Righteous Anger (Okal Rel Saga #2)

5.3: Unification

Days later, back on Tark, Horth struggled through telling his father about arbiters, and that Tessitatt Monitum knew the jump into the Reetion territories. Hangst took in the information thoughtfully. So did Zer Sarn, who stood beside him.

All Hangst said was, "Thank you."

Then there was more waiting, with messengers arriving almost daily from everywhere in the empire, as well as from SanHome.

"Your father is persuading the kinf'stan to unite with us against the Reetions," Lywulf told Horth. "But they all say the same thing. They will decide on Black Wedge, nowhere else. And not until Bryllit is able to stand for them if they decide against your father."

Horth could not remember when he had come to realize that Unification was going to take place over the conquest of the Reetion territories, but he was not immune to the excitement trickling through the ranks of those who gathered about Hangst in hope of favors. Whole planets awaited, people said, with no one to defend them except commoners. Nersallians talked about fields and factories populated by brown-skinned workers, while Nesaks talked about the problems of depopulating their new territories so they could stock them properly with immigrants from SanHome. But the worst tensions were over nobleborns, not commoners.

One evening, in the great hall where Hangst's guests took dinner together, a Nesak shoved a nobleborn. The nobleborn pulled a knife and killed the Nesak. By the time the resulting melee ended, eighteen people were dead and twice that many injured. Horth heard about it the next morning, from the servant who brought his breakfast to his guest suite.

Not all interactions were fatal ones, however. Much to Horth's surprise, sex made inroads where blades failed, in the form of female nobleborns intent on seducing Nesaks to commit the Error of Debasement.

Not every Nesak succumbed to these temptations, but Kale was aghast at how many did, given that every one of them had a wife back on SanHome.

Nersallian women sobered up after the first dozen found themselves grounded by pregnancies, and business picked up again for male prostitutes in the nearest town, much to every Nesak's apparent disgust although some of them snuck off to tag along with the Nersallian men who visited the commoner women at such brothels.

Horth was beginning to wonder how long they could keep waiting, with Nesaks and Nersallians living in such close quarters, when word of the zer'stan's decision about the Reetion box arrived in the person of Ackal, himself, the Zer'sis.

Every Sevolite at the estate gathered at an outdoor amphitheatre to hear the Zer-sis.

Horth was down the front with his family. Even Zrenyl was present, although he stayed on the far side of their mother and her younger children.

There were also a dozen broadcast crews present, Nersallians being less strict than the Demish about keeping impersonal forms of communication to a minimum, especially as Tark was free of the endemic interference and meddling suffered within the hullsteel shell of UnderGelion.

The mood in the amphitheatre was expectant. The Zer-sis represented all zer-pol souls among the Waiting Dead, although why a zer-pol would desire rebirth was beyond Horth. He could not imagine willingly stepping into a life that was destined to be strewn with shame and defeat, no matter how much he might desire to warn the living through the nastiness of his sacrifice. The whole idea of zer-pol put Horth off. He would prefer to take direction from a zer-rel — a strong leader who emerged in troubled times. He thought his father might be a zer-rel. He knew his mother thought so and he wanted, very badly, to be sure himself. He hoped that might be what Zer-sis Ackal had come to tell them.