The general showed no sign that he thought the man’s message of particular import, but some time later he walked away from his officers to think. Even if the man’s story was only illness creeping into him, it was still a danger. Scouts predict more things than just the lay of the land. Perhaps they should hold up where they were or retrace their tracks back to the last camp, where there was still an ample supply of fuel for the fires. They could wait out the storms, even eating into the food reserves if necessary. They were near Tahalian after all. Even if Hanish Mein was up to something, they would still have to be welcomed with a pretense of kindness…

It was because he stood at the edge of the column that he first heard the sound, if heard is the right word. With the noise of the troops behind him and the trudge of their feet and the scrape of a sled passing nearby he did not truly hear through his ears. He felt the sound as if the bones of his rib cage captured a low vibration and amplified it in his chest. He took a few steps away from the column and sank to one knee. One of his officers called to him, but he thrust up a clenched fist and the man fell silent. Leeka knelt, trying to feel the sound captured inside him, to block out the howl of the wind and friction of his hood across the sides of his head. When he quieted all this as best he could, he found what he was searching for. It was faint, yes, but undeniable. Like breathing, true enough. Like a heartbeat, yes… The scout had not lied. There was a rhythm to it, a throbbing time. A conscious, measured reason to it…

He spun on his knee and yelled for the ranks to form up. He ran back to them, shouting for the column to draw tight, shields up and facing outward, weapons to hand. He instructed the archers to quiver their arrows and unsheathe blades not victim to the wind and better suited to close quarters. He told the sled drivers to circle them within the troops and huddle the dogs. The same officer who had called to him before asked him what he had discovered. He met the young man’s eyes and gave a simple answer. “There is a war drum beating.”

Once the army had been formed into one defensive wedge and five hundred pairs of eyes stared out into the increasing fury of the north, then, finally, they all heard it. For a long hour that was all they did. The sound throbbed constant behind the wind, which was heavier now with large flakes of snow that stuck fast to their clothes and shields and fur-lined fringes and even, eventually, to the chill skin on their faces, rendering their still forms like some elaborate snow sculptures. At some point the reverberation mingled with the general’s heartbeat. That was why he was struck breathless at the shock of it when the noise stopped. It simply ceased. In the moments afterward Leeka knew he had made a mistake. Whatever drum beat was out there had been doing so not for hours but for days. It had been there for weeks perhaps before he was able to distinguish it. How could something like that have eluded him?

He was not to contemplate this question for long, however. A creature hurtled through the screen of blown snow. It rampaged forward, a horned thing, woolly and huge, some sort of man astride it, a figure clothed in skins and furs, a spear raised in one hand, a yell emanating from his unseen mouth. The beast smashed into the ranks of men just to one side of the general’s guard. It tore through them as if the soldiers were of no consequence. It squashed some and knocked others aside without diminishing its speed or altering its course. It vanished through the far side of the troops as quickly as it appeared. In the few seconds the general had to contemplate the scene he counted ten dead and twice as many more writhing on the blood-splashed snow.

A hand on his shoulder spun him around and he observed-as he had already known he would-that the rider had not been alone. The rest of them materialized all at once, as if the snow had thinned to better his view. There were so many of them, an alien multitude like nothing he had seen before. He suspected that the horror of it would be the last thing he took in with living eyes, and he knew that even if his message got through, he had failed to adequately warn the king and the people of the empire of the hideous threat massed against them.

Late in the evening Leodan Akaran heard someone enter his private chamber. He did not look up, but he knew who it was. The chancellor’s clipped footfalls had a unique rhythm to them, something that the king had once pinpointed as a stiffness in the right leg. A servant had just lit his mist pipe and withdrawn. The pungent scent of the drug was, at that moment, the only thing that mattered. A phantom had clung to the back of his head throughout the day, a hunger he envisioned as a batlike creature that huddled around the contours of his skull, its claws sharp and thin as curved needles where they pierced his flesh and found purchase by anchoring into the bone. It had gripped him during his morning meetings; left him for a time during an hour spent with Corinn; but returned with sharpened, malicious claws throughout the evening. It prodded him as he dined and gnawed at him as he put Dariel down to sleep.

When Dariel had asked him for a story, Leodan had grimaced. It was just for a moment, a second of creviced physical expression that he regretted instantly. The boy had not even seen it, but it remained a nagging shame that he could long for his own vices while still in the company of his children. Where would he be without his children? Without Mena who still-for precious months more perhaps-wanted him to spin tales for her? And Dariel, who hung on his words with a trusting certainty the father knew time would shatter? He would be an empty shell without them. Shame on him for letting a moment with them pass in distraction. He told Dariel the story he asked for, and then he stood a few extra moments beside the boy’s door, listening to his slumbering breath and regretting his own weaknesses.

All this was earlier; his feeble penance was complete. Now the pipe sat on the low table before him. It was an intricate confusion of glass tubes and water-filled chambers and leather hoses, one of which the king held between the fingertips of both hands. He placed the narrow bit of it between his teeth, touching it with his tongue. He inhaled gently at first. Then-as he tasted the bitter, putrid sweetness of the mist-his cheeks caved against his jawbones. The pipe bubbled and sputtered. He stayed huddled forward, eyes closed, aware that his chancellor stood near him but not caring. This was nothing Thaddeus had not seen before.

When he fell back against the cushions of his couch, he exhaled a slow plume of green vapor. The creature on his head plucked out its talons one by one. It faded into nothingness, taking with it the gray weight that he had carried with him like a granite cloak throughout the day. The opiate numbed the edges of the world. He felt no barbs. Instead he was filled with blurred tranquillity, a warm feeling of connection with the millions of people throughout his empire tied to the same drug. Peasant farmers and blacksmiths, municipal guards and rubbish collectors, miners, slavers: in this one thing he was the same as them all. It was-to the reasoning of his muted mind-a secret offering made for their forgiveness.

He opened his eyes, clouded now and veined reddish brown. “What news has the chancellor to share?”

Thaddeus had seated himself on a nearby divan. He sat with his legs crossed at the knee and a glass of port pinned between his right thumb and forefinger. The king eyed the small vessel, transfixed by something about the movement of the liquid against the glass, the stain it left as Thaddeus swirled it. He listened as the chancellor apprised him of the preparations for the Aushenian delegation. They were prepared, he said, to impress upon the foreigners both their strength and wealth and to extend a cautious hand of welcome. If the Aushenians confirmed that they acknowledged Acacian hegemony, everything would be in place to respond positively to them, if such was the king’s wish.