies. A great success!”
    Maeander did not like being led. “Do not get ahead of yourself. You failed to keep your general shackled. You sat at your window here as he marched out to threaten everything my brother has been planning for years now. The outcome was not that bad, true, but you have forced us to speed up our plans. And is it true that your general sent out messengers—several of them?”
    “He did, but not to worry. I had them all hunted and slain.”
    “Not true. One of them got through. One of them met with the king’s chancellor, Thaddeus Clegg.”
    “Oh,” Rialus said.
    “Yes. ‘Oh.’ Again, however, you have been saved by a piece of fortune.” He paused to let Rialus squirm a moment, and then said, “Thaddeus is…conflicted, enough so that he may not see his interests as aligned with Leodan’s.”
    Rialus’s mouth formed an oval. “Conflicted?”
    “Just so,” Maeander said. He reached down and pushed the tips of his fingers through olives set in a bowl on Rialus’s desk, imported delicacies not easy to come by in the Mein. He popped a few in his mouth and watched the governor. “Actually, Rialus, the reasons for his conflicted state of mind intersect with your own situation. Would you like me to explain?”
    Rialus nodded, hesitant but too curious to refuse. Maeander spoke as he chewed. He asked Rialus to step back in time with him and to imagine Leodan and Thaddeus as they were in their youth. Imagine the young prince: dreamy, idealistic, indecisive in his acceptance of the power he was being groomed to wield, smitten by a