The Sacred Band

by David Anthony Durham

  Sire Nathos could not keep the enthusiasm from his voice when he said, “And don’t forget the vintage. Brothers, in the coming weeks the supplies of the stuff in the Known World will begin to run out. As our testing has shown, they will grow apathetic. They will lose any lust for life. They will sit down and … die. A great many of them will, at least. Imagine the Santoth newly in charge of the world discovering that their conquered subjects can’t be made to work, to eat, to fornicate, or do anything else. The same goes for the Auldek, should they emerge victorious. And the same is true for the Akarans, if by some miracle they hold on to power. All of them will face the same problem—a mass dying that they have no way to remedy.” He paused for effect. “Except by reaching out to us. Only we control the process. Only we can make more of the vintage. Sire Dagon was foolish for ordering the warehouse and distillery on Prios destroyed, but we can just rebuild, either here or …”

  “In Ushen Brae,” Grau finished. “I rather fancy one of those Lothan Aklun estates on the barrier isles myself.”

  “You will have one,” Nathos said. “We all will. It’s absolutely without risk of failure, brothers. If they balk, we simply let them die. If for any reason we want to prevent that, we can give them the release. Not even the queen ever figured out that we both made the addiction and the cure for it at the same time. It was the cure, really, that took us so long to perfect. Should we want to, we could even give the cure to some and not to others, as suits us.” He chuckled. “I’m sorry for showing my mirth, brothers, but we have been too somber up to now. The situation is not so dire, despite Dagon’s attempts to make it so.”

  “True enough,” Sire Grau said. “Let us sail through this as ever. When the dust settles, we can make our arrangements with whoever is left. Both the Known World and Ushen Brae will need to be rebuilt, repopulated, controlled. Labor will need to be managed, security provided, goods and services transported. The powerful will need the resources only we can provide them. The weak will again clamor for the illusions and trinkets only we know how to wave before their noses. I think, brothers, that we can look to the future with just as much optimism as ever.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Sire Grindus said. “If I’m not mistaken, you’ll be on your way to Rapture now. You and Revek.”

  “Fate has made that so,” Grau acknowledged. “Such is my burden. I may not see it all with you, but I know the future is wonderfully bright.”

  “Oh …” Dagon said. He caught himself before the exhalation became a word. He stretched it out, staring at Grau as he did so. And at Revek. What a fool I am.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-ONE

  Having so little time to live, with so much to do, Aliver worked without resting. He did not think about all the weeks he had lounged about the palace in Acacia. Bemoaning the past would do him no good. He had told Corinn not to. He wouldn’t either.

  Later that very day, he cut away from the other riders and swept down on Kidnaban. He caught Paddel, the head vintner, trying to make his escape on a pleasure yacht loaded to the brim with the riches of his estate. Landing Kohl on the boat’s elaborate prow, Aliver shouted over her shoulders and the black flare of her wings, “Paddel, I am Aliver Akaran! I come to you with questions. I will have answers; you will give them now. If not, you will be food for my mount.”

  Paddel—sweating and faint as he was, constantly touching his bald head and the tattooing meant to replicate hair on it—proved very forthcoming.

  That evening in Alecia, Aliver spoke before a late session of the Senate. The things he said were easy for him, the words there on his tongue without hesitation. They were truths as he knew them. He would himself lead the army of Acacia north, up over the Methalian Rim. Hopefully, they would meet Princess Mena quickly, but in any event they would face the Auldek on the Mein Plateau. “While I live, they will not come down from there,” he said. “I pledge you that.”

  He declared that the league had shown themselves to be traitorous scoundrels, enemies to everyone in the empire. “They’ve bled us all these years and sipped our blood as if it were wine. You see their abandoned palaces, their warehouses in ashes, and their ships all gone, fled to the Outer Isles? This is all proof that they’ve been found out. They’ve run from us, and they are now our enemy just as much as the Auldek are.”

  He announced to them what he had learned about the vintage. The nation was addicted to the mist once again. They did not even know it, for it came to them in the bottles of wine on every table in the empire and it affected them so mildly that they did not know how much they depended on it. They drank of it every night, an enemy right there in their homes. “It is vile and subtle,” he said, “but we cannot save our nation without our full and true minds.” He ordered all wine poured out, casks smashed, not one more drop of it consumed. “Friends, let us drink water until this war is concluded. I will do the same. You may find it hard, at first, but I will be with each and every one of you, helping you forward.”

  He told them that the Santoth had finally revealed their true nature. “They are an evil none of us here can stand against, and if they triumph, all the world will be enslaved to them.” He said that only one person could defeat them. Queen Corinn. “Only my sister has sorcery to match theirs. So pray for her. Put behind you now your hatred of her, your jealousy. Put behind you the schemes you have had for grasping power when this war ends. Put it all behind you, and pray to the Giver that she succeeds. If she does not, you have no future anyway.”

  He admitted that he had a daughter but said she was not to be a pawn in the war or after it. “The queen and I have agreed to the order of succession. Should anything happen to us, we want these instructions followed.” He produced the box, a small metal container that he had carried with him on Kohl. “I have them here, in a locked box that I will leave in the care of the Senate. In this box are my wishes. Corinn’s wishes. You need not fear them, for they are just. This box is not to be opened until instructions on succession are needed. The key will be kept in safety. You need not seek it. It will appear when it’s needed. Before I leave this in your care I must have something from you: your word that you will abide by our wishes. All of you. Each and every one of you must swear to abide by our wishes. I want your oath on the Senate records.” Aliver had smiled then, looking around the chamber at the rapt faces staring at him. “I understand that I am not giving you a say in this. But I am your king.”

  After saying all this, and after getting each senator’s oath to abide by the instructions in the locked box, Aliver left the senators in the chamber speechless. Yes, he spoke the truth, but he did not speak all of it. He had not mentioned that the league, in their treachery, had put numbers on his days of life. If he failed on the Mein Plateau, he would be dead before he had to see the Auldek coming down from it. He did not say that as the people came off the vintage they would lose the will to live, and die because of it. Though he told them Corinn fought on their behalf, he did not say that she had only as many days to succeed as he did, or that she no longer could use The Song to aid her, or that she did not intend to return from the mission at all. He knew that the senators who swore to obey the succession plan would not have done so readily if they did not fear him and Corinn and the coming war. And while he told them he would repel the Auldek, he did not say that to him success was no longer the same as what it was for them. Victory could be something else, he believed. No easier to attain—perhaps harder, in truth—but a new way. A better way.

  Kohl lifted Aliver away from the city that night. The silence and the sound that is wind in motion, the flapping of massive wings, the creak of Kohl’s harness and armor. Far out to his left Thaïs carried Dram. To the east Ilabo rode Tij. The dragons called to one another every now and then. Their sounds were like chirrups stretched out with bass notes, each call ending with an almost flutelike sweetness of tone. Aliver had never heard anything like it.

  Dragonsong, he thought. I would never have imagined such a thing.

 
As he listened to it, the night passed in beauty. The world below them slept beneath a starry sky, farms and villages, rivers and roads and dense patches of woodland. Love it for what it is, Aliver told himself. Love it for being my daughter’s world, my nephew’s future. Love it for what it is and because it will go on after me.

  Many campfires glowed beneath them, often in clusters. His army. A great migration of soldiers heading north. Love them for who they are. For them, I cannot fail.

  This thought became the frame inside which he ordered the rest of his life. Inside which he planned and dreamed and worked through the things to come and how he would face every hurdle he could imagine. He had already begun reaching out to people, urging them off the vintage, speaking to them to keep their minds clear, to fill them with his love of life, with purpose. He would not let them die, or waver. Not while he lived. He had done this before, with the Santoth’s help, and he believed he could do it again without them. He had only to open his mind, to offer himself to all the people of the Known World, to touch their minds and let them touch his.

  As part of his consciousness took root in people’s minds, the sense of connection with them built. Thousands upon thousands of different connections. It was wonderful. Through it, he knew every reason he had to succeed, to end this war, and save all the lives he could. It was not the same as when the Santoth aided him. It was better, the connection his and the peoples’ alone. It was a communion shared, even as it was intimate with each individual. It was not even a strain on him. Rather, it felt as if once the connection was established, each person hosted his voice inside himself or herself, keeping alive Aliver’s words and praise and hopes for them.

  He was still at this at sunrise, when the three dragons left the Eilavan Woodlands and rose over the Methalian Rim. The zigzag path up its heights thronged with his army, climbing. Aliver flew up to the Mein Plateau, skimming low over the great mass of troops already gathered there. He let the army see him and the dragons, and he rejoiced to hear the shouts that rose to greet them. Then he and the other dragon riders pressed on as the climbing sun crept across the land, bringing color to it. And it was later that day, under the brief blaze of the arctic day, that he saw Mena and Elya.

  They were under attack.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-TWO

  Bad idea, Mena thought. This was a bad idea.

  She clung tight to Elya’s back as she rose and fell, dipped and twirled and undulated with the contours of the broken, icy terrain. Stone and snow, crevice and outcropping snapped by beneath her at speeds Mena had never experienced before. It might have been exhilarating, except that Elya raced before a snarling pack of fréketes, all baying for her blood. They were so near. Mena had stopped looking back, but she could hear their jaws snap. Several times she felt one of them had clawed at Elya’s tail.

  Faster, Elya. Come on, girl! Faster!

  An hour earlier, back with the ragged remains of her army, Rialus had pointed out Devoth and his frékete mount, Bitten, as they swooped in for another aerial attack. It had seemed like the right strategic move to single him out, as she had done Howlk and Nawth. If she could kill or lame them, perhaps the Auldek would cease their endless pursuit. For headlong pursuit is exactly what her army had faced since the Auldek’s nighttime attack. Mena’s battered army ran; the Auldek pursued. They rode on their antoks and woolly rhinoceroses and kwedeir. They dropped on them from the air on bellowing fréketes. Her soldiers marched day and night, racing between the food and supplies they had cached during their earlier march northward. But they were not fast enough, or strong enough anymore. They could not pull away, and the Auldek had clearly decided to run them into the ground.

  Her soldiers died one by one, trampled or cut down, snatched into the air or impaled. Some simply fell and gave up, the exhaustion and cold too much for them to carry on fighting. Even her officers died. Bledas got trampled by an antok. Perceven won himself honor—and a bloody death—defending a sled packed with the wounded. A group of the divine children ran them down. A man with a lion’s mane of white hair cut him with two strokes so fast that Perceven was legless before he even began to topple, and headless by the time his body hit the ground.

  Mena watched from a distance, but could do nothing, not even avenge him or the injured, who followed him to the afterdeath just moments later. If she let this go on, she would not have an army anymore. She was not sure what effect she had expected Calrach’s death or the destruction of the Auldek histories to have, but so far all the small victories they had won only seemed to fuel the intensity of the Auldek’s rage.

  That was why Mena had wanted so badly to buy them a reprieve. She and Elya had flown within shouting distance of the fréketes. Instead of listening to anything she had to say, the beasts converged on her. No talking. No taunting. None of the curious, arrogant bravado of their earlier encounters. They just roared toward her. She had given Elya free rein to flee. Mena simply held on. At least they led the fréketes away from the army. That was something.

  The beasts took turns pressing the pursuit. Two or three of them clawed the air behind Elya, as the others flew, resting themselves. Elya performed with agility and speed Mena had not known her capable of. But Elya could not go on much longer. Before them stretched a hilly landscape of dips and rises. Mena glanced back. The frékete that had been behind them had just pulled away. Devoth and Bitten pressed the attack now, coming on with a fresh surge of energy.

  Let’s get them, Mena thought to Elya. She shaped the thought with anger and defiance, but she knew they had no choice. Any moment now one of those grasping claws would get a firm grip on Elya and pull her from the sky. They had to act first.

  They did not get that chance.

  While Mena still looked behind, Elya broke her speed and cut to one side. The motion whipped Mena’s neck around savagely. A frékete that had lain in hiding for them surged up from a hollow, right in front of them. It raked one of its claws through Elya’s thin wing membrane and then down her side. Blood erupted from the wound. The beast’s claws cut through the saddle straps. Mena felt her harness go loose and cant off to one side. She barely managed to say atop Elya by clinging to her neck.

  Elya skimmed away, so near to the earth that her feet touched down briefly as each hill rose beneath her. That did not last long either. Another frékete and rider dropped from the sky in front of them. Elya snapped her wings in and twisted past them, sleek as a spear. The Auldek’s sword sung by Mena’s ear, so close. Elya reached another rise, but her feet twisted beneath her. She crashed down on the other side, grinding and rolling, Mena with her in a tangle of harness and webbing and wings. Mena felt the familiar, breath-stealing pain of her shoulder being dislocated, her arm flopping limply.

  The frékete and its rider swooped over the rise. Mena tried to grab for her sword hilt with her good arm, but the scabbard had twisted around beneath her and the pain in her shoulder made it hard to control her movements. The frékete touched the ground in a flying run. Mena knew it would reach her before she could draw her weapon. She was still struggling to get the King’s Trust free when Elya twisted away from her, found her feet.

  Elya leaped over the frékete. He slashed at her, but passed just underneath her—and just above Mena. One of its feet swept so close to the princess that it splattered her face with bits of ripped-up turf. Elya’s wings beat the air as she lifted higher, flying backward, tail slapping about, tauntingly close to the frékete’s grasping claws. From below, Mena watched the Auldek twist around in his harness, looking at her. He yanked back on his reins with his full body weight, trying to turn the frékete back toward her. The cords pulled taut against the frékete’s shoulders, but the creature strained against them. It did not care about following its rider’s commands anymore or about Mena. It wanted Elya. The three of them disappeared over the hillcrest, leaving Mena crumpled on the ground, tangled in her harness rigging.

  Mena screamed Elya’s name, both in her mind and with all her voice. She wr
ithed up and out of the harness and kicked free of it. With her good hand, she gripped the bicep of her dangling arm. She inhaled, clenched her teeth, and then pushed the arm back into place. The pain was dizzying. It took several attempts before she felt the ball of her arm bone slip back into its socket. Once it had, she drew the King’s Trust and ran as fast as she could up the slope over which the others had disappeared.

  Cresting it, she saw them. Below her in the next depression the frékete fought a snarling duel with Elya. The beast punched and grappled her, landing brutal blows. It was all brawny muscle and weight, sharp claws and bared teeth. Elya writhed with serpentine speed, a hissing tangle of motion. She fought more fiercely than Mena would have thought possible, but she was not made for it, her body too slim and delicate. Her wings hung in useless tatters, her side black with blood. She tried several times to leap away, but the frékete yanked her back down each time.

  The Auldek had dismounted to let the beast have its fun. He had started up the rise toward Mena, his sword in hand, but had paused, obviously amused by the fight. He shouted something to the animal. It bellowed in return. It slammed a fist across Elya’s jaw. She reeled away, but it grabbed her and pulled her back. It bit down on the long curve of her neck.

  “No!”

  Mena rushed down the slope, her sword raised, all pain forgotten. The Auldek snapped around. He moved to intercept her. They crashed together, Mena savage in her attack; the Auldek just as furious in repelling it. They went around, the Auldek moving so that she could not see what the frékete was doing to Elya. This drove Mena into a fury of slashing, hacking, thrusting motion faster than any attack she had managed before. The Auldek backed. Mena wanted him dead. Fast. Now!

  When a roar ripped through the air behind her she feared it was the frékete announcing its kill. The Auldek heard it, too. He looked past her and saw something that surprised him. His eyes left Mena only for a moment. That’s all she needed. She hacked his sword hand off at the wrist. As the sword and severed hand dropped, she reached over them and sliced a cut through the Auldek’s face. He survived it only by snapping his head back, turning, and running.