The Sacred Band

by David Anthony Durham

  He sailed for Aushenia the next morning. He took no joy in leaving Rhrenna. If she had showed any of the emotion that had racked her with sobs during the night, he might well have said something regrettable. Sentimental. Further promises of the type he had thought only lesser men ever made to women. Fortunately, she parted with a businesslike efficiency, wishing him speed on his mission in no more time than it took to roll out of bed, snatch her garments from the floor, and depart while still climbing into them. He lay in bed a moment after the door slammed shut, uneasy with what seemed like a reversal in the role he normally occupied in amorous matters.

  “You can’t pretend I didn’t see into you,” he said to his empty chamber. “We both know I did.”

  What he did not say, but thought, was that perhaps she had seen rather a bit too much into him as well. What he also did not say—and could not quite believe he even found himself thinking—was that he wanted nothing more urgently than to return to her, to have her again, to be with her many more times. To make love, yes, but also to talk; to jest; to see the fit of clothes on her under the play of many different types of light; to be there should she wake crying; perhaps, even, to reveal even more of his intimate thoughts to her.

  You’re getting soft, Delivegu, he thought.

  Ruminating on this as he sailed, Delivegu failed to remember to stop in at Alecia, Manil, or Aos. He could have found diversion in any of these places—social gatherings and flirtation early, more serious drink and fornication later. His friend Yanzen had even left an open invitation for him to stop in at Sigh Saden’s rustic estate outside Aos. The senator, having fled the isle of Acacia, divided his staff between Alecia, where he had to conduct senatorial business, and Aos, where he planned to flee if the empire collapsed. Yanzen had promised Delivegu that if he visited, he could deduct from the debt Yanzen owed him by dipping himself into the concubines Saden hid among the household staff. “They’d welcome that stiff rod of yours,” he had said.

  Yanzen always knew the right things to say to encourage Delivegu.

  Inexplicable then, that he sailed right past each port with barely a sideways glance. He landed in Killintich a full two days before schedule, and he found himself riding with King Grae, doing his best to offer the monarch a deference he did not feel. Outside the city, the country was beautiful—woodland and small villages, occasional solitary farms. They rode winding dirt roads through the forest with just a few guards trailing them. Delivegu would have been happiest with silence, but the king was in a more talkative mood.

  “We did not expect you so soon,” Grae said. He sat easy in his saddle, like one born to horses, which he was. He was just as stone-chiseled handsome as Delivegu remembered. His rustic attire nonetheless wafted a scent of royal luxury, as if the supple leather had been sewn with gold thread and the pockets filled with lavender flowers. He wore his blue eyes as much like jewelry as his turquoise necklace or the subtle diadem that rested on his reddish blond hair.

  Delivegu avoided those eyes as much as he could. “I’m on the king’s business,” he responded. “Best to be prompt.”

  “ ‘Prompt’? Prompt is not a word I would have associated with the name Delivegu Lemardine,” Grae said. He showed a mouthful of straight, white teeth and leaned toward him. “At least, that’s not what certain ladies of my acquaintance have said about you. They all attest that there are two things you are gifted at. One is deceitful treachery; the other is … Oh, I shouldn’t mention it. It’s a somewhat more admirable skill, though, even if it’s a gift mostly to the whores and maidservants of the world.”

  He’s baiting me, Delivegu thought. It surprised him to hear that the king of Aushenia had been asking anybody about him. For some reason he did not like the idea. It was he who was supposed to know things about others, not the other way around. It was Grae who had been sent packing from Acacia, spurned by the queen for his treachery. The fact that she discovered that treachery had been Delivegu’s doing, of course. Apparently the king knew it.

  Telling himself to keep his calm, Delivegu shifted the subject. “So, have they been safe in your care? No more unfortunate accidents?”

  “Yes, we haven’t lost a one of them since the queen sent them here. The ones who were killed were not slaughtered in Aushenia. That happened in Aos. Here they’ve been taken good care of. All of them.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven?”

  “I know. Not many to be an entire generation of a race,” Grae said. “The queen makes for a … challenging adversary. How is she? I’ve heard all manner of dire things.”

  “She is the queen,” Delivegu said.

  “Yes,” Grae guffawed, “I’m sure she’s that. Off to sort out the Santoth while the rest of us do the same with the Auldek. I suspect we’ve got the bloodier end of that bargain.”

  You weren’t there. You didn’t see them. But he did not want to give Grae anything, so he said, “Is this it?”

  On a rise of land coming into view before them stood a squat stone-block building. It was large enough to be a castle, but it was, in truth, a prison.

  “Yes, that’s our keep,” Grae said, straightening to take in the view. “I’m sure you understand the various reasons we did not want to house them in the city. It wasn’t one of the queen’s stipulations. She asked this of me, and I obliged. They’ve been perfectly safe here. Safer than they deserve.”

  “Do they speak Acacian?”

  “I suppose. I’ve not been stopping in to chat with them.”

  Delivegu noted the edge in the monarch’s voice. He rather liked finding it. Beneath his regal demeanor, Grae did chafe at being told to care for these creatures. Feeling a bit like a wet nurse, are you, Your Majesty? “No, I wouldn’t imagine you’d have much to say to them. Or they to you.”

  Once they had both dismounted and had their horses taken from them, Grae led them into the keep on foot. “What are you to do with them?”

  “Take them to King Aliver, as instructed.”

  The Aushenian pondered that for a moment. “I meant what is he going to do with them, but I don’t suppose it’s your place to know that. King Aliver back from the dead … By the Giver, the world seems to have turned upside down overnight. You’ll have to dine with me this evening. I have many questions for you.”

  “That’s not possible,” Delivegu said. “I carry on tonight. I have to see to the details of transporting them.”

  “Surely, you have an evening to—”

  “No, I don’t.” Delivegu turned toward him, meeting those blue eyes. “As I said, I’m on the king’s business. I choose to be prompt.”

  Grae studied him for a long moment. “You don’t seem like the same man I met in Acacia just months ago. You’re … tamed. Obedient. Fine, don’t dine with me. I have no interest in your people anymore. I would say I wish you all the best with your war, but the words would stick on my tongue.”

  “It may prove to be your war as well,” Delivegu pointed out.

  “I know more about the Numrek and their kind than you, errand boy. Aushenia took the brunt of the first invasion, or have your people forgotten that? Have they written Aushenguk Fell out of the histories? No matter. We remember. We remember that we fought the Numrek first, with no aid from Acacia. We remember that the Numrek overran our lands while Acacians looked after their own interests. This time, Aushenia will defend its own borders fiercely if need be, but we won’t fight your war for you.”

  They had walked through the keep’s main gate, beneath the fortifications, through a second wall and a gate that was cranked up only once they had reached it. As they stepped through, it immediately began to descend again.

  “There,” Grae said, “they’re out at play. We let them spar with wooden swords. What’s the harm in it?”

  Delivegu saw them then. On the far side of the large enclosure, sparring, just as the king said. Just seven of them. Seven Numrek children of various ages. The only ones still alive after Co
rinn’s massacre of their parents at the Thumb.

  “They’re yours now,” Grae said. “Take them.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Dariel did his best to explain that he had reconsidered how to proceed. Now that he was about to set off, he worried about taking others into danger on a fool’s errand. He should go alone. He could handle a small skiff himself. He knew the way to Lithram Len already. If he succeeded at what he had planned, it would not be because he fought his way in. If a league clipper spotted him, it would not matter how many friends he had sitting on the seat beside him. Stealth was what mattered. That he could best achieve alone. This was his mission, after all. If he was wrong or failed at it, they would need each and every able body perched on the walls of Avina.

  He might as well have been a youngest child arguing for something before a unified front of older, skeptical siblings. He had felt this way before. They would have none of it. They had discussed Dariel’s plan only within a small circle, but Mór still insisted they be cautious. Considering the magnitude of what hinged on Dariel’s success, they could not chance some malicious clansman of Dukish’s alerting the league somehow.

  “Tunnel is with you, Rhuin Fá,” the big man said. He tugged on a golden tusk. “That’s the way it is. Stop scratching at it.”

  “And us,” Geena said. “You’re not going alone in some skiff. Not when we have a right lovely, sleek, fast clipper with your name on it.”

  “Face it, Dariel,” Clytus added. “We’re brigands. You can’t expect us to stand on a city wall flashing our asses and such. I mean, that’s all right for Melio, being Marah and all that, but us? No, not when there’s a bit of piracy to get up to.”

  Even Skylene asked him to see sense. The very fact that she could ask him was miraculous. She woke the evening he breathed life into her. Sometime that night her fever broke, and the next morning she sat up, her skin cool and filled with color. The first thing she did was ask for lentils. Red lentils in a creamy cheese sauce, with long strips of fried onion in it. She ate and ate, and laughed, and asked a thousand questions about the things that she had missed. And here she was, just a couple of days from the edge of death, standing, thin but vibrant, in the late light of the day, holding Mór’s arm and asking Dariel to see sense. He had not told her what he had done, and figured he never would. He told no one.

  When Birké showed his canines and shrugged, as if to say that he, surely, would not try to say no to Skylene, Dariel did not. He acquiesced without a word more of protest. Tunnel had hefted up his mallets. Clytus tied back his long hair with a band across his forehead, set his hands on his hips, and danced for a few merry moments, preternaturally light on his feet. Kartholomé patted the throwing stars flat against his waist. Geena smiled and batted her eyelashes.

  Dariel, loving the buoyancy of the moment, prayed that he knew what he was doing, that he was not leading his friends to certain death and placing the Free People at the mercy of the league.

  I think it’s safe to say the invasion has begun,” Clytus said.

  None of the soul vessels churning the waters from the barrier isles toward Avina paid the slightest attention to the single, now terribly old-fashioned clipper moving the other way, propelled only by the power of a favorable breeze. The league had been won over by the wonders that were the soul vessels. And why not? Those vessels cut right into that wind, sleek and glistening, unerringly aimed at their target. Dariel remembered the intoxicating power of having his hands on the steering wheel of one of those ships. It was a hard wheel to let go of. He had counted on that being the case for the leaguemen.

  We’re right about that, at least, Dariel thought. Of course, if he was wrong about the rest of it, that would be a moot point.

  While most of the barge transports would be coming down from Eigg, where the newly arrived army had landed, two of them had sailed for Lithram Len. All on board the Slipfin gathered by the bridge to stare at them.

  Each transport was its own squat, rectangular island of dull gray, smooth as stone, flat, and largely featureless. Dariel thought them ghostly, dead-looking things, unnatural in the way they shoved through the chop. Both barges thronged with Ishtat soldiers. Thousands of them, from one edge of the structure to another, stood shoulder to shoulder. Here and there towers jutted up. The structures were not the same material as the vessel but were simple wood and stone and leather, obviously recent additions. Other military hardware cluttered them as well. The distance made them hard to discern. The transports may never have been used for warfare before, but the quick outfitting for Sire Lethel’s siege of Avina had transformed them most convincingly.

  “They moved us on those,” Tunnel said, “when we were small. Those took us across to Ushen Brae.” He stared a moment longer. “They don’t know. Them soldiers, they don’t know they’re slaves, too.”

  “Don’t start feeling sorry for them,” Kartholomé said. He fingered the new earrings that hung in long curves from his lobes. “They’d spit and roast you in a Bocoum minute. Though you wouldn’t really taste like pork, would you?”

  The large man looked at the brigand, perplexed. He tugged on a tusk.

  The harbor of Lithram Len proved a floating labyrinth. Though largely deserted in the wake of the invasion force’s departure, it was crowded with the league ships that had been left behind. Dariel and the others tethered the Slipfin to a brig well away from the docks. They crammed into the skiff and rowed the rest of the way, navigating a meandering course through the maze of anchored ships. They pulled in below the bow of a large brig. In its shadow, they tied the skiff to the pier and clambered up an old, barnacle-encrusted ladder.

  Standing on the long, high pier as the others climbed, Clytus scanned the distant piers, ships, and even the town itself. “We still don’t have a plan, do we?”

  Dariel said, “If it were just me, I would’ve worn a disguise. Tried to blend—”

  “With that face?” Clytus asked. “I haven’t seen too many Ishtat wearing full facial tattoos.”

  “True enough. They’ve no fashion sense.”

  The others continued to bunch around them, nervously looking about. Tunnel came up last. He had looped a strap of leather around his neck and hung his mallets from it. They dangled behind him as he climbed. Gaining the pier, he let the mallets drop, heavy things that dented the wood and stuck to it, pressed down by their weight. A moment later, as everyone watched, he hefted both up and straightened. He stood, surprised to find all eyes on him, holding the mallets out to either side as the muscles of his arms and chest and ridged compartments of his abdomen flexed. “What?”

  “I’ve got the plan,” Kartholomé said. He pulled his hand away from the oiled tip of his beard and pointed at Tunnel. “We follow him.”

  They did. Weapons drawn—bare-chested like Tunnel, open shirted like Clytus and Kartholomé, smiling with unaccountable good humor, like Geena—Dariel and his brigands marched down the pier and into the Lothan Aklun port city of Lithram. Dariel took the vanguard, unsure where his destination was. I’ll feel it, he thought. I’ll feel it when I’m close.

  He thought of Bashar and Cashen, wishing they were with him to help sniff out the place he intended to find. They would not have actually helped, however. The place he searched for was not to be found by scent. Part of him already knew his destination. It was that part of him that had proposed this, vague as it was, to the others. He had not even detailed what he hoped to accomplish here. He had just said that Nâ Gâmen was urging him to go to Lithram. There was something he needed to face there, something important.

  They met no one along the waterfront. In the distance several people went about their work, but none was near enough to notice the new arrivals. “Any idea where we’re headed?” Clytus asked.

  “We could ask that fellow,” Geena said, indicating a figure passing between two buildings without noticing them.

  Quietly, so the man would not actually hear him, Kartholomé said, “Hey, you know wh
ere to find the thing we’re looking for? Not sure what it is, but …”

  “Up there,” Dariel said, indicating a narrow structure, the roof of which was just visible rising above the nearer row buildings. “It’s over there.”

  Joking aside, nobody asked him how he knew that. They found a stairway between two of the larger buildings and ascended it, taking the steps a few at a time. Reaching the higher street, they stepped cautiously onto it. Tunnel pointed out that the architecture of the town was nothing like the Lothan Aklun estates he had seen on some of the barrier isles. Though childhood memories, the images were strong in his mind, as they were in Dariel’s. Here the smooth granite stones and the spires atop some buildings looked like the work of laborers, not sorcerers. They did not have long to ponder the differences.

  Kartholomé saw them first. He cursed.

  A hundred or so paces down the street, a contingent of six Ishtat dashed into view. Judging by their well-armed look of determination, they had been alerted to the group’s presence. They pulled up, spotting the intruders. They conferred for a moment. Swords drawn, they fanned out, evenly spaced, clearly disciplined.

  “We can handle them,” Clytus said to Dariel, drawing his sword. “They can’t be the best of the lot. Else they wouldn’t be here. They’d be with the invasion.”

  Kartholomé cursed again. Another group of Ishtat appeared on the far side of them, about the same distance away. The two groups converged, with Dariel’s group in the middle.

  “We’re not so good at sneaking, huh?” Tunnel asked. “Oh well …” He stepped toward the first, nearer contingent of soldiers. He paused. “Dariel, I see a passage. What do I do? Go around and over? Or through?”

  “Through it,” Dariel answered.

  Tunnel grinned. “That’s the way.” He walked at first, but as he came nearer the soldiers he fell into a jog, and then a run. His mallets came up. The careful array of soldiers burst like an explosion had just hit their center. Tunnel had to swing around and come back at them, pressing several up against a building wall. He went to work, mallets hissing savage arcs around him, smashing stone, knocking swords away, and then, when he got serious, smashing bones.