The War with the Mein Read Online Free Page A

but I have not finished my report.” The messenger seemed saddened by this fact. For a moment she rubbed at the bags beneath her eyes. “It is not just the Mein we must contend with. Hanish Mein has struck some alliance with people from beyond the Ice Fields. They have come over the roof of the world and south into the Mein.”
    The chancellor’s smile faded. “That is not possible.”
    “Sir, I swear by my right arm that they come south by the thousands. We believe they do so at the call of Hanish Mein.”
    “He has gone out of the Known World?”
    “Scouts have seen them coming. They are a strange people, barbaric and fierce—”
    “Foreign people are always thought to be barbaric and fierce.”
    “They are taller than normal men by more than a head. They ride atop woolly creatures, horned things that trample men underfoot. They come not just with soldiers but with women and children and the elderly, with great carts like moving cities, pulled by rows of hundreds and hundreds of beasts like none I have heard described before. It is said they wheel siege towers and other strange weapons with them, and manage great herds of livestock….”
    “You describe wandering nomads. These are figments of some liar’s fancy.”
    “If these be nomads they are like none our world has ever seen. They sacked a town called Vedus in the far north. I say sacked, but in truth they simply rolled over it. They left nothing behind, but grasped up everything of value and carried it with them.”
    “How do you know Hanish Mein has anything to do with this?”
    The messenger fixed the chancellor in her gaze. She could have been no older than twenty-five, but there was more than that length of suffering and perseverance in her face. Thaddeus had often believed this to be true of female soldiers. They were, by and large, cast of finer steel than average men. She knew what she was talking about, and he should acknowledge it.
    Thaddeus rose and motioned the woman toward a large chart of the empire on the far wall. “Show me these things on the map. Tell me all you can.”
    For the next hour the two talked: one asking questions with ever-increasing gravity, the other answering with conviction. Running his eyes over the chart, Thaddeus could not help but imagine the howling wildness of the place they discussed. No other region of the Known World was as troublesome as the Mein Satrapy. It was a harsh northern plateau region, a land of nine-month winters and of a blond-haired race of people who managed to survive there. The plateau bore the name of the people who inhabited it, but the Mein were not native to the region. They had once been a Mainland clan from the eastern foothills of the Senivalian Mountains, not all that different from the early Acacians. After an earlier displacement—at the hands of the Old Akarans—they had settled there and been forced to call it their home for twenty-two generations, just as the Akarans had made Acacia their base for the same amount of time.
    The Mein were a tribal, warlike, bickering people, as harsh and prone to callousness as the landscape they inhabited, with a culture built around a spiteful pantheon of spirits called the Tunishnevre. They held in common a pride in their shared ancestry, which they protected by living a cloistered existence. They married only with each other and condemned interbreeding with other races. Because of their perceived racial purity, any Meinish male could claim the throne as his own, so long as he won it through the death duel called the Maseret.
    This system made for a rapid turnover of rule, with each new chieftain having to win the approbation of the masses. Once crowned, the new chieftain took the race’s name as his own, signifying his representation of all his people. Thus, their current leader, Hanish of the line Heberen, became Hanish Mein on the day he fought his first Maseret and retained the crown of his deceased father. The fact that Hanish roiled with