Only Talay, with its vast resources, stood against the Mein even after the Mainland and Acacia were overrun. Whether they did this for the Acacian cause or because they wished to forge their own independence was unclear. They might have given up on Acacia-as most of the rest of the world had-while still choosing to fight for themselves. Leeka had not asked and had not cared. They were fighting Hanish Mein and the Numrek horde. That was what mattered. He had rushed to join them. In particular, he had relished the opportunity to fight the Numrek.

Many had surmised that the Numrek would not be able to fight outside the northern regions. They had seemed ill suited to even the mild warmth of Aushenia. But on arriving in sun-baked Talay they stripped off their furs and cloaks and stepped out as grotesquely white creatures. They were more fearsome for the length of their limbs and the striations of their muscles and the unconcealed girth in their hands and feet. From their first day exposed to the undiluted sun, their skin blistered and peeled as meat does above coals. During the first battles they looked like they had walked through flames. Chunks of their skin sloughed off. Clumps of hair pulled free from their scalps.

Surely, Leeka had thought, they could not go about so red and oozing and live. But they did. They fought like crazed madmen. They stood among the carnage looking worse than the corpses around them, but they never fell except from the gravest of injuries. Within a few weeks they began to recover. Their skin grew back shades darker, taut against their muscles. It peeled again-not so savagely this time-but with the next healing they ripened even more. Before long they walked the land proudly, naked save for a skirt that male and female wore alike. To the dismay of the retreating Talayans, the Numrek had never looked healthier and stronger than in coppered nudity. On the summer solstice they danced a tribute to the length of the day and the strength of the sun. A new conjecture spread. The Numrek were not the creatures of the north everyone thought them to be. They must have once been a tropical race. Perhaps they had been driven to exile in the north and had only now returned to their preferred climate. In the face of their onslaught, Talay surrendered piece by tribal piece.

People said that Hanish Mein sought the utter destruction of all things Acacian. They said the spite of the Tunishnevre was such that Hanish would destroy all sign of the race he had conquered. But once the peace was established, Hanish set about securing his hold on the empire in ways surprising in their reasonableness. He did not damage Acacian architecture. He left Alecia and Manil and Aos accoutred in their splendor. He touched not a stone or statue on Acacia itself, except those of Tinhadin, which he tore down and had splintered into shards. He had the black stone of Scatevith cut out of Alecia’s outer wall, moved it to the palace on Acacia, and set it as a monument in the place that tributes to Edifus and Tinhadin had once sat. Mostly, though, he just filled Acacian places with his own people, adding his relics to those already there. He layered things Meinish atop the Acacian and seemed to welcome taking on aspects of the defeated empire’s mantle. Instead of dismantling the Acacian system of government and commerce, he grasped them and adopted them to his own purposes.

None of this cooled the heat of Leeka’s hatred, but eventually he could fight no more. All his allies had died, put down their arms, or slunk away into hiding. His enemy turned from conquest to tasks of rebuilding and entrenching and managing their newfound wealth. If Leeka had known with surety on any particular day what his life would become, he would have leaned upon his sword and cut his bowels out. But he did not know. One day slipped with its veiled import into the next, so that his defeat clung to him in tiny increments, accrued day by day.

He wandered the empire. He lost or abandoned the trappings of his rank: his vest traded for food, his dagger for wine, his helmet lost one hazy evening, his shoulder pack stolen by a youth much faster than he. Before long he looked like any other war-weary veteran. He was unkempt, lost, perhaps mind addled, obviously harmless to the Meinish military that now policed most of the Known World. He had always been a man who liked a drink. After the war, he no longer enjoyed drinking-there was none of the mirth in his inebriation that there had once been-but he drank alcohol like it was sustaining water. He might have died a drunkard’s death and been content with it. He was saved, ironically, by the introduction of a new addiction.

The mist was more plentiful throughout the Meinish Empire than it had been during the Akaran reign. It was everywhere, constant as bread or water, cheaper than Candovian wine. He inhaled a pipefull one evening when there was nothing else to be had. What revelations! With mist in him, he understood he had been mistaken. He was not a failure. The war was not concluded. No, in truth he was a lone apostle of bloody retribution. He had killed Numreks before and he would do so again. He lay back and saw the images right there above him, cast on the screen that was the night sky. He strode through Aushenia with a sword in each hand. The earth had not seen the likes of him in ages. At some point the vision was not just an imagined thing. He lived within it. He felt ground beneath his feet and air pumping in his lungs. He traveled a thousand miles and fought until his face was red and dripping with Numrek blood, his fists so welded to his swords that the steel was an extension of his being. Such damage he did! Such holy, retributive carnage he unleashed…

The first morning he awoke from such dreams anguished to find himself in his enfeebled body, no hero at all. He might have spurned the drug and cursed it, except that he could not help but hear the low heartbeat of the mist lingering thereafter, with it the promised possibility that there was truth in his vision. The mist dream was so very real. It was intimate in every detail, vivid as life. No, it was more tactile and real than the life he now led.

There were prohibitions on using the drug during the daylight, working hours. Being found in mist haze by a soldier of the Mein could get one locked up and deprived of the stuff-which was punishment all devotees dreaded. Before long Leeka had contracted himself to his present arrangement-he would labor drunken among the animals through day to earn the few coins needed to dream the mist through the night. In this, he became one of millions in the Known World. He never even noticed that it was happening to him, never questioned this order of life. He could not truly have said at what moment he gave himself to it completely. The mist commands full devotion; Leeka, believing in no other god anymore, learned to worship at a new altar.

It was this that he was thinking of as he approached the darkened shell in which he passed the evenings. Sometime earlier he had taken the packet of mist threads from his breast pocket and walked, caressing the fibers with his fingers. Once inside it would only take a few minutes’ preparation, and then he would inhale and inhale and inhale…

Leeka stopped in his tracks and stilled himself. He sensed something, another breathing thing, close but hidden. He thought of the predators of the mountain night and knew that if this be one of those, he was likely dead on his feet.

“Forgive me,” a voice said. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” A hooded figure peeled away from the shadows beside his hut and stepped into the moonlight, arms raised in a gesture of innocence. “In fact, you surprised me, coming so quietly.”

The man’s tone was kindly, but Leeka had a particular dislike for speaking to people wearing hoods, especially ones who stepped out of the shadows of his hovel late at night and blocked his path. He sought to convey as much with the full intensity of his glare.