The Sacred Band

by David Anthony Durham

  “There will be more than just Elya,” Corinn said. “There will be.”

  In the face of such dual certainty, Jason withered. He took back his documents and mumbled that he would begin researching that very afternoon.

  Winged riders? Dagon wanted to laugh, but the knot that formed in his stomach told him there was something to this. When was the last time his agents had seen Elya’s young? He had a sudden realization that the maid who funneled information from the palace had been silent on the subject lately. He would have to check. Could the queen be doing something with them? She must be. She was confident enough in her actions to flaunt it here, among her councilor enemies.

  In everything as they talked on, the royal siblings shared the same mind. How bothersome. Even when Aliver set his light brown eyes on the leagueman himself it might as well have been Corinn doing so. “Sire Dagon, what of the search for my brother? I read the last dispatch, but you must give us more than vague hopes and possibilities.”

  “I’m afraid I cannot, Your Highness. Our search continues, of course, but there has been no word of your brother at all.” Aliver stared at him. “It’s our top priority in the Other Lands, I assure you.”

  The prince made a sour face. It was startling, until he followed it with a gesture of his fingers, as if he were opening his hand to drop seeds. Dagon recognized it for what it was—a Talayan expression of grudging acknowledgment. “I’m sure that’s so, but Dariel is lost in a foreign land! What can be more important than finding him?”

  More likely he’s dead in a foreign land, Dagon came very near to saying. “Dare I say it, but we may never do that, Your Highness.”

  Aliver leaned forward, set both elbows on the table. “Then the league will have me to answer to. Let me be clear. This will happen. You will find Dariel. Everything about the empire’s relationship with the league depends on it. Do you understand that, Sire Dagon? Need I detail exactly what I mean?”

  The whelp is threatening me! Dagon thought. He’s threatening the league and making sure everyone here knows it. Corinn looked as pleased as a proud mother.

  The other thing it convinced him of was that Queen Corinn had evolved into a greater danger than the league had anticipated. It was not just that every rumor about what she had achieved through sorcery appeared to be true. Nor was it that her demeanor was more self-satisfied than he had ever seen. It was none of the things Dagon detailed about the weapons she had at her disposal. It was, instead, that for brief moments he was sure her eyes sparked with madness. He was sure nobody else noticed. It was there, though, a quiver at their corners on occasion. Once it looked as if she saw something in the room that was not actually there.

  By the late hour that the meeting concluded, Dagon knew he would have to send his brothers a troubling report. The situation was not as chaotically tranquil as they had anticipated. More was at work than they had known. The league could not simply float above the bloodshed, watch the shuffling of pieces, and accept any outcome as beneficial. Not when Corinn raised the dead and destroyed small armies and planned to fly men on dragons. With all that, she might actually triumph! What a terrifying thought.

  In his quarters in the league area of Acacia, Dagon moved swiftly. There were enough leaguemen in Alecia to convene a partial council. He would sail for the Mainland and commune with them there. He wrote a quick missive and had it sent ahead of him via the swiftest of his messenger birds. He penned it in the league’s archaic script so that he could speak directly. No fear of anyone decoding the message.

  Brothers,

  Aliver lives. I have seen and touched him. The queen’s power expands to danger.

  We must meet.

  He signed it by pressing a fingertip smeared with his own blood on the parchment.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Rialus did his best to explain that he need not be brought along. Calrach was going. He could surely provide all the pertinent information. He knew more than Rialus did about the Ice Fields and all that. Rialus would just be deadweight. An extra burden. Besides—and this was no small thing—Rialus was not good with heights.

  He need not have tired his tongue. Devoth’s mind was made up. Rialus’s objections influenced him no more than a buzzing gnat would have—if there had been any buzzing gnats in this arctic hell. Devoth only acknowledged his protests as if Rialus were being self-denigrating. A willful misinterpretation if Rialus had ever seen one. It did not help matters that Sabeer offered to ride with Rialus between her legs, for extra warmth, she said.

  Devoth pointedly ignored her. “Come, Rialus, it’s no bother. You’re my guest.”

  Rialus found himself standing in the blistering cold, so weighted with furs that just staying upright was a mighty effort. Before him, like stone statues brought to life, moving with their strange, regally bestial mannerisms, stood the fréketes. Rialus had learned that there were only twelve of them. Though furless and naked, they took no notice of the cold. They shifted every so often, but did so as if posing before an audience, flexing their muscles and stretching their wings, which shone blue-black against the gray wall of the sky. Quota minders moved around them. Some climbed about on the leather harnesses strapped to the creatures’ backs, making adjustments. A few seemed to be massaging oils into their skin.

  The massive size of the fréketes was bad enough. The fact that their bodies had humanoid musculature—masculine yet somehow sexless—was even worse. But their pale faces truly made Rialus want to slither away. Large, round eyes set in apelike features, proud and cocky and malicious at the same time. They did not look like dumb beasts at all. Rather, they gave the impression of intelligent creatures bored and unimpressed by life, doubtfully hoping that this whole mad invasion might prove diverting.

  “That one is my mount.” Devoth smacked Rialus on the shoulder and pointed at one of the nearer fréketes. He named it something that Rialus did not catch in the slightest. It sounded like a sputtering grunt cut short by a sneeze, then snapped away on the wind at that. “But you can call him Bitten. You will like him, Rialus.”

  Not likely.

  “Listen, though.” Devoth pulled him near and whispered, almost as if he feared the creatures would overhear. “Don’t look them in the eyes.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you. Don’t look them in the eyes. They don’t like it. Not from any but their riders. They’re particular, Rialus. Take no offense at it.” Devoth smacked him on the back, an impact that nearly sent Rialus sprawling.

  Other Auldek arrived, jolly and shouting at one another, blowing plumes of mist. Calrach had never looked more pleased with himself. Herith and Millwa actually sang verses of some ghastly song. Menteus Nemré was among them also. He stood with the Auldek, not with any of the quota slaves. Even with his body wrapped in furs the sculpted musculature showed through. His hood was thrown back. Perhaps it had to be, considering the way his mass of white dreadlocks jutted out from his scalp like an unruly mane of thick snakes.

  For a while they milled around as if just enjoying the morning, but at some point the Auldek announced that it was time to depart. The quota handlers jumped from the beasts as the Auldek clambered up them. With Devoth climbing up after him and several slaves directing him, Rialus scaled their frékete’s back. Slaves pushed him into position, shoving his limbs through straps, buckling him down. Before he knew it he was spread-eagled against the creature’s back, immobile. Devoth took up a position just behind him, pressing against him in a more intimate position than Rialus had ever experienced with a man. Rialus set his cheek against the frékete’s warm skin, closed his eyes, and tried to think of …

  The frékete bellowed. Rialus felt the vibrations through his cheek and chest and thighs, a sound so complete it became everything for a few moments. As it faded, the creature shifted from leg to leg. The muscles in its back quivered, and then it leaped. Rialus’s internal organs tried to slip out of him and stay earthbound. They caught down around his groin and went hurdli
ng into the air with the rest of him.

  For a few seconds it seemed they would just rise indefinitely with the power of that first leap, but then the momentum slowed. They reached a zenith and the mighty wings flared. They flew, slanting away with a speed that this time shoved Rialus’s insides up against one side of his rib cage. Devoth howled in pleasure; the frékete answered; Rialus clung, eyes still shut, miserable.

  For a time the frékete pounded its wings vigorously. The beasts called to one another, and the riders on them shouted as if to top them. Soon they developed a slow rhythm, one wingbeat followed by a long pause before the next. Judging by the way wind ripped at him and howled in his ears, they must have been moving at great speed. Rialus could not know for sure, though. He kept his hood fastened tight and endured the passing hours and constant motion as best he could.

  The expedition took nearly a week. They flew east along the ragged, ice-choked coast, camping on the boulder-strewn beach with a wall of stone pressing them toward the sea. Massive rivers of ice choked the few gaps in the mountains. Fissured. Groaning and cracking as if alive. Impenetrable. Beautiful in a way that confounded Rialus. The ice glistened blue, clear as glass in some places, touched with swirls of red in others. Certain formations he would have thought sculpted by artists, save the scale was too massive. It was a work out of proportion for human contemplation, as was his view of it on the occasions he looked down from thousands of feet in the air.

  For a few days Rialus felt a bubbling of hope and fear in his chest. He knew that farther south the mountains jutted right out into the sea. No rolling army could pass there. Perhaps there was no route. Perhaps they would have to turn back and Calrach would lose his head and Rialus would … well, he would spend the rest of his days in Ushen Brae.

  It was a short-lived notion. Flying on south, they found the gap in the stone barricade, the very one that Calrach insisted existed. No river of ice flowed in this one. Perhaps it once had, but now it just lay before them, the long tongue of a peaceful valley. They turned inland, scouting a route through the mountains and eventually out onto the Ice Fields. The Auldek became more and more pleased with everything they observed. The route through the mountains was navigable. The ice of the fields was solid enough for all their structures and beasts to roll over. Everything was as Calrach had said. Because of it, his stature among the small group grew in direct proportion to the degree to which Rialus’s hopes shriveled.

  Their destination before returning to the war column was Tavirith, the northernmost trading outpost along the Candovian coast. Rialus himself had named the place a few days before they flew out. He had been there only once while governor of the Mein satrapy. He had never thought he would return.

  When Bitten touched down, Rialus did not really believe they had made it that far. They had been flying long enough that he had lost track of time and distance, but at some level he could not believe these arctic wastes would ever end. He did not so much feel as if they were hiking toward one world as he felt they were marching out of the world entirely, into endless nothing.

  Devoth dismounted before him, and was off conferring with the other Auldek by the time Rialus touched his feet to the ice-crusted stones of the windswept beach. He moved away from Bitten, not trusting the beast without Devoth beside him. He found himself too close to one of the other hulking fréketes, so he moved forward and a little to the side of where the Auldek stood conferring. He tried to make sense of the low, dull light, but he could not even say what time of day it was. They could be anyplace. Anyplace at all in this forsaken barrenness.

  He had just begun to turn and look toward the north when something caught his eye. Shapes huddled in the shadow of the dunes to the south. A cluster of geometry just ordered enough to stand out. As he stared, the details became clearer and clearer. A village. There a second cluster of houses. What looked like large stones on the shore were the hulls of beached boats, and that clutter of sticks was actually an old pier. Smoke rose from several chimneys. The moment he spotted the plumes he smelled them as well. Embedded in the side of one building was a square of glowing yellow light. He had been inside that building. He had looked out of that very window.

  “Is this it?” Howlk asked. “Tavirith?”

  The Auldek had gathered to either side of him, studying the same view he was studying. Rialus yanked his eyes away, as if he could deny that he had seen anything. He did not want to answer. And yet, there it was, a piece of the Known World again.

  “Rialus, tell us,” Sabeer said. “Is that Tavirith?”

  He only meant to acknowledge it to himself, but the word escaped him. “Yes.”

  “Yeesss!” Howlk hissed. “Yeesss! I knew it. I can smell Acacians.”

  The people of Tavirith were hardly Acacians—more a mix of ancestral Candovians, combined with some of the Scav who were their own race, perhaps a few of Meinish stock and a motley collection of others, misfits who had fled the real world and washed up here.

  The Auldek shouted something at the fréketes, and then pointed toward the village. The creatures followed the gestures. They glanced at one another as if coming to their own agreement on the order, and then rose one by one into the air. They flew for the village. Devoth had never looked happier. His eyes followed them with childish amazement, as if he somehow were not the architect of all this but just a witness. Then he marched after them without a word of direction to Rialus. As he strode, he reached around and yanked free the long sword strapped to his back. The other Auldek also freed their various weapons.

  Rialus almost stayed where he was, an act of protest against whatever was about to happen. But as the Auldek got farther away, the howling emptiness at his back shifted closer. His feet moved of their own accord. He stumbled forward. The fréketes circled above the village. A few of them touched down. Several alighted on the structures’ roofs. The Auldek lumbered forward, getting faster. Rialus himself began to run. On the one hand he hated being pulled forward. On the other he wanted to shout an alarm, to somehow alert the villagers to the enemy upon them and to explain that he was not one of them. He did not get to do any of this. Instead, he was in place to watch what followed.

  One of the fréketes on a roof leaped into the air and, holding its wings angled up vertically, slammed down on the structure. The houses, Rialus knew, were built around a framework of pinewood and whalebone, layered with a latticework of beams and skins and covered with turf. The house being attacked was solid enough that the frékete needed to leap several times before it punched through. It half disappeared inside. Only its wings protruded as the rest of its body twisted and slashed around inside.

  The others went wild. One shattered another roof. Another punched in a door and shoved an arm in. The first to break through climbed out of the wreckage, a flailing body clenched in its jaws. When its upper body was clear of the rooftop, it grabbed the person in one hand and hurled him out toward the onrushing Auldek. The man screamed as he tumbled through the air and crashed down. Howlk slammed his spear into the man’s abdomen, pinning him to the ground for the moment it took before he strode over him, yanking the weapon out as he did so.

  The Auldek reached the village as the inhabitants began to emerge. A man burst through a door and ran roaring into the open. He carried an ax in one hand, raised above his head not so much in an attack as in a gesture of warning. Rialus could tell it was not a war ax. It was one for chipping away ice. Devoth, who was standing directly in the man’s path, spun to one side. As the man passed him, he swung his sword around, angled it up, and severed the man’s arm at the elbow. It and the ax looped away. The man ran forward a few strides, waving his stump as if it still held the ax. Devoth let him turn, spraying blood in a circle around him. He let him understand a portion of what was happening, then he sliced his legs out from under him.

  Other men followed, to variations of the same fate. Women and children died the same way. The villagers fought as best they could, or they begged for mercy. The Auldek were like ca
ts playing with baby mice. When the villagers stood still, the Auldek smiled and laughed and said incomprehensible things to them. When they dropped to their knees or ran or lashed out, the Auldek slashed them to pieces. Sabeer was just as gleeful as Devoth or Howlk. Menteus Nemré worked his own bloody havoc. He dove into houses and chased out the inhabitants. He shoved them savagely toward waiting Auldek, slicing to pieces any who ran in a whirling dance of butchery, his face expressionless, his white locks wild and living as he moved, whipping about like snakes searching for victims to bite.

  It did not last long. Yet it went on forever. All in the settlement—men and women, old and young, even a few children—were hunted out and slaughtered. All of them. This could happen to Gurta, he thought. This could be what happens to my—He did not let himself finish the thought. It lingered, incomplete, within him.

  The last few died within a howling circle of monsters dancing around them, gleefully cutting them down one after another. Until they were all gone. All dead. The Auldek held to that circle, drawing in closer over the bodies, their weapons finally lowered. The fréketes already looked bored. They rummaged through the debris of the houses. One began stoking a fire that had spread from a chimney. The others took up the task, caving in whole walls to watch them ignite.

  Rialus hovered at the margin of the carnage. It was like he was standing too close to the fires. The blaze of shame scorched his face even as the raging winter froze his back. The people of Tavirith were not warriors. They had been whalers, hunters, traders, women and children, as poor and simple as any in the Known World. Why kill them? For what purpose? What sense did it make? Didn’t they see what they had done? He wanted to find Devoth and ask him, show him how vile this all was. The work of cowards. An act to be ashamed of for the rest of his eternal life.

  That was why he stepped forward across the blood-splattered stones. That was why he approached the circle of Auldek backs. That was why he moved around them, searching for Devoth. That was why he was right in among them when he understood what they were doing. In a crack between the huddled bodies, Devoth worked over a slain villager. The furs and clothing had been cut from his body. Devoth slid the point of his short dagger up along the man’s thigh, slicing away a strip of flesh that he then held dangling from his fingers. He stared at it, the other Auldek silent around him. Their blood joy was gone. This was something else.