The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy

by David Anthony Durham

  Mena screamed Elya’s name, both in her mind and with all her voice. She writhed 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.

  A second roar hit Mena’s back, this one different from the first, higher and more shrill.

  Mena wanted to turn, but she also feared to. She ran after the fleeing Auldek as if blasted forward by a third roar, a low bass note that made the ground tremble.

  The Auldek stumbled once. Again, that moment was all Mena needed. She was Maeben now, dropping from the sky, nothing but a screech of mindless rage. At full sprint, she brought the King’s Trust up horizontally, her shoulder cocked high. She slammed her foot down on the Auldek’s heel. As his step hitched, she dove forward, driving the sword with all her weight and speed. The point of the blade slipped in at the base of the Auldek’s skull, cut through, and jutted through his face. Mena nearly ran up the man’s back. She kicked off him, yanking the cutting edge up as she did so. His head split in two.

  She did not pause to watch him fall. She turned in the air and landed, ready to run back toward Elya. Only then did she see what had so frightened the Auldek.

  The sky was alive with dragons.

  A brown one hurtled toward the approaching fréketes. The other—nearly as blue as the sky behind it—swept around to attack them from the other side. The brown one roared first, and then the blue one did the same.

  All the fréketes heard them. They pulled up, hesitating, as their eyes took in the shapes approaching them. Mena saw the dragons cut into the airborne fréketes, scattering them. That was all she saw, for now there was a third dragon. This one became a searing black arrow that shot straight toward Elya and the frékete that held her limp body. The creature—larger than any frékete, dwarfing Elya, with a massive, big-jawed head that was so crimson it could have been on fire—rode in on that rumbling wave of sound, the greatest of the roars.

  The frékete holding Elya tossed her down and leaped into flight. The dragon met the frékete that way. At the last moment, the dragon pulled its head back and tossed its claws forward, grabbing and scratching at the very moment of impact. A man leaped from the monster’s back. Mena had not even noticed the rider. He slid across a slick stretch of wing membrane and then hit the ground in a jarring roll. The two beasts were carried forward by the dragon’s weight and momentum. A writhing ball of wings and tails, teeth and fists, screaming, fighting fury, they disappeared over the hillock.

  The man found his feet and spotted Mena. Meeting his gaze, Mena felt her vision blur. She stood swaying, staring, the King’s Trust forgotten in her hand. Her eyes followed the man as he rushed toward her. She heard his feet crunching on the snow. She saw the plumes of vapor when he breathed. She knew his face and recognized the joy and concern written in his features. She knew him. She knew him.

  “Mena,” Aliver said, reaching her in time to catch her before she fell from consciousness, “it’s all right. I’m with you.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-THREE

  Nualo was the first to appear, called by Corinn’s reading from The Song. Circling high above the ruined valley of Calfa Ven, she saw the moving tumult of his passage. It began as a disturbance to the east, like a small, dense storm roiling on the horizon and moving at an unnatural speed. She did not know why she knew it was he, except perhaps that his hunger was greater than any of the others’, his evil more pronounced.

  “How close do we let them get?” Hanish asked.

  Close enough, but not too close.

  “That could be hard to measure,” Hanish said. “There’s no ruler for such a thing.”

  When Nualo was near enough that Corinn could see his tall, elongated form striding up and down the mountains, she turned Po and headed north. They left behind the devastation of Calfa Ven, but there were signs of the Santoth’s wandering destruction written across the hills and valleys beneath them. In places it looked like giant versions of the worms that had eaten her mouth had chewed up the earth and then vomited it back in twisted, sickening piles of soil and vegetation and rock. Would the Santoth do this to the entire world? Would studying The Song move them away from this rage and hunger for destruction, or would it just make them more horrific versions of what they already were? She knew the answers to these questions. The world below her both prompted and confirmed them, over and over again. Whatever had twisted the Santoth had taken them to a state they could not come back from. She hoped the same was not true of herself.

  Looking back at Nualo, seeing him shoulder through great pine trees as if they were shrubs, Corinn did not notice how close they flew to another Santoth. Po barked an alarm. The figure climbed up over a buttress of rock on the mountain below them. As soon as he stood with his feet planted, he threw up his arms and bellowed out his garbled version of the song. The notes rushed upward in the form of long, deformed black birds, with eyeless heads stretched eagerly forward from their bodies. They flew without so much as flapping their wings, like darts with only the force of the sorcerer’s voice to propel them.

  Po twisted and turned as they reached him. He contorted his body as the bird-shaped missiles zipped by. Each of them cried out as it missed, leaving in its wake a scorching burn that fouled the air. The stench of malevolence was so thick Corinn began coughing; a painful, useless gesture that wracked her chest with pain.

  “Don’t breathe it,” Hanish said. “Don’t breathe.”

  Hanish’s hands reached around and grasped hers, steadying her. Through her, he pulled the reins to direct Po into a sliding dive away from the sorcerer. The missiles continued to fly past them, but Po kept at his maneuvers even as he banked away, wings pulled tight to edge their speed forward.

  One of the birds punched through Po’s left wing. It expanded on impact. Its legs and wings and beak all became hooks that tore through the thick membrane. Blood and tissue sprayed from the ragged hole. The barbed bird then sank away beneath them. Po
screamed. He yanked the wing in, sending them into a corkscrew dive. Hanish fought to get control, still using Corinn’s hands. The spin was too chaotic.

  “Corinn!” Hanish called. “I can’t …”

  Corinn reached for the creature’s mind. She found it a cauldron overflowing with pain and anger and fear. The wound was worse even than it looked. The touch of the bird’s hooks carried the poison of tainted sorcery with it. It ate at Po, burning his wing like flaming oil. The agony of it was driving him mad.

  Corinn grasped for the song. She built it inside her head. She conjured the spell she would have used to heal him and shared it with Po. It could not do so, not as she would have liked, but just hearing it in his mind soothed him. She reminded him of who he was, how strong and wonderful. He stretched the wing again, pulling them out of the descent, and flew. The ragged hole remained, loose skin flapping horribly in the wind, but Corinn could feel that he was fighting the poisoned magic, deadening it. And he was beating his wings anyway.

  Looking back, Corinn saw the evil bird drifting toward the sorcerer. Dural. That was who it was. He stood calmly, his hands folded, no longer singing, no longer enormous, just a man waiting for the bird to drift back to him. Something about his receding outline gave Corinn his name and brought to mind the face that she had seen him wear back at the Carmelia. Before she looked away, she saw Nualo reach the rock buttress. He, too, had shrunk to normal dimensions. He conferred with Dural, both of them reaching to catch the falling bird.

  They have the scent of us, Corinn said. That’s what they just took. They’re hunters, and that bird has brought them Po’s scent. They can follow us around the world now.

  Hanish responded by pulling his hands away from hers, giving her the reins again, and wrapping his arms back around her waist. She knew what he was thinking, and loved him for not saying it: better that they have that scent. It would help draw them to her as she led them on. With the part of her mind reserved for Po, she thanked him for it.

  Coming on the wide, glimmering snake that was the River Ask, Po rode the air up its course, toward Candovia. All that day they flew. All that day Nualo and Dural trailed them. Toward dusk, another Santoth, Abernis, ran south toward them along the surface of the river. At times he jumped from rock to rock. At others he simply churned across the surface of the water. When he attacked them, he did so with a motion of his hands that scooped water from the river and sent it in a flood up and over them.

  As it fell toward them, Corinn knew it was not water any longer. It still sparkled in the air but was more like shards of glass than liquid. The wave of it stretched so wide and moved so quickly that Po could not avoid it. Instead, he beat furiously toward it. As it fell on them, he wrapped his wings around himself, the short lengths of bone in them going loose. They wrapped across his belly and over his back. They covered Corinn and the ghost, and still went farther, wrapping around and around. They punched through the rain of shards like an arrow. Corinn felt Po’s agony as the glass slivers cut into him, savage as living things. They cut into his wings, but not deep enough to touch Corinn.

  Po’s momentum carried him through them. Only then did he snap his wings out and catch the air again. They were even more shredded. Like the previous time, the cuts festered with acid. Like last time, Corinn helped Po fight them, to fly through the pain with yet another Santoth now behind them.

  That night they stayed aloft. They saw the lights of Pelos to the east but stayed far away from that city. Po carved a meandering course, avoiding settlements as much as possible. During the dark hours Corinn felt other Santoth join the hunters. And early the next morning, Tenith emerged out of the marshes of the Lakelands. He hurled the corpses of cranes at them. The creatures sprang to undead life and surged up toward them. Po dodged a few. Caught one in his jaws. He snatched it out of the air and then, with one whiplike snapping of his neck, he sent it twirling toward the ground. Another he batted away with a foot. Each touch of them was filled with corruption, but he did it anyway. He was getting better at this already.

  “Corinn,” Hanish said, “I’ve not told you how glad I am that we have this dragon. And they don’t.”

  Don’t tell it to me, Corinn answered. Tell him.

  Po swung his neck around and gazed at them a moment. Corinn knew he did so because she asked him to, but it looked very much as if he had turned to hear Hanish’s praise. He received it gracefully, blinking his large, golden eyes and never losing the rhythm and strength of his wingbeats.

  The Santoth were pulling together now, drawn not just to her but also back to one another. Corinn kept them as close to the far horizon as much as she could, watching their numbers grow. They flew out over the northern ocean, and then cut around the peninsula north of Luana. The Santoth ran across the waves as if they were moving features of the land. They were tireless, persistent. They could no more stop pursuing her than they could choose to stop breathing.

  Good, Corinn thought. Good. Hunt me. Hunt me to our deaths.

  Hanish stayed pressed to her the whole time. Often, he spoke beside her ear, telling her tales like the ones he had that night he spent with her after she tried to cut herself a new mouth. He spoke of his childhood, of his brothers. Amazingly, he found humor in even the brutal Meinish winters, in the training that was forced upon him, in the constant need to prove himself to both the living and the dead. Corinn had never shared such stories with him. She had never been able to see the light in the darkness that he did.

  Or she had never been able to before.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-FOUR

  You know,” Delivegu said, once his gasping breaths had calmed enough to allow it, “I’m not so sure anybody noticed how terribly bold it was of me to bring Kelis and Shen to the palace. I’ve yet to be thanked properly for it.”

  Rhrenna lifted her sweat-slicked forehead from his chest. She tossed her head, snapping her hair from her face so that it draped from one naked shoulder. “Why,” she asked, “would you think to say that right now?”

  “No one has acknowledged it, is all I mean.”

  “I’m here with you,” Rhrenna said. “That should count for something.”

  From straddling him, she flopped to one side and lay on her back, eyes closed. Delivegu missed the warmth of her immediately. He rolled onto his side and studied her in profile. The almost-too-fine point to her nose, the bones across her shoulders a little too pronounced, her breasts small enough that they all but disappeared when she stretched her arms above her head. In all these ways she was not the type of woman he would usually have fancied. But fancy her he did. Perhaps more than he should.

  “Oh, come now, you don’t mean to say this bed wrestling is a thank-you? Am I paid as cheaply as that? In a manner that pleases you so much more than me?”

  Rhrenna lifted the arm nearest him and dropped the weight of it over him. “Shut up,” she said.

  For a time, he did. He liked that she could be so direct. She had been so when she arrived unannounced at his chamber door. Though she had come for seduction, she had not followed any of the routines he was used to. Her light blue eyes had not smoldered. Her lips had not puckered. She had not batted her eyelashes or anything like that. Still, when she said, “I think I’ll try you now, if you are prepared for it,” he had found that he was—with stunning rapidity—prepared for it.

  Lying beside her now, staring at the ceiling, he was so satiated that he did not even mind when Rhrenna began to snore softly. It seemed a little strange to him that she came to him now, when events in the world had taken such a dire turn, when her own mistress was cursed and off somewhere, hunting sorcerers who had already proven themselves more powerful than she. Perhaps Rhrenna was not as devoted to the queen as she had seemed. In a way, the possibility that her loyalty was a carefully calculated deception impressed him as much as if it were real. More so, perhaps.

  “Either way, you’re besotted, Delivegu,” he whispered. “You’re growing silly with age.”

  Th
at got him thinking, with a small measure of concern, about his recent choices. The thing with Kelis and Shen, for example. Stroll into the queen’s presence with an illegitimate heir to the throne, one that might very well usurp her own illegitimate heir? Bring along the Talayan who had escorted the Santoth right into the heart of the empire, with catastrophic results? If he had done something like that before the events at the coronation, the queen would have found a way to kill him. Unpleasantly. No doubt employing a man like himself for the task. Nor did he arrange to meet the queen on the stone staircase, as he once had, to present them both bound and gagged for her secret consideration, interrogation, and disposal. That, based on all the services he had rendered the queen in the past, would have been a reasonable way to proceed.

  Why did he choose the first way and not the latter? Because the events at the coronation changed everything. For all he knew, the queen might not have escaped the Carmelia with her powers intact. Surely she had suffered from some curse the Santoth had tossed at her. She might not even be long for this world. If she wasn’t, what better than to enter Aliver’s service with a golden ticket? Also—dare he even think it?—it felt like the right thing to do. Delivegu had not yet given up on the hope that his role in the world might be measured by things other than hunting down verbose rabble-rousers, poisoning pregnant women, and bedding maidservants and secretaries.