The Sacred Band a-3

by David Anthony Durham

  “Sire?” The secretary’s voice was barely audible.

  Dagon yanked around. How much time had passed? Measuring by the clutter on the floor it could have been hours. “Are they here? All gathered?”

  “No,” the man said. He stood with one foot out of the room, seeming to slide farther out as he spoke. “They are all gone. Sire Grau and Sire Peneth. Sire Flann. All their attendants.”

  “Gone?” Dagon let his arms droop. “Gone how?”

  “They sail even as we speak, through the channel the Ishtat kept open. I’m sorry, Sire, but I could not reach them. The Ishtat withdrew. The channel closed.”

  A folder slipped from Dagon’s hand. “All of them are gone?”

  “All of them,” the secretary said. And then, stepping a little closer, “We’re alone. Trapped.”

  Normally Dagon would have slapped the man for being overdramatic. Instead, he cast around, found his simmering pipe, and sucked on it like a pup on his mother’s tit.

  T he dark hours of the middle of the night found Dagon still in the library, having picked himself up from the floor, and again rummaging through what volumes had not already been strewn across the stones. When he found the book it was obvious he could have done so all along, had his mind been calm enough to organize a more orderly search. It stood on a shelf among some of the oldest books. Jeflen the Red’s account of the Wars of Distribution. That was what he had been looking for, even if he had not been clearheaded enough to know it.

  Dagon tipped it down. He placed it in the stand on a round table, the one best situated beneath the reading lamps, and he stared at the cover. Jeflen had been Tinhadin’s official chronicler. As such, his account of things was suspect, but it was the most complete single volume of the times that Dagon knew of. And it was also vivid. Dagon remembered that now. He felt it in the pit of his stomach and in his fingers, which trembled despite the mist’s sedative effects. He got up, flapped across to the other table, and worshipped at the pipe until he killed it.

  Opening well into Jeflen’s account and flipping forward, Dagon skimmed the pages that documented the wars themselves. His eyes stuck on descriptions of battle, on numerical equations that measured the massive death tolls of the time. It described scenes of incredible carnage, in numbers that made the Santoth’s destruction of the Meins seem a minor skirmish in comparison. It was horrible, made more stunning because Dagon had images of his own to compare them to. That ribbon of red, torn flesh. It had taken him a long time to understand what he had seen. And when he had, he had vomited all down his front. This book, though, told of such things on a massive scale. Entire wars fought that way, between all-powerful sorcerers and armies that could do nothing but march forward to their ghastly deaths. The Santoth had never been defeated by any army of men. Never even close. So there was that.

  Moving forward, he read of the growing friction between the king and his sorcerer knights. They each of them were ambitious, greedy men, ravenous for greater portions of the world. Were they not gods walking the earth? Did not the very words from their mouths destroy or create? According to Jeflen, Tinhadin came to believe the Santoth would soon turn against him. Against each other as well, but first against him, as he sat as king over them all. It was in reading his father’s journals for guidance on how to handle them that he discovered something his father had not intended him to discover. It was there in the journal, hinted at, suggested, promised. He came to believe that he and the Santoth had learned only a portion of the Giver’s tongue. The first text he acquired from the Dwellers was incomplete. It was only much later, after his father died and he began to piece together clues from his journal, that he realized there was an even more complete volume.

  The Song of Elenet.

  It was not, as Dagon had dimly remembered, an old epic poem. It was not a lament or a dirge or a eulogy. It was the first thief-sorcerer’s manual for speaking the language of a god. Dagon had known that, come to think of it. He just had not credited it. It had never mattered. He doubted it ever existed. Doubted such a language ever existed, or Elenet to overhear it. He had doubted, really, that there had ever been a Giver.

  “You believe now, don’t you?” he asked himself.

  Even when the Santoth proved themselves real on the Teh plains he had not truly had to face the ramifications of their existence. And when Corinn had begun to work sorcery, Dagon had thought it a nuisance peculiar to her alone. If she was removed, the nuisance would be as well. How foolish that seemed now.

  He read on.

  Tinhadin had gone in search of The Song of Elenet. Jelfen wrote at length about the epic journey Tinhadin had undergone to find it, but Dagon skipped that. What mattered was that Tinhadin had found it, studied it, and returned as a more powerful sorcerer than all the Santoth combined. The song lived in him. It coursed through him. He breathed it and sweated it. He dreamed in the language of creation and sometimes woke to find the world changed.

  When Tinhadin returned to Acacia-for his search had taken him far away-his sorcerers came against him. He threw them back. He would have destroyed them, but a moment of compassion stayed him. They had been his companions from youth. Like brothers to him. Soldiers beside him for so many years. He hated their betrayal, but he did not want to sing them out of existence, as he could have. Instead, he banished them to the Far South.

  The Santoth went, for they could not disobey their master. They could not stand against him, not when he was so much more a god than they. The sorcerers vented their rage on the land and up into the skies and upon any who got in their way as they moved south.

  Only one nation massed to stand against them. A race of centaurs from the far south of Talay, the Anniben Dur Anniben. These horsemen had for eons roamed rich southern grasslands that teemed with life. They were among the Giver’s first creations, and they had always scorned humans, the spawn of the Betrayer, as they named Edifus. They had stayed outside the affairs of the Known World, and Tinhadin had not risked battle with them before. In his act of banishment, though, he sent his sorcerers against them.

  Behind Burith-ben they ranked to face the raging sorcerers. They stood side by side in one great herd and said the Santoth could not pass into their lands. The Santoth destroyed them with fire, with worms that dropped from the sky and rolled across the plains, flattening the grasses and leaving them charred, with diseases that blistered their skin and split their hooves and ignited their hides and-

  Dagon stopped reading. The words burned his eyes. It was all as horrible as he had feared. Before, if he had read descriptions like this, he would have thought them the fancies of imaginative, if twisted, minds. Now, he read them as truths that might as well have been written in the paving cement the queen had recently had spread across the streets of the lower town. The Santoth were loose in the world again, soon to have the book that would grant them even greater power. They would each of them be as strong as Tinhadin ever was, and much more twisted. How would they punish the world then? How long before they turned one against the other?

  “They’ll destroy us all,” Dagon said. Only Corinn could possibly fight their sorcery, but she… Regardless of what had happened to her in the Carmelia, the clock of her life was winding down, and she didn’t know it. If she didn’t act quickly… “They’ll destroy us all,” he said again. Dagon heard Grau’s voice: What use is going to Rapture if it all comes crashing down in a few years? He tried to laugh, but he only managed to blow air through his nose. “It is the end of Rapture.”

  He called for his secretary. The man stepped into the room before the sound of his voice had faded. He glanced around for a moment, looking as aghast at the state of the place, and then found Dagon with his eyes. “Sire?”

  “I will visit the palace,” he said. “Send a messenger to alert them. Prepare an escort. Ishtat to go as far as the royal grounds. Do it just now. I must see… no, not the queen. I shouldn’t want to see her. Or tell her what I have to. Make it the… king. Aliver, I mean. I’ll tell him. Arrange
it.”

  The secretary nodded but did not set to it. He worked his nervousness with fingers, curling them over each other like spider legs. “You will have to change, Sire. Your clothing…”

  Dagon looked down. “Yes, I’m filthy. This is not my blood. I don’t know if it is blood. It’s filth. It’s…”

  “We’ll run a bath,” the man said. “I’ll get fresh clothes. We’ll burn those. Do not concern yourself with them.” He darted away.

  Into the silence after his departure, Dagon said, “He thinks you’re mad, you fool.”

  He ran his fingers over the crackly, yellowed pages of Jeflen’s account. He flipped the pages absently, lost not in thought but in the absence of it. So much to think through, and yet he felt empty. His gaze drifted down to the pages of their own account. His eyes began to move across the words there with an interest not really matched by the mind seeing through them. Monsters. The words described monsters. Wolves, leviathans, a great worm at the black bottom of the ocean…

  He tore his eyes away.

  What am I thinking? I can’t go to the queen and tell her she’s dead on her feet. That would be madness. Don’t make yourself a fool, Dagon.

  He called his secretary back and retracted the message to the palace. Fortunately, it had not yet been sent. “Bring me parchment and a pen. Oh, and the fading ink. I’ll write a note. Much better idea. And then alert all the staff-everyone essential-that we are leaving.”

  “Leaving, Sire?”

  “Yes. We will take everything we can and… go.”

  “For how long, Sire?”

  “Assume that we will not be returning at all.” End of Book Two

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Mena arrived back at Mein Tahalian partially snow-blind, with the tips of her fingers and toes frozen twigs, yellow patches on her nose and cheeks. Despite the protests of Perrin and the other officers, she did not go to the physician. She slept right there in the relative warmth of the stables, curled against Elya’s exhausted body. Mena let attendants pull off her boots and gloves, and then ordered them to step back. When her hands and feet were free, she pressed them up against her mount’s plumage. She slept like that, the two of them dead to the world and nearly dead outright. It was the best thing she could have done.

  When she awoke hours later, she lay for a time without moving, knowing that any motion would stir the interest of the people watching over her. She could tell that life had tingled back into her limbs and facial skin, stimulated by that amazing healing power that Elya’s feathers had. She was whole again. She would still be able to grip a sword, to run into battle. Though she very much wished that she could roll over and return to sleep, she knew she could not. Images of mornings she had lain wrapped in her sheets in the palace rose up to haunt her, as a girl, as a woman, with the heat of Melio’s body just a finger’s breadth away. Days spent stretched naked on her pallet in Vumu, or times she had watched the morning chase the stars from a bedroll in Talay. She hated that those moments were forever in the past. They taunted. They teased her. They would not let her go, but she could not have them back, either. They were moments of peace that seemed impossible luxuries now. Had life ever been so carefree? She did not trust that those moments had ever been as she imagined, but she wanted them so badly for those first few waking moments that she bled tears as her body healed.

  And then she rose and called her officers for a briefing in which she explained what she had seen and done instead of flying to the coronation. After that, she sent several letters via messenger bird to Acacia, detailing everything she had learned from her meeting with the Auldek and everything she now planned. She wrote things, in fact, that she had not disclosed to her own captains. She asked-more openly than she ever had, more like a younger sister than ever before-for any guidance Corinn could offer.

  That done, she kept moving. She did all the things she had to as she waited for a response, all the tasks and problems and duties that kept her from being too much with herself. She mustered the troops. She sent horsemen riding for all the remote, northern settlements they could safely reach, warning that war was upon them. They should evacuate for the south, if possible, or come to see out the winter in Tahalian, if they could not. With her officers, she went over battle plans and studied charts and calculated the probable toll in human lives. It was not an arithmetic she could live with, though she betrayed no sign of it. Secretly, she met alone with Haleeven and the Scav Kant, talking late into the night.

  The work of each day kept her busy. Every minute she hoped to hear back from Corinn. From Aliver, for that matter! Though she could not yet really believe he lived. Part of her clung to a hope that Corinn would find some way to fix it all, a solution only her cunning mind could manage, something that would save the troops Mena had grown to love. She slept little, and when she did she often woke in the pitch-black of the Meinish night, her mind a cacophony of concerns, problems, calculations, doubts. On occasion, she started awake in the hope that Corinn was there in the room with her, or a dream-travel version of her moving in Perrin’s body. But that did not happen. Nothing came back from the south. Nothing at all.

  Behind it all, she chastised herself for not having done better when she spoke to the Auldek. She should have found a way to make peace with them. Instead, she had let anxious bravado snap her tongue, puff out her chest like some adolescent boy’s. Because of it, they would have war. Because of it, many would die. That had always been the purpose of her mission-not so much to defeat the Auldek but to blunt their attack so that a second army led by the queen could finish them. What sort of plan was that? A desperate one. A cruel one. One with a cold, calculating efficiency that she did her best to sharpen, even while she did not, secretly, accept it as the only way.

  At the last meeting she was to have with her officers before some of them went into the field, she asked them to attend her after all the other business had been concluded. The troops were again gathering inside the Calathrock, to hear their orders as a group one last time within that chamber.

  “Before you go to them,” she said, “I have two things to ask of you. I’m sure you have all thought much about why we were sent here. We’ve had even more time since coming here to Tahalian, but things will unfold quickly from now on. I think it best that we are honest about it. We are not marching to defeat the Auldek. I’ve seen them. We can’t do that, not with the troops we have. They control the air, so we cannot surprise them or flank them or any such thing. When we fight them, it will be in the open, our cunning against their might.”

  Bledas, the Marah captain, began to tout the training they had put in recently.

  Mena quieted him just by touching him with her eyes. “All that aside, Bledas, we don’t march to defeat them. I need us all to acknowledge this. Our task is to die fighting them. To die. To kill as many of them as possible, and to hurt and delay them as much as we can, to fall so that our bodies trip their feet and slow them. That way, they will enter the Known World battered and frozen, weakened. It will then fall upon the next army to destroy them. If we do our work, they’ll be able to, but none of us should think that we will see that victory. I want to ask two things of you. First, I ask you to decide today that you are going to die in this fight. I need each of you to do that. If you cannot, you may leave my service.”

  Letting this sit with them, she glanced around the room at each man’s face, offering him the opportunity to respond. Talkative Edell said nothing. Bledas worked his finger into a crack in the old wooden table. Perceven’s Senivalian mouth, narrow and full, pursed, accentuating the two mountain peaks of his upper lip. Mena read thought behind the gesture. Kissing life good-bye. That’s what he was doing. Haleeven was a comfort to look upon. His face was solid, untroubled, as if he welcomed this conversation and thought it right. Perrin watched her with his lover’s eyes. Despite herself, she had often wondered if Melio would mind if she sought solace in the soldier’s arms. She would not do it, but at times she wished to.

&
nbsp; “All right,” Mena said. “Now the second thing. I want you to go before me to your troops. Tell them what I have just told you. Make them the same offer.”

  “Princess Mena!” Edell started. “We can’t offer them-”

  “I have to,” Mena said. “I won’t order soldiers to die. I’ll lead them to it, but not command them. I’ve thought about this a long time, Edell. You will not change my mind. I will command an army only of willing soldiers. That’s what I want for Acacia after this war. If we are to win it, we must start now. So, that’s all. If you wish to leave my service, do so now. If not, go and speak to your soldiers.”

  She said this with all the calm resolution she could muster, and then she stood as the men filed out. She wondered that she could manage to show so little emotion on her face, and then she realized it was because she felt so little emotion. She was just saying what was true. What she believed, and had to say and to do.

  A nd yet an hour later she could not pretend, as she approached the doors behind which the entire army was gathered in the Calathrock, that her insides weren’t knotted and her palms sweaty and her jaw muscles sore from being locked in a clench she was not even aware of. She was supposed to be returning with a blessing from Aliver reborn. Instead she had returned with a choice of life or death. What would she do if each and every one of them took her up on her offer to leave? She had no plan for that. No speech to change their minds. No heart to keep them against their will.

  If it comes to that, she thought, the Auldek will truly witness a sight to laugh at, a lone princess with a sword, come to vanquish the lot of them all by herself.

  A soldier pulled the door open for her. She stepped into the underground chamber and knew that she never had anything to fear. Not with soldiers like hers. Not with free hearts like theirs. Men who knew why they fought and did so out of their own convictions. That, she thought, is what Acacia should be. It was what it could be, and it was the reason she would not be standing all by herself before the Auldek. Not by a long shot.