Dressed a little later, straight backed in a thalba and looking perfectly at home within his icy composure, Hanish read the letters his secretaries brought him in his office. The first was from the log Haleeven kept. He was meticulous in his entries, detailed and rigorous and honest. Because he received such correspondence at least twice a week, Hanish had followed every step of the Tunishnevre transport. Not one of those steps had been easy. Just getting them out of their burial slots had been an ordeal. The chamber had been built to house them indefinitely. The original architects had not considered that the ancestors might someday be removed. They were crammed in close together, stacked high in honeycombed alcoves.

Haleeven had all manner of ramps and pulleys set up. It was an awkward business in the small space. It would not have been easy in the best of circumstances to wring from the workers the necessary level of care and precision, but it was especially hard with the lot of them nervous about the seething, incorporeal presence all around them. One night nearly fifty of the conscripted laborers fled from their makeshift camp outside the gates of Tahalian. Each and every one of them had to be hunted down. They were then punished in ways that served as considerable deterrents to any others with similar notions.

Keeping the workers in line; wrapping, housing, and transporting the ancestors; flattering the priests; maintaining roads softened to mush by the spring thaw; driving forward through swarms of ravenous insects; negotiating the steep descent from the Rim down to the Eilavan Woodlands: each task provided myriad challenges to Haleeven’s abilities. Now, at last, they were making their way through the woodlands and into the farmlands that would lead them to the coast. The hardest portion was behind them, although in his dispatch Haleeven cautioned that the going would be slow. They were on paved roads now, but they could hardly move any faster for fear of the jarring effects on the ancestors. Their frailty required gentle handling, as much so now as ever.

There were several other pieces of correspondence as well. One was from the warden who looked after the island land outside the palace and lower town. He claimed that the acacia trees, which he had faithfully sawed close to the roots, were managing to sprout anew. They were hardier trees than they’d thought. They’d never really died, apparently, and it would be an ongoing effort on his part if he was to keep the trees from returning.

Another missive was marked with Sire Dagon’s seal. He requested an audience. Request, was how it was written, and yet the leagueman named the time later that day with such an air of finality that it was more like a demand. Fine, Hanish thought. It was about time the League of Vessels reported to him. Whether that was Sire Dagon’s intention for the meeting or not, Hanish decided he would make it the focus.

Hanish was always surprised by the look of leaguemen. The fact that they were so thin and fragile looking sat uneasily beside their demeanor of complete calm, unchallengeable control. Sire Dagon wore a head cap ringed with bands of gold. His gaunt features were as pallid as ever. His neck seemed longer than it had been the last time they met, but Hanish assumed this was a trick of his own eyes.

They bowed to each other, and Sire Dagon took a seat. He collapsed his body into it and exhaled a fatigued breath. He slipped a hand inside his robe and drew it out, holding a short length of a mist pipe. It looked to be of blue glass, with a small bowl and the thinnest tendril of a mouthpiece. He flipped the lid from the bowl with one of his long fingernails and checked the packed material. It smoldered instantly, as if it had either been lit already or had sparked to life as the latch opened. He said, “I would offer you a smoke, but I doubt you could handle this purity.”

Hanish cocked his head and straightened it, mouth wrinkling enough to convey his respectful disdain for the drug. “I know too little of how the league is responding to the attack on the platforms. You must fill me in.”

The leagueman waited long enough before speaking to demonstrate that he did so at his leisure, not at Hanish’s command. He began by reiterating in vague terms that the losses on the platforms were manifold, creating problems both now and for well into the future. Those further problems the league would deal with as appropriate. For today there was the immediate issue that they had been made late in delivering a shipment of quota to the Lothan Aklun. It was not just time that was at issue, however. The blasts and subsequent fires on the platforms had burned the warehouses in which the quota was stored before transport. The area for this was quite a large complex of buildings, a miniature metropolis, really. During the resulting chaos, the product-as he referred to the slave children-rioted. They swarmed to other sections of the platforms. They began spreading the fires with them, running through the lanes with torches smeared in pitch. The Ishtat Inspectorate squelched the uprising, but not before the entire platform verged on destruction. In the end they had to cut loose the warehouse unit and drag it away to burn itself out. All the product was destroyed. An entire shipment.

“You should have told me this before,” Hanish said.

Sire Dagon drew on the pipe. He exhaled a cloud of powdery-blue smoke and said with a detached air, “We don’t consider league affairs to be your concern.”

“It’s all my concern. When have our interests not been aligned?”

The leagueman fixed a stare on Hanish that might have been angry, though it was hard to read emotion on the emaciated configuration of his features. “The league is a commercial venture. To us, everyone is an adversary, no one more so than our rich clients. I am surprised you haven’t realized this by now.”

Hanish had realized such things long ago. The league had weathered the war on calm waters and emerged at the far end of it in a better position than ever, with little apparent concern about the fate of the Akarans, with whom they had dealt for twenty-two generations. This had once seemed a clever boon for his own interests. Now their lack of loyalty troubled him. Better not to show it, though. Instead, he mused, “I don’t suppose the raiders intended such an outcome. The common lore is that they’re fighting against organized tyranny. They wish to free slaves, not incinerate them.”

“Such are the unconsidered consequences of violent action masked by ideology. The innocent take the brunt of it. It’s always been that way and always will be that way.” He scowled at the nuisance of such things. “We will deal with the raiders soon enough. No force is better suited to deal with this than the Ishtat Inspectorate. When we find the raiders, we’ll squash them for good.”

Hanish motioned with his finger that he wished to pose a question. “When you find them? I thought you had spies on every rock rising out of the Gray Slopes.”

“We do, but since their attack on the platforms the group led by Spratling has vanished.”

“Is that so?”

Sire Dagon glanced at Hanish, checking the tone of the question against his facial expression. He placed his thin lips on his pipe, inhaled, and held the vapors in his chest a moment. “What the league needs now is to immediately replenish what we’ve lost. To that end we have devised a plan to take the units from the coastal city of Luana, north of Candovia. We’ll recoup the loss in a single action.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ll take the units from Luana. We’ll arrive under cover of night, subdue the place, and leave with the product we need.”

“The children you need,” Hanish clarified. “Which is how many?”

Sire Dagon answered flatly, “Two thousand.” Before Hanish could respond, he continued, explaining that there was a festival in the region that brought the population together. Children, in particular, gathered in the city to celebrate the return of spring. It pulled them in from all the neighboring villages and towns. It would not be a perfect venture. It would be hard to find children up to their normal standards. Perhaps they would have to accept some out of the optimal age range. But they believed it was the preferred remedy to the problem.