The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy

by David Anthony Durham

  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 where 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.

  “Go,” Clytus said grimly. “Do what you have to. We will, too.” He led the charge toward the other group, with Kartholomé just behind him, already snapping his throwing stars into hissing motion.

  Geena pulled her knife free. “Go, Dariel!” she said, pointing to the narrow structure Dariel had indicated earlier.

  It took great effort for the prince to pull himself away. He hated doing so. He had never left his companions in danger. Hand on the hilt of the Ishtat sword he bore, he almost could not go.

  “There’s your goal. We’ll sort out these ones. Go!” She rushed to join Tunnel. “Go!”

  Dariel turned and ran. The entrance of the narrow building stood open. He dashed into it and kept going, stumbling over a low table, reaching out for the wall for support. He kept moving down a long corridor, past adjoining hallways and rooms, not really thinking about where he was going. He just got himself farther and farther from his friends, committing himself to leaving them behind.

  Once he was deep enough inside and the clash and shouts of fighting had faded, Dariel paused. All right. Let me do this quickly. He closed his eyes and waited, hoping direction would come to him. When it did, he wasted a few precious seconds realizing it. As ever, Nâ Gâmen did not speak to him as a separate being. He spoke as part of Dariel himself. So the vague feeling that he had to walk down the corridor to the second opening, through it, and down the stairs was not just an idle thought. Remembering this, he opened his eyes and dashed for the opening.

  The next several minutes passed in the same manner. Dariel had to keep reminding himself that his instincts were more than instincts. He was not guessing. He was following a path he already knew, though it only came to him piece by piece. It felt like his knowledge stretched only as far as the light of a candle. As he moved, the illumination did as well. He kept going.

  Until he stopped. At some point, just an empty stretch of corridor, he lost the drive to move forward. For a moment the fear that he was lost knifed through him. He breathed. Tried to trust. He leaned his hands against the wall and pushed his weight into it. As before, he thought the action was meaningless until the section of wall turned soft. He pushed right through and emerged into another room.

  A small chamber. Four walls and seemingly sealed tight. Just before him, a lean, curving pedestal rose up to waist height. The room was not exactly dark and not exactly light, but he could see what he needed to. The dust was inches thick on the floor. Beneath his feet, it was as soft as carpet, undisturbed until this moment. The league has not found this place yet. They must have scoured the city already and the island after that and farther still, searching without knowing what they were searching for. Here, though, was a relic right here, undiscovered.

  I wouldn’t have found it either, Dariel thought. Not without help.

  Having found it, he stared, hoping Nâ Gâmen was not done helping, for he had no idea what to do now. A framed area on the wall before him glowed with a low luminescence. The frame held no painting or window, and yet it was the center—the purpose—of the chamber. Staring, Dariel saw. Deep inside the wall, which was translucent, lights pulsed and wavered, much like the glowing aquatic life he had seen on special nights at sea. The energy in there was different, though. It changed shape before his eyes. At times it looked like a constellation of stars blooming into life all at once. But then that wasn’t right. The lights moved in swirls, tossed and shaped by layers of different currents. In other moments the light came in pulses, like so many heartbeats.

  Looking closely at the pedestal’s top, he saw a single shape on the flat surface. It looked strangely familiar, but it took him a moment to realize it was an engraving of the same symbol protruding from his forehead.

  His fingers tingled.

  He had thought the chamber was completely silent, but that was not quite right. He heard something. He craned his head this way and that, sure that there were sounds just out of reach. The sound did not come from inside the room. It did not come from the pedestal. It was not even inside the living wall.

  Stepping back, he took in the whole frame. As if in response, the constellation bloomed again. So many lights, all of them pulsing, pulsing. In time with one another. He pressed up close against it. And then he understood. The lights were not within the frame. The lights were not even lights. The wall was simply a way of seeing what they represented. He knew then what this place was and why he had come here. Most important, he knew what he was supposed to do.

  He did not question the impulse that came to him. He moved around to the pedestal. He bent forward like a peasant before a king, like the faithful before evidence of his god. He bent forward in reverence and humility, and he touched his forehead to the altar. He placed the rune he wore into the imprint that matched it.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-SIX

  You can’t be serious,” Mena said. “You can’t mean to try that. Not after what they’ve done.”

  Aliver almost replied that he was dead serious, but considering the things they had spent the night discussing he did not think the expression would go over well. “I am, Mena,” he said. “I do mean to try it. I may be wrong, but it feels right. It feels like it may be the way to cut through to the heart of things. I know it’s a hard thing to hear me say, but let’s toss it back and forth. If I can’t convince you, I won’t manage to convince anybody else either.”

  They had already b
een at council many hours, sitting together in a shelter made of living bodies. Elya lay at its center, with the long bulk of Kohl curved around her and the two humans. Aliver and Mena sat, wrapped in blankets, with an oil lamp burning between them, heat and light both, such as it was. The night blustered above them, but the spread wings of the dragon covered them, dulling the sound of the wind. An unusual chamber in which to hold a reunion, but it was what the Giver allowed them. Aliver was more thankful for it than he could have expressed.

  Mena! He was really seeing Mena again. It took her some time to stare Aliver into belief, to accept him as real, but he knew her without a doubt. It was truly Mena who had touched his face with her fingers, smearing his tears even as she cried herself. It was Mena who had first been wordlessly amazed, and then had been possessed by a babbling of half-formed sentences and declarations. Aliver had found what threads he could in her words and tied them together. Because of this, Mena—his sister; his young, wise, gifted sister; she who lived both gentle and furious, her faces like two sides of a sword blade, one of peace and one of war—came to believe in him again.

  She was leaner than ever, her face gaunt, curls of skin peeling away from her nose and cheeks. Painful-looking crevices lined her lips. She was not the girl he had known in childhood. Nor was she the woman he had later known on the fields of Teh. How very strange their lives had been. How much he loved her, even though fate had kept them apart more years than it had let them be together.

  Ilabo and Dram had flown their mounts to meet the tattered remains of Mena’s army, to chase back the fréketes and to protect those battered troops as they continued south. They numbered only a fraction of the souls the princess had set out with. By the time they arrived, they would be even fewer than they had been the day before. Mena, delirious with pain and fatigue, battered by the sight of Elya’s horrible wounds and the shock of Aliver’s appearance, had stilled only after Ilabo had sworn to guide her army to safety.

  “You’re not alone out here anymore,” Aliver had said.

  There, with the sleeping mother and daughter sheltering them, they worked through many things of import. When they did begin to talk, everything came out in a rush: all the events on Acacia, the truth of things Corinn had done, the arrival of Shen and the Santoth, the events at the Carmelia, the curse on Corinn’s mouth, and the changes they all went through in the days just afterward. So much. Aliver confessed the death sentence that he and Corinn were under. He thought it best to reveal this right away, before Mena grew too accustomed to him being among the living again.

  The many things Mena told him in return were troubling. Her hatred of the Auldek blazed in her eyes. The hardest of the things Aliver had to explain was that he wanted to make peace with them. But that was the truth, so he said it.

  “You can’t be serious,” Mena repeated. “They nearly killed Elya. They would have, if you hadn’t arrived. If they had … if they had, I would have gone mad. I would have killed every one of them, each and every soul I’d have—”

  “Mena, I did arrive. Elya is not dead. I don’t want you dead either. I don’t want thousands upon thousands more dead—which will happen if we keep fighting.”

  The look she gave him was a glare, but he thought the lamplight exaggerated her anger. He hoped so, for the wildness in her eyes was nothing he had seen in her before. She said, “I hate them. There is no way to make peace with them.”

  “What if I find a way? Would you consider it?”

  “They ate the villagers of Tavirith. That can’t be undone. It can’t be forgiven.”

  “I know,” Aliver said, “but perhaps the way to move forward is to find peace without forgiveness. Or to find forgiveness in peace. Not to forget anything but to put first the lives of those still living. Mena, you’re arguing with me, but everything you’ve done up here was for the same cause. In all your decisions I see you trying to keep your soldiers alive. That’s what I’m proposing. If we ask the thousands who are still climbing up the Methalian Rim to run to their deaths, they’ll do it. If we do that, they’ll understand it. It will be the same as what our family has asked of them for generations. Maybe their sheer numbers will tire the Auldek’s arms or dull their blades. But what then? Won’t that be defeat? What world will there be for any of them afterward?”

  Mena closed her eyes. “They won’t let you.”

  “You may be right, but I have to try.”

  “They want us all enslaved.”

  Aliver reached over the lamp and set a hand on her blanketed knee. “That they cannot have. I’m not talking about giving in to them. No concessions. No defeat. I’m talking about finding a peace that doesn’t destroy us all. Help me do that. Tell me everything you know about them. Help me find their souls. It’s that I’ll have to speak to.”

  “How can you even think that’s possible?”

  “I am Aliver,” he said. He lifted his hand to her chin, nudging her head up so that she looked at the thin smile he offered her. “I’ve been given a second chance. I can’t fail this time. I won’t.”

  That resolve was what drove his soul up out of his body two nights later. After hours upon hours of talking with his sister, after caring for Mena and seeing Elya’s wounds miraculously heal as the creature slept, after seeing the first of his troops arriving in force, after flying out to greet Mena’s battered forces, even after speaking for a time to Rialus Neptos, the traitor who had proved a treasure trove of information about the invaders … After all that, when it was time to sleep, Aliver lay down for the busy night’s work he had ahead of him.

  He had seen Devoth flying atop his mount when he saved Mena. She had identified him. Aliver used those images to pull his spirit out of his body and to send it after the Auldek. His version of dream travel may or may not have been akin to what Corinn had attempted, or to what Hanish Mein had used to commune both with his undead ancestors and with others among the living. Likely, it came to Aliver easily because of the years he had spent as a spirit dispersed throughout the world, floating. Separating his soul from his body proved not difficult. Perhaps his body had already begun the dying that would soon make his release complete.

  He had barely fallen into the rhythm of sleep before he rose above his growing war camp. He surveyed the tents and supplies and animals, the slumbering forms and the many campfires for a time, but only until he got his bearings. Then he set his mind on Devoth. Aliver’s spirit floated north. Slowly at first, then gaining speed until the dark, cold world of the plateau rushed by beneath him, gray-white under the moon’s light.

  He reached the Auldek camp, coming upon its steaming masses, bodies and beasts and fires. The towers seemed like mountains on the undulating landscape. Their numbers might have daunted him, but he had not the time to consider them. Before he knew it, his soul found the station it needed and punched, soundless and without force of impact, through the structure’s wall. Inside, a large, sumptuous room, the walls hung with swords and axes, with tapestries depicting cityscapes and mountain ranges and vistas not of the Known World. A lamp burned low on a table, but even without it he would have been able to see. Light was within him. It illumined the room around him and also flowed through his vision. He came to stillness at the foot of a bed. Standing there for a while, Aliver’s glow built in the room until he could see the shape beneath the covers.

  “Devoth,” Aliver called. “You are Devoth, aren’t you? Chieftain of the Lvin. Get up. I know you speak my tongue.”

  The shape in the bed went from lying down to sitting up in one flash of motion. His reaction was so immediate he might have been lying in wait for the moment. His eyes found Aliver’s wavering form, and his face expressed the depths of his confusion and fear. He sprang from the bed. He snatched for a battle-ax racked on the wall and whirled around with a savage swing that would have cut a man in half at the waist.

  Or it would have if he had managed this same motion as a physical body and if Aliver had been there in the flesh also. Instead, the Auldek’s bod
y lay still beneath the blankets, just as motionless as before. The ax that Devoth had grasped for hung as it had, not disturbed at all. Devoth’s spirit swung around after the blow he had tried to make.

  “You can’t defeat me that way,” Aliver said, once Devoth had looked back at him, still now, and even more terrified. “I’m a ghost, you see. I’m one who went to the afterdeath and returned. I’ve pulled you out of your body so that we may speak.”

  “Who are you?” Devoth rasped, his accent thick on the Acacian words.

  “Aliver Akaran.”

  “No, that one has gone. Do not lie to me!”

  Aliver crossed his glowing arms. “Look at me, Devoth. Do I look like any man you have ever known? I am vapor and light. I am one who is dead and who also lives. Look at me and decide for yourself.”

  He stood, letting the warrior take him in. At the same time, he studied Devoth. There was something about his spirit that confused Aliver. He could see the Auldek’s features, versions of his body made of glowing light. But his form held more than just his features. There were others beneath that outer skin of spirit light. The longer Devoth held still, the more Aliver could see the others move.

  Quota children.

  “What?” Devoth asked. He circled around the bed, trying to pull several weapons down, clearly hating it each time his hands passed like vapor through the wood and steel. “What have you done to me?”

  “Nothing yet,” Aliver said. “We are just talking. When I release you, you can return to your body.”

  Devoth shook his head. He tried to climb back onto the bed, but he was terrified at how he sank into the blankets, both having purchase and yet passing through them. Part of the world but not.

  “Look at me,” Aliver said. The Auldek did. All the other spirits within him did as well. How many incorporeal faces were layered there? Aliver could not tell, but he could see them. And they could see and hear him. “I have come with an army that dwarfs yours. All the people of the Known World are united against you. They pour onto this plateau like a river running uphill. We will overrun you. I have come to tell you to turn back now. Go back to your own lands, and we will not pursue you.”