She stretched out her hand. He grasped it without a second thought, content to feel the strength and gentleness of her grip. Here was another thing. They had not spoken of their intimacy beside the pool, but it was there between them. He was sure it would happen again, and he wanted it to. It felt right. He did not think too often of Wren, as he feared he might. He promised himself he would later, but really he felt no shame in what he had done with Anira. That had to mean something.
They joined the others on the grassy slope of a hill that tumbled down toward a horizon-wide lake. They all watched as he and Anira approached. They must know, Dariel thought. He could not tell if it mattered. By Birké’s smile and Tam’s indifferent expression and Mór’s impatience he surmised that it did not. Something about this disappointed him. Mór, at least, should have shown some emotion. Jealousy was too much to hope for. He would have settled for derision. It would only have been fair, considering the effort it took for him to turn his thoughts from her. And that made no sense either. He had done nothing with her. Never would. Why did his thoughts about Mór feel like betrayal of Wren while his actual intimacy with Anira did not? He would never understand matters of his heart. Best to stop trying.
Looking at the vista beyond them, he said, “I can see where the name came from.”
The Sky Isle appeared to hover above the earth. Its peak was the smooth, pointed cone of a volcano. Partway down, its slopes disappeared into a narrow circlet of clouds. Beneath them ran a hazy band, colorless and vague above the sparkling green waters of the lake. It looked as if they would be able to sail across the waters and pass beneath the mountain, gazing up into the clouds upon which it floated.
The hike down took an hour. As they dropped out of the heights Dariel lost sight of the lake. They picked up a path and wound through a forest of slim, silver-skinned trees. Their bark came away in delicate peels that crunched underfoot. The leaves of the trees formed triangular points, tiny kites that quivered when the breeze brushed their boughs. They had a touch of red mixed with the green. Dariel could not tell if this was their regular coloring, or if it was a sign of the winter season. It should be winter, but this land gave so little sign of it.
Behind them came a commotion of limbs snapping. Dariel spun to see the tree crowns near one side of the path behind them swaying and trembling. Something large pushed through them and stepped out onto the path with a sickening, lumbering grace. A kwedeir. A man stood attached to its back, high behind its wolfish head.
Bashar and Cashen bristled and growled. Dariel clawed for the dagger strapped to his leg, but before he got it loosened Mór had raised an arm in greeting. She called something to the rider in Auldek and snapped at Birké. Birké squatted between Bashar and Cashen, pulling them to his side and soothing them. The mount came forward. It walked on its wing limbs, all angles and joints, flaps of skin like oil-black leather. The rider answered, and then found Dariel with his eyes. Stared.
No more was said. Birké nudged Dariel back into motion by handing him Cashen to carry. He hefted Bashar himself. The kwedeir and rider followed them the rest of the way. Dariel would have looked back more if the hounds had not done so for him. Between them they passed their growling displeasure back and forth.
A little farther on they passed guards posted on either side of the path. Before long they had an escort flanking them: two older men with short swords sheathed at the thigh; a youth who walked with a limp; a tall, rangy woman with a bow and arrow pinched between the fingers of one hand.
A group of a dozen old men and women awaited them on the shore. Behind them a pier crooked out into the lake, a barge secured to it, motionless on the clear, mirrorlike water. In the distance the volcanic peak of the Sky Isle thrust up into view again, still growing from an island of cloud. The air was moist with the smell of the lake. It was strangely saltless. It’s not the sea, Dariel thought.
He glanced at Mór. She looked breathless with relief and joy. For a moment, her guise of control and detachment fell from her face. By following her gaze, Dariel picked out Yoen. That was who the look was for, the look of a daughter seeing a father. Yoen stood at the center of the elders. A short, frail-looking man, he favored one leg over the other, leaning on a cane of carved wood. His hair was disheveled, unruly like a child’s that had been tousled. His skin was Acacian brown, a complexion just like Dariel’s. He smiled, briefly, at Mór.
They stopped in front of the waiting elders. For a moment no one spoke. Dariel remembered the squirming burden in his arms. He set Cashen down. The pup stood, unsure of the moment’s protocol.
The woman to one side of Yoen wore a circlet woven of leaves. It looked like it could be dismantled by a light breeze. Her features had more solidity, and her voice was Talayan. Dariel could tell from the timbre of it, even though she first spoke Auldek. Mór answered her, bowing her head as she did so. The two spoke for a moment, and then the woman turned toward him.
“Are you the one they call Dariel Akaran?” she asked, speaking Acacian.
“I am.”
“Did you speak with Nâ Gâmen, the Watcher of the Sky Mount?”
“Yes.”
The man whom Dariel already thought of as Yoen asked, “Did he tell you to come here?”
“Yes.” Dariel looked at him, realizing that he wore no signs of belonging, no tattoo or piercing or any other enhancement.
“What did he tell you of the circle?”
“That it could be closed,” Dariel said.
“It can be, though the way is hard.” The man lifted his left arm, crooked in an invitation to an embrace. “I am Yoen. Come to me.”
Dariel stepped forward. He raised his arms, thinking that he would set them lightly on the man’s thin shoulders so as not to harm him. He was completely unprepared for what happened next.
It was not that the old man was fast, but just that the action did not make sense until it was completed. Yoen’s lowered hand snatched the hilt of Dariel’s dagger. He slipped the blade free from the sheath and thrust it upward into Dariel’s gut with a force that should not have been possible from such a frail-looking arm. The impact doubled Dariel over on top of Yoen. The pain did not stop. It stayed, the moment of impact sustained and unrelenting. It was so great that the burning sensation on his forehead barely registered.
When Yoen pulled back, Dariel looked down at the shaft of the dagger, the blade deep in his abdomen. “I am sorry,” the old man said. “This had to be done. You had to be killed, so that …”
That was all Dariel heard before he toppled to the ground.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Have a drink, brother,” Sire Grau said, motioning toward the servant entering with a tray of tall, thin glasses. Another servant set down a display of cheese parcels wrapped in edible leaves. A third hovered nearby, an intricate mist pipe in his hands. “Or a pipe, if you wish it.”
“No, thank you.” Dagon waved the servant away. He lowered himself to the floor cushions in Grau’s plush quarters. Why a man as elderly as Grau would choose to sit on the floor baffled Dagon, but he sighed and patted the pillow beside him as if he liked nothing more than to lie about in the middle of the day.
“You really should have a drink,” Grau said. He selected a glass from the tray and handed it to Dagon.
“If you insist,” Dagon said.
“I do,” the older man said. His glossed lips smiled, though the expression was limited to the mouth. His cheeks and eyes and forehead did nothing in support. He waved the servant away, having not taken anything for himself.
Dagon held his frown hidden deep below the surface of his face. He sipped, smiled, and made an audible indication of pleasure. He was certain that Grau knew he did not like liqueurs, especially pungent ones redolent of fennel, as this one was. At least, he thought he knew. Perhaps there was nothing sinister in it. Grau was past his hundredth year. He could be forgiven for misplacing specific likes and dislikes of the myriad leaguemen he communed with.
T
hough the room was deeply shadowed, one wall featured a long balcony. From his reclined position, Dagon could see only a featureless swath of sky. If he stood on the balcony, he knew, he would take in one of the grander views of the teeming city of Alecia. To the right the Akaran palace sprouted from a hillock. A rambling estate with large gardens, it went unused by the royal family. To the left he would have seen the white stone estates of the richer nobles, with those of Agnate families flying their lineage’s crest. Just beyond them the green dome of the senate building itself. Straight out from the balcony the view stretched over the city proper. Business and trading districts, markets, residential quarters, areas rich and poor, all thronging with their own heartbeats.
Dagon had sometimes imagined stripping himself of his league regalia and wandering into the city’s alleys and lanes. What world would he discover there? How different from the existence he had always known and worked so hard to maintain? He even wondered, on occasion, if he might lose himself within the anonymity of the urban vastness and take on a new identity. The thought never lasted long. With the distinctive cone shape of his head everyone would know him for what he was. He was Sire Dagon of the league; why would he ever wish to be anyone else?
“I wanted to discuss a few things with you,” the senior leagueman said. “Did you find our council meeting as unsatisfactory as I did?”
Having no idea just how unsatisfactory Grau had found it, Dagon dipped his head, something that was balanced between a nod and a shake. Better not to offer anything more committing just yet.
“Most frustrating,” Grau went on. “We’re too spread apart. With Faleen and Lethel in the Other Lands and half the council on the Outer Isles … Seems that some of us believe the center of the world has shifted west. No longer Alecia. It’s those islands now. You and I, Dagon, are on the margins, it seems. Our so-called official council. Most unsatisfactory. Hardly a trust of mighty thinkers. Not enough of us to truly meld. Didn’t you find it so?”
He had very much found it so. The emergency council had been called at his urging. After witnessing the queen’s growing power he had needed to meld his mind with his fellow leaguemen. In so many ways that was the basis of their success over the generations. One of the first things they were taught as children was to blend their minds, to take solace in one another, to share fears and doubts and ambitions and lusts and everything else that ordinary people had to handle while locked inside the solitude of their skulls. As a child, Dagon had found the melding more soothing than anything else in life. The fact that it had always been augmented by copious quantities of highgrade mist helped, but there was something comforting about sharing with others.
That had not happened during this last council. They had gathered in the chamber in Alecia. It was the largest of their council halls, rank upon rank of reclining chairs rising from the center. It could hold a couple hundred leaguemen, but this time only twenty-six attended. Most of these were not even senior enough to sit within the first three circles. Their thoughts reached Dagon muffled by the distance between them. Never before had he noticed how often others held opposing thoughts on the same issue, and never before had he noticed the noise of minds trying to hide the very things they were there to share. Perhaps it was the particular individuals involved. He did not think so, though.
He had never noticed it before precisely because a chamber filled with minds made it easier to hide. To join. To share. To remain a single fish within a shoal of similar fish. Without the great collective motion and comfort it brought, Dagon had felt more dissonance than he wished to coming from his brothers. They were more separate individuals than he had acknowledged. The disquiet of the experience lingered with him. As, apparently, it lingered with Grau.
“As you say,” Dagon said, “there were not enough of us in attendance.”
“We grew no clearer on how to proceed. It’s the issues we face as well. Mustn’t forget that. Let us discuss it now, just you and me.”
Grau picked up a cheese parcel pinched between the curved talons that were his long, painted fingernails. “When last we met in a proper council, it had seemed likely the Auldek would inflict great damage on the Akarans. Either side might win; both would suffer. At this last attempt at a council you expressed doubts about this.”
“A few weeks ago I would have said the outcome was a toss of the bones, going either way as chance blesses. Now … I fear Corinn has made herself a new Tinhadin.”
“That old bastard,” Grau said. “The worst of the lot.”
“And she is not alone,” Dagon continued. “Aliver is beside her. I do not think his mind is entirely his own, but if Corinn has shaped it—”
“He may be worse than the old idealist he had been.”
Dagon pressed the sour truth of this between his lips. “She’s powerful. Raising the dead and making dragons. Don’t forget that she did destroy the Numrek at … What was that place called in Teh? The Thumb. I find it unsettling that there are almost no rumors of discontent among the populace. What with Barad the Lesser singing her praises and the vintage putting a shiny new gleam on the entire world, there are no voices fomenting against her. None that I’ve heard of recently, at least.”
“That vintage was our own fault.”
Shrugging, Dagon said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time. She even gets credit for ending the quota trade, as if she had any choice in the matter.”
“You think she could defeat the Auldek.”
“I fear that’s a possibility.”
Grau seemed to have something else to say on this matter, but instead he swallowed it along with a cheese parcel. “Think about our situation. Without the Lothan Aklun for us to trade with … without an enemy they fear like the Auldek … how long before the queen aims her ire at us? Sire El may think his army will be a match for her, but do we really want to become just another petty power, settling matters with the sword and spear? I find that distasteful and far too uncertain. Our success has never come from martial prowess; it never truly will. I once thought we could float through any change. I am no longer sure of that.”
“Nor am I.”
“We could try to remove Corinn. We’ve done such things in the past. I myself helped shorten Gridulan’s life. That old bastard. I’ve come to feel we must kill her. And her brother as well.” Grau made an expression as if he had burped and found the taste unpleasant. For the first time since they had begun, Grau’s eyes fixed on Dagon’s. “We are in agreement on that?”
There was something about the directness of Grau’s eyes that unnerved Dagon. “Yes,” he said, “we are in agreement.”
Grau held him pinned to his yellowish eyes for a little longer, then relaxed again. He puckered his lips and made a kissing sound. Dagon might have been unnerved yet again, had not the pipe-holding servant peeled away from the wall in answer. He brought the delicate instrument to his master. He lit it by snapping the flame strips glued to his thumb and forefinger. It took him several tries to get the resulting tiny burst of flame to catch the threads in the bowl. Once they did, the young man darted away. He returned a moment later and lit a second pipe for Dagon, who did not refuse this time.
Grau held the tubing of the mouthpiece and smelled the pungent scent a moment. The threads were potent, pure, as the rich aroma of them attested to. “Dagon, I wish to send you back to Acacia with a charge, one outside the unsatisfactory proceedings of the last council. Council Speaker Sire Faleen should be here, but he isn’t. Sire El should be here, but he isn’t. Many others should be here, but they aren’t. It falls to us to take action when the council cannot. Are you prepared to do that?” Before Dagon could answer, Grau added, “Soon I will step down from all council matters. I am ready for Rapture.”
Of course you are, Dagon thought. It made perfect sense, and it perplexed him that he had not anticipated it. Grau was old. His body no longer took the physical pleasure in living that it once had. Why wouldn’t he be ready to join his predecessors in perpetual bliss? That was wh
at awaited every leagueman who lived long enough—and who earned enough for the league over that long life. Rapture. It was the Tunishnevre in reverse. Instead of undead, ageless suffering, Rapture offered continuous life, unending bliss through a process that drained one’s body of blood, replacing it, very gradually, with the purest distillation of mist. It was a process that took the better part of a long life to prepare, and then several years of slow transition. Dagon had been tithing toward his own Rapture for decades, but it was still a faraway goal. Such a gift was incredibly expensive. Grau must have finally paid his dues.
“You have served many years,” Dagon said, realizing he had not responded yet.
“When I am gone, I would like to believe Sire Faleen won’t hold the reins of power. He may be council speaker, but I’d be remiss if I left it up to him to appoint his successor. I want a bold man in the position, one who will keep the league powerful forever. What use is going to Rapture if it all comes crashing down in a few years?”
Dagon nodded.
“I see several prospects for this role. I’m sure you know those I mean.”
Of course he did. Bold—or at least ambitious—leaguemen were as numerous as pimples, and as hard to scrub away. Sire Nathos with his vintage. Sire El creating his Ishtat army. Even the upstart Sire Lethel had the scent of blood in his nose. Dagon had damned them all more than once in moments of ill temper, but he said, “There are none like you, but many worthy men who aspire to be.”
“Well … there are one or two individuals that I would rather not see ascend. Lethel, if you must know.”
Dagon almost spilled his drink. Had Grau just—just … spoken ill of another leagueman?
“I am going to take you into my confidence. The next council speaker could well be you, Dagon. Why not? You’ve served us right from within the wolves’ den all these years. You’ve done a great deal more than you’ve received credit for, haven’t you?”
The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy Page 24