The Sacred Band a-3

by David Anthony Durham

  At her side, he looked through the volumes she found most interesting. Some of them were truly ancient, enough so that Rialus gingerly turned the brittle pages. He read accounts of battles lost to memory, preserved only here, in ink on parchment. In some ways it was no different from looking at old Acacian records, except that he knew the individuals named in these long-past events. Howlk was on the page, and Jafith with her famed attack on the Wrathic stronghold in Rath Batatt, and Devoth presiding over the terms of the Numreks’ exile.

  He read of events in Sabeer’s life that she knew only from the images and thoughts the words returned to her. She guided him to passages that mentioned her. Shivering and laughing that now she was cold, she had them take off their coats. She pulled her stool behind his, scooted up close behind him, and draped the coats over them like blankets. Her inner thighs wrapped snug around him. Leaning forward to point at things on pages, her breasts pressed against his back.

  “Not all the records are our own, though. Some of them, Rialus, were written by the Lothan Aklun. The most ancient ones. They gave them to us but would not translate them. At least, they did not offer and we did not ask.” She pulled another volume nearer, opened it, and ran her finger over the script. “Perhaps we once could read what they said. We might not have known then that we would forget. I can’t say, because I have forgotten. But, Rialus, part of our history is in these Lothan Aklun volumes. Perhaps important things. We can’t read them, but you can read their writing, can’t you? They were from your nation, I think. Would you translate them for us?”

  “Me?” Rialus peered more closely at the pages she had opened to. The letters were looping and antiquated, formal in a way that Acacian no longer was, but it was Acacian. He could read it.

  “Who better than you?” Sabeer slid one of her hands across Rialus’s thigh. He was aroused already, but the touch of her fingers sent his blood surging. “You know things about us that no other Acacian does. The writing is too complicated for the divine children to translate. It doesn’t seem right for them to read things about us that we can’t read ourselves. You understand how that could be undesirable. And if you find anything in there that speaks unfavorably about me… you’ll correct it. Hmmm? It would mean a lot to us if you did this-if you became our chronicler. It would make you an important man, Rialus. Once we have conquered your lands, this will make you a rich man, a man all Auldek will have to respect. Also, it will mean a lot to me.”

  Rialus tried to stand again.

  With her free hand, she turned his face toward hers. She covered his mouth with a kiss. Her lips were softer than he would have imagined. They were unbelievably lush. They were a world, and her tongue, when she slid it through his teeth, was too much for him to bear. She pulled away. “Tell me you’ll be our chronicler, Rialus. Tell me and you won’t regret it.”

  T hat night, he deserted the Auldek army for the second time.

  He realized he could as he lay still as death on his bed. He knew what he needed to do in order to face Mena again. Considering the placement of his station near the back of the encampment, there might not be another night as favorable as this one. He could not get the taste of Sabeer out of his mouth. I can still taste her. Stop it. Stop thinking of her. She is a bitch who would kill you in a heartbeat. He couldn’t stop thinking of her, though, and he hated that he wanted more of her. He would never be able to defy her to her face. He would never be her equal.

  So he fled.

  When he gauged the hour late enough, he climbed out from under his covers and carefully slipped into his many layers. He tried not to wake Fingel, but it would not matter if he did. She would say nothing. Do nothing. Care not at all about his activities. When he opened his door and felt the rush of frigid air on his face, he glanced back at her cot. Her back was turned to him, as it always had been.

  The night was dark, moonless. The wind came and went in savage gusts as he climbed down to the ground. Between the gusts were long, quiet lulls. It was frigidly cold. Despite the temperature, Rialus kept his hood thrown back. He wanted all his senses, and he had them. Every touch of his feet on the ground crunched absurdly loud. It was real earth, frozen just as completely as the ice had been. He kept stopping, thinking the entire camp must have heard him. In the silence he heard motion. Was it the sound of steps or just the play of the wind on the frozen earth?

  It doesn’t matter, he thought. Just go, fool!

  Crouched low, he ran through the shadows of several stations. He looped away from where he knew the rhinos were penned, and soon after he was at the far edge of the encampment, the end farthest away from the Acacians and least guarded. He stopped and looked back. No movement. The stations squatted on the ice, steaming. An antok bellowed. Something groaned on the far side of the camp. He stood long enough that he imagined he could hear Nawth’s laments floating across from the ice. That got him moving again.

  He had made it away from the camp and down into a dip that ran south. He shuffled fast now, his hood up. Perhaps that was why he did not hear the lioness approach. He just saw her. She crept down the slope in front of him with a feline grace that stopped Rialus in his tracks. The cat froze. She crouched. She moved forward, low to the ground, and then froze again.

  Rialus closed his eyes. The thought came to him almost coolly, Kill me fast, you bitch.

  When he heard the sound of movement behind him, his eyes snapped open. Another cat? He turned. A heavily furred person rushed toward him. The person raised an arm. Rialus ducked. The person collided with him, throwing something over him at the same time. Rialus saw what happened from his back, sprawled on the ground.

  The object-no bigger than a child’s ball-bounced once on the ground. It ignited as it sailed up toward the crouched cat. The lioness leaped to one side but not fast enough. The ball exploded in a wide spray of liquid flame. The cat ran writhing and screaming away, a living torch. For a few moments more, at least.

  The person grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up. He could not see the person’s face, hidden behind a visor, with a hood pulled snug around it. But he recognized the voice.

  “Let’s go,” Fingel said. She tugged him into motion. “Fast.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Melio sat on the bench, squashed between Clytus and Kartholome, with Geena just on the pilot’s other side. The bench was too short for all four of them, but it was where a wolf of a man dragging around two hounds had deposited them after the strange events of the clan gathering. Unwashed, bruised, scratched, smeared with dried blood around their wrists and ankles, with staring eyes and faces limp with perplexity, they looked like children rammed together by a callous tutor, being punished for a game that had gotten violently out of control.

  “I don’t understand anything,” Kartholome said. He had found a comb somewhere. He dragged it through his beard, causing it to frizz in a manner that he would not have liked at all if he’d had a mirror to see it.

  The others grunted.

  “Not a damn thing.” And then, indicating the curving metal slivers that a passing man wore as earrings, Kartholome asked, “How do you think I’d look with some of those? I feel less myself with only a single hook in. This lobe has healed up, you know?” He caressed the earlobe from which the bone earring had been ripped back when the league ship tried to run them down near the Outer Isles.

  Nobody answered him.

  “Is that really Dariel?” Melio asked, watching the prince from a distance.

  “Of course it is,” Geena said.

  As ever, Melio could not fathom where she got her certainty. The man they watched in heated discussion with a tight circle of strangely tattooed and accoutred foreigners spoke fluently in a guttural language that sounded like Numrek. His face was spotted like a running cat’s from the Talayan plains, and he seemed to have some sort of mark embossed on his forehead. He was one of them. At home amid the strangeness of them. Had Melio no known the man was Dariel-if he had not heard his voice and met his eyes-he would have ha
d no clue to his identity. And that barely helped, for that same man had harangued a chamber filled with the weirdest-looking people Melio had ever seen. Dariel had then been stabbed in the abdomen, a killing slice if ever there was one. Instead of dying, he had shouted out, ripped off his shirt, and displayed himself, bloody and yet unscathed. How could that person be Prince Dariel Akaran? If that was him, what had happened to him? Was he still, somehow, the man Melio had been sent to find?

  “How do you know?” Melio whispered.

  “His chest,” Geena said. “He’s got Dariel’s physique. And his backside.”

  Whatever this second, smaller meeting was, it ended abruptly. All the seated participants rose and bowed to one another. The man who might be Dariel spoke a few last words with a woman whose black hair jutted up from her head in featherlike plumes. As she turned away, Dariel seemed to remember the waiting Acacians. He cast about until he spotted them, then rushed over.

  Embracing them one by one, he probed their faces, as they did the same to his. Up close it was obvious that he was the prince. The open lips of his smile revealed the spacing of his teeth, a trait Melio never knew he would recognize as Dariel’s. And yet there it was. And there was the distinctive ridge of bone high on his nose. The prince named each of them reverently, as if their names held sacred power. “Melio. Clytus. Geena… By the Giver, what are you doing here? How are you here? I can’t imagine it. Tell me. Tell me!”

  For some reason, the others deferred to Melio to answer. “We came to find you,” he said. “To rescue you. Corinn sent me, and Clytus and Geena, and Kartholome.”

  Dariel grinned as he absorbed that. He said Kartholome’s name a few times, memorizing it, and then he backed a step away, taking them all in. “Well, you found me. Rescued me? Not so much. Would I be boasting if I said I rescued you?”

  Thinking about the short, brutal captivity they had suffered at the hands of the gray, tusked people-beatings, interrogations in broken Acacian, threats of their pending horrific deaths-Melio said, “Not at all. I think, really, that we came quite close to having a hard time of it.”

  Geena barked a laugh, which set the others off as well.

  Serious again a moment later, Dariel said, “Oh, there’s so much I want to ask you. And so much I want to tell you. I don’t know where to start. Also, everything is happening here now.”

  “I can see that,” Clytus said.

  “You’ve no idea what you’ve dropped into. I may have to ask you to go to war with me.”

  “A just fight?” Clytus asked.

  “Yes, absolutely.” Dariel glanced over his shoulder. A woman with facial markings like his own stood waiting for him, looking uneasy. “I have to go now. One of my friends here is hurt. I must see her. We’ll talk tonight. All of us. I want to know you, too, Kartholome. We’ll talk each other’s ears off as soon as we get a moment. I’ll leave you with Birke, to wash up and rest.” He indicated the wolf-faced youth. “He is a good friend to me. He’ll be one to you very soon.”

  A half step away, he paused. “Melio, would you come with me? We could speak a little as we walk.”

  Melio joined him. They walked quickly, part of a small group that cut across courtyards, passing from inside to out and back again, down a mazelike series of corridors that occasionally offered views over a stunning cityscape. As on Acacia, a contingent of guards shadowed Dariel. Not Marah but a motley, deadly serious crew, armed with a hodgepodge assortment of weapons. Judging by the sidelong glances they fixed on him, they did not yet trust Melio to be so near Dariel.

  What is going on here?

  “How are my sisters?” Dariel asked. “Tell me the last news you had of them.”

  Melio’s attempts at this got him virtually nowhere. So much had happened since Dariel had left the Known World with Sire Neen that each thing he mentioned was predicated on explaining something else. That, in turn, affected something else that he needed to loop away from, enough so that he was soon unsure he was doing anything other than tying them both in troubling knots.

  Stopping at the door into which the others entered, Dariel took his arm. “But they lived? When you left, they both lived?”

  “Yes. And-” Melio cut himself off. He could not tell Dariel what Corinn had said about Aliver. It might not have been true. It would be cruel to say it now, in the midst of whatever was happening here.

  The prince motioned to someone just inside the door that he would only be a moment more. “And what?”

  “I can’t say it now. Later, when we can truly talk.”

  Reluctantly, Dariel nodded. He stepped inside. Melio followed him. The entrance opened onto a large living room, filled with silent people. On a wide couch set against the far wall lay a woman, propped on her back, blankets pulled snug across her chest. Her shoulder bulged with bandages. What the injury was Melio could not tell, but that it was grave was obvious. The woman’s skin was a light blue. Her eyes were large in their sockets, her cheeks sunken. The woman with the running cat spots had already reached her. She clung to one of the woman’s hands, speaking close to her, kissing her face with a passion and sadness that made Melio feel he should look away.

  Dariel exhaled a long breath. “Oh, Skylene…” Just a whisper. He did not go to her until sometime later, when the spotted woman lifted her head and pointed him out. The blue woman found him and bent her lips up into a weak but sincere smile. On that invitation, Dariel went forward. He kneeled by the spotted woman at the side of the bed and took one of Skylene’s hands. He touched her forehead with his own and they spoke close, too quietly for Melio to hear.

  Watching them, Melio realized he had forgotten all about doubting this man’s identity. He was Dariel Akaran. Somehow, he had found a new family in Ushen Brae, a new conflict that he was at the center of. He had a sense of purpose that positively glowed as if a flame burned inside him. Melio did not yet understand what was going on here, but it felt perfectly right that he had come. Mena would want him here. She would want him fighting beside Dariel, shoulder to shoulder with the same guards that, for the moment, looked at him with suspicion.

  I’m with him, Mena. I found him. Now I’ll just fight this war with him-whatever that entails-and then I’ll bring him home.

  T hat night, while Mor and Tam went to another meeting of the clan leaders, the others talked well into the dead hours. There was so much to tell. It proved impossible to convey any of it in perfect order. Instead, they made a stew together. With Dariel and his friends Anira and Birke and Tunnel on one side of the pot, and the new arrivals ringed around the other, they all tossed in what they could about the situation in the Known World as they knew it, about their voyages across the Gray Slopes, about Dariel’s betrayal by Sire Neen, the extermination of the Lothan Aklun, the bloodbath that was the prince’s first meeting with the Auldek, the confusion in this city, Avina…

  It went on and on. When Melio thought the time was right, he offered the tale he’d heard of Aliver’s resurrection and of Corinn’s confirmation to him that it was true. He just told it plainly, worrying that he was stirring hope for something that sounded too fantastic to be true. Dariel sat with it in silence for a long time, then looked up. “Is she so powerful as that?”

  Melio had mentioned the defeat of the Numrek in Teh already. Now he described how it was accomplished. After he had, the others sat through another long silence.

  Dariel eventually shook his head. “Not even a year away and one sister’s the most powerful sorcerer since Tinhadin, the other is facing the worst invasion in history, and my brother… he’s defeated death.”

  “And you-the Rhuin Fa,” Tunnel said. “Strange family you have.”

  Later, visions of the one Dariel called the Sky Watcher, Na Gamen, led Melio into sleep. Against his will he followed the slim man around his mountaintop aerie. He could not help thinking of him with avian features, some blending of him and the injured woman Skylene, perhaps. His version of Na Gamen showed him the way to sleep, walking, explaining to him
the unimaginable things that Dariel had just tried to explain.

  W hen Melio woke it was to birds as well. Yellow finches flew through the room in a rush. His eyes fluttered open as they skimmed the ceiling above him, darting away down one of the corridors. It’s funny, he thought. In Avina I can never tell whether I’m inside or out. The birds can’t either.

  Geena lay on the mat beside him, her sleeping warmth curled toward him. He sat up. Around him the others slumbered where they had passed out, on mats and wrapped in light blankets, all of them near the fire pit carved out of the stone floor. The warmth of it had somehow radiated through the stones themselves, fighting back the mild chill of the night.

  Dariel sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, watching him. “It’s okay,” Dariel said when Melio reflectively scooted away from Geena. “I know how she is. She already told me you did nothing to dishonor my sister.”

  “I never would,” Melio said. “I want nothing more than to get back to her alive. We have a child to make, Dariel. She promised me. I want to hold her to it.”

  “I hope you do. In any event, I’m no one to judge.” Dariel poked the coals in the fire, atop which a kettle hung from a thin, delicately constructed framework. “I don’t suppose you caught all of what we argued about at the meeting?”

  “None of it,” Melio said. He rose stiffly and moved closer. One of the hounds pressed against Dariel’s hip sniffed in his direction. The other simply stretched. “The lot of you spoke Auldek.”

  “Well, let’s just say I’ll have some explaining to do when I get back.” He tossed his poking stick into the fire. “You’ll know what I mean soon enough.”

  Melio already had some idea. He had noticed the way Dariel and Anira tended to stay near each other, how she spoke to him in touches on the wrist and back. “When you get back… When will that be? I get the feeling you don’t plan to leave until you’ve finished what you’ve started here.” He let his eyes drift around the sleeping forms. “I like these people already. Birke. Tunnel. What kind of name is Tunnel?”